Here are the implications of idealism and why materialist dogma isn't viable. I also talk about religious and political propaganda as well as my personal experiences with pristine cognition which in some traditions is believed to be the ground of being (clear consciousness). I end up briefly rehashing some old material which I have discussed before with Claudio Soprano of thenonphysical channel and Dr. Michael S. Lee. I talk about scientific geniuses like Federico Faggin (the inventor of the microprocessor) and Giacomo D'Ariano (the father of quantum metrology) who currently endorse metaphysical idealism.

Consciousness is fundamental. It doesn't require a secondary source, apart from itself, in order to sustain the very awareness quality that defines it. The Hindu monk Swami Sarvapriyananda used a light analogy to convey this truth (and I paraphrase):

Objects in the world require light in order to be seen; when we turn our bedroom light on, photons bounce off objects and hit the retinas in our eyes, allowing us to see them; but notice that light itself doesn't require another light source to shine on itself in order to be seen; it is its own light.

The world is akin to a shared dream. Nature is a collective dream shared by multiple observers. Consciousness, as an irreducible essence, underpins all reality. No such thing as 'too abstract'. An abstraction beyond knowledge is the assumption that a reality outside the mind—which is devoid of colour and sound—exists (as is the materialist claim).

Trust me, I'm not a religious person and I used to be a materialist up until two years ago until some things began to happen in the scientific community in multiple fields—in particular physics and neuroscience. My channel explains that journey.

There is some philosophy in my thinking but it was science that caused my latest paradigm shift. I understand if it seems to go against our intuitions, but reality isn't what we take it to be. All we have is conscious experience.

Consciousness exists and is irreducible. It is the ground of existence. It sounds religious or mystical because we've been led to believe that reality is made of matter devoid of mind (this is false). Under materialism, people will always struggle with the hard problem of consciousness. But there is no such problem. Ontologically speaking, the base of reality isn't 'nothingness' as this one can't exist by definition; the next existential level up is consciousness, which we know to exist and begets the world.

There is a great place to start which is the analytic idealism of Bernardo Kastrup and also the conscious realism of Donald Hoffman. Kastrup is a former physicist who worked on superdeterminism at the large hadron collider years ago when he was a materialist. Now, his metaphysics explains how it all works and gets rid of the hard problem. We are like whirlpools in an ocean. In the end, there is only water (consciousness). We are spatiotemporally localised consciousness. His model also explains, dreams, memory and how it all works. And the brain is only a partial image of a mental process. The brain does not generate consciousness any more than the radio synthesises the voices that we hear coming out of it.

I have quite a few videos on my channel explaining all of that. If you really want to go deep into the brain science, read Kastrup's 'Why Materialism Is Baloney'. Brain function is more commensurate with filtration theory than what you are led to believe under materialism. In fact, if you watch the video I posted above, you will see that to assume that a physical reality exists outside minds violates Occam's razor.

Correlation isn't necessarily causation. To assume so is a materialist fallacy. It's known as the cum hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy (you can look this up). Here's a radio analogy: the voice on the radio might correlate with the electromagnetic oscillations in the radio's circuitry but the circuitry does not synthesise the voice. In the same manner, consciousness is not generated by the brain as you would have to assume that unconscious elements generate consciousness and here you hit an impasse.

Materialism cannot explain why psychedelics, which reduce brain activity, actually can lead to mind-expanding transpersonal experiences. This is congruous with the view that the brain filters out much of what can be perceived and constricts your experience to a narrow focus. Even when people say that they don't have dreams is erroneous because everybody dreams. And here's another thing about the notion of unconsciousness: just because you don't remember something doesn't mean that you were unconscious at the time.

You can only be in consciousness because that is exactly what you are. So your stream of experience is continuous. Another fallacy materialists make is the argumentum ad lapidem (appeal to the stone), which began 300 years ago when Samuel Johnson tried to refute George Berkeley's Immaterialism by kicking a large stone. It was noted that the same actions and the same sensations that come with kicking a stone can occur in vivid dreams, therefore, kicking a large stone does not prove, in any way, that objects have material existence.

I've been exactly where you are and I have had the same questions. Answering them, surprisingly, led me away from physicalism, which is untenable, and into idealism. It all began when John Clauser, Anton Zeilinger and Alain Aspect proved local realism to be false and won the Nobel Prize for it in 2022. Trust me, my friend. I understand what you are saying about brain damage and mental deficits, but as I have found out, it's more akin to a damaged oculus not allowing one to perceive a 3D game. Once you remove the oculus, your experience expands, it does not end.

Note that, even though I am practically claiming that consciousness NATURALLY survives death, I am not claiming that God exists or that any of the religions are true.


https://youtu.be/mn-IXOM2eJ8?si=GO_03zMufks4g__j