Quantum Physics, Consciousness, and Schopenhauer: Resolving Paradoxes of Reality

Quantum physics paradoxes, according to Bernardo Kastrup, are resolved by recognizing the mental, not solely physical, nature of reality.

### Quantum Physics, Consciousness, and the Illusion of Physical Reality
* ⚛️  The interview discusses Dr. Bernardo Kastrup's perspective on resolving quantum physics paradoxes, particularly the EPR paradox and entanglement, through a non-materialist lens.
* 🧠  Experiments, including those testing Bell's inequalities and Leggett's inequalities, suggest that particles don't possess independent, objective existence before observation, implying a role for consciousness.
* 🔬  Kastrup argues that the paradoxes arise from the assumption that reality is purely physical; instead, he proposes that physicality is a manifestation of a deeper, transpersonal mental state.  This is supported by the fact that physics is fundamentally a science of perception.
* ⏱️  Faster-than-light signal transmission is theoretically impossible, despite entanglement correlations; however, this doesn't negate the possibility of meaningful correlations (synchronicity) without causal links.
* 🌌  The universe is an entangled whole, and local causality is an emergent phenomenon from a deeper quantum reality.  The transition between quantum and classical reality remains an open question.
* 🧘  Schopenhauer's metaphysics, with its concept of "will" as the underlying essence of reality, aligns with quantum findings. The "will" represents endogenous mental states, and physicality is a representation arising from observation.
* 🤝  Relational quantum mechanics suggests that each observer experiences a personal physical world, arising from their interaction with a shared, transpersonal mental context. This doesn't imply complete control over reality but challenges the materialist notion of zero influence.
* 🤔  The reconciliation of general relativity and quantum physics remains an open problem, distinct from the interpretational issues surrounding quantum entanglement.  The interview concludes by acknowledging the possibility of a "leaky margin" where consciousness might exert some influence on physical reality, despite the overwhelming dominance of the transpersonal mental environment.

[Music] New Thinking Allowed: Conversations on the leading edge of knowledge and

discovery. With parapsychologist Jeffrey Mishlove. Hello and welcome. I'm Jeffrey Mishlove. Today we're going to

look at a path to resolving the paradoxes of quantum physics. My guest is Dr. Bernardo Kastrup, who has often been

a guest on the New Thinking Allowed channel. He is a computer scientist and a philosopher, and he has co-published

articles with major figures in the field of physics on quantum physics. He is the author of many books, including

Rationalist Spirituality; An Exploration of the Meaning of Life and Existence Informed by Logic and Science; Meaning in

Absurdity; What Bizarre Phenomena Can Tell Us About the Nature of Reality; Dreamed-Up Reality; Diving into the Mind

to Uncover the Astonishing Hidden Tale of Nature; Why Materialism is Baloney; How True Skeptics Know There Is No Death;

and Fathom Answers to Life, the Universe, and Everything; Brief Peaks Beyond; Critical Essays on Metaphysics, Neuroscience, Free Will, Skepticism, and

Culture; More Than Allegory; On Religious Myth, Truth, and Belief; The Idea of the World: A Multidisciplinary Argument for

the Mental Nature of Reality; and, of course, Decoding Schopenhauer's Metaphysics. And it's really upon that

book that our discussion shall be based today. This is an internet interview, and now I'll switch over to the internet

video. Welcome, Bernardo. It's a pleasure to see you once again.

pleasure. It's very interesting that you've written this elegant chapter in your book on Schopenhauer about quantum

mechanics, but I suppose it's important to specify, for the benefit of our viewers, you are credentialed as a

philosopher and computer scientist, not a quantum physicist. That's correct. I have worked in the physics environment

for years, but I don't have a physics degree. And you've co-authored at least one paper on quantum physics with some

Yes, I know the one you're referring to, with Henry Stapp and Menas Kafatos, in Scientific American. I did author a few others on quantum mechanics as well. I trust that you know what you're talking about, so we

can start digging into it in really some detail. And I think the issue goes back to Einstein and the EPR

paradox, in which Einstein thought he could refute quantum physics by pointing out a strange effect that he said, if

quantum physics is true, that means 'spooky action at a distance.' And since spooky action at a distance would be

impossible to anybody with a naturalistic perspective, therefore Einstein felt that quantum physics wasn't really true. Right. That's a famous

1935 paper, co-authored by Einstein and a couple of others as well, and that has been proven wrong by a whole series of

experiments. I remember back when I was a graduate student at Berkeley back in the 1970s, physicists there—John

Clauser—did some of the very first tests of what became more formalized from what we call the EPR paradox.

The Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky paradox became formalized by John Bell. He—John Bell—he basically...

because you see, the thing is, the EPR paradox is about two entangled particles behaving in a way that cannot be described independently of each other. So

they behave as though they were still intrinsically connected, even though they are measured at large distances. And one

possibility would be to say that, hey, they are behaving in an interrelated way because they have some unknown property.

that they share, they share from the moment of their creation, which leads to these correlations in their

respective behavior. And it just appears that they are still connected, but they are not; they only have this hidden

shared property. And John Bell, what he showed is that there are experiments you can do to differentiate the predictions

of quantum mechanics from the predictions of a theory based on this shared, local, hidden property. It would make, so you can make a distinction

between the two. And this distinction has been formalized by John Bell in that theorem, Bell's Theorem, of Bell's

inequalities, and they have been experimentally shown to be the case. In other words, you cannot explain the entanglement of particles in

quantum mechanics on the basis of—either of—what you cannot make sense of that in the way

that Einstein thought we would need to make sense of it, by hidden local properties—he didn't—local variables. I

remember back in 1975 when I published my first book, *The Roots of Consciousness*. I worked with the physicists then, Jack

Sarfatti, who knew about Bell's Theorem. And I think my book was actually the first popular exposition of how it might in

some way be related to parapsychology. And the thinking back in those days was that there was a signal that could

transfer faster than the speed of light because of this strange entanglement. Now, I think most physicists today don't

accept that interpretation. Your interpretation actually is much more daring: signal transmission faster than the speed of light would

violate relativity, which is where Einstein was coming from. So I don't think that is taken very seriously today

as a hypothesis to make sense of quantum entanglement or Bell's inequalities. In the meantime, there are some more

inequalities published in 2003 by another physicist. It doesn't matter, so we are left with... well, there aren't many

options. We are left with one: to say that the entangled particles still share a property, but that property is not a

local one; it's not in the particles themselves. It's sort of smeared out across space and time. That's the

so-called global hidden variables interpretation. But there are new inequalities, proven and published in 2003, but proven mathematically—Leggett's

inequalities by physicist Tony Leggett. And some of those inequalities, unlike Bell's, made a distinction between what we

call realism and locality. Because Bell's inequalities prove that the quantum system violates either realism—that the particles exist in and of

themselves—or violates locality—that the global interpretations would say, well, they violate locality because there is a global property and it

is smeared out across space and time. But Leggett's inequalities make a distinction. There are some inequalities by Tony

Leggett that are only about realism, and those have been proven as well, which leads to the conclusion that, you know,

you cannot speak of the particles existing in and of themselves before they are observed. It is the

act of observation that brings their physical reality into being. And therefore, my own interpretation is that before they are observed,

they don't exist physically; they exist as a mental state, a transpersonal mental state out there, which essentially

constitutes what we call the shared world. And it is by interacting with this transpersonal mental context that we

bring physicality about on the screen of our... So for me, physicality can be reduced to transpersonal mentality, and I think

quantum physics has come to a point where this conclusion is very, very nearly inevitable to anybody contemplating the latest results without

Prejudice? Well, I suppose "without prejudices" is the key phrase in your sentence there, because there's a very strong prejudice

among physicists towards materialistic, physicalistic explanations. I talked to one scholar who said that the many

worlds theory—you ever—it is gaining in popularity because people in the physics community would rather not

acknowledge the significance of consciousness, unfortunately. But that is built into the culture of physics, into the history of physics. Physics

started as a reaction to religion, to the way religion had of making sense of nature, so it reacted to that and it has

it built into its DNA, you know, to go away from the idea that there is a mind underlying nature and instead thinking

of nature as a mechanism. I think, you know, as a reaction to the status quo back in the 17th century, this was

legitimate because when things are so extreme, you need to counter that by playing on the other extreme, but the

pendulum has now swung all the way to the other side, and at the end of the day, you know, experiment is the final

criterion for truth in physics, and what the experiments are telling us defy the autonomous, objective existence

of physicality. And then some people prefer to think of nature as a mushrooming infinity of parallel

universes, for which there is not a smidgen of empirical evidence. They prefer that than to think that an

ontological category we know to exist—mentality—because we have it.  Between you and me, to think of this category as existing beyond the

boundaries of living beings in the form of a still very naturalistic, but transpersonal mental context surrounding

us. For some reason, although these two hypotheses are hardly comparable in plausibility, you know, to think of

Infinities being created at every infinitesimal moment of time; infinities of new multiverses, new universes, and on.

The one hand, and on the other hand, imagining a transpersonal mind; they think the infinity of universes is

more plausible. And that's, if anything, a cultural artifact; that is one right there. Well, you refer to a series of

experiments that are attempting to kind of pin this down. And I remember John Clauser at Berkeley did some of the very

earliest tests of Bell's Theorem in the 1970s. Used to hang out with him in those

days. But these tests are continuing, and I'm under the impression that there's still physicists who believe we could

use their—we'll find a way to use Bell's inequality to actually transmit signals faster than the speed of light. They

haven't given up on that. That that is a theoretical impossibility. There is a theorem in quantum information theory,

the no-communication theorem, which shows without any shadow of a doubt, theoretically—and the theory has been

confirmed in many other different ways—that you cannot use quantum entanglement to transfer information. You only know

that the measurements made at different points in the universe correlate once an observer brings them together, but they cannot be used to transmit information

faster than the speed of light. It is not possible. Since I know you have a book that will be coming out next year on the

metaphysics of Carl Jung, who wrote extensively about synchronicity, let me bounce this off of you. I did speak with

a physicist and parapsychologist from Germany, Walter von Lucadou, who maintains that this quantum entanglement actually is quite

compatible with yoga and synchronicity. I agree it is, but that does not mean that you can transmit information faster than

The speed of light, and the reason is: look, if Bob is doing a measurement on one side of the universe and Alice is doing a measurement on the other side of the universe, and the measurements are entangled, you could suspect...

you could at least think that they could use this entanglement to transmit information to one another faster than

the speed of light because their measurements are correlated. So it could use this correlation, but actually you can't, because you only know that they

are correlated once Alice and Bob come together. And they have to come together according to the limits of the speed of

light; you know, they have to walk towards one another, take a bus, whatever. And then they can compare notes, and only then do

they see that what they measured was highly correlated—that Alice's measurements were highly correlated with Bob's measurements. Before they come

together, they only see their own measurements, and their own measurements are random. Taken in and of themselves,

the measurements obey the criteria for randomness. So they cannot transmit information to one another faster than the speed of light because the

phenomenon in question is only real—is only noted—once they come together. But synchronicity... Jung's synchronicity...

Solving the Paradoxes of Quantum Physics with Bernardo Kastrup

New Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove 

Introduction of Bernardo Kastrup and his work on quantum physics.

Bernardo Kastrup, a computer scientist and philosopher, is introduced as the guest.

He has co-published articles with major figures in physics on quantum physics.

He is the author of numerous books on metaphysics, neuroscience, and related topics.

The discussion will be based on his book, 'Decoding Schopenhauer's Metaphysics'.

Discussion of the EPR paradox and Bell's Theorem.

Kastrup clarifies his credentials as a philosopher and computer scientist, not a physicist.

He mentions co-authoring a paper on quantum physics with Henry Stapp and Menas Kafatos.

The discussion centers on Einstein's EPR paradox and the concept of 'spooky action at a distance'.

Explanation of the EPR paradox concerning entangled particles and their interconnected behavior.

John Bell's theorem is discussed, showing the distinction between quantum mechanics and theories with local hidden variables.

Leggett's inequalities are mentioned, further challenging the notion of local realism.

Kastrup's interpretation of quantum mechanics and the role of consciousness.

Kastrup proposes that particles don't exist physically before observation, existing instead as a mental state.

He suggests that physical reality emerges from interaction with a transpersonal mental context.

He argues that physicality can be reduced to transpersonal mentality.

The discussion touches upon the prevailing materialistic prejudices within the physics community.

Further discussion on entanglement, faster-than-light communication, and synchronicity.

The ongoing experiments testing Bell's Theorem are mentioned.

The 'no-communication theorem' is introduced, stating that quantum entanglement cannot be used to transmit information faster than light.

The conversation shifts to Jung's concept of synchronicity and its relation to quantum entanglement.

Synchronicity is differentiated from faster-than-light communication.

The correlation of entangled particles suggests the universe as an undivided whole.

Schopenhauer's metaphysics and its consistency with quantum mechanics.

The discussion returns to Schopenhauer's metaphysics and its compatibility with quantum mechanics findings.

The paradoxes of quantum mechanics are attributed to the assumption that all reality is physical.

Schopenhauer's concept of 'will' as the underlying essence of reality is explained.

Physics is described as a science of perception, not encompassing all aspects of consciousness.

The incompatibility of general relativity and quantum physics.

The ongoing challenge of reconciling general relativity and quantum physics is discussed.

General relativity's accuracy in describing large-scale phenomena and quantum field theory's accuracy in describing small-scale phenomena are noted.

The problem of incorporating gravity into a unified field theory is highlighted.

The twin paradox in special relativity is used to illustrate the counterintuitive nature of time dilation.

Relational quantum mechanics and the concept of individual realities.

Relational quantum mechanics is introduced, suggesting that each observer experiences their own physical universe.

The idea that physicality is an appearance dependent on observation is discussed.

The existence of a shared, non-physical world is proposed, composed of transpersonal thoughts.

The double-slit experiment is mentioned as an example where the observer's role affects the outcome.

The idea of a collective creation of reality is discussed in relation to the shared transpersonal mental state.