
Point of Convergence
091 - A Reality of Dreamscapes
Episode guests
Podcast summary created with Snipd AI
Quick takeaways
- Philosophers need to seek empirical grounding to prevent drifting into pure abstraction and must actively integrate the hard sciences.
- Reality may be better understood as a cognitive world of meaning associations rather than conforming to traditional physicalist or dualist frameworks.
Deep dives
Bernardo Castro's unique perspective on bridging the gap between the hard sciences and metaphysics
Bernardo Castro discusses the advantage of having a background in both the hard sciences, such as physics, and philosophy. He emphasizes the importance of grounding oneself in empirical evidence, citing his experience at CERN where his fascination with finding supersymmetry was not supported by the results. Castro argues that philosophers need to actively seek empirical grounding to prevent drifting away into a world of pure abstraction. Furthermore, he reflects on his work in artificial intelligence and how attempting to create consciousness through AI led him to question the notion that consciousness is generated by material arrangements. This realization sparked his journey towards idealism, where he now sees reality as fundamentally mental and the physical world as an external appearance of mental processes.