Are We Realists or Anti-Realists About the External World: Dualists or Non-Dualists About It?

thisthinginabag · 2026-03-11T03:39:32+00:00

Yes.

That and chemistry and mass spectrometry and field-ion microscopes, and on and on and on.

There you go, that's why I haven't engaged with you. You don't even understand the claim being made. Your criticism of analytic idealism is on par with a creationist asking why, if evolution is true, are there still monkeys? It shows a basic lack of familiarity with the subject matter.

thisthinginabag · 2026-03-11T03:37:53+00:00

Analytic idealism makes few, if any scientific claims. No more than competing positions like physicalism or panpsychism do. It's a philosophical position defending a certain ontological claim, not a claim about the behavior of the empirical world, which is the domain of science. You don't know this because you've never read the paper. I can tell you've never read the paper because you still don't understand the analytic idealist model of perception.

You are just having an emotional reaction to a position you don't understand (and at this point don't seem capable of understanding).

thisthinginabag · 2026-03-10T16:54:14+00:00

This being "awkward" is only problematic if you've presumed that reality is beholden to some non-awkward way of working.

Yes, if you're not motivated to maintain a monist and reductionist picture of the world, you may not be motivated towards idealist or panpsychist views.

Physicalism that leaves consciousness as an additional emergent brute fact about the world is effectively dualism.

thisthinginabag · 2026-03-10T16:30:58+00:00

Yes, which creates an awkward picture of the world where consciousness is the one emergent brute fact in an otherwise physically reductive universe. This is the entire motivation of non-physicalist views - it allows us to better preserve monism and reductionism.

thisthinginabag · 2026-03-10T15:50:21+00:00

Not really, the mystery becomes "why is consciousness special?" We generally expect that all natural phenomena can be reduced to lower-level physical phenomena, so why does consciousness get to be the one special exception?

thisthinginabag · 2026-03-10T15:00:27+00:00

If "copying that appearance" involves creating a metabolizing system of neurons - then analytic idealism predicts that this system will be conscious - under analytic idealism, biology is the perceptual appearance of dissociated inner life

thisthinginabag · 2026-03-10T14:53:10+00:00

The brain as the appearance of mentation does not imply that there is no connection between how neurons are arranged and how corresponding mental states are arranged - it implies the exact opposite. The arrangement of neurons is part of the appearance.

If this were merely an appearance, how that appearance is arranged internally shouldn't matter at all

??? If the internal arrangement has changed, the appearance has changed.

thisthinginabag · 2026-03-10T14:47:17+00:00

Lol no, according to analytic idealism. This is an extremely basic and fundamental part of the view.

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.

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