A lecture on whether consciousness exists beyond the brain, drawing on ideas from Dr. Bernardo Kastrup about consciousness as fundamental to reality. The speaker explores non-local consciousness, psychic phenomena, and whether consciousness survives after death.
What evidence do you really have that consciousness isn't in your brain? Just break it down. I like to break it down into two categories. One is basically psychic phenomena, non local consciousness, meaning consciousness not stuck in your brain. It's somewhere beyond space and time. Category two is potentially that consciousness survives bodily death. And the approach I took, if I'm going to talk about this publicly, I was worried, I was scared. I need to make it as scientific as possible and I need to de risk this. So my approach was if there's one phenomenon that is real in these categories, not necessarily all, just one, then our current paradigm that consciousness is just stuck in our skull, cannot accommodate that. Whereas the new paradigm where consciousness is maybe the basis of all reality, like Dr. Bernardo Castrup says, we're whirlpools in a stream of consciousness. So there's the individual, Dave. Individual, Mark. We feel like individuals, but we're actually part of the same stream. That really resonated with me. But it also made very possible things like psychic abilities. Some of the water from my whirlpool getting into yours, that's like a telepathic ability by analogy. Some of my consciousness getting into yours, that's not an anomaly anymore. That's not paranormal. Paranormal is paranormal. If we assume normal is materialism, that consciousness is stuck in our skull.
