"I think suffering is an intrinsic part of nature. But what i'm not a is with meaninglessness. Is nihilism," he says. "If you're having fun all the time, you sort of glide through nature without really introspecting and thinking about the issues." He adds that we have to embrace suffering but realize it has meaning.
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.