[Don Salmon]

Hi Andrei:

Thanks for starting a wonderful conversation.

Regarding Spira, I suppose you may have heard he wrote a book, “The Nature of Consciousness,” with Bernardo Kastrup writing the scientific afterword.

I think Bernardo has absolutely the perfect beginning in approaching materialists;

1. All we know, directly, are forms in awareness.

2. If you, the materialists (or physicalists or whatever) want to posit some purely dead, unconscious, insentient, non intelligent “stuff” which you can’t define beyond “it’s what physicists study,” and this posited stuff not only adds absolutely nothing to our understanding of science, and makes the study of everything but the forms we identify as matter remotely intelligible (and has no idea what matter is in itself to boot) then the burden of evidence is on you – why should we or anybody believe in something which by definition (something outside awareness) for which there can never be ANY evidence?

That’s the starting point. No physicalist has or ever will be able to answer it because it’s irrefutably obvious. How did Sam Harris deal with it for example? He said to Rupert Spira, who made these points to him, “I can’t refute it logically. It can’t be refuted. I just don’t like it and I choose not to believe it.”

And that’s what folks say about the Qanon conspiracy theories.

Meanwhile, we have over a half century of fantastic profoundly powerful practices to deeply alter the way we pay attention (Whit – any time you want to ask about it, let me know).

That to me is the important first step (actually, we have thousands of years of these practices, but the last 50 years has brought a wealth of practices informed by psychology and minimally informed by neuroscience – I say minimally because, probably due to my bias as a psychologist, I personally think neuroscience is extremely almost irrevocably limited in what it understands about our psyches – particularly given that modern academic and clinical psychology also understand hardly more than an infinitesimal aspect of consciousness, if that much!