Since the essay is so long, I'm posting only it's first two parts: The first (this one) raises some objections against Bernardo's system. The second part offers an alternative, more intuitive formulation of idealism. I would greatly appreciate any comments, corrections and/or suggestions!
Intuitive Idealism vs. Analytic Idealism (I)
A critique of Bernardo Kastrup’s formulation of idealism
A critique of Bernardo Kastrup’s formulation of idealism
Bernardo Kastrup is, in my humble opinion, the most relevant philosopher of our time. His diagnosis of materialism, or reductionist physicalism, as the ultimate cause of the existential crisis our civilization is facing right now, and his advancing of idealism as the only viable alternative are, I believe, spot on. However, it is my view that Analytic Idealism, the particular formulation of idealism that Bernardo Kastrup is proposing, has some subtle but serious flaws that will prevent it from dethroning materialism and becoming the new dominant philosophy in our culture.
The purpose of this essay is to point out those flaws, and to delineate an alternative formulation of idealism which I believe has a better chance at transforming the mainstream worldview of our culture. To distinguish it from Bernardo’s version of idealism, I have provisionally called this alternative view “Intuitive Idealism”, because it uses intuition, rather than logic or reasoning, as its main guiding force. As a result, it presents a more intuitive view of reality than any other version of idealism I’m aware of.
Our intuitions about the world
We all feel that the world around us is real. It doesn’t matter if we are physicalists or idealists. When we see a rock, we feel it is a real rock. We feel it exists independently of our conscious perception of it.
This isn’t the result of cultural indoctrination. In all known cultures, even those where non-dual philosophies and world-denying religions are prevalent, unschooled human beings take the world they inhabit as absolutely real. It is a universal intuition. That’s why this view is often called “naive realism”.
A cognitive psychologist like Donald Hoffman would probably explain the universality of this basic intuition about the world as the result of natural selection. For the purpose of survival, it is an obvious evolutionary advantage to take the world seriously, even literally.
I don’t agree with that explanation, though. In an idealistic paradigm, any argument from natural selection is problematic (I will come back to this point later). And in this particular case, if we don’t assume (like physicalists do) that our ideas about the world are mechanically produced by our brains, it’s not clear how natural selection could have any influence on those ideas.
In the view I’m presenting here, intuition is a fundamental faculty of consciousness that enables us to get direct access to (or at least, glimpses of) objective truth.
In other words, according to Intuitive Idealism our basic intuition about the world is correct: the physical world is real, and it exists objectively, no matter if we are looking at it or not.
This universal intuition that all humans share about a real, objective world that we all perceive but that exists independently of our perceptions is the main reason behind the supremacy of modern materialism/physicalism.
However, there is another basic, universal intuition about the world that modern physicalists have chosen to ignore. When we look at the world, when we gaze at the sea, at a mountainous landscape, at a starry night sky, we don’t see a dead, cold universe. We feel that the universe is alive. And that it is, somehow, conscious.
Our ancestors shared this intuition, and expressed it in innumerable myths. Modern physicalists dismiss those myths as childish fantasies in which the human mind projects its own consciousness onto a lifeless, meaningless universe. But the basic intuition of a conscious universe persists (even though many people, conditioned by religious beliefs, interpret it as the presence of God’s spirit in all of creation, or something along those lines), and has prevented the total dominion of the materialist paradigm over contemporary culture.
We thus have two basic intuitions about the nature of the universe: that the world we perceive has objective existence, independent of our perceptions, and that it is imbued with consciousness. Physicalism accepts the first and denies the second. Analytic Idealism does the opposite. Intuitive Idealism embraces both.
A rose is a rose
Donald Hoffman has recently popularized the notion of the physical world as a simplified, species-specific user interface, evolved through natural selection, that doesn’t match the underlying objective reality, to which we have no direct access. Bernardo Kastrup endorses this view, preferring to use the equivalent metaphor of the physical world as a “dashboard of dials”.
This counter-intuitive notion is no doubt suggestive and ingenious, but it is based on a false premise. The mathematical theorem developed by Hoffman and his team, if correct (I’m assuming it is, since I’m not qualified to assess it), proves that physicalism is false. That’s it. It can’t be used to extract any other conclusions about the nature of reality.
Hoffman’s theorem is based on the theory of evolution by natural selection (which is part of the physicalist paradigm). But if, as Hoffman suggests, space-time is not fundamental, evolution by natural selection can’t be fundamental either. It may be mathematically provable that natural selection would evolve simplified, species-specific user interfaces to deal with the objective environment. But without fundamental time, the very notion of evolution loses all explanatory power regarding fundamental reality (it can only explain developments within relative space-time). And without fundamental space, there is no environment to begin with.
This last statement is a crucial one. The user interface (or dashboard) model relies on the existence of an objective environment, a fundamental reality that is “out there”, outside our perceptions. According to Intuitive Idealism, there is no such thing. There is no absolute space containing the relative space-time in which our perceptions appear. There is no environment.
The physical world is appearance. Not the “outer appearance” of something else. Just appearance. Appearing is being. The physical world is purely phenomenal.
In Intuitive Idealism there is no duality, no separation between noumena and phenomena. This is why a more precise name for this metaphysical view would be Nondual Idealism. I chose not to use it in this essay, though, because Analytic Idealism is also, at least in principle, a non-dualistic ontology. (It can be argued, of course, that Bernardo Kastrup introduces a sort of dualism with his distinction between “intrinsic view” and “extrinsic appearance”, but I don’t want to argue around terminology here.)
In other words, according to Intuitive Idealism a rock is a rock, a tree is a tree, a star is a star. The physical world is exactly what it appears to be. Nothing more, nothing less. A rose is a rose.
Conscious experience has no extrinsic appearance
Bernardo Kastrup’s entire philosophical system (Analytic Idealism) is based on the idea that physical reality is the extrinsic appearance of inner experience. This is certainly an original and clever idea, but it’s also completely counter-intuitive. Not only that. It is difficult (maybe impossible) to get a clear mental picture of what it means.
Do conscious experiences have an extrinsic appearance? The immediate intuition is that they don’t. The very notion seems preposterous. How could something as private, as personally untransferable as our conscious experiences be witnessed in any way from a third-person perspective? Can we look from outside at a thought, an emotion, a sense perception? The intuitive answer is that we definitely can’t. When it comes to conscious experience, there is only a first-person perspective.
The notion of extrinsic or outer appearance relies on the dualist separation between subject and object. For something to have an extrinsic appearance, we have to conceptualize it as an object that can be observed from the outside by a separate subject. But conscious experiences aren’t objects. There is no subject-object separation in consciousness. The observer is the observed. Consciousness can’t be observed from the outside, because there is nothing outside consciousness.
Consciousness has no boundaries
Bernardo Kastrup knows all this perfectly well, of course. When he uses the expression “extrinsic or outer appearance of inner experience”, he doesn’t mean “from outside the experience”, but “from outside the dissociative boundary”. This is actually the cornerstone on which the whole edifice of Analytic Idealism rests: the notion of dissociative boundaries separating our individual consciousness from universal consciousness and from other instances of individual consciousness (I use the expression “instances of individual consciousness” to avoid the misleading plural “consciousnesses”; there is only one consciousness).
We are on uncharted territory here. As far as I know, this is a completely novel and original idea, completely detached from any basic intuitions we may have about the nature of consciousness. Bernardo sometimes uses the metaphor of whirlpools on a stream to help us visualize these dissociative boundaries in consciousness. The dissociative boundary encircling an instance of individual consciousness is akin to the rim of a particular whirlpool.
However, the metaphor doesn’t really work, because whirlpools don’t have rims. There is no boundary, no dividing line separating a whirlpool from the rest of the stream. This is probably the reason why Bernardo seems to have abandoned the metaphor (he certainly doesn’t use it in his academic writings).
According to Analytic Idealism, our physical bodies are the extrinsic appearance of dissociative boundaries inside universal consciousness. Well, we can certainly visualize physical bodies. But in what meaningful way could these be the outer appearance of something we can hardly conceive?
Since there is only consciousness and nothing but consciousness (as idealists, we can all agree on this), these dissociative boundaries must also consist of consciousness (that was the whole point of the whirlpool metaphor: there is nothing to whirlpools but water). How can this be? How can something absolutely boundless and limitless like consciousness create any kind of limiting boundaries within itself? The intuitive answer to this question is straightforward: it can’t.
Universal consciousness has no mental disorder
I’m not denying the existence of dissociation. What I’m denying is the existence of dissociative boundaries. Dissociation doesn’t entail the existence of a boundary limiting the access of consciousness to certain contents. Dissociation is just a shift in attention. To a dissociated mind, like for example a person who has defensively suppressed memories of childhood trauma, it may seem that there’s an impenetrable barrier barring access to those painful memories, but there is no actual barrier: the mind is simply refusing to go there.
It’s an obvious fact that we don’t habitually have direct access to the experience of universal consciousness. Our individual consciousness is (for most of us, and for most of the time) dissociated from universal consciousness. But this isn’t caused by any sort of barrier or boundary. Our attention is simply elsewhere. We are completely absorbed in the content of our everyday life experiences. This absorption, this fixation of our attention in the experiences of our individual, apparently limited self, is what prevents us from experiencing universal consciousness in its limitless fullness.
Bernardo Kastrup sometimes refers to this phenomenon with the term “obfuscation”. He uses the metaphor of the stronger light of the Sun obfuscating the stars and rendering them invisible to us during the day, although they are still there. The problem with this metaphor is that it is physically impossible for us to see the stars during daylight. But it is never impossible for us to experience universal consciousness. In fact, we are experiencing it all the time. We simply are not paying attention.
A better metaphor (since the light of universal consciousness is infinitely stronger than that of our individual consciousness, and is its source) would be to say that if we look directly at the Sun, it’s blinding light will prevent us from seeing anything else. Therefore, in order to be able to see the ground under our feet, the trees, the mountains, the sea, the sky, the world around us, we actively avoid looking directly at the Sun. But it’s the light of the Sun what enables us to see all those things. This averting of our eyes is akin to the averting of our attention, the dissociation that, as we go about our everyday life, prevents us from directly experiencing universal consciousness.
Consciousness can never get obfuscated. Nothing can limit it in any way. In other words, universal consciousness doesn’t suffer from “dissociative identity disorder” (DID). If we want to use psychiatric analogies, it would be much more appropriate to use the notion of narcissism.
Narcissism as a natural development in consciousness
Narcissism is usually defined as pathological self-absorption. Psychiatrists diagnose severe cases of narcissistic disturbance as “narcissistic personality disorder” (NPD). But narcissism can also be understood in a broader sense, as a universal condition of all unenlightened human beings. Everybody who has an ego has some form of narcissism.
A. H. Almaas defines narcissism as “the condition that results when the self identifies with any content of experience to the exclusion of awareness of its fundamental Being” (Almaas, A. H. The Point of Existence. Transformation of Narcissism in Self-Realization, Shambhala, 1996, p. 36). This is the condition most of us find ourselves in, most of the time.
We all remember the old myth of Narcissus, the young man who fell in love with his own reflection in a pool of water. He spent the rest of his life staring at it, forgetting everything else. Analogously, our individual consciousness identifies and becomes absorbed with a mental image of itself, a mental construct based on past impressions and acquired beliefs (ego identity), forgetting its fundamental Being, which is Consciousness. This is what Almaas calls “narcissism of everyday life”.
This universal narcissism is the sole explanation for our dissociation from universal consciousness. It’s a matter of misplaced attention, caused by a false identity, an illusion of self-reflection. For millennia, wisdom traditions of East and West have applied all kinds of practices (such as different forms of meditation, yoga, ritualized use of psychedelics, philosophical inquiry, experiential introspection, etc.) to liberate humans from this false ego identity, this absorption in an illusory mental reflection, and bring them back to the full realization of their true identity: pure consciousness or Being. In its origins, Western philosophy was one of these wisdom traditions. Only in modern times does it seem to have lost its way.
Most Eastern traditions see ego identity as an unjustified and regrettable error, the direct cause of all human suffering. Following Almaas, I prefer to view it as a necessary phase in the development and evolution of consciousness. This is consistent with Western spiritual traditions, like Sufism, that value the human soul (individual consciousness) as an indispensable conduit for Being (universal consciousness) in its never-ending movement towards self-knowledge and self-realization.
In short, there is nothing wrong or pathological in our present situation. All is well with universal consciousness. Our dissociation from it is just a temporary and necessary phase in its unstoppable evolution.
