Alex O'Connor

And they are just separate kinds of things.

And somehow they interact with each other.

Another way is to say, actually, there's only one type of stuff.

And that type of stuff is the dead stuff.

It's the matter, the atoms.

This is the most popular view in the West today.

The only stuff that exists is atoms that are dead.

And it's just that if you put them together in the right way, you get this thing called consciousness.

But really, it's kind of just a manifestation of the atoms.

There's a third option, which is there is only one type of stuff, and it's the mental stuff.

And what we call physical, what we call the physical world around us is a manifestation of mental stuff, which sounds super hippy-dippy, but that's only because we're not used to it.

I mean, the idea that people think that, you know, they're just happy to accept that if you put physical matter together in the right order, it will produce thoughts.

That is as weird to me as saying that if you put thoughts together in the right order, you could produce some physical matter.

It seems like a sort of category mistake, right?

But I think there's only one type of stuff.

So there's this view which in the Western tradition is called idealism, which is kind of the view that everything exists as mental stuff.

Some people have said that everything is kind of an idea in the mind of God.

Some people think that nothing exists except insofar as it's being perceived.

It's a very sort of complicated and quite deep philosophical tradition, but it's something that the Advaita Vedanta tradition had been banging on about for thousands of years prior to its development in the Western canon.

The reason it's Vedanta is because the Upanishads are particularly interested in the idea that kind of