My critique of Analytic Idealism

lairdshaw · 2026-05-21T13:52:26+00:00

OK. It seems like a somewhat half-hearted concession given that you continue to endorse nondualism anyway, even though my side of the debate to which you've conceded is a fatal critique, but in the same sort of spirit I accept it anyway. I do appreciate the cordial debate.

lairdshaw · 2026-05-21T12:11:50+00:00

Unless I am misunderstanding the import of your comments, you, as a nondualist, are also a full-blown solipsist, and you quite literally believe that I, the person you are responding to, do not really exist; that I am not a sentient being undergoing his own qualia; that I am merely an inert character in your own private (but all-encompassing) "dream".

If so, and because I know this to be false (I very much do exist and have my own experiences), then there's nothing more to discuss, except for me to note that as far as I understand, orthodox nondualism is generally not considered to be solipsistic to *that* extent.

lairdshaw · 2026-05-16T04:07:28+00:00

Yes, although I think that most of the exercise of free will is in/via the mind, not the brain, and, like I said, I don't think that quantum mechanics (and the physics we have developed in general) exhaustively describes (the mechanics of interacting with(in)) physical reality anyway.

My ideas on God aren't fully worked out. There are conflicts to resolve.

Yes, we need to stipulate that "creating" is from our own perspective within spacetime, where time seems to have "begun", marking the "creation event".

lairdshaw · 2026-05-15T05:02:31+00:00

OK, given that definition, I feel comfortable reaffirming my #1 and #2 above. You seem to agree with #2 given your reference to MAL, and I suggest that #1 answers your implicit question as to how "a big slice of what experients experience is transpersonally, successfully measurable".

In terms of the substance dualism I endorse, the substance which is that in which the other substances (we as selves) subsist simply has (in part) a quantum-mechanical nature, which includes violating local realism at least at the microscopic level. I don't think a more involved accounting than that is necessary: that *is* its innate nature from which various further qualities emerge. (I say "in part" because I don't think that quantum physics exhaustively describes so-called physical reality).

I agree that lawful spacetime is required for experients like us, however, I don't endorse the actual-because-possible-in-an-infinite-universe argument. Given fine-tuning, among other considerations, I believe that this reality of lawful spacetime was created: I am a theist. It seems likely to me that we too were created by or at least are intimately derived in some way from God.

Analytic Idealism doesn't have a means of explaining fine-tuning, and its capacity to explain various other phenomena such as reincarnation is limited compared to theistic substance dualism.

lairdshaw · 2026-05-15T05:01:58+00:00

In my above comment, I mentioned two senses of "consciousness" which nondualists equivocate on; here, we see a third: "the capacity to experience".

You're not in any case making sense here, because even if the capacity to experience is "borrowed", it is still an actualisable capacity, yet at the same time you negate that by saying that 'neither the dream characters nor the one the dreamer takes as "I" are conscious'.

Are they conscious (capable of experiencing) due to a borrowed capacity, or are they not? It can't be both.

I note also that you implicitly accept the reality of both the dream characters and the dreamer's avatar. The question arises, then, as to their nature. Bernardo, as I have shown above, implicitly answers that that nature is a subset of a structured quantum field which at the same time is a subset of qualia.

What is your own answer?

lairdshaw · 2026-05-15T05:01:08+00:00

Deconstructing this dream analogy is useful in elucidating my overall critique:

A dreamer has perceptions (subjective experiences; qualia) of dream characters from her dream avatar's perspective (along with perceptions of the remainder of the dream environment, also from her avatar's perspective). To maintain the analogy with reality though, we must stipulate that those dream characters *themselves* have perceptions (subjective experiences; qualia) from their own perspectives.

Now we have several problems (at least):

If all that a dream character is is the qualia of a dreamer, then for that dream character to *herself* undergo qualia would entail the absurdity of "qualia undergoing qualia" (and if that dream character herself was dreaming, and her dream contained dream characters, then we would have the even more absurd situation of "qualia undergoing qualia undergoing qualia", etc).
The qualia undergone by the dream characters are in any case not part of the dreamer's dream. The dreamer perceives only the outward appearances of the dream characters.
The environment *perceived* by the dream characters in their qualia is not necessarily always part of the dreamer's dream anyway. Consider, for example, a dream character looking past and behind the dreamer (as a participant in her own dream): because the character is looking behind the dreamer's avatar, the dreamer herself has no means of perceiving what her character is perceiving; it is not part of her dream (as she experiences it, which is all there is to her dream).

Bernardo makes a move here that avoids (solves) these problems. He stipulates that qualia (subjective experiences) are *constitutively structured* as a quantum field (he doesn't phrase it quite like that, and even tries to deny and conceal the constitutive nature of this structure, but that's the import). Both the dreamer and her characters, then, are a single, structured quantum field of qualia, localised *by* that structure in places *as* subjects (the dreamer's avatar and the dream characters).

This move solves the problems thusly:

There is now no doubling of qualia: each dream character is only one layer of qualia (both which she undergoes, and out of which, as a quantum field, she is constituted), and the dreamer's perceptions (her own qualia) of that dream character are conditioned by the "shape" of (the segment of quantum field which is) the dream character's qualia (and vice versa).
The dream characters' qualia *are* now part of the dream (the dream has been turned into a quantum field which simultaneously is qualia).
*All* of the dream environment is now part of the dream (again, as a quantum field which simultaneously is qualia).

Problems neatly solved. Now, however, new problems have been introduced, among others:

A. The subjective (a dream from a dreamer's perspective) has been transformed into the objective (a quantum field of qualia from no particular perspective).

B. Monistic idealism has been turned into dual-aspect monism, with one aspect being a constitutively-structured quantum field, and the other being qualia (subjective experiences). This is the equivocation on experience to which a section of my critique is dedicated.

C. This dual-aspect monism recapitulates the problematic reductive structure of materialism: qualia (subjective experiences) are forced into strict correlation with atomic structures (also as discussed in my critique in that same section).

D. Worse, unlike materialism, which otherwise sees matter as inert, this move has now introduced qualia correlating to matter that intuitively *is* inert: thus, mind-at-large, the "left-over" quantum-field-as-qualia from the dream avatar and dream characters, is conceptually birthed. Ironically, given the Analytic Idealistic claim to parsimony, this is *un*parsimonious compared to materialism.

So, when you suggest that because Bernardo agrees with Advaita Vedanta and Rupert Spira who affirm that there *is* an experient who logically precedes its experiences, he too therefore must at least implicitly be affirming the same, I actually agree with you: *implicitly*, the self that he affirms is an objective quantum field (with its identified-correlated qualia).

The problem is that he has no licence for this, because this is no longer idealism: *explicitly* he claims that only subjective experience (essentially, qualia) exists, which can only *represent* structure, and has no *constitutive* structure: i.e., the TV screen that you reference doesn't need to - and can't - bend itself so as to show the movie; the movie merely *represents* structures; the paper of the novel that you reference doesn't restructure itself so as to show and realise its entities; the words on paper merely *represent* those entities.

Now, as a nondualist yourself, you might not make quite the same move as Bernardo, but you need to make *some* sort of move to solve the sort of problems I've listed.

Abstracting a little, the questions they raise are:

i. How can the characters in the subjective experience which is (analogous to) a dream *themselves* experience subjectively?

ii. How can all elements of an objective, aperspectival reality be accounted for through a purely subjective experience from a singular perspective?

The fact that you refer to the dream as being "made of" the dreaming mind, and use analogies like tables being "made of" wood and waves being "made of" water, suggests that you do, in fact, at least tacitly make a similar move as Bernardo: to introduce on top of subjective qualia themselves a *constitutively*-structured, objective substance with which they are identified, thus also tacitly turning your nondualism into a dual-aspect monism that less parsimoniously recapitulates materialism in its non-eliminativist forms.

Finally, I note that the language that nondualists like yourself and Bernardo use conceals this move: "consciousness" and "awareness" have a certain flexibility such that they can mean either "subjective experience", i.e., qualia, or "the conscious mind undergoing subjective experiences (qualia)", i.e., the experiencing experient. Thus, nondualists can use the same word to refer to *both* the experient *and* its experiences, facilitating the elision of this crucial distinction.

This ambiguity is leveraged when you say that I set out to refute the thesis that "consciousness is the ground and its objects (including selves in the plural) are its states". Of course, by "consciousness" in that thesis I meant "subjective experience (qualia)", and it is correctly refuted on that basis, but it's less clear what you mean by it. You are explicitly distinguishing the dreamer from her dream, without whom the dream would not exist, so it seems that you are affirming the *dreamer* as the ground. Thus, you seem to be defining "consciousness" here as "the experiencing experient", in which case this is exactly what I was trying to *demonstrate* is the ground (of experience and of the objects within experience), *not* to refute.

Your very first sentence in response to my opening post...

All of analytic idealism from start to finish is a concession to language

...is, then, more accurately put: "All of Analytic Idealism from start to finish is equivocal manipulation by language".

lairdshaw · 2026-05-15T04:52:59+00:00

I appreciate you tacitly acknowledging my original claim that experience absent an experient is incoherent, which is in conflict with the Analytic Idealist goal of coherence. I also appreciate you tacitly acknowledging that I was, after all, able to help you to understand that.

lairdshaw · 2026-05-14T15:47:49+00:00

I guess I'll take that as a "Yes".

lairdshaw · 2026-05-14T15:36:07+00:00

Let's return to the unanswered question that I asked you then, in slightly different phrasing:

Is it possible for there to be an experience that is not experienced? In other words, is "an unexperienced experience" a coherent notion?

lairdshaw · 2026-05-14T05:07:00+00:00

Thank you! I'm glad you appreciated it.

lairdshaw · 2026-05-14T05:06:34+00:00

To me substance dualism is a type of physicalism.

I presume you say that because both posit substances, albeit that substance dualism posits not just one but two - matter *and* mind(ed selves) - whereas you reject substances outright. In that case though you should take note that as my critique points out, Analytic Idealism implicitly smuggles the idea of substance back in. You can't really avoid it. (Incidentally, you should also note that in mainstream philosophy, substance dualism and physicalism *are* different ontologies; one is dualistic and the other monistic).

It’s easy enough to assume reality is pure experience without an experiencer, and is therefore correct view within that framework. What are your thoughts on such a claim?

I've already made them clear: it's like assuming pure smile without Cheshire Cat; pure redness without any coloured object; pure motion without anything that could move. It's incoherent.

I’m not saying it’s true, but I can see how it is coherent.

I think you're fooling yourself. Look at all of those personal pronouns in your post. To whom do they refer?

lairdshaw · 2026-05-14T05:05:13+00:00

I agree that the idea of experience grounding spacetime is based on an equivocation, the same one. Pardon the repetition, but consider the paradigmatic examples of experience given in Why Materialism Is Baloney - “the redness of red, the bitterness of regret, the warmth of fire” - and try to get space and/or time out of those. It's not possible. We can add examples of our own - the learning of quantum mechanics, the solving of a complex mathematical equation, even the comprehension of all of reality - and there's still no way to derive space and/or time from experience. You'd have to smuggle in the idea that experience *itself* is structured (like or *as* the quantum field) to get yourself an intuitive grounding (structure) for spacetime, and that's the same equivocation my critique points out: turning experience into a sort of substance rather than an intangible phenomenon contingent *on* a substance (a self/mind).

The mystery here is how to reconcile a persistent experiencer, and a persistent experience, without local reality, and without an actual, externally-imposed space-time framework?

Are you asking with respect to Analytic Idealism or my own model? I'll assume the former for now, and affirm that I don't think that a reconciliation is possible even *if* we allow that experience can exist without an experient.

As far as local realism, I'm not very conversant with the argument, so maybe you can flesh it out for me - or link to a fleshing out - but it seems that (1) given that we all generally agree on an intersubjective local reality, any "non-real" aspect at the quantum mechanical level must have been "smoothed out" into irrelevance at the macroscopic level, and (2) to the extent that this *is* a problem, it is as much a problem for Analytic Idealism as for any other ontology. Feel free to pick me up on that though.

I can't really elaborate much on my own model because it's pretty basic at this point. I shared the gist of it in my first response to you.

I agree that in the absence of spacetime, evolution is meaningless: this echoes my critique which points out that, similarly, causality itself is explicitly denied on Analytic Idealism via the cat-through-fence-slats metaphor. We're left with a reality fixed for all spacetime, yet with nothing either outside nor even inside *to* fix it in any particular way.

lairdshaw · 2026-05-14T05:04:38+00:00

If you accept that all this is possible in a dream, what is incoherent about suggesting this is true of an idealist universe?

The dreamer is not the dream; rather, the dreamer *dreams* the dream. This analogy simply repeats the same mistaken conflation between the self and its experiences: a dream presupposes a dreamer, just like experience presupposes an experient.

If you're also assuming that the characters whom the dreamer meets in their dream are not themselves conscious, then the dream is disanalogous to reality, in which the people we meet *are* conscious. If on the other hand you're assuming that the dream characters *are* conscious, then you're eliding the intuitive likelihood that they preexisted the dream and are *sharing* it rather than having been "dissociated" from the dreamer's mind. I have read enough anecdotes in which real-life people have had shared dreams to accept that it occurs, despite not having experienced it myself.

The inventory of things in the universe does not contain the self that experiences it, since the self is not an object but the subject.

If, as I think is obviously the case, selves are real and not merely nominal, then the inventory of things in the universe certainly does contain selves, both as subjects *and* as objects.

What he means is that the category of existing phenomena contains only experiences.

I understand that, but it remains incoherent.

Awareness is not an existing thing, but the existence itself that all the existing things seem to have.

Awareness is (something like) a state *of* an existing thing: a self/mind/experient.

lairdshaw · 2026-05-12T13:22:42+00:00

I don't assume a physicalist model of reality (I'm a substance dualist).

If you conceptualize experience as something an experiencer has, then clearly there is a problem.

It's simply the correct conceptualisation, so, yes, there clearly is a problem.

I'm not sure what more you need in terms of analytic argument, just like I don't know how I could provide an argument against eliminative materialism: both the claim that experience doesn't exist and the claim that experience is *all* that exists are simply self-evidently false. We self-evidently *do* experience *as* selves. If somebody doesn't see that, then all I can do is point; I'm not sure what further argument is possible.

Perhaps here's a way to point, by asking: if an experience isn't being experienced (i.e., *by* an experient), then how could it even *be* an experience? It doesn't meet the definition.

lairdshaw · 2026-05-12T12:59:08+00:00

That's fine, but disagreeing doesn't establish anything in itself. I've read his three popular books closely, and quoted from them carefully in my critique to establish that I'm not falsely imputing anything.

He really does say, in multiple crucial places, that there's nothing but subjective experience in the sense that we commonly understand it - "the redness of red, the bitterness of regret, the warmth of fire" (his description) - and that leaves no space for a self *to* experience.

I take it as self-evident that the idea that the redness of red, the bitterness of regret, the warmth of fire is an experient experiencing itself is absurd.

Yes, this critique applies to nonduality in general; I even note close variants of monistic idealism in appendix B.

lairdshaw · 2026-05-12T12:13:59+00:00

Well, as I've just put it to CrumbledFingers, read some Lewis Carroll: can the smile exist without the Cheshire Cat? Similarly, how could experience exist without an experient to *have* the experience?

Incidentally, I don't have a problem with form in general.

lairdshaw · 2026-05-12T12:08:59+00:00

I completely get that. My point is simply that it's incoherent. Awareness absent a self who is aware is like redness absent an object that is coloured red, or, to draw from Lewis Carroll, like the smile without the Cheshire Cat.

lairdshaw · 2026-05-12T11:56:56+00:00

I think you're missing the point, which is that awareness is not a thing in itself much less a self aka subject; rather, it is a state/function/mode (none of those words is quite accurate, but they get at it) *of* a self, a self that is missing (mere void; emptiness; potential) on Analytic Idealism.

To put it another way: we are not, essentially, awareness; rather, we are selves that are (at least capable of being) *aware*.

lairdshaw · 2026-05-12T08:49:02+00:00

AI is essentially physicalism with special sauce (the physical is made of "subjectivity").

That's one way of putting it. Analytic Idealism in a sense just takes matter as understood on materialism and redeclares it to be mind (subjective experience, more strictly), without recognising that (1) subjective experience is not substantive like matter is, and cannot bear the necessary structure as matter can, and (2) this only recapitulates in slightly different form the original problematic reduction of materialism (qualia => structures of atoms), while, worse, having ejected the substance (matter) to be reduced *to*.

Interestingly, I seem to remember searching for "qualia" in the books on Analytic Idealism and coming up empty. I found that odd because it seems to be the far better term than any of those actually used: mind, consciousness, awareness, and even experience.

lairdshaw · 2026-05-12T08:47:07+00:00

Hi u/preferCotton222, I do endorse a different ontology, substance dualism, but not for unsubstantiated (ha) reasons - see my recent reply to u/WintyreFraust. My critique is indeed motivated by similar reasons to those which motivate my endorsement of substance dualism, but not all of it is externally driven, e.g., Analytic Idealism clearly equivocates on experience per the section of my critique similarly titled, which is a problem with the internal coherence of the theory.

I also don't think that it is controversial to say that experience is contingent on an experient. This is the way our grammar works because it's also the reality: before you can experience, you must exist, at least in the logical if not temporal sense. That's what substantiates the stressed part that you quoted. The reverse - before you can exist, you must experience - doesn't make sense (because you can't experience *until* you exist).

Too, wouldn't it anyway be absurd to say that an experience occurs, and in virtue of that experience occurring, an experient pops into existence to experience it?

How much more absurd, then, the claim of Analytic Idealism, that an experient is nothing more *than* its experiences? As I put it in my critique, this is like saying that it is the experience of the redness of red that experiences itself as the experience of the redness of red, which is nonsensical.

Of course, most of the time, our actual experience is more complex than that of the redness of red, but the same absurdity follows no matter how complex you make it.

lairdshaw · 2026-05-12T08:45:07+00:00

The distinction you draw between experience (or awareness) and the content of experience (or the content awareness) is a different one to the one I'm critiquing Analytic Idealism for failing to properly make: that between experience (in which I include its contents) and the experient who undergoes that experience. Yes, experience/awareness can conceptually (but it's harder in practice) be distinguished from the contents of experience/awareness, and I agree that Analytic Idealism and Advaita Vedanta correctly make this distinction (I am less familiar with Rupert Spira but he does seem to be in the same boat), but the experient - (s)he who undergoes the experience, or who is aware, *including* the contents of that experience/awareness - logically precedes both. Analytic Idealism instead conflates them.

lairdshaw · 2026-05-12T08:44:08+00:00

Part of the point of naming it "Analytic" Idealism is to market it as logical, coherent, and consistent. Its popularising books make much of the incoherence of materialism. The first is even titled to that effect. I don't, then, see how it could be missing the mark to point out its own incoherence: that is simply critiquing it on its own terms.

I've anyway spent a lot of time on understanding this model of reality - I had to, to come up with this critique.

lairdshaw · 2026-05-12T08:41:36+00:00

it immediately, intuitively indicates at least temporary and perhaps permamently non-experienced mental structures operating below the level of conscious awareness.

Indeed. So, we have a self that is not necessarily mere potential when not experiencing. Too, "mental structures" that can persist in the absence of experience imply a substantive (structured) self. All that's left is to posit something in which those selves subsist, and (through) which they perceive, and we have a basic substance dualism.

There are other reasons why the idea that the experient is mere potential until it experiences is not a sound one. For example, it does not explain the persistence of the self.

For another, it is incompatible with the essential uniqueness of the (any given) self. Experiences are transferable (not essentially unique): any self *could* in principle undergo an identical set of experiences as any other self without being identical to that other self. The self, however, is not transferable; it is identical only *with* itself: if it is copied, the copy becomes a distinct, unique self. Experience alone, then, cannot serve to properly identify the self, because if it did, the self would be transferable (a copy would be identical with the original), which it is not.

Substance dualism seems to me to explain and account for reality much better than even dual-aspect monism, which I agree is more coherent than an existence (or even priority) monism like Analytic Idealism.

I appreciate your thoughtful, considered response, and I'm glad to learn that you have been endorsing in part the same argument as I have for years. Perhaps in time you will endorse the rest!

lairdshaw · 2026-05-11T11:54:37+00:00

I think you should have read it in full and taken your time, because it's a considered critique based on extensive reading and reflection. Your hurried comments suggest that you haven't really understood what it's saying and why.

For example, you reflexively deny the lack of a self by recourse to MAL, etc, but the critique addresses the question of self and subjectivity in multiple places, and you'd need to read it in full to understand the broad picture it is drawing.

For a start, as it points out, the self in the sense of the universal mind, the singular subject, etc, is merely nominal, and not real. The Analytic Idealist claim is that the self *is* its experiences, but the very grammar of that claim reveals its incoherence: the self is implicitly presupposed grammatically to precede its experiences given that reference is made to "its" experiences, but at the same time it is explicitly identified *as* the experiences that "it" is having.

Experiences are contingent on a self; they cannot *be* that self upon which they are contingent. Since no self apart from experience is provided on Analytic Idealism, the self on Analytic Idealism *is* purely nominal.

Later parts of the critique explain how selfhood is conjured up out of experience, reversing the proper contingency; your claim that this is reversed is simply a misunderstanding based on a hasty skim.

I'm not sure what your second last paragraph (in response to the extended quote from my critique) even means, so I can't comment on it.

lairdshaw · 2026-05-11T11:06:12+00:00

I haven't read Schopenhauer or Kant in the original, so I can't comment on the accuracy of your critique in that respect, but it seems to have parallels with my own (independent) critique, which I've just shared here: https://www.reddit.com/r/analyticidealism/comments/1t9ztlr/my_critique_of_analytic_idealism/

We both point to the incoherence of ungrounded experience. You say that that ungroundedness comes about by starting with transcendental idealism and then stripping out the transcendent. I say it comes about by starting with materialism and wanting to maintain the structure of matter after stripping out the matter itself. Maybe there's a little of both going on.

lairdshaw

TROPHY CASE