Is Your Dog Conscious?

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Consciousness is usually described as, you know what it's like to be something. I don't think my dog can reflect on his consciousness. He's just conscious, and he responds to heat and cold and the bouncing ball or food. My naturalist view of this field of subjectivity is one that has no higher level mental function at all. It reacts in a predictable way because of what it is. And those patterns of behavior are what we call the laws of physics,. which seem to be very stable, very reliable. They are not changing from day to day. Which suggests that if idealism is correct, then this universal mind, if you want to call it, is a

In this expansive conversation, Michael Shermer speaks with Bernardo Kastrup, the executive director of Essentia Foundation. His work has been leading the modern renaissance of metaphysical idealism, the notion that reality is essentially mental. He has a Ph.D. in philosophy (ontology, philosophy of mind) and another Ph.D. in computer engineering (reconfigurable computing, artificial intelligence). Shermer and Kastrup discuss: materialism, idealism, dualism, monism, panpsychism, free will, determinism, consciousness, the problem of other minds, artificial intelligence, out of body and near-death experiences, model dependent realism, and the ultimate nature of reality.