Source: Essentia Foundation, Analytic Idealism Course, Dr. Bernardo Kastrup, 2022.
The Hidden Flaws In Our Common Worldview of Reality.wav
We investigate whether our ordinary intuitions about the nature of reality and the world at large can be true at all. Is the world really what it looks and feels like or is there more?
This podcast is the introductory module on analytic idealism, aiming to challenge our everyday understanding of reality. It begins by outlining the topics structure, promising to critique mainstream physicalism and pancychism before presenting analytic idealism as an alternative. The core of this initial podcast argues that our ordinary intuition of perceiving the world as it truly is, a transparent view of external objects, is incorrect. Two independent lines of reasoning, based on thermodynamics and evolutionary theory, are introduced to suggest that our perception is more akin to a user interface or a dashboard, providing useful but not necessarily truthful information for survival, implying that the physical world we experience is an encoded representation rather than reality itself.
We will begin by exploring how our common understanding of the world and our relationship to it has been challenged by recent findings in neuroscience, analytic philosophy, and evolutionary theory.
Two primary lines of reasoning demonstrate that our perception does not directly reflect reality as it is. The first involves the concept of entropy and the need for organisms to maintain their structure, while the second is based on evolutionary pressures favoring useful, but not necessarily truthful, perceptions.
Our perception of the physical world can be understood as a "dashboard" or "user interface", providing us with necessary information for survival but not a literal representation of reality.
This "dashboard" analogy implies that what we perceive as the physical world, including objects, colors, sounds, and even concepts like space and time, are akin to the dials and indicators on an instrument panel, not the underlying reality itself.
While we can enhance our perception through instrumentation like telescopes and microscopes, the output of these tools still needs to be processed and perceived through our inherent "dashboard," meaning we do not escape this fundamental paradigm.
1. What is the fundamental premise being challenged regarding our ordinary understanding of reality?
Our ordinary intuition suggests that the world we perceive – with its clouds, lightning, objects we can touch, smell, hear, and see – is the external world as it truly exists. We tend to believe that our perception acts as a transparent window, directly disclosing the nature of reality as it is in itself. This intuition claims that the world has the forms and shapes we observe, and our senses simply reveal these pre-existing properties.