Ep 36: An Interview with Bernardo Kastrup: UFOs, Ultraterrestrials, and Meaning In Absurdity

The UFO Rabbit Hole Podcast

In today’s episode, I had the absolute honor of speaking with one of my personal intellectual heroes, Bernardo Kastrup.
Bernardo Kastrup is the executive director of the 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 (with a focus in ontology and philosophy of mind) and another Ph.D. in computer engineering (with a focus in reconfigurable computing and artificial intelligence). As a scientist, Bernardo has worked for the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) and the Philips Research Laboratories (where the 'Casimir Effect' of Quantum Field Theory was discovered). He has also had a 25-year career in high-technology, having co-founded parallel processing company Silicon Hive (which was acquired by Intel in 2011).
Bernardo Kastrup is also the author of 11 books. I basically have an entire Kastrup shelf inmy office. His book, “Meaning In Absurdity: What Bizarre Phenomena Can Tell Us About the Nature of Reality” is, in my opinion, one of the most important books written on the UFO phenomenon. I can’t recommend it highly enough.
Just a heads up before we begin—if you aren’t familiar with Kastrup’s thinking on analytic idealism, the first part of this interview might be a little challenging. If you stick it out, I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised at how elegantly analytic idealism deals with some of the more mysterious aspects of the anomalous phenomena. If you’d like to learn more about analytic idealism, there are some great resources and videos that can walk you through it step-by-step. [Links in episode brief.]

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EPISODE BRIEF
[Links to videos on Analytic Idealism in Episode Brief]
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TIMESTAMP
00:00:30 Introduction
00:04:35 How working with artificial neural networks at CERN led Bernardo to break with physicalism
00:07:12 The difference between intelligence and consciousness00:08:36 Analytic idealism
00:12:26 How does analytic idealism relate to the ideas of Donald Hoffman?
00:14:38 If the world is mental, why doesn’t it behave like a dream?
00:17:23 Bernardo’s UFO experience
00:19:37 How UFOs repel our attention
00:23:02 Memory and UFOs
00:25:46 UFOs and analytic idealism
00:30:09 Logic and finding meaning in absurdity
00:35:11 The “call of the absurd” and the control mechanism
00:39:27 How marketing and propaganda hijack the control mechanism
00:42:47 Are “nuts and bolts” UAPs and high strangeness UFO encounters the same phenomenon?
00:48:44 Bernardo’s ultraterrestrial hypothesis
00:58:37 The rise of AI, NHIs, and the coming consciousness shift
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