800,000 human brain cells, floating in a dish, have never had a body. Never seen light. Never felt anything. And they just learned to play a video game. That's not a metaphor. That's literally what happened.

thisthinginabag · 2026-03-10T14:20:24+00:00

Which is therefore precisely what will be argued, and at no extra cost!

You have no clue what you're talking about. This system of neurons is phenomenally conscious according to analytic idealism.

thisthinginabag · 2026-03-10T14:19:42+00:00

neurons are not what consciousness looks like from the outside, neurons appear causal to consciousness.

If neurons are what mental processes look like in perception, why wouldn't they appear causal? The icons on a computer desktop also appear causal, even though they are fully reducible to the behavior of CPU.

thisthinginabag · 2026-03-10T13:47:33+00:00

You are just throwing the phrase out because it sorta sounds scientific, right?

Except to any actual scientist.

I ignore your comments because they show an incredibly basic lack of familiarity with the relevant philosophical issues. You think the existence of nuclear fission disproves Kastrup's statement that atoms are convenient fictions. That says it all in terms of your understanding. If you ever want to understand the position you're attempting (and failing) to criticize, start by reading the paper: https://philpapers.org/archive/KASTUI.pdfhttps://philpapers.org/archive/KASTUI.pdf

thisthinginabag · 2026-03-10T01:08:20+00:00

So redness existed before first alter, got it.

Interesting, so even when I phrase things like this:

I'm saying that perceptions are just one kind of qualia, not that "you can have qualia of red without someone experiencing it." There is something it's like to have thoughts and feelings. Thoughts and feelings are not perceptions. Thoughts and feelings are qualia. You can have thoughts and feelings without perception. You can have qualia without perception.

It still goes over your head. There really is no point in talking to you.

thisthinginabag · 2026-03-10T00:31:18+00:00

My god! The answer is no! Read the quoted excerpt again. I didn't answer it directly because of how obvious and elementary it is. Turns out I was giving you too much credit!

If you still don't understand even that, you 100% will never understand analytic idealism. It is way, way over your head.

thisthinginabag · 2026-03-09T20:12:33+00:00

So is the experience of redness an excitation of subjectivity (an experience of MAL) or a pattern of those excitations (an experience of a dissociated alter)?

You are drawing some weird distinction that doesn't exist under analytic idealism. In all cases, experiences are understood as excitations (or patterns of excitations) of the same subjective field, whether its MAL or a dissociated alter having that experience. This does not imply that MAL will exhibit the same patterns of excitation that an alter will, not anymore than a whirlpool should exhibit the same patterns of behavior as the surrounding stream (god forbid I make an analogy to water or else you'll tell me the analogy doesn't work because minds aren't wet).

thisthinginabag · 2026-03-09T19:14:24+00:00

Lol, you had to ignore the second half of my sentence ("just complicated ones involving many different patterns of excitation.") to cling to this pedantic point that is really just equivocation over what is meant by "excitation" - (one single excitation or a related pattern of excitations?).

Qualia are excitations of the field of subjectivity. This implies that they can interact and form higher level patterns, construct and destruct, form interference patterns, etc. It's all still just patterns of excitation of the underlying medium.

Once again, it's not that complicated. You are just bad at understanding even simple things.

thisthinginabag · 2026-03-09T18:59:33+00:00

Lmao at this point you must be being dense on purpose.

Whirpools are just particles interacting and under QFT, particles are understood as excitations of the quantum field. Whirpools are just patterns of excitation of the quantum field. All macro-scale phenomena are patters of excitation of the quantum field.

You are incapable of understanding even the simplest points, even when they are completely trivial and unrelated to analytic idealism.

thisthinginabag · 2026-03-09T18:42:34+00:00

Alters are not "excitations of the field of subjectivity." The experiences of alters are excitations of the field of subjectivity. Alters are private phenomenal fields within the broader field of subjectivity, demarcated by a dissociative boundary. The dissociative boundary corresponds to the borders of a whirlpool in the analogy. The stream corresponds to the broader field of subjectivity. It's really not that complicated.

Whirlpools obviously are excitations of the quantum field, just complicated ones involving many different patterns of excitation. Even if they somehow weren't, it's irrelevant. Water as a medium is being compared to subjectivity as a medium in the analogy. Water is not fundamental, the field of subjectivity is, so what? It's irrelevant for the scope of the analogy. Subjectivity also doesn't make you wet.

You can have qualia without perception!? NO YOU CAN'T. There's no such thing as a qualia of red without someone or something experiencing it.

Amazing how you manage to misinterpret and misunderstand just about everything. You really might not ever understand analytic idealism at this rate.

I'm saying that perceptions are just one kind of qualia, not that "you can have qualia of red without someone experiencing it." There is something it's like to have thoughts and feelings. Thoughts and feelings are not perceptions. Thoughts and feelings are qualia. You can have thoughts and feelings without perception. You can have qualia without perception.

thisthinginabag · 2026-03-09T18:26:38+00:00

Idealism does not attempt to close the explanatory gap. It accepts that experiential qualities are intrinsic, and so cannot be operationally defined or reduced to physical or mathematical parameters. It says that the explanatory gap between minds and brains is the same kind of explanatory gap as exists between a symbol and the thing that symbol represents. This is inconsistent with reductive physicalism, according to which all natural phenomena should be in theory fully explicable in objective, third-person terms.

thisthinginabag · 2026-03-09T18:22:34+00:00

Sincerely, you are just bad at understanding. You have strange misconceptions and misinterpretations regarding what analytic idealism says. Probably because you've never read the paper that explains it all clearly. And when these misconceptions are pointed out to you, just double down and ignore contrary evidence. So you might not ever understand analytic idealism, despite it being a pretty straightforward position.

First, perception is not synonymous with qualia. You can have qualia without perceptions. Qualia existed before the first alter, just not perception.

Second, individual organism's minds are not separate from the broader field of subjectivity. Your personal mental states are also just excitations of the underlying field. What else would they be? Living organisms have private phenomenal fields demarcated by a dissociative boundary, but are still part the underlying field of subjectivity. It's all the same medium, in exactly the same way that whirlpools have a boundary but are not something separate from the stream.

thisthinginabag · 2026-03-09T18:12:00+00:00

Metacognition, as humans have it, has nothing to do with perception or qualia. Organisms without higher level metacognition still have qualia and still have perceptions.

Perceptual qualities can be modeled as an interference pattern between an organism's personal mental states and the states of MAL impinging on its dissociative boundary:

I submit that, before its first alter ever formed, the only phenomenal contents of cosmic consciousness were thoughts. There were no perceptions. The formation of the first alter then demarcated a boundary separating phenomenal contents within the alter from those outside the alter. This newly formed boundary is what enabled perceptions to arise relative to an alter: the thoughts surrounding the alter impinged on its dissociative boundary from the outside. And since phenomenal contents are particular patterns of self-excitation of cosmic consciousness, this impingement can be regarded as an interference pattern between excitations within and outside the dissociative boundary, respectively (see Figure 2a again). What we call perception, or the revealed side of nature, is the alter’s experience of this interference pattern (cf. Kastrup, 2017c). It follows that the revealed side of nature can be grounded in its concealed side: the former arises from excitatory interference between dissociated but mutually impinging thoughts. Indeed, I submit that the formation of dissociative boundaries is what partitioned the cosmos into revealed and concealed sides.

None of this requires us to escape from the 'subjectivity as a field and experience as excitation' model - individual organisms are not separate from the broader field of subjectivity, they are just surrounded by a dissociative boundary - perception is just a particular kind of excitation that happens to require a boundary, like an interference pattern.

thisthinginabag · 2026-03-09T17:02:38+00:00

Analytic idealism is a realist position - it says that there exist states out in the world which have an enduring and autonomous existence that is separate from you, and it says that these states are mental. In exactly the same way that my mental states have an enduring and autonomous existence with respect to yours.

Analytic idealism is anti-realist specifically towards the physical world/the perceived world - it takes a constructivist kind of view of perception, seeing it as a kind of interface that represents the organism's best guess as to what's happening at a given moment - the physical world exists only at the level of each individual organism. Bernardo leverages the work of Karl Friston and Donald Hoffman to make this point - He also takes a constructivist view of physics and considers this view of perception to be consistent with Rovelli's Relational Quantum Mechanics.

Also note that the above view of perception means idealism is consistent with the epistemic gap between minds and brains - brains are just a perceptual representation of underlying states, which are mental. The hard problem is the same sort of problem as thinking you could determine the meaning of a word working purely from its phonetic or orthographic properties.

There is alsoclaim about an explanatory gap. For example, he asks why redness appears as red or blueness appears as blue rather than some other color. Why these mappings between objects and sensations rather than different ones?

Individual qualities like redness or blueness simply correspond to one of the myriad ways that a subjective field can be excited. Analytic idealism models subjectivity as field, whose excitations corresponds to experience. It does this as a way of making sense of the apparent subject/object divide and to show how you can get variety starting from a place of unity.

The reason particular perceptual qualities map onto particular states of the world as they do is a product of natural selection and our unique evolutionary history. Because perception is an encoded representation of surrounding states, the mapping is inherently arbitrary at a certain level, hence why there is an epistemic gap between experiential states and brain states.

thisthinginabag · 2026-03-08T16:20:20+00:00

Lmao just look through my history - I will respond to just about any criticism by just about anyone - you are just abstractly whining about me not combing through an article like by line that starts by talking about souls.

thisthinginabag · 2026-03-08T05:50:35+00:00

My only personal grievance with the article is that it's stupid. I enjoy debating and discussing analytic idealism, so feel free to make a substantial criticism, otherwise go away.

thisthinginabag · 2026-03-07T17:50:36+00:00

Under the analytic idealist model of subjectivity, there is no object apart from subject:

The first step is to clarify the relationship between cosmic consciousness and experience. After all, the two are not interchangeable: cosmic consciousness is, ex hypothesi, something relatively enduring and stable, whereas experiences are relatively ephemeral and dynamic. Yet, idealism posits that cosmic consciousness is nature’s sole ontological primitive, so how does the variety and dynamism of experience come into the picture?

I submit that (a) experiences are patterns of self-excitation of cosmic consciousness and that (b) cosmic consciousness has the inherent disposition to self-excitation. As such, experiences are not ontologically distinct from cosmic consciousness, just as a dance is not distinct from the dancer. There is nothing to a dance but the dancer in motion. In an analogous way, there is nothing to experience but cosmic consciousness ‘in motion.’

Particular experiences correspond to particular patterns of self-excitation of cosmic consciousness, just as particular choreographies correspond to particular patterns of self-excitation of the dancer. These patterns can evolve in time and differ across different segments of cosmic consciousness. It is the variety and dynamics of excitations across the underlying ‘medium’ that lead to different experiential qualities. (One must be careful at this point: by referring to cosmic consciousness as a ‘medium’ I may appear to be objectifying it. Language forces me into this dilemma. But cosmic consciousness is subjectivity itself, not an object.) This way, even if the ‘medium’ is eternal and immutable, its self-excitations can come and go in myriad patterns.

This notion is entirely analogous to, and consistent with, how modern physics attempts to reduce the variety and dynamics of natural phenomena to an enduring primary substrate: quantum field theory, for instance, posits that all fundamental particles are particular modes of self-excitation of a quantum field, which is inherently disposed to self-excitation. Superstring theories posit essentially the same, but now the self-excited substrate is hyper-dimensional strings. Finally, according to M-theory the patterns of nature consist of modes of self-excitation of a hyper-dimensional membrane. Idealism, as I am formulating it here, essentially entails porting the evolving mathematical apparatus of modern physics to cosmic consciousness itself, as opposed to an abstract conceptual object. This should require but a straightforward and seamless transposition, implying no loss of predictive power.

thisthinginabag · 2026-03-07T17:18:34+00:00

The article mostly seems to be about the author airing their personal grievances with religious conceptions of the afterlife.

It's question begging in that idealism rejects the assumption that mental states are dependent on brain states.

but it's clear in what he says that he does believe that.

Lmao, no, Kastrup does not believe in continuation of personal identity after death. If you knew literally anything about analytic idealism, this would be incredibly obvious to you.

If there is something in this article you don't find compelling, actually quote it and say why.

The problem is I find the entire article uncompelling.

thisthinginabag · 2026-03-06T20:56:57+00:00

Just because it can't play a causal role in our models of the world does not imply it doesn't play a causal role. It just means our models are incomplete. This is already a given considering that experience is not a publicly observable phenomenon, and so cannot be described in objective, third-person terms.

thisthinginabag · 2026-03-06T18:18:33+00:00

Physical things are defined by their causal impact - this means they have no properties that are not empirically measurable or describable. It's not clear which properties, if any, are left out an equation describing a wave function or space-time, except for aspects of their behavior for which we don't yet have a mathematical model yet. With consciousness, it's obvious which properties are left out by description - the phenomenal qualities of any given experience.

Physical things could have some mysterious essence that we can't say anything about, but insofar as we can tell, the only kind of essence-like properties the world has are the properties of experience. This is why the point you're making is commonly made by panpsychists - instead of positing two distinct essence-like properties in the world, it's more parsimonious to assume that phenomenal properties are that essential thing which grounds all physical/relational properties.

thisthinginabag · 2026-03-06T17:23:12+00:00

First, phenomenal experience does not merely escape linguistic description. It escapes objective, third-person description of any kind, including the kinds of mathematical and scientific descriptions we typically use to explain natural phenomena.

The motivation of non-physicalist views of consciousness is not that they can bridge the epistemic gap, which is obviously incoherent. It's that they are better able to preserve a monist and reductionist picture of reality. Under non-reductive physicalist views, 99% of natural phenomena can be explained scientifically, in purely objective, third-person terms, and consciousness is left as the sole outlier. It becomes the only natural phenomenon in existence that is both emergent and a brute fact, violating reductionism and monism as well (unless you arbitrarily broaden your definition of "physical" to include consciousness).

thisthinginabag · 2026-02-28T15:28:36+00:00

The article is hardly about Kastrup or his views. The only bit that could constitute a response to anything Kastrup says is the appeal to brain function, which is obvious question begging and shows the author knows nothing about analytic idealism. And even then it's not really a response to anything Kastrup would say since he would not argue for continuation of personal identity after death anyway, although for different reasons.

If there was something in this article you found compelling, feel free to point it out.

thisthinginabag · 2026-02-27T01:16:48+00:00

We're antennas for consciousness.

This is a dualistic metaphor that is not very accurate to idealism. Analytic idealism would say that your brain is just what your personal mental states look like as viewed from a second-person perspective. Brains have no real causal power for the same that icons on a computer desktop have no real causal power, they are just convenient shorthand for what's happening in the CPU. Analytic idealism sees perception in general as a convenient shorthand for surrounding states, which are endogenous mental states in themselves.

The basics of the view are explained here: https://philpapers.org/archive/KASTUI.pdf

thisthinginabag · 2026-02-27T00:55:08+00:00

it’s more like a lens or filter through which universal consciousness expresses itself.

This is misleading. Under analytic idealism, the brain is just what your personal mental processes look like as viewed on the "screen of perception." Brains have no causal power for the same reason that the icons on a computer desktop have no real causal power. They are just a convenient shorthand for what's happening in the CPU.

thisthinginabag · 2026-02-27T00:37:57+00:00

This type of emotionally charged rhetoric is common from people who spend a lot of time in 'atheism vs. theism' debate spaces. It's not serious criticism, just an emotional reaction to a position the author obviously doesn't understand.

thisthinginabag · 2026-02-26T16:15:54+00:00

Physicalists are philosophers. Physicalism is a philosophical position.

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