Bernardo Kastrup

Similarly, neuroses and psychoses – such as some obsessions, phobias, and schizophrenic visions – all seem to arise from a part of mind that we do not at all identify with; a part of mind that feels entirely alien, external to the ego

Imagine mind as the screen of a movie theater. Images on the screen represent the entire set of your subjective experiences. Materialism states that those images have an external source and are captured by ‘cameras’ – our sense organs – used to record the movie you are watching. Under idealism, on the other hand, only the movie theater exists: all images you see are generated in the theatre itself, like a computer animation rendered in real-time, and have no external source (we will discuss the role of our sense organs under idealism in ). We can empirically identify certain patterns and regularities in the unfolding of these images. The so-called ‘laws of physics’ are simply a model of these observed patterns and regularities according to which the ‘pixels’ of the images seem to change. In other words, the ‘laws’ reflect the observed regularities of the behavior of the ‘pixels’ in the ‘computer-generated’ images, as opposed to representing rules governing how events in an abstract external world unfold.

The sequence of abstract images in the figure clearly does not represent anything in an outside world. They are not ‘copies’ of anything, but realities in their own right. The advantage of using such abstract images is that they help by-pass all of your cultural programming, since you won’t be able to find any recognizable pattern in them that your mind already assumes to represent an external object

The coherence of such chunks of pixels across frames seems to reflect certain regularities and patterns in the unfolding of the images. Yet, we would never attribute such regularities and patterns to some abstract world separate from the images in . Clearly, whatever regularities there are, are regularities of the images themselves. The images aren’t a representation of something else, but a self-contained phenomenon

The chunks of pixels in are analogous to macroscopic objects like tables and chairs. Instead of thinking of tables and chairs as objects of an abstract world outside your mind, try to think of them as particular, coherent groups of pixels in the images unfolding in the medium of your mind, just as in . You may want to take a few seconds to carry out this thought exercise before reading on.

We tend to tile the entire world around us with an intricate web of concepts derived from language. We live inside a self-woven conceptual cocoon that insulates us from raw reality. Studies have shown, for instance, that people whose languages categorize colors differently from our Western languages actually see colors very differently too.97 The conceptual tiling we place onto reality is often so dense that we lose sight of the raw perceptual ‘pixels’ hidden underneath: we only see wooden tables and chairs, not pixels of various brownish shades coming together in astoundingly rich and fluid combinations.

onto reality the entire set of attributes that our culture associates with those concepts: tables and chairs are supposed to be objects of a world outside mind, so every time we look around we see objects outside mind, as opposed to the raw pixels of the tapestry of mind. Do you see what I mean? We no longer see reality as it is, but as our education and cultural milieu inculcated into us. I invite you to try and briefly remove the conceptual tiling that blocks your view of reality,

that all of reality is a phenomenon of, and in, mind. Instead of postulating an abstract, objective world outside mind – which unfolds according to the laws of physics and modulates our conscious perceptions via electromagnetic signals captured by our sense organs – we discussed the hypothesis that it is the flow of the contents of mind that obeys certain patterns and regularities. No abstract universe outside mind is needed: reality can be explained by observing and modeling the behavior of mind directly

What I am thus claiming is that the brain is the image of a process of localization of mental contents. This is what the brain is, primarily.

if the brain itself exists in mind, how can it filter that which gives it its very existence?