A short while ago I saw you in the television program 'Tegenlicht' aired on January 24. Your statement that reality is essentially conscious attracted my attention, so I searched the internet and found many videos and publications in which you express this statement unambiguously, over and over again. With interest I have since studied your opinion on a number of related topics and I could agree with most of it, as far as I could understand it. To get to know your position better, I have read your book 'The idea of the world' and found it very impressive and also stimulating. You have done a great job in refuting the materialistic paradigm and in formulating as accurately as possible the arguments and implications of an idealistic worldview.
You mentioned Schopenhauer and Jung as outstanding idealistic philosophers. You also indicated that there are more idealistic philosophers, but nowhere did you mention Gerard Heymans, who was also a remarkable idealistic philosopher. He can be considered the founder of Dutch psychology as he started the first psychological laboratory in the Netherlands in the last decade of the nineteenth century. He proposed a non-materialistic metaphysics that he called psychic monism. This was not just a minor detail of his work as an academic professor, but the conclusion of a long search through the philosophical speculations and opinions from the leading philosphers, psychologists and other scientists of his day. He was involved in the academic discussions and published several articles about it. In his main opus 'Einführung in die Metaphysik auf Grundlage der Erfahrung' published in 1905 he expounded psychic monism as the most powerful and parsimonious metaphysical theory to explain our world and accomodate for all empirically established scientific facts.
In a short publication of 1915, 'Het psychisch monisme', he explained his theory for a wider audience in the Netherlands. Rereading this publication, I can find no principal differences between your idealism and psychic monism. Of course, Heymans did not have the neurophysiological findings from brain research that we have today, but his arguments are strikingly similar to your arguments.
Let me just quote three sentences from this publication: (1: for original text see below)
Heymans was appointed to the chair of philosophy at the university of Groningen, with an assignment in psychology. He founded a laboratory for experimental psychology and started studying perception. Building on the psychophysical research that had been done in Germany by Ernst Heinrich Weber and Gustav Theodor Fechner, Heymans designed experiments to explore the notion of psychological inhibition. Weber had established what was called Weber's law: the relationship between the intensity of a stimulus and the just noticeable difference (jnd) to that stimulus is proportional. Heymans found that the threshold level to perceive the difference between two stimuli is increased in proportion to the intensity of a simultaneously present inhibitory stimulus. This proportional relationship was tested and verified for many different sense modalities, e.g. pressure, taste, light, sound, and became known as Heymans' law. As a corollary the law of Weber could be derived from it."Thus the limited, anthropological, necessarily leads to a general cosmological psychic monism; thus to the view that the whole reality known to us is consciousness, and that all the physical phenomena given in our sensual perceptions are no different from the way in which, through certain intermediaries, one consciousness is reflected in the other. If we then take into account that in this reflection, therefore in the world of natural phenomena, everything more and more appears to be connected with everything else, we can hardly refrain from assuming such an all-embracing coherence also in the foundational world of consciousness; and this leads to the thought of a World Consciousness, of which all individual consciousnesses would equally take part, just like our single imagery complexes are part of our consciousness. Just as these few imaginary complexes may temporarily separate from our central consciousness and sink back into what we call the unconscious, so would all individual consciousnesses be nothing but temporarily separate parts of the World Consciousness, which meanwhile continues to contain them in the same sense as in which the representations which we do not think of for the moment, yet remain part of our spiritual possession."
As another result of his experiments the law of Fechner was found unjustified. Fechner had extended the findings of Weber outside the range of the threshold of perception and postulated a logarithmic relationship between the intensity of a stimulus and the intensity of the subjective sensation of it. Despite Heymans' repeated criticisms of Fechner's law, textbooks on psychology still present Fechner's law as established science. One wonders how this can go on unnoticed for more than a century. How is it possible that a law that claims to specify the ratio between a physical intensity and the intensity of the corresponding sensation in consciousness can be invalid and still be taught as basic knowledge?
I hope to have aroused your curiosity in Gerard Heymans and his work.
(1) original text in 'Het Psychisch Monisme',p 16
"Zoo voert dan het beperkte, anthropologische, noodzakelijk tot een algemeen kosmologisch psychisch-monisme; derhalve tot de opvatting, dat de hele voor ons kenbare werkelijkheid bewustzijn is, en dat alle in onze zinnelijke waarnemingen gegeven physische verschijnselen niet anders zijn dan de wijze waarop, door bepaalde tusschenschakels het ene bewustzijn zich in het andere afspiegelt. Geven wij ons er vervolgens rekenschap van, dat in deze afspiegeling, derhalve in de wereld der natuurverschijnselen, steeds meer alles met alles blijkt samen te hangen, dan kunnen wij moeilijk nalaten, een dergelijke allesomvattenden samenhang ook in de te gronde liggende bewustzijnswereld aan te nemen; en dit leidt tot de gedachte aan een Wereldbewustzijn, waarvan alle individueele bewustzijnen op gelijke wijze deel zouden uitmaken, als onze enkele voorstellingscomplexen deel uitmaken van ons bewustzijn. Evenals deze enkele voorstellingscomplexen zich tijdelijk kunnen afzonderen van ons centraal bewustzijn en terugzinken in wat wij het onbewuste noemen, evenzoo zouden alle individueele bewustzijnen niets anders zijn dan tijdelijk afgezonderde deelen van het Wereldbewustzijn, dat ze intusschen in denzelfden zin blijft omvatten, als waarin de voorstellingen, waaraan wij voor het oogenblik niet denken, toch blijven behooren tot ons geestelijk bezit."
