Don Salmon
2 min readNov 20, 2022

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Hi Matthew, I see in your response to Jonathan Shearman you're willing to reflect on what you wrote.

The idea that much of pop non duality is bungled Advaita is an idea I have no problem with.

My concern here is your conflation of empirical science with a particular philosophic outlook:

"Science works, it has a level of proof that exists operatively, we can change the world because we have come to understand it objectively. "

It's not entirely clear, but you appear to have conflated empirical investigation ("a level of proof that exists operationally") with an ontological claim "we have come to understand it objectively."

Note I intentionally changed "operatively" to "operationally" - as a researcher, it was my job to 'operationalize" the data - that is, to take a tiny purely quantitative aspect of immeasurable experience, which is what all scientists start with, and turn it into numbers.

If you think through what that means, you can see why the 'objective" (or more accurately, intersubjective) findings of empirical science do not in themselves require us to adopt any particular philosophic outlook.

Bernardo Kastrup, like others who are far better philosophers of science than him, has shown that virtually every scientific finding can be equally (if not better) accounted for in an idealist philosophy as by a physicalist one (I don't agree with his idealist philosophy but that's another matter - I tend toward Sri Aurobindo's integral nondualism).

This can take some years of VERY careful reflection to get over this misunderstanding. Stephen Hawking, among others, makes the same mistake, so it's clear that it's not one easily understood.

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Don Salmon
Don Salmon

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