Brilliant content, difficult narration (Audible)

The content of the book is brilliant, but the narration on Audible feels very mechanical, almost as if it was read by AI.

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Irritating voice-over

The narrator clearly has little cue of what he is reading about. He is adopting a tone of voice which might be appropriate for some crime story. I doubt that Bernardo Kastrup had any say in the selection of this narrator. I wrote off the book as I could not concentrate on the meaning of the text.

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Stunning!

I am stunned by this book. I thought I’d see through it as an elaborate joke or just nonsense but as I stuck with it, everything made sense.

The ‘hard problem’ of consciousness simply cannot be solved with the current scientific paradigm. Physical matter (brains) cannot give rise a conscious self. There’s no colour, sound, pain etc ‘out there’ beyond perception. The only reality is perception, the electrical and chemical messages sent to the brain to construct reality. And then there’s the quantum physicists who delve deeper and deeper into ‘physical reality’ and find that matter simply disappears into waves of probability that only become ‘real’ when observed, when a perceiving subject is aware of it.

I’ve never felt at home with atheism nor any kind of religion and yet there were niggling insights and experiences that I tried to dismiss. After finishing this book, I see that these insights were pointing towards Idealism. Reality is consciousness, not matter and we are that reality with all its profound implications.

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A rewarding struggle to read

Coming from a different field and language, reading this book with the intention of understanding everything leads to many interruptions looking up the meaning of words, that can escalate to a recursive dive into wikipedia articles and youtube videos. I find a better strategy is to just listen and pick up what you can understand, only looking up words that come up often (like parsimonious and ontological). In fact, I've come to think parsimonious is this author's favorite word.

If you really want to understand every word and metaphisics isn't your field, I recommend (also) reading the e-book. Unfortunately, whisper-sync doesn't seem available at this time. However, the point of an audiobook is often that one wants to combine reading with undemanding activities like driving or walking the dog. So for this purpose, and for keeping your sanity, I recommend listening more superficially the first time you listen.

The author chose to make this book as resistant to unfounded criticism as possible, at the cost of readability. This choice seems defendable, given the controversial status of idealism. It also conveys the feeling this author may have, that he is trying to show the world an obvious fact, that not many care to hear, and that is rebutted without proper argument.

The content of the book is convincing for me. I have been a physicalist and this book converted me into believing idealism is a better view than physicalism for all intents and purposes. Which isn't the same thing as believing idealism is the 'truth', although that statement could lead to semantic and philosophical discussions about truth. I believe adopting idealism, for those with the cognitive ability to grasp it, leads to better progress in my own field (psychiatry) than physicalism.

I find the narrator's voice somewhat haughty, but nothing too distracting.

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7 people found this helpful

A fascinating subject ruined by narrator.

I love Bernardo; I appreciate his philosophy and perspective but the narrator here sucked the joy and interest out of this book with a monotonous and robotic reading.

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