Agreed. Dean Radin's aim is to offer psi respectability by number crunching. It's useful as far as it goes, but it means adopting some dumb ideas that are common currency within science, like everyone from the past was ignorant and everyone in future will reach more useful conclusions based on their knowledge. If mind based reality is all there is, everyone has access to all they need at any point in time. Existence may be progressing in some abstract way we can't begin to guess at, but not in a linear way of accumulated data. There's no enlightenment awaiting at the end of the paper trail, and Radin's deferral to intelligent supercomputers to crunch the maths is a promise note.
I like Radin, he's a smart, funny guy who speaks to reductionists in a language they understand, even if they ignore him 95% of the time. However his new work on magic (a misnomer for the evidence he's gathering) is one of his less satisfactory works. You can't run with the dogs and the fox.
The thing about number crunching/the scientific method, is that it has built into it the idea of causality. Everything has to have a cause, and that is the result, essentially, of the materialistic viewpoint. If you believe that everything is material, i.e. you are a materialistic monist, then the universe as we perceive it really exists out there, and existed prior to you. So you try to explain everything in terms of one thing causing another. To some extent that works, but it hits the buffers when one tries to explain how consciousness arises from insentient matter. The easy way out is to posit panpsychism, that somehow even the most elementary forms of matter possess the property (akin to spin or charge) of consciousness. It relegates consciousness from being fundamental to being still within the ambit of materialism.
With Idealism, where consciousness is fundamental, causality is appreciated differently: it's not a fact of a material world, but a
way of thinking about reality that can be reasonably successful -- up to a point. We can treat processes/events as if they have causal chains; not because causality exists as such, but because universal consciousness is regular and ordered. Science is about describing those regularities and working within the concepts we develop about them.
Part of the way we perceive those regularities, as it happens, is as matter and its properties. But what is matter? According to Bernardo, it's a second-person interpretation of the inner being of universal consciousness. It's not so much that matter, time and space don't exist -- are illusions -- but that they arise out of the way we perceive what is (apparently) external to us, which really does exist, though not literally as matter, time and space. We perceive what MAL (Mind-At-Large) looks like from a second-person perspective, and project onto it our own ideas about causality; and that works, but only, as previously mentioned, up to a point.
You're probably aware that Bernardo thinks we (and other life-forms) are akin (it's just a metaphor) to dissociated alters of MAL. We perceive others and to some extent ourselves (e.g. in a mirror) as second-person material constructs, but also, from a first-person perspective, each of us has the experience of ourselves that we call consciousness.
When one starts to think like this, one begins to appreciate in a different and unaccustomed way. There aren't really galaxies out there of unimaginable size in unimaginably larger expanses of space, but instead time and distance become expressions of unfamiliarity. We'll quite probably never be able to see them "up close" and "in the present" not because they're literally so far away, as because they're so foreign to us. As it is, we perceive a restricted view of them and are able to posit that they're composed of stars, and confirm that by spectrographic and other analyses, but that's just a second-person view.
When we observe things more familiar to us, such as our own bodies. we often think in terms of their being caused by physical entities (from atoms to organs) organised at different levels of complexity, but what we're actually observing are processes, from our second-person perspective, occurring in the consciousness of MAL and experienced from our first-person perspective as dissociated alters of MAL. This is the way that MAL gets to experience itself -- through our agency. The price is the fact that our consciousness is limited in what it can conceive.
The impression of duality is overwhelming, and to a great extent it's understandable, given the underlying regularity and order of MAL (the "laws of nature"). If there's duality, it's as a result of the way we perceive reality, not reality as it actually is. It's quite natural to be a (perceptive) dualist until we come up against the hard problem of consciousness, when the only thing we can come up with to explain it is that consciousness somehow is generated by matter.
We get it the wrong way round: the impression of matter is generated by consciousness. When our bodies are sick, it isn't down to matter going awry, but down to our bodies appearing that way because there's a process happening in consciousness that we perceive as sickness. Sometimes, we can intervene in sickness through pharmacological or surgical means, so doesn't that mean that there really is matter organised into our bodies that we can manipulate? Not really. Our interventions can be viewed as processes that appear to be the result of manipulating matter. They can be viewed as instances of certain conscious processes being able to interact with other conscious processes, all within certain limits imposed by alter dissociation.
So what about magic? If it exists, what is it? One can only conjecture. Maybe it comprises examples of the interaction of conscious processes which don't rely on the acceptance at face value of matter. Same sort of thing with psi, one supposes. BTW, as I understand it, Bernardo doesn't see MAL as being self-reflectively conscious: it achieves self-reflectivity only through its alters, and only to the extent that they are capable of such self-reflectivity. However, it is conscious, or perhaps a better word is
aware. It hasn't consciously and deliberately created us, so much as has, by dint of being what it is, quite effortlessly and naturally generated us.
At some elemental level, then, it has an irresistible need to view itself in a self-reflective manner, and we're its means of doing that. It appears to have done it through some kind of evolutionary process, because, given our apparent natures, only evolutionary processes could have interacted to generate the kind of environment we need to come into, and maintain, our existence. To us, it appears that the process took billions of years and went through many different stages, but time, like space and matter, is just a construct of our minds.
I might draw the analogy of
Stephen Wiltshire, an autistic person who is able to draw with great accuracy views of whole cities, such as New York, after only a brief helicopter viewing. Obviously, though it takes him some time to do the drawing, it must exist whole and entire in his mind before he commences to draw. In an analogous way, the whole of evolution might exist in the awareness of MAL. The difference is that what MAL desires comes to be, instantly; but from the limited perspective of alters like us, it is interpreted as having taken time to happen.
What, imo, Radin wants to do is to explain from the second-person viewpoint in a way that will satisfy materialists, i.e. by presenting the results of experiments that will convince them. He's trying to hoist them on their own petard, and to some extent I suppose that can work, but it does rather pander to their worldview, and thereby is playing the game according to their rules.
I doubt he'll succeed except insofar as he'll prompt them to try to come up with explanations from within their accustomed cause-and-effect schema. To truly change that, they'd have to start looking at the world from a first-person perspective, i.e. to start from consciousness (the only thing from which all second-person percepts and concepts arise). They'd have to become philosophers as well as scientists wedded to naive realism. Some scientists are already thinking in this way, e.g. Donald Hoffman, Federico Faggin, Bernardo Kastrup, even, possibly, Rupert sheldrake (see
here for a discussion about that by Bernardo). However, philosophy is difficult, and many of them prefer to take the dismissive route of disparaging it rather than tackling it in earnest.