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WillowOne's Positions

Idealism

My Positions

  1. I reject metaphysical idealism: the view that mind or consciousness is the fundamental reality and that the physical world is its appearance, content or product. This is physicalism turned inside out, and of the alternatives it is the one I find most interesting and least believable.
  2. The argument that idealism is more parsimonious than physicalism, because consciousness is the one thing we know directly and matter is an inference from it, confuses the order in which we come to know things with the order in which they exist. That experience is epistemically first does not make it ontologically first. The thermometer reading is what I know directly; the temperature is still what caused it.
  3. Idealism, in every version I have examined, either makes no predictions that differ from physicalism, in which case it is a relabelling (Popper's Razor), or it does, in which case the predictions fail.
  4. The contemporary form, the analytic idealism of Bernardo Kastrup, is the version worth engaging with. It does not survive the engagement, but it fails in instructive places.

Notes

  1. The versions. Subjective idealism (George Berkeley): to be is to be perceived, matter is a fiction, and objects persist when nobody is looking because God always is. Transcendental idealism (Immanuel Kant): the world as we know it is structured by the mind, but there is a world in itself behind it about which we can say nothing; this is an epistemology rather than a metaphysics, and I have less quarrel with it. Absolute idealism, the German tradition after Kant, in which reality is a single mind coming to know itself through history. Analytic idealism (Kastrup): there is one universal consciousness, "mind at large"; what we call the physical world is how its mental processes appear from across a "dissociative boundary"; individual minds are dissociated alters of it, on the model of dissociative identity disorder; and a brain is the image of a person's mental processes, not their cause. The related "conscious realism" of Donald Hoffman holds that spacetime is a user interface and that the fundamental entities are conscious agents.
  2. Why it looks parsimonious and is not. The idealist says: you posit two things, matter and mind, and the hard problem is the gap between them; I posit one. But physicalism also posits one, and the idealist's one has to do more work. A physical world explains why my experience is consistent, lawful, indifferent to my wishes and shared with yours in fine detail: there is a thing out there doing it. Idealism has to explain the same consistency, lawfulness, indifference and sharing without the thing. Its answer is that mind at large behaves as if it were a physical world governed by equations, which is to say that it has every property of matter except the name. Occam counts assumptions, not substances, and "there is a universal mind whose regular behaviour exactly mimics a physical world" is a larger assumption than "there is a physical world".
  3. The hard problem reversed. Idealism is sold as the solution to the hard problem: no need to explain how matter produces experience if there is only experience. But it inherits a problem of exactly the same shape. Why does universal consciousness appear, from the outside, as neurons, and why do those appearances track experience so precisely that an anaesthetist can switch experience off by adjusting them? Kastrup's answer is that the brain is the "extrinsic appearance" of the mental process, as a whirlpool is the appearance of a current. But then every fact neuroscience has found about the brain is a fact about the structure of experience, and the explanation of why experience has that structure is that it does. The decombination problem, how one universal mind becomes billions of separate ones with no access to each other, is the combination problem run backwards, and "dissociation" is a name for it, not an answer. We know dissociation as something brains do under stress. Making it the founding act of the cosmos borrows the term and drops the mechanism.
  4. The evidence idealism points to is physicalist evidence. Kastrup leans on cases where reduced brain activity accompanies rich experience: psychedelics, near-death states, the lucidity sometimes reported before death. These are presented as showing that the brain filters consciousness rather than producing it. But in each case the relation between brain state and experience is lawful and specific, which is what physicalism predicts and what a filter metaphor cannot: psilocybin disintegrates the default mode network and the sense of self goes with it; the drug is a molecule with a receptor; the dose-response relation is a graph. "Less activity, more experience" is in any case a misreading of the imaging, which shows redistributed and desynchronised activity rather than less. A filter theory should predict that destroying more of the filter frees more mind. Dementia is that experiment, and it shows the opposite (Souls, Mind-body dualism).
  5. Unfalsifiable by design. Ask what would be different if idealism were false and physicalism true. The idealist's answer is: nothing observable, since every observation is an experience and both theories predict the same ones. That concession ends the matter for me. A theory that agrees with its rival about every possible observation is not a rival; it is a vocabulary. And the vocabulary is not neutral. "Mind at large" is God with the personality removed, and the view is attractive to its audience for the reasons Pantheism and Deism are: it keeps the cosmic consciousness and drops the dogma. The move from "the universe is mental" to "the universe is meaningful, and my consciousness survives death as a return to the whole" is made in the second chapter of every popular book on the subject, and it is the move the theory is for.
  6. Johnson's stone. Boswell records that Johnson, told that Berkeley's doctrine could not be refuted, kicked a large stone and said, "I refute it thus." This is not an argument, and Berkeley has an answer (the pain in the foot is an idea too). But it points at the right thing. Idealism must account for the fact that the world resists us in ways we did not author and cannot override, and it does so by positing a mind that resists us exactly as matter would. At that point I do not know what the word "mind" is adding, and I suspect that what it adds is comfort.
  7. What I take from it. The idealist is right that experience is the only thing anyone has encountered directly, and right that physicalism owes an account of it. Solipsism is idealism with one mind, and I treat both the same way: unfalsifiable, unusable, and a useful reminder that certainty is not available (My Presuppositions). The existence of an external physical world is a presupposition I make because it is the simplest model of why experience behaves as it does, and idealism, when it has finished, has proposed the same model and renamed it.

Sources

  • Berkeley, G., A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710)
  • Kant, I., Critique of Pure Reason (1781), Transcendental Aesthetic
  • Kastrup, B., The Idea of the World: A Multi-Disciplinary Argument for the Mental Nature of Reality (2019); Analytic Idealism in a Nutshell (2024)
  • Hoffman, D., The Case Against Reality: How Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes (2019)
  • Carhart-Harris, R. L. et al., "Neural correlates of the psychedelic state as determined by fMRI studies with psilocybin", PNAS 109 (2012)
  • Boswell, J., Life of Johnson (1791), entry for 6 August 1763
  • Guyer, P. and Horstmann, R.-P., "Idealism", Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/idealism/

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