Is the hard problem just ignored by Analytic idealism? Too many questions...

[misaeld7]

Please, be patient. I'm still new to this.

The assumption "material arrangements are primary and somehow give rise to consciousness/mind/experience" is just wrong, according to BK.
"There is nothing about material configurations (mass, charge, momentum, spin, geometrical relationships, frequency, amplitude, whatever), nothing about physical parameters, in terms of which you could deduce the qualities of experience".
"Matter doesn't create consciousness. Matter is a content of consciousness". And "We can't create consciousness out of matter, because matter itself is something that appears in consciousness".

Let me try to reframe the problem (MY problems, maybe, and not necessarily the hard one):

We know we are conscious, and that rock over there is not. Or do we? How do we know a star is NOT conscious? How do we know it is nothing to be like a galaxy? Or do we really know?

Is the universe in consciousness and not conscious, or is the cosmic mind the universe itself, or what can we say about the cosmos as a whole and it's relationship to consciousness? I know BK has compared, with some proof, the universe structure to neural connections, but how is that even relevant in his own view, without assuming a materialistic framework?

If we can't create consciousness because consciousness is all there is, "creating a new conscious being" becomes "inducing a dissociation of the cosmic mind" or something like that, but how is that not just word choice? BK believes abiogenesis is possible, so... Before there was life in the universe, mind (undissociated mind, that is) was all there was? So is life then the ONLY way something can be said to be conscious or not?

If we can't infer inner experience just by looking at the properties or physical parameters or how it looks like from the second person perspective... Why does BK claim the cosmic mind is not meta-conscious just because it didn't evolve to be so, it didn't undergo the preasure by natural selection that we did, and so on? And, again, why is the fact that its appearance resembles something like a brain (a HUMAN brain??? Or a really primitive brain? WHY? Please, can somebody explain this to me?) even relevant, if its appearance shouldn't tell us anything about how its experience is from the first person perspective?
Why does BK talk about the brain so much, and not about the nervous system?

AND MORE CHILDISH QUESTIONS:
What can Analytic idealism say about reincarnation, or the resurrection of a body, or physical immortality?
And, if any of that is possible, why close the door to something as seemingly simple as "uploading consciousness to a machine"? Even if it is not a machine, let's say we are talking about "inducing a dissociation in the cosmic mind by creating a metabolising entity". How is that NOT possible, if he believes abiogenesis is possible? Won't we be able, even if in 10 000 000 000 years, for example, to create an adult human being (no development whatsoever, but DIRECTLY, just as if we were making a robot), capable of experiencing anything we experience?

I mean, if space-time is not fundamental, how does he reject the idea that we can create a mechanical conscious being, for example? The fact that everything is in mind... to me that opens up the possibility of exploring much more amazing things such as playing with space and TIME themselves, let alone "creating a conscious being from unconscious matter" (that's what a materialist would say, but you know what I mean even if we disregard the context).

How does BK reconcile abiogenesis with analytic idealism? Inorganic matter is a content of experience, and it can become organic matter, and organic matter can become "something that is alive", and that can become "something that is conscious". The hard problem, perhaps, would be... "How does the Mind-at-larg dissociate into alters?". Like, why can't we skip the "become alive" part and go straight from "dead matter" (yah, yah, something in mind) to something that is conscious? Anyway, again: word choice, in my estimation.

And thinking that something must be a metabolising entity in order to experience the world sounds like "something must have feathers, hollow bones and wings in order to fly" to me, if I'm honest with you.

[AshvinP]

We know we are conscious, and that rock over there is not. Or do we? How do we know a star is NOT conscious? How do we know it is nothing to be like a galaxy? Or do we really know?

Who is "we"? I think you should understand there are many different formulations of idealism, just as other metaphysical positions (except materialism is all kind of the same). Then you should consider there are questions which cannot be answered by metaphysics alone. And then you should further cosider that some people know more than others when it comes to scientific and spiritual questions of the sort you are asking with the first "childish question" (the two - science and spirituality - cannot be separated in my view, and that actually follows from metaphysical idealism, although one can reach the same conclusion without it as well).

How does BK reconcile abiogenesis with analytic idealism? Inorganic matter is a content of experience, and it can become organic matter, and organic matter can become "something that is alive", and that can become "something that is conscious".

Under idealism, there is nothing that is not conscious or the thoughts of conscious beings. The concept of "inorganic matter" is a result of our deadened intellectual thinking when viewing the activity of living beings, not inherent to the structure of Reality itself.

[Hedge90]

Is the universe in consciousness and not conscious, or is the cosmic mind the universe itself, or what can we say about the cosmos as a whole and it's relationship to consciousness? I know BK has compared, with some proof, the universe structure to neural connections, but how is that even relevant in his own view, without assuming a materialistic framework?

The universe is Mind-at-Large (MAL). It is conscious, AND is also in our consciousness: since we are dissociated and localised bundles of experience WITHIN that consciousness, what we see the universe is like is what the mental processes of MAL look like from our perspective. An analogy is that when you look at another person, you intuit that they are conscious (have an inner subjective experience), and can also make a brain scan of them and thereby examine what their mental processes LOOK LIKE as neural processes. But the neural processes are not what it FEELS LIKE to be that person, it's just how it looks from your dissociated perspective. It's the same with MAL, and the reason why the notion that the structure of the universe resembles a neural network is that if our localised consciousness bundles (i.e. our brains) are structurally similar to the universe itself, it's at least reasonable to infer that mental processes indeed take place in the universe at large itself, just as they do in a human brain (or more precisely, the human brain is an image of such processes, and so is the physical universe itself).

If we can't create consciousness because consciousness is all there is, "creating a new conscious being" becomes "inducing a dissociation of the cosmic mind" or something like that, but how is that not just word choice? BK believes abiogenesis is possible, so... Before there was life in the universe, mind (undissociated mind, that is) was all there was? So is life then the ONLY way something can be said to be conscious or not?

If we can't infer inner experience just by looking at the properties or physical parameters or how it looks like from the second person perspective... Why does BK claim the cosmic mind is not meta-conscious just because it didn't evolve to be so, it didn't undergo the preasure by natural selection that we did, and so on? And, again, why is the fact that its appearance resembles something like a brain (a HUMAN brain??? Or a really primitive brain? WHY? Please, can somebody explain this to me?) even relevant, if its appearance shouldn't tell us anything about how its experience is from the first person perspective?
Why does BK talk about the brain so much, and not about the nervous system?

Before there was life in the universe, there was (assuming no other sub-levels of dissociation), MAL's mentation was all there was. There was no alter to "see" MAL's mentation from across a dissociative boundary, so there was no one to perceive what we call the "physical" universe - but the physical universe experienced its own mentation, just as you experience the processes whose image is your brain.
And the main argument against MAL's meta-consciousness is not evolutaion / natural selection, but the fact that metacognition requires a subject and an object. You need something to reflect to, to have a relation to, in order to able to think about what you are thinking. Though I don't necessarily agree with BK on that MAL is STILL not meta-conscious. I could imagine that the ocean of experience merged into it from all the alters that have ever existed could have resulted in a level of meta-cognition.

How does BK reconcile abiogenesis with analytic idealism? Inorganic matter is a content of experience, and it can become organic matter, and organic matter can become "something that is alive", and that can become "something that is conscious". The hard problem, perhaps, would be... "How does the Mind-at-larg dissociate into alters?". Like, why can't we skip the "become alive" part and go straight from "dead matter" (yah, yah, something in mind) to something that is conscious? Anyway, again: word choice, in my estimation.

And thinking that something must be a metabolising entity in order to experience the world sounds like "something must have feathers, hollow bones and wings in order to fly" to me, if I'm honest with you.

This is not the hard problem. There is no hard problem. Everything is consciousness, and everything is ONE consciousness. You are, at this very moment, conscious of everything taking place in the entire universe (or multiverse). But the spatio-temporal localisation of experiences that is your brain 'amplifies' experiential states that are "close" to you (and are therefore important for your alter's survival). If you've ever had a major psychedelic trip you know that you wouldn't be able to conduct your life in that state of mind: you have to focus on things that help you survive and procreate (and that's probably nothing compared to experiencing EVERYTHING).

HOW this dissociation happens is, as of yet, a mystery. BK suggests there may be a natural process we haven't yet found that "drives" the universe towards creating life where the conditions are present. But I also don't necessarily agree that we couldn't create artificial dissociation - I just don't think current cybernetics are the way to do it.

And regarding why we have physical needs: you are taking the "dream" analogy too literally. While indeed everything is in consciousness, that doesn't mean that then everything was just "imagined there" in a fit of fancy. I actually see two possible answers to this:
A) As MAL's mentation is presumably subject to certain regularities (archetypes or drives, as you will), the 2nd person look at that mentation will also involve certain regularities. These regularities, from our perspective, look like the laws of physics.
OR
B) MAL's mentation has no "laws", but there are still 'instincts' in him, which can be said to be his likes and dislikes. These may be entirely abstract things, like mathematical regularity, rhytmic patterns of order and disorder, and the like. In that case, the laws of the physical world formed analoguously to what MAL 'liked'. E.g. it may have tried (or may be trying) out (from the perspective of its own mentation) various options that would have created universes with very different physics (or even logic). And universes where, e.g., no life could form (no dissociation could take place) didn't 'feel good', while our current one is a good attempt (but who says it's the last). This is a broad oversimplification of what I'm having in mind (maybe I'll write a post about it later), but I hope you get the point.