Why Materialism Is Baloney Quotes

“Indeed, it is nearly impossible for any person inserted in a modern cultural context to escape the haze of the zeitgeist and develop a truly unbiased, critical, and personal worldview.”
― Bernardo Kastrup, Why Materialism Is Baloney: How True Skeptics Know There Is No Death and Fathom Answers to life, the Universe, and Everything

“if we could escape the hysterical cacophony of culture so to develop a more authentic and unbiased worldview,”
― Bernardo Kastrup, Why Materialism Is Baloney: How True Skeptics Know There Is No Death and Fathom Answers to life, the Universe, and Everything

“In today's culture we take the package for the content, the vehicle for the precious cargo. We attribute reality to physical phenomena while taking their *meanings* to be inconsequential fantasies. By extricating 'reality' from mind, materialism has sent the significance of nature into exile. With the pathetic grin of hubris stamped on our foolish faces, we carefully unwrap the package and then proceed to throw away its contents while proudly storing the empty box on the altar of our ontology.”
― Bernardo Kastrup, Why Materialism Is Baloney: How True Skeptics Know There is no Death and Fathom Answers to Life, the Universe and Everything

“The ability to turn conscious apprehension itself into an object of conscious apprehension is what fundamentally characterizes our ordinary state of consciousness”
― Bernardo Kastrup, Why Materialism Is Baloney: How True Skeptics Know There Is No Death and Fathom Answers to life, the Universe, and Everything

“Particular experiences – that is, particular contents of mind – are just mind in movement.”
― Bernardo Kastrup, Why Materialism Is Baloney: How True Skeptics Know There Is No Death and Fathom Answers to life, the Universe, and Everything

“The pattern here is not only clear, but striking. The most complex, coherent, intense, non-local, and transpersonal experiences people report are associated precisely with reductions, or even elimination, of brain activity”
― Bernardo Kastrup, Why Materialism Is Baloney: How True Skeptics Know There Is No Death and Fathom Answers to life, the Universe, and Everything

“Figure 3. A whirlpool in a stream is a metaphor for a brain in the medium of mind.”
― Bernardo Kastrup, Why Materialism Is Baloney: How True Skeptics Know There Is No Death and Fathom Answers to life, the Universe, and Everything

“They basically suggest that specificity allows for a handful of neurons, whose activity is too faint to be measurable, to hypothetically explain lifetimes of complex and coherent experiences. Resuscitation specialist Dr. Sam Parnia’s candid rebuttal of this suggestion seems to frame it best: ‘When you die, there’s no blood flow going into your brain. If it goes below a certain level, you can’t have electric activity. It takes a lot of imagination to think there’s somehow a hidden area of your brain that comes into action when everything else isn’t working.’38 But even if we grant that there is hidden neural activity somewhere, the materialist position immediately raises the question of why we are born with such large brains if only a handful of neurons were sufficient to confabulate unfathomable dreams. After all, as a species, we pay a high price for our large brains in terms of metabolism and in terms of having to be born basically premature, since a more developed head cannot pass through a woman’s birth canal. Moreover, under ordinary conditions, it has been scientifically demonstrated that we generate measurable neocortical activity even when we dream of the mere clenching of a hand!39 It is, thus, incoherent to postulate that undetectable neural firings – the extreme of specificity – are sufficient to explain complex experiences.”
― Bernardo Kastrup, Why Materialism Is Baloney: How True Skeptics Know There Is No Death and Fathom Answers to life, the Universe, and Everything

“The meaning of it all is unfolding right under our noses, all the time, but we can't see it. We don't pay any attention. We were taught from childhood to avert our gaze, lest we be considered fools. So now we seem to live in some kind of collective trance, lost in a daze the likes of which have probably never before been witnessed in history. We feel the gaping emptiness and meaninglessness of our condition in the depths of our psyches. But, like a desperate man thrashing about in quicksand, our reactions only make things worse: we chase more fictitious goals and accumulate more fictitious stuff, precisely the things that distract us further from watching what is really happening. And, when we finally realize the senselessness of such reactions, we turn to 'gurus' doling out pill-form answers instead of paying attention to life, the only authentic teacher, who is constantly speaking to us. There is no literal shortcut to whatever it is that the metaphor of life is trying to convey. There is no literal truth. The meaning of it all cannot be communicated directly. There are no secret answers spelled out in words in some rare old book. The metaphor is the only way to the answers, if only we have patience and pay attention. Look around: what is life trying to say?”
― Bernardo Kastrup, Why Materialism Is Baloney: How True Skeptics Know There is no Death and Fathom Answers to Life, the Universe and Everything

“Clearly, we once knew with intuitive clarity that which we can no longer remember. In today’s culture we take the package for the content, the vehicle for the precious cargo. We attribute reality to physical phenomena while taking their meanings to inconsequential fantasies. By extricating ‘reality’ from mind, materialism has sent the significance of nature into exile. With the pathetic grin of hubris stamped on our foolish faces, we carefully unwrap the package and then proceed to throw away its contents while proudly storing the empty box on the altar of our ontology. What a huge stash of empty boxes have we accumulated! Idols of stupidity they are; public reminders of a state of affairs that would be hilarious if it weren't tragic.”
― Bernardo Kastrup, Why Materialism Is Baloney: How True Skeptics Know There is no Death and Fathom Answers to Life, the Universe and Everything

“By extricating 'reality' from mind, materialism has sent the significance of nature into exile. With the pathetic grin of hubris stamped on our foolish faces, we carefully unwrap the package and then proceed to throw away its contents whileb proudly storing the empty box on the altar of our ontology. What a huge stash of empty boxes have we accumulated! Idols of stupidity they are; public reminders of a state of affairs that would be hilarious if it weren't tragic.

The meaning of it all is unfolding right under our noses, all the time, but we can't see it. We don't pay any attention. We were taught from childhood to avert our gaze, lest we be considered fools. So now we seem to live in some kind of collective trance, lost in a daze the likes of which have probably never before been witnessed in history. We feel the gaping emptiness and meaninglessness of our condition in the depths of our psyches. But, like a desperate man thrashing about in quicksand, our reactions only make things worse: we chase more fictitious goals and accumulate more fictitious stuff, precisely the things that distract us further from watching what is really happening. And, when we finally realize the senselessness of such reactions, we turn to 'gurus' doling out pill-form answers instead of paying attention to life, the only authentic teacher, who is constantly speaking to us. There is no literal shortcut to whatever it is that the metaphor of life is trying to convey. There is no literal truth. The meaning of it all cannot be communicated directly. There are no secret answers spelled out in words in some rare old book. The metaphor is the only way to the answers, if only we have patience and pay attention. Look around: what is life trying to say?”
― Bernardo Kastrup, Why Materialism Is Baloney: How True Skeptics Know There is no Death and Fathom Answers to Life, the Universe and Everything

“By extricating 'reality' from mind, materialism has sent the significance of nature into exile. With the pathetic grin of hubris stamped on our foolish faces, we carefully unwrap the package and then proceed to throw away its contents whileb proudly storing the empty box on the altar of our ontology. What a huge stash of empty boxes have we accumulated! Idols of stupidity they are; public reminders of a state of affairs that would be hilarious if it weren't tragic.”
― Bernardo Kastrup, Why Materialism Is Baloney: How True Skeptics Know There is no Death and Fathom Answers to Life, the Universe and Everything

“Our particular states of mind colour and frame the whole of our experiences. We live under the illusion that we all share the exact same world because *our language has evolved to pick out precisely the few aspects of our experiences that are common and shared, while ignoring those that are completely personal and idiosyncratic.*”
― Bernardo Kastrup, Why Materialism Is Baloney: How True Skeptics Know There is no Death and Fathom Answers to Life, the Universe and Everything

“When materialists like Daniel Dennett say that a person's experiences *are* the chains of neural firings in her brain *they are mistaking the {animal's} tracks for the {animal's} gait; the imprinted image for the phenomenon.*”
― Bernardo Kastrup, Why Materialism Is Baloney: How True Skeptics Know There is no Death and Fathom Answers to Life, the Universe and Everything

“Scientism today is doing what the church did in the fifteenth century: forcing theory to fit a predetermined metaphysics.”
― Bernardo Kastrup, Why Materialism Is Baloney: How True Skeptics Know There is no Death and Fathom Answers to Life, the Universe and Everything

“Indeed, we have concluded in Chapter 2 that the brain is a kind of filter of mind: it selects and localizes the flow of certain contents of mind, which would otherwise be unbound and non-local.”
― Bernardo Kastrup, Why Materialism Is Baloney: How True Skeptics Know There Is No Death and Fathom Answers to life, the Universe, and Everything

“There is nothing illogical, inconsistent, incoherent, or absurd about the idea that the medium of reality is mind itself.”
― Bernardo Kastrup, Why Materialism Is Baloney: How True Skeptics Know There Is No Death and Fathom Answers to life, the Universe, and Everything

“I invite you to try and briefly remove the conceptual tiling that blocks your view of reality, so you can see the raw chunks of perceptual pixels in the medium of mind. If you can see reality that way, freed from conceptual projections, even if just for a short moment, you may surprise yourself with how natural idealism will feel to you. If you are able to see the ‘pixels’ of perceptual experience in the same way that you see the pixels of Figure 2, you will have removed part of the veil of culture.”
― Bernardo Kastrup, Why Materialism Is Baloney: How True Skeptics Know There Is No Death and Fathom Answers to life, the Universe, and Everything

“Statement 4 is even worse. It postulates that things you can never know to exist are actually responsible for the only thing you can be absolutely sure to exist: your own consciousness. It postulates that abstractions generate what is concrete. This is quite an extraordinary statement in that it completely inverts the natural direction of inference: normally, one infers the unknown from the known, not the known from the unknown!”
― Bernardo Kastrup, Why Materialism Is Baloney: How True Skeptics Know There Is No Death and Fathom Answers to life, the Universe, and Everything

“I submit to you a much simpler alternative: there is no state A. If there were, we could, by definition, never see it anyway. State A is just a mental abstraction of smart human beings engaged in fun puzzle-solving. And neither do we have the magical power to change the universe ‘out there’ merely by the act of glancing at it. Yes, nature is contextual, but contextuality does not require superhero powers: it is simply another way to say that reality is the unfolding of mind; that is, the unfolding of the observer in the process of observation.”
― Bernardo Kastrup, Why Materialism Is Baloney: How True Skeptics Know There Is No Death and Fathom Answers to life, the Universe, and Everything

“Gröblacher et al. (2007).”
― Bernardo Kastrup, Why Materialism Is Baloney: How True Skeptics Know There Is No Death and Fathom Answers to life, the Universe, and Everything

“no subjective experience is ever generated by the brain, but merely selected by it according to the perspective of the body in space-time, as Bergson so cogently argued over a hundred years ago.49 This selection process is akin to a ‘filtering out’ of conscious experience: like a radio receiver selecting, from among the variety of stations present concurrently in the broadcast signal, that which one wants to listen to, all other stations being filtered out and never reaching the consciousness of the listener.”
― Bernardo Kastrup, Why Materialism Is Baloney: How True Skeptics Know There Is No Death and Fathom Answers to life, the Universe, and Everything

“When not subject to this localization and modulation mechanism, mind is unbound: it entails consciousness of all there is across space, time, and perhaps beyond. Therefore, by localizing mind, the brain also ‘filters out’ of consciousness anything that is not correlated with the body’s perspective.”
― Bernardo Kastrup, Why Materialism Is Baloney: How True Skeptics Know There Is No Death and Fathom Answers to life, the Universe, and Everything

“The hypothesis I submit is that the function of the brain is to localize consciousness, pinning it to the space-time reference point implied by the physical body.”
― Bernardo Kastrup, Why Materialism Is Baloney: How True Skeptics Know There Is No Death and Fathom Answers to life, the Universe, and Everything

“Taking consciousness to be an ontological primitive also circumvents the ‘explanatory gap’ and the ‘hard problem of consciousness,’ since both only arise from the attempt to reduce consciousness to matter.”
― Bernardo Kastrup, Why Materialism Is Baloney: How True Skeptics Know There Is No Death and Fathom Answers to life, the Universe, and Everything

“If this is true, the logical consequence is that consciousness cannot be reduced to matter – for it appears that it is needed for matter to exist in the first place”
― Bernardo Kastrup, Why Materialism Is Baloney: How True Skeptics Know There Is No Death and Fathom Answers to life, the Universe, and Everything

“Materialism attempts to reduce conscious experience to physical entities like these particles. As such, it assumes consciousness to be derivative, not fundamental.”
― Bernardo Kastrup, Why Materialism Is Baloney: How True Skeptics Know There Is No Death and Fathom Answers to life, the Universe, and Everything

“the voices one hears coming out of an analog radio receiver correlate very tightly with the electromagnetic oscillations in the radio’s circuitry, but that does not mean that the radio circuitry synthesizes the voices.”
― Bernardo Kastrup, Why Materialism Is Baloney: How True Skeptics Know There Is No Death and Fathom Answers to life, the Universe, and Everything

“cum hoc ergo propter hoc’ fallacy.”
― Bernardo Kastrup, Why Materialism Is Baloney: How True Skeptics Know There Is No Death and Fathom Answers to life, the Universe, and Everything