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

Author:Bernardo Kastrup [Kastrup, Bernardo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Philosophy, Metaphysics, Mind & Body, Body; Mind & Spirit, General
ISBN: 9781782793618
Google: iXd8AwAAQBAJ
Amazon: B00IXUXDE4
Publisher: Iff Books
Published: 2014-04-24T21:00:00+00:00

Spinning cones and the ‘external’ world

According to the cone metaphor, all the objects and phenomena of what we ordinarily call the ‘external’ world are, insofar as you experience them, merely ripples propagating within the spinning cone of mind that you call your ego. Everything you ordinarily see, hear, smell, taste, or feel through your skin is just these trapped ripples. Recursive self-reflection amplifies these ripples enormously, obfuscating everything going on outside the cone, just like the sun’s glare at noon obfuscates distant stars.

The cone metaphor can still neatly explain the consistency of reality across individuals; that is, the fact that we all seem to share the same ‘external’ world: each whirlpool forms in the broader medium of mind and, as such, has contact points with it along its rim. Metaphorically speaking, these contact points correspond to our sense organs: skin, eyes, nose, ears, and tongue. An alternative way to say the same thing is to state that the rim of a whirlpool is a way of seeing our sense organs. Ripples propagating in that broader mercury ocean can, thus, penetrate the whirlpool through its contact points and get trapped within its internal, circular flow. Some of these trapped ripples will make their way to the center of the whirlpool and fall within its spinning cone. These correspond to the perceptions that we are ordinarily conscious of, like the letters on this page as you read them right now. Other ripples trapped in the whirlpool will remain circulating in its periphery and never make it to the center. These correspond to subliminal perceptions that, because they do not become amplified, remain under the threshold of egoic awareness, like the feeling of air passing through your nose until just before you read this.

Now, imagine that there is a source of disturbances somewhere in this common medium, which generates ripples with certain patterns. The patterns of these ripples represent information. The ripples then propagate broadly, carrying the same information across large areas of the medium. Eventually, they reach the rims of different whirlpools in the broader mercury ocean, injecting roughly the same information into each of them, except perhaps for some idiosyncratic differences related to the position of each whirlpool and the particular configuration of its rim. It is this common information that eventually makes its way to the spinning cone at the center of each whirlpool, enters the field of self-reflective awareness and then gives rise to the perception of a shared reality. This is how each one of us perceives roughly the same ‘outside’ world – that is, the same incoming information stream penetrating our sense organs – apart from certain idiosyncrasies related to our particular positions in space-time and the particular way our perceptual apparatuses filter reality.

Like before, it is important that you keep in mind that we are talking about metaphors here. The actual images of reality aren’t the rims of mercury whirlpools, but people, skin, eyes, noses, etc. The actual image of the universe is not an ocean of mercury, but the sky, planets, stars, etc.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.