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Analytic Idealism

Analytic Idealism

Spirituality

Soothfast
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Bernardo Kastrup, who started out with a PhD in computer engineering, and then later in life obtained a PhD in philosophy (specializing in ontology and the philosophy of mind), has in recent years advanced an ontological model he calls analytic idealism.

I have made a study of it, and continue to study it. It is a robust and rigorous metaphysical model of the ultimate nature of reality. It is a full-bore assault on physicalism, yet steers well clear of spiritualism. It is idealism for the 21st century, and perhaps well beyond. To my understanding it is the most coherent, parsimonious, and explanatorily powerful model of reality that exists.

Now, I thought of writing an enormous post that summarizes the model in its entirety, but I don't have the energy or time for that, because even a modestly detailed summary would be very long-winded. What I shall give here is just a brief outline, which will have woven into it certain critiques of physicalism (a.k.a. materialism).

1) The ontological primitive (i.e. the irreducible bedrock of existence/reality) is consciousness. And what is meant by "consciousness" here? Well...

2) At the base level, "consciousness" is phenomenal experience, or qualia. Reality is a unified field of pure mentation lacking any metacognition (or "self-awareness"​). Here the word "field" is used in a manner similar to how physicists use it, and one may characterize qualia (any instance of subjective conscious experience) as being excitations of this field. This field is often referred to as "mind at large" (MAL). It is not a god, and it does not plan or act with deliberate intent. MAL is pattern and thought, and probably purely spontaneous.

3) No attempt is made to determine what consciousness is "made" of. It just is, precisely as branes "just are" in M-theory, or strings "just are" in string theory, or quantum fields "just are" in quantum physics generally. Every explanatory model, physical or metaphysical, must start with some irreducible ingredient(s), otherwise infinite regress results, with "turtles all the way down."

4) Our first-person, subjective experiences are the only thing we know exist. The idea of "physical stuff" that is distinct from consciousness is an abstraction -- an explanatory model. We perceive "stuff," but these things are just that: representations on our "screen of perception" (that is, our sense organs), like pixels make up the images on a laptop screen.

5) The mistake of physicalism is to take the particles detected by our senses (augmented by instrumentation) as being the make-up of reality, and, by extension, of consciousness itself. (An analogous mistake: to see the image of a person on a computer screen, and then say that the pixels that make up the image is the person itself.) Let me say this another way: our subjective conscious experience, informed by our sense perception, perceives entities that it abstractly models as particles, and then we go about trying to conceive (with our conscious thought!) how those particles we observe must somehow comprise or give rise to our consciousness. Besides summoning the specter of "the hard problem of consciousness," this approach also is not parsimonious, since it invents a new ontic category that we have no first-hand knowledge actually exists. Again, what we know actually exists is our own subjective inner life, our consciousness, our first-person experiences. All else is abstraction to explain patterns on our screen of perception.

6) Now I get back to the analytic idealist model with the main novel idea: we are each dissociated "alters" of MAL. In modern psychology and neuroscience, dissociation is a process whereby mental processes of various kinds (and to varying degrees) may take place in a person's mind that are not accessible or controllable by that person's introspection or volition, respectively. In extreme cases, dissociation gives rise to alternate personalities that are called alters. Biological processes and bodies are the extrinsic appearance (on our screen of perception) of what a dissociative process in MAL "looks like."

7) This is important: the idea that consciousness is the sole ontological primitive means that everything is "in consciousness." MAL is not "contained" in a circumscribing spacetime, because MAL is all there is. There is an objective real world, but it is mental, not physical. What we call the physical world is what the real world looks like to our senses. The physical world is a representation of an underlying reality that is mental in nature, because nature is mental.

8) Our sense perceptions are formed at the dissociative boundary separating each of us from the non-dissociated component of MAL. The experiences of MAL impinge this boundary and are perceived by us as sights, sounds, tastes, and so on.

9) This idealist model avoids the "hard problem of consciousness," which is the problem of how arrangements of dead particles give rise to qualitative experiences (seeing colors, smelling flowers) and, with enough biological complexity, even a sense of self-awareness. Rather than mind emerging from matter, it is posited that matter emerges from mind in this sense: matter is the extrinsic appearance, to our senses (or on the screen of our perception), of certain mental processes of MAL. The consciousness "just is," and biological evolution over billions of years created organisms, or alters of MAL, that are capable of higher-level cognition compared to what the non-dissociated component of MAL itself is capable of.

10) There is no "hard problem" here: from consciousness comes self-reflective consciousness -- the kind of consciousness that turns in on itself and can introspect. Analytic idealism takes consciousness to be the basis of reality, whereafter it is no hard thing to conceive of that consciousness achieving locally greater degrees of sophistication capable of metacognition. Humans, for instance.


Whelp, I'm knackered. I'm happy to entertain questions, nitpicking, or whatever, though it may take me a couple days to come back here and make replies!

Meanwhile, here is an accessible video series by Dr. Kastrup himself that explains the idea of analytic idealism:

https://www.essentiafoundation.org/analytic-idealism-course/

He is a very clear expositor. If you don't want to watch all seven parts, just the first four parts really get the main points across.

KellyJay
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@Soothfast said
Bernardo Kastrup, who started out with a PhD in computer engineering, and then later in life obtained a PhD in philosophy (specializing in ontology and the philosophy of mind), has in recent years advanced an ontological model he calls analytic idealism.

I have made a study of it, and continue to study it. It is a robust and rigorous metaphysical model of the ultimate ...[text shortened]... ou don't want to watch all seven parts, just the first four parts really get the main points across.
I'm not sure anything is being said in your post that doesn't simply take a huge leap from pure chemicals into something much higher without a cause being given. A chemical reaction is one thing, but being aware of a chemical reaction is another on a level far higher than simple chemistry. It isn't much different than defining information in a book, you can look at the physical makeup of the paper and ink, but the chemical makeup doesn't matter, it is the arrangement where the information is found, and even there to grasp that send and receive mechanisms are required for perception and understanding.

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@Soothfast said
Bernardo Kastrup, who started out with a PhD in computer engineering, and then later in life obtained a PhD in philosophy (specializing in ontology and the philosophy of mind), has in recent years advanced an ontological model he calls analytic idealism.

I have made a study of it, and continue to study it. It is a robust and rigorous metaphysical model of the ultimate ...[text shortened]... ou don't want to watch all seven parts, just the first four parts really get the main points across.
Theoretical academia; what a waste of time.

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@divegeester said
Theoretical academia; what a waste of time.
Not entirely, though it is true that metaphysical models, as opposed to strictly scientific ones, are not typically falsifiable. But there has long been a symbiosis between philosophy and science, dating back to the time when the two subjects were essentially the same under the heading of "natural philosophy."

What are called "metaphysical experiments" are beginning to gain traction as a means of possibly getting the foundations of physics and cosmology out of a long-standing rut, and maybe even make progress on a scientific understanding of consciousness itself. Here's a fairly accessible article about it:

https://www.quantamagazine.org/metaphysical-experiments-test-hidden-assumptions-about-reality-20240730/

Now, returning to the subject of analytical idealism as espoused by Kastrup, there are in fact some heady implications for quantum physics. This is something I'm hoping to get to in greater detail in this thread later, because Kastrup convincingly and with logical precision demonstrates how analytical idealism is compatible with the eminent theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli's "relational interpretation" of quantum mechanics. This interpretation, informed by an idealist philosophy, could finally make the weirdnesses of quantum mechanics "make sense."

The basic idea, which seems scientifically (and not merely philosophically) inescapable, is that the long-held physicalist orthodoxy of "non-contextuality" is not tenable. Experiments done over the past two or three decades have for practical purposes disproven non-contextuality.

This is not merely academic. Non-contextuality is nothing less than the idea that the world -- and all reality -- is independent of perception, insofar as perception constitutes observation (such as with a scientific measuring apparatus). This seemingly commonsense notion appears to be false, because the only other option, really, is to conclude that quantum mechanics is wrong -- something no experiment devised has ever found the faintest hint of.

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@Soothfast said
Not entirely, though it is true that metaphysical models, as opposed to strictly scientific ones, are not typically falsifiable. But there has long been a symbiosis between philosophy and science, dating back to the time when the two subjects were essentially the same under the heading of "natural philosophy."

What are called "metaphysical experiments" are beginning to ...[text shortened]... t quantum mechanics is wrong -- something no experiment devised has ever found the faintest hint of.
Ok so you’ve read up on something which no one else understand wtf you’re on about.

Congratulations; you probably feel very smart.

Soothfast
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@divegeester said
Ok so you’ve read up on something which no one else understand wtf you’re on about.

Congratulations; you probably feel very smart.
Well, you have to be interested in these kinds of inquiries to readily gain an understanding. You're not dumb, and I do not think I'm particularly smart. I'm into esoteric things, I suppose. But, I still think of this forum as the philosophy forum (which it used to be).

The video series I linked to I guarantee you would understand, but it would be an investment of several hours. So again, you would need to have that interest in the subject.

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@Soothfast said
Well, you have to be interested in these kinds of inquiries to readily gain an understanding. You're not dumb, and I do not think I'm particularly smart. I'm into esoteric things, I suppose. But, I still think of this forum as the philosophy forum (which it used to be).

The video series I linked to I guarantee you would understand, but it would be an investment of several hours. So again, you would need to have that interest in the subject.
I have no idea what it is you are going on about in your OP and I’m certainly not going to waste “several hours” trying to find out.

If you can’t explain your over complicated academic mumbo-jumbo then just continue to copy paste it and carry on feeling superior.

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@divegeester said
I have no idea what it is you are going on about in your OP and I’m certainly not going to waste “several hours” trying to find out.

If you can’t explain your over complicated academic mumbo-jumbo then just continue to copy paste it and carry on feeling superior.
What I've said in the OP is, I must confess, something of an "idea dump," because I just wanted to get something out, see what kinds of questions (if any) folks might bring up, and then later amend and improve the outline. It was written in haste, late at night, but figured that once I put it out there, it would force me to go back to it repeatedly to improve it.

What I've written thus far I freely acknowledge is likely to be confusing on many points. But, if I write drafts to myself, I'd miss out on the input from others.

See, the ideas are only complicated at first glance because they go so hard against the intuition of physicalism. But there is something about this ontology that I've found, well, spiritually revelatory. The way Kastrup has described things has crystalized a "feeling" I've had about the nature of reality for decades that I was not smart enough -- that's right, not smart enough -- to get organized into a coherent model on my own. And certainly I never thought of the dissociation angle.

So I get excited, and bang out a very dense post in this sleepy backwater of the internet late one night. I hope someday I might describe the whole model better. Though, I should also supply some definitions of certain words philosophers use that are hard to find more familiar equivalents for, like "ontic."

Truly, I am rather sorry you think this is all just intellectual showboating. Not my intent at all. This thing about idealism, it's not just being bandied about by philosophers anymore. It's creeping into neuroscience, and also quantum physics.

It's Kastrup's book, The Idea of the World, that really put me on to this.

You might just tell me a bit about yourself, maybe. I think you're a Christian, but not of the fundamentalist variety. Am I right? If I am right, then I would guess that this model of reality might rub you the wrong way. Or maybe not.

Here, in plain terms: the ultimate nature of reality is subjective experience. The kind of experience we all know from a very young age. Everything around us -- the world, the universe, and all other universes (should they exist) -- arise from a unified, all-pervasive consciousness that at its base level is spontaneous in nature. Just that. And you and I are pieces of this "mind at large" (MAL). We arise from MAL in a way analogous to how multiple personalities are known to arise in a single person's mind, if that person is suffering from dissociative identity disorder. There is much more to this story, but I'll stop there for now.

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@divegeester

One thing that I think I now understand is that it was a mistake to weave refutations of physicalism into my description of analytic idealism. It's too much. I should describe analytic idealism first, then make the case for why it is the better model of reality than physicalism.

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@Soothfast said

Here, in plain terms: the ultimate nature of reality is subjective experience. The kind of experience we all know from a very young age. Everything around us -- the world, the universe, and all other universes (should they exist) -- arise from a unified, all-pervasive consciousness that at its base level is spontaneous in nature. Just that. And you and I are pieces o ...[text shortened]... from dissociative identity disorder. There is much more to this story, but I'll stop there for now.
Why can’t you just talk like a normal person instead of spouting all this word salad?

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@Soothfast said
@divegeester

One thing that I think I now understand is that it was a mistake to weave refutations of physicalism into my description of analytic idealism. It's too much. I should describe analytic idealism first, then make the case for why it is the better model of reality than physicalism.
Whatever.

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@Soothfast said
You might just tell me a bit about yourself, maybe. I think you're a Christian, but not of the fundamentalist variety. Am I right? If I am right, then I would guess that this model of reality might rub you the wrong way. Or maybe not.
It might rub me up the wrong way if I had the faintest idea of what you’re rambling on about.

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@Soothfast said
Bernardo Kastrup, who started out with a PhD in computer engineering, and then later in life obtained a PhD in philosophy (specializing in ontology and the philosophy of mind), has in recent years advanced an ontological model he calls analytic idealism.

I have made a study of it, and continue to study it. It is a robust and rigorous metaphysical model of the ultimate ...[text shortened]... ou don't want to watch all seven parts, just the first four parts really get the main points across.
How is this different from George Berkeley’s esse est percipi?

How is this different to Schopenhauer's The World As Will and Idea?

I too have a degree in philosophy, and what Kastrup, Berkeley, and Schopenhauer have is not so much a philosophy, as a psychological condition. Schopenhauer even named it as "theoretical egoism", though I would call it "theoretical egotism." One does not refute a psychological condition with logical arguments; one recommends their proponents to a therapist.

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@moonbus said
How is this different from George Berkeley’s esse est percipi?

How is this different to Schopenhauer's The World As Will and Idea?

I too have a degree in philosophy, and what Kastrup, Berkeley, and Schopenhauer have is not so much a philosophy, as a psychological condition. Schopenhauer even named it as "theoretical egoism", though I would call it "theore ...[text shortened]... te a psychological condition with logical arguments; one recommends their proponents to a therapist.
@moonbus

These other philosophers are acknowledged and addressed by Kastrup now and then, and he notes the differences amongst the ontologies. Berkley, if I recall correctly, was a theist, and Kastrup's ontology features no gods (there are other differences though).*

What distinguishes Kastrup's model from the others is the dissociation mechanism, which has gained a strong scientific footing in recent decades in neuroscience and clinical psychology. He analyzes the experimental results from these fields and demonstrates how his ontology is compatible with them whilst also retaining greater parsimony and explanatory power compared to strict "mainstream" physicalism.

Dissociation of a unified mind-at-large, he demonstrates fairly convincingly, is why we all seem to inhabit (more or less) the same world, yet cannot read each other's minds, or know what's going on in another galaxy, or change physical laws or the comportment of the "physical" world merely by willing it (i.e. applying mere volition). And of course, that we each are distinct dissociative "bubbles" in MAL means this does not all amount to mere solipsism.

Kastrup's ontology speaks to the "real" nature of reality, and how it can explain quantum mechanics, the "hard problem of consciousness," and other scientific problems, so it is not a description of a psychological condition (though it may have implications for a variety of clinically observed psychological conditions). But idealism of any kind, by definition, denies the existence of the physical "in and of itself." All that is physical is merely a representation of mental processes on the "screen of perception" of living beings. All is thought (or experience), and sensory perceptions (sights, sounds, etc.) play out only on the dissociative boundary of each alter of MAL.

And then there is quantum physics angle, and the aforementioned relational interpretation of quantum mechanics which attempt to address the so-called "measurement problem." This is addressed by Kastrup, as is the problem of defining a "physical system." Because of quantum entanglement, non-contextual physicalist orthodoxy has painted itself into a corner and can point to only one legitimate physical system: the entire universe as a whole, which isn't useful. But reasoning along the lines of analytical idealism leads to the logical inference that the undissociated portion of MAL corresponds to a "physical system," as do each of its alters. This has relevance to experimental results in physics laboratories. I'd like to get to this in greater detail next week when time allows. (I intend to return to this thread for quite some time, but my appearances are bound to be irregular because of my schedule.)


*It seems to have taken Kastrup some number of years to decide to label his ontology "analytical idealism" in order to differentiate it from other historical idealist philosophies.

PS - I can heartily recommend Kastrup's book The Idea of the World. The heart of it is just around 200 pages. For me, having no degree in philosophy, it was fortunate that I watched the video series first, because it made diving into the book much easier.

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@divegeester said
Whatever.
Yes, I think you are simply not interested in these lines of inquiry, so will let you do your thing. Cheers.

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