Bernardo Kastrup

What is mind? The most natural and obvious answer to this ancient question is simply this: mind is the medium of everything you have ever known, seen or felt; everything that has ever meant anything to you. Whatever has never fallen within the embrace of your mind might as well have never existed as far as you are concerned.

Granted that contemporary materialist thought about the nature of reality, as we have seen in Chapter 1, entails that the world is ‘out there’ and that the contents of your mind are a reconstruction – architected and hosted by your brain – of that external reality. But even if that were true, the implication is still that you live your entire life locked within this brain-constructed hallucination. An ‘external reality’ is merely a non-provable abstraction, regardless of how good the theoretical reasons can be to believe in it. Therefore, even if it were true that reality is some external realm of abstract energy fields, and even if it were true that your mind is merely a product of brain activity, your mind would still be the sole carrier of reality you can know. All materialist ideas about nature and reality are products of mind and exist solely within mind.

It is impossible to know anything outside mind, for anything that is touched by the act of knowing is inevitably and instantaneously ‘dragged into’ the sphere of mind.

The part of the materialist worldview that entails that objects exist outside, and independently, of mind is called realism.86 To Western ears, realism is a very intuitive metaphysics: objects possess an undeniable concreteness and continuity that suggests their autonomous existence outside ourselves. But realism is not the only metaphysics that has been proposed by philosophers over the ages. There is another alternative called idealism: the notion that all reality is a phenomenon of, and in, mind

Realism: Reality exists outside and independent of mind;
Idealism: Reality consists exclusively of mind and its contents.
Notice that materialism entails realism but goes beyond it: it postulates not only that matter exists outside mind, but that mind itself is generated by matter

we must start from the data that is right under our noses: experience itself. Postulating an entire ‘shadow’ universe outside experience is only justifiable if we cannot make sense of reality without it. However, as I hope to show, we very well can. As such, the abstract ‘shadow’ world of materialism does nothing but complicate and inflate our models of reality by adding unnecessary, unprovable elements

Suppose, thus, that we drop such an inflationary notion and reject a ‘shadow’ world outside mind. What we are then left with is a conception of reality that reflects precisely what reality seems to be: all that which we experience. Notice how this completely validates Johnson’s intuition: the rock he felt was indeed the real rock, not a hallucination of his brain! And yet, that is precisely the reason why Berkeley was right in his idealism. When you avoid creating an unnecessary and unprovable ‘shadow’ of the world of experience, the only world you are left with is the world of experience, the world of mind.

If the book or electronic reader in your hands right now feels real, it’s because it is real, not the brain-constructed copy that materialists would have you believe

The most important implication is this: if idealism is correct, then mind is not within the brain, because it is the brain that is within mind

In I will be proposing that the body is a mental artifact that grounds a localized point-of-view within mind in much the same way that a dreamed-up body grounds a certain localized perspective within a nightly dream. Yet, it’s the dream that is in you, not you in the dream.