This post is an introduction to the thinking of Bernardo Kastrup on free will.
As usual, everything here is sourced from multiple videos, podcasts, and articlesāalong with some quotes from Bernardo Kastrup’s book Brief Peeks Beyond. Enjoy!
Premium members have access to the full post: š Bernardo Kastrup Synthesis: Everything about Free Will
How did this come about? I recently completed an incredibly deep dive into Rupert Spira (culminating with my most ambitious šāPremium synthesisā to date covering 3 books and 50+ videos/podcasts). As a byproduct of that process, I watched a couple videos of Spira with Donald Hoffman and Bernardo Kastrup. I’m now venturing down the Kastrup rabbit hole, and it turns out that he comes to the same conclusions as Spira but from a scientific perspective.
If you’d like to watch a video of Bernardo Kastrup’s thoughts on free will, this one is the most recent and most comprehensive:
25 Deep Quotes on Free Will from Bernardo Kastrup
Free Will, Determinism, & Irreducibility
1. “Free will boils down to identification … Free will is the capacity of an agent to make a choice unhindered by any factor outside that which the agent identifies itself with.”
2. “What most people mean by ‘free will’ is that my choices are determined, but they are determined by me … My choice is only free if it is determined solely by what I perceive as me … If my choices are determined by my views, my preferences, my tastes, my desires, my dispositions, my plans, my wishes, my fears, then my choices are free.”
3. “What you do will always be determined by what you are. Our choices are consequence of what we are, and we cannot not be what we are. So, in that sense, there is no room to play here. Our choices are a function of what we are, and we are what we are.”
4. “Our choices are clearly not determined by us alone because we are not in a vacuum; there are a lot of input variables into the system that we are, and the consequence of all of that input are the choices we make. If we had absolutely free will as individuals we would, each and everyone, be completely happy because we would choose to will whatever the circumstances are that we are living through.”
5. “What I will do in a determined manner depends on the variables that I collect as input. So, if an input changes, then my choice changes. It’s still determined, but it’s determined on the basis of the input … To say that everything is determined by what nature is doesn’t mean that our actions as part of the natural unfolding are futile. No, they produce input variables for other parts of nature, so we still have to play it out.”
6. “We experience something that we call ‘free will’ because our choices are computationally irreducible. Nothing in the universe knows in advance what our choices are going to be … The universe can only know itself by expressing itself fully in a computationally irreducible way … The fact that it’s determined doesn’t mean that it doesn’t need to play outāit’s computationally irreducible, so it has to play out … This does not contradict determinism. My free choices are still determined, they’re just determined by me. They are determined by phenomena or events that I identify myself with … A free choice is not the opposite of a determined choice; indeed, a free choice is always determined, but determined by that which we identify with.”
Will, Necessity, & Desire
7. “The question of ‘free will’ is a meaningless red herring: it presupposes that necessity and desire are distinctāeven dichotomousāthings ā¦ This is what you must try to see to realize that the whole discussion about free will is nonsensical.”
8. “The ‘will’ is Schopenhauer’s word for the ‘universal mind’āit is the universe, God (provided you don’t separate God from nature), whatever you want to call it. There are no outside forces; there is nothing that could make determinations beyond the will because the will is all there is … There is only the one will of nature … As Schopenhauer put it, we are free to act according to our will, but we are not free to will our will … Schopenhauer saw every necessity in nature … necessities as expressions of a natural will.”
9. “What is a desire but the direct experience of an inner imperative? … The necessities entailed by our being are experienced by us as our desires. This is what our desires are, have always been, and will always beādesires are the manifestation of the necessities intrinsic to our being … The concept of ‘free will’ has no meaning because it cannot be contrasted with anything else. Necessity collapses with desireāthey are one and the same thing, two words for the same thing.”
10. “The will, as an experience of irresistible desire, is the necessityāit is the determination … What the will desires to do is what the will must doāand what the will must do, because it is what it is, is the expression of its irresistible desire … The desire to do is the necessity to do, and the necessity to do is the expression of the irresistible desire to do it.”
11. “At the level of core subjectivity or universal consciousness: the desire is the need, the need is the desire. The need to do something is the same thing as the desire to do it. There’s no distinction between the two because there is no external world that imposes choices on the agency that makes choices … There is no fundamental distinction between necessity and desire. What the universal subject desires to do is what its intrinsic dispositions dictate; its desires are determined by what it is. And, what the universal subject must do is what it desires irresistibly to do; it canāt desire otherwise because its desires, too, are dictated by what it is.”
12. “Every choice is determined by what core subjectivity is. Core subjectivity chooses to act the way it does because it is what it is. To choose differently would imply that it is something that it is not which is a contradiction. Whatever it chooses to do, it’s per necessity and also per will because it chooses to do it out of itself. The choice is determined by what it identifies itself with which is all there is. Necessity and will at the ultimate levelāwhich is the only level that really counts, where existence really is what it isāare one and the same thing.”
Ego & Delusions
13. “I don’t think Bernardo Kastrup really exists; how can it have free will if it’s not there? If free will is: Bernardo Kastrup can choose against nature, because Bernardo Kastrup is separate from nature, then of course not. The entity isn’t there to have free will.”
14. “The ‘ego’ is that mental complex that we identify withāthat narrative of individual selfhood … When it comes to the big things of life, clearly the ego doesn’t chooseādoesn’t choose the person you fall in love with, doesn’t choose your desired profession, doesn’t choose your sense of meaning. Nothing … Do I identify with brain activity/physiology? No, I have never seen my brain physiology, so I cannot possibly identify myself with those. Do I choose my thoughts? No, I don’t think I do. Do I choose my emotions? Certainly I don’t, otherwise I would never suffer, feel anxious, feel afraid, feel depressed. They happen to me, I don’t choose them … If you go down this line of investigation, you quickly realize that you don’t choose what you think and don’t choose what you feel. You witness your thoughts and your feelings like you witness the trees as you walk down the street. They are experiences that come to you that you have, not that you chose.”
15. “If you identify with the ego, you have very little free will … To the extent that we identify only with a particular idea of self ā that is, with a particular dissociated thought ā our personal free will be rather limited … If we identify with our ego ā a particular, dissociated set of ideas ā we turn the universe at large, and even our own intrusive thoughts and unwanted feelings, into oppressive tyrants. They become external factors that constrain and coerce us.”
16. “The entire industry and philosophy of self-help in the West is completely based on the notion that your life’s about you, and you should take the reins of your lifeāyou should take control of your life, and if you do that you can do anything. It’s the foundation of the Western sense of well-being in the 21st century … The strong illusion we have, especially in Western societies, of personal agency ties in with this notion that your life is about you and my life is about me. We are this personal agent; in some sense, separate from nature. We are mental and the rest of nature is not mental, so we are sort of aliens in here. The world is of a completely different nature than we are from the inside, and so we are separate and individual. So, for our little lives as this tiny little speck of dust walking around this little rock to have meaning, this personal agent has at the very least to be able to make choices and set its destiny in some way. Otherwise, it’s just an automatic play of predetermined moves. That’s what jails us. It’s this need for that kind of illusory freedom that confines us because it prevents us from seeing the horizon, from taking notice of what is really going on … If you see through these delusions, you understand that your personal agency is extremely superficial.”
17. “The delusion of complete personal agency, as if we were separate from the rest of nature, is an oppressive delusion because it puts all the responsibility for the outcome of your life on you. So, if you are a failure you have only yourself to blame, but if you are successful you can beat your chest in front of the mirror until the chickens come home to roostāboth are based on this notion of intrinsic personal agency. This leads to the other delusion that your life’s about you … If that’s what you truly believe then you’ve got to have free will because otherwise you’re just a pawn and everything is meaningless.”
18. “It’s a matter of how committed you are to wanting to know the truth as opposed to wanting something that is functionally useful. Is the notion of free will functionally useful? In that case, you ignore whether it’s true or not. If it is useful, you embrace it. I can’t do that. My mind is set up in such a way that I’m too committed to truth. I can’t knowingly deceive myself. Of course I deceive myself unknowingly like all of us, but I am incapable of saying, ‘Okay I’ll buy into this because it’s useful.'”
Metacognition & Meaning
19. “To derive some form of nihilism from this is the wrong conclusion. It’s a problem that arises from not seeing deep enough … Everything is profoundly meaningful. To say that it’s unavoidable because nature is what it is and not something else is not to say that it’s meaningless because every part in the deterministic system plays an an indispensable role … I live this worldview every day, and it has given me a fantastic peace of mind.”
20. “Your life’s not about you, so it’s not about making the right choices … The meaning of life has nothing to do with making āfreeā choices, as if such freedom were somehow distinct from the necessity of making said choices. The meaning of life has to do with paying attention to what is going on, observing the dance of existence, taking it in, reflecting, bearing witness. This is humanityās service to nature, not the egomaniacal delusion of individual agency. Only when you truly see this, will you be free in the only way that holds water: the freedom to allow yourself to be what you cannot help but be, and to choose to do what nature demands … If you remove those colored glasses that your life is about you and therefore your individual choices are what determine the meaning of it all, what remains is this unfathomably incomprehensible system called the universeāand you are bang in the middle of it. You’re a part of it, and it’s computationally irreducible.”
21. “There is this link that people make between having free will and their lives having meaning … If we are integrated in a larger organism, it’s irrelevant whether we have individual choice or not … The association between meaning and free choice is inconsequential because it’s not about choosing, it’s about witnessing the thing play itself out. It cannot know itself until and unless it plays itself out because it’s computationally irreducible. The future state cannot be known, and therefore it’s own intrinsic dispositions cannot be known because they’re only known in so far as they are expressed, and they are expressed in playing the game out … By witnessing the unfolding of that which we areāwhat we are determines our choices; what nature is determines our choicesāsince that is unknown to nature before it plays out, we experience each and every choice as a novelty.”
22. “The only way you can take account of what’s happening is through meta-consciousness, or metacognition … We recognize ourselves as individual subjects, and that helps a lot because now we can ponder things, we can reflect about the great questions of life, we can inspect the contents of our own minds and gain insight about ourselvesāall of that is made possible by a recognition of ourselves as individual subjects … But that leads to egotism because now you recognize yourself as an individual distinct from the rest and that leads to wars and all the crap. The ideal state would be one were there is meta-consciousness, but there is also the understanding that our lives are not about us … We are not separate from nature. We are something nature is doing. We’re not just here watching. The watcher is a behavior, a doing, of what is being watched. Understanding that is the end of egotism but preserves metacognition … This race between increasing metacognition, but also the understanding that life is sacrificial and it’s not about us, determines whether our civilization comes to an end or not … If the metacognitive understanding that your life is not about you wins the race, then we survive as a civilization.”
23. “You are the metacognitive eyes that are part of the system to bear witness to its playing itself out. Why is that not meaningful? It’s the deepest meaning imaginable … It does not know itself until it plays itself out, and you are the eyes through which it’s doing that. It’s not about you, it’s about itābut you play a role … It’s all just nature, but recognizing this doesn’t mean that we don’t have to play our roles … It’s all still determined by what nature is, but every part plays an indispensable role … Take us out of the equation, and there are no eyes to see the universe play itself out … To say that your choices are determined doesn’t mean that you are unimportant. Take you out of the system, and it doesn’t play itself out.”
24. “Whatever you do, you cannot escape the notion that whatever is happening in nature is a function of what nature is … Everything that happens in nature is a function of what nature is; it can’t be anything else … If you are that mind of nature, everything is determined by what you are. Every action you take is determined by what you are, but you experience that action-taking as an expression of your irresistible desire to do that action because there is no other way you could experience that actionāyou’re not being forced to do it by anything else … Every move in nature is in principle determined by what nature is because there’s no alternative to this. Everything has to be determined by what nature is … Nature’s actions are determined by what it is, and what it does is what it irresistibly wills to doāand what it needs to do is the expression of that irresistible will. The will and the necessity are one and the same thing … We don’t have the overview of the unitary whole that nature is. Nature is going through its own moves, and its means of understanding itself through playing itself out is us. So, your life, my life, has inherent meaning. The struggle has inherent meaning. The regrets, which may be senseless, have a meaning because it’s part of that unfolding. Everything you got wrong is part of that unfolding … Going through the deterministic moves is what will allow the universe to know what it is … There is intrinsic meaning going through the moves … We think the struggle is a means to an end, and the value and the meaning of it all will depend on the outcome of that struggleāand the decision/choice that is made, and what will play out as a function of that. I submit to you that the meaning is in the struggle. That’s the end. The end is that inner observation of our own mental struggles. That’s what it’s all about; that’s what you’re contributing to nature the day you die. It is about the process because the end is determined by what nature is.”
25. “Life is about allowing yourself to be played by nature. The metaphor is not you are playing yourself as an instrument; you are the instrument that nature is playing. You are the violin in the hands of God. Allow yourself to be played. If you want the orchestra to play in unison like an organism, that’s what it’s about. Our role as metacognitive agents is to pay attention, to observe how we are being played … To recognize that your life is not about you is not to say that your life is meaningless. The blossom of the apple tree is not about it, it’s about the appleāwithout the blossom there is no apple and there is no next apple tree. The fact that our lives are not about us does not entail or imply that our lives are meaningless. They’re extremely meaningful precisely because they are not about us, precisely because they are about something much bigger than us.”
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