Why Materialism Is Baloney: How True Skeptics Know There Is No Death and Fathom Answers to life, the Universe, and Everything

by Bernardo Kastrup

Think of mind as a stream.

Now imagine a small whirlpool in the stream:

The whirlpool localizes the flow of water in the stream.

there is nothing to the whirlpool but water itself. The whirlpool is just a specific pattern of water movement

There is nothing to the brain but mind,

In the whirlpool metaphor the medium of mind is represented by water.

The whirlpool represents a partial localization of the flow of experiences in the stream.

The brain is not the source of localized experience; it is how localized experience looks from a second-person perspective.

the whirlpool metaphor entails that what we perceive in ordinary awareness is a ‘filtered down’ version of the images available in the broader medium of mind.

The whirlpool grows from the broader flow of water just as the body grows from the broader medium of mind. Reality is mind.

If something is in the psyche but is not in consciousness, where exactly is it? Materialist neuroscience offers an explanation: ‘unconscious’ processes are neural processes that, for whatever reason, do not become conscious, but still exist as material phenomena in the brain. As such, the psyche is defined as the collection of electrochemical processes taking place in the nervous system, only a subset of which, somehow, magically becomes conscious.

We are all conscious, at all times, of absolutely everything that exists in time, space, and beyond.