Why I believe Analytic Idealism is flawed

[joepoe9236]

I want to preface this: I greatly admire Bernardo Kastrup, and his philosophical ideas are the first I encountered that made me aware of the implications of the Physicalist paradigm and how contradictory and flawed it really is.

However, In further thinking I don’t think I can adopt his metaphysics.

When we try to explain what reality is - one could argue this is the central task of ontology - we are as Bernardo often points out, reducing reality to something/somethings. The physicalist tries to do this by saying that Reality is fundamentally the activity of physical phenomena, and what we call the mind is simply either an epiphenomenon of that physical matter, or runs along side it in accordance with the parameters of it.

Bernardo points out our invalid assumptions regarding the actual externality of the world as it appears to us, and thus that this summing up of the world, this filling in of the statement “reality is x” where X is matter, is a failed pursuit from the start.

It is invalid for a fundamental reason. We must first acknowledge not only the existence of conscious experience, but also the necessary primary epistemological nature of it. From this, we incorrectly categorise a portion of our conscious experience (that which appears to be outside of oneself, that is solid, concrete, or measurable perhaps) and then awarded this portion a kind of ontological fundamentality to it. This is a wrong step to take.

I would argue that Bernardo’s metaphysics, whilst I would say is correctly aiming for one that contains only consciousness, includes specific configurations that are blatantly tied to the Physicalist way of thinking.

Going back to physicalism - the search for the objective mind independent world, and the subsequent task of reducing that which we call mind, to that world - all starts from what is essentially a false self-identification. Referring back to the epistemically primary nature of consciousness, it is the thing which has given view to all supposed ‘things’. That includes you, it also includes the division between where you end, and the outside world begins. It makes a fundamental judgement of reality and says - it is made of things that see and feel and think, and then also things that are seen and felt and thought about. Not only do we have our conscious experience, but we imagine these two categories as being distinct ontological entities. But we are mistaken. Both come from the same source - and to identify with thoughts, or a body, or a brain, to say that is what I am, is to point to an aspect of experience, and say “That right there, that’s who’s doing the experiencing, that’s where the experience happening”. No! Any indication of this being the case is just an artefact of experience. Once we assume that there is in fact a thing that sees, and that there are in fact things that are seen, we lead ourselves down this impossible philosophical rabbit hole of investigating the degree of transparency and overlapping between the two.

Back to Bernardo. Analytic Idealism, while stating that consciousness is not accompanied and preceded by mind independent physical matter, insists that there is an “objective world” beyond each of the dissociated alters and their experiences, it’s just that that world in itself is experiential as well. He draws a grand picture of reality by starting that this is all occurring in the context of ‘Mind at large’. Referring to Bernardo’s metaphor of there being ‘nothing to the waves but the water’, he states that all there is to the multiplicity of minds and seemingly objective objects we all interact with, is just dissociative mental processes in this one mind. There is nothing to any of it but the one mind. So if we consider this further, Bernardo is making a similar mistake to the physicalist, to implement a subject/object dichotomy into his metaphysics, whereby the outside world portion, and private selves portion have their own distinct natures, and are representative of what is truly going on: dissociative mental processes in mind at large.

Is Bernardo not in a certain way doing the same thing as the physicalist? He is concentrating on the consistent experience of division between what it feels like I am, and what feels like it’s outside of that thing that I am, and is so transfixed, that it is now a concrete part of his metaphysics.

I would say when one goes deep into the investigation into the primacy of consciousness, there is no sense in compartmentalising consciousness into those beings that have it, or those objects and things that it reveals, because both of those things are seen and contextualised within consciousness.

Reality isn’t x. It can’t be called any x. It’s just this.

Very much open to discussion, and again I greatly admire Bernardo’s work, and would love to engage in conversation where it may be pointed out that I am mistaken in my understanding of his ideas.

[AshvinP]

I want to preface this: I greatly admire Bernardo Kastrup, and his philosophical ideas are the first I encountered that made me aware of the implications of the Physicalist paradigm and how contradictory and flawed it really is.

However, In further thinking I don’t think I can adopt his metaphysics.

When we try to explain what reality is - one could argue this is the central task of ontology - we are as Bernardo often points out, reducing reality to something/somethings. The physicalist tries to do this by saying that Reality is fundamentally the activity of physical phenomena, and what we call the mind is simply either an epiphenomenon of that physical matter, or runs along side it in accordance with the parameters of it.

Bernardo points out our invalid assumptions regarding the actual externality of the world as it appears to us, and thus that this summing up of the world, this filling in of the statement “reality is x” where X is matter, is a failed pursuit from the start.

It is invalid for a fundamental reason. We must first acknowledge not only the existence of conscious experience, but also the necessary primary epistemological nature of it. From this, we incorrectly categorise a portion of our conscious experience (that which appears to be outside of oneself, that is solid, concrete, or measurable perhaps) and then awarded this portion a kind of ontological fundamentality to it. This is a wrong step to take.

I would argue that Bernardo’s metaphysics, whilst I would say is correctly aiming for one that contains only consciousness, includes specific configurations that are blatantly tied to the Physicalist way of thinking.

Going back to physicalism - the search for the objective mind independent world, and the subsequent task of reducing that which we call mind, to that world - all starts from what is essentially a false self-identification. Referring back to the epistemically primary nature of consciousness, it is the thing which has given view to all supposed ‘things’. That includes you, it also includes the division between where you end, and the outside world begins. It makes a fundamental judgement of reality and says - it is made of things that see and feel and think, and then also things that are seen and felt and thought about. Not only do we have our conscious experience, but we imagine these two categories as being distinct ontological entities. But we are mistaken. Both come from the same source - and to identify with thoughts, or a body, or a brain, to say that is what I am, is to point to an aspect of experience, and say “That right there, that’s who’s doing the experiencing, that’s where the experience happening”. No! Any indication of this being the case is just an artefact of experience. Once we assume that there is in fact a thing that sees, and that there are in fact things that are seen, we lead ourselves down this impossible philosophical rabbit hole of investigating the degree of transparency and overlapping between the two.

Back to Bernardo. Analytic Idealism, while stating that consciousness is not accompanied and preceded by mind independent physical matter, insists that there is an “objective world” beyond each of the dissociated alters and their experiences, it’s just that that world in itself is experiential as well. He draws a grand picture of reality by starting that this is all occurring in the context of ‘Mind at large’. Referring to Bernardo’s metaphor of there being ‘nothing to the waves but the water’, he states that all there is to the multiplicity of minds and seemingly objective objects we all interact with, is just dissociative mental processes in this one mind. There is nothing to any of it but the one mind. So if we consider this further, Bernardo is making a similar mistake to the physicalist, to implement a subject/object dichotomy into his metaphysics, whereby the outside world portion, and private selves portion have their own distinct natures, and are representative of what is truly going on: dissociative mental processes in mind at large.

Is Bernardo not in a certain way doing the same thing as the physicalist? He is concentrating on the consistent experience of division between what it feels like I am, and what feels like it’s outside of that thing that I am, and is so transfixed, that it is now a concrete part of his metaphysics.

I would say when one goes deep into the investigation into the primacy of consciousness, there is no sense in compartmentalising consciousness into those beings that have it, or those objects and things that it reveals, because both of those things are seen and contextualised within consciousness.

Reality isn’t x. It can’t be called any x. It’s just this.

Very much open to discussion, and again I greatly admire Bernardo’s work, and would love to engage in conversation where it may be pointed out that I am mistaken in my understanding of his ideas.

Yes, this is exactly right. It's really a simple dualistic error pervading all modern philosophies and religions, including analytic idealism, yet the most simple errors are often the hardest for us to take notice of, precisely because they pervade our collective thinking habits and we have not differentiated ourselves from those habits. At the root of this error is an abstracted mode of perceiving-cognizing the World Content, which are two distinct modes of the same spiritual (ideational) activity, in which the perceiver-knower has been entirely removed from consideration and unaccounted for. Here is a recent comment from another poster here, Cleric, which summarizes this. We should keep in mind, it's not enough to point out the error in physicalism or idealism, but we must always seek concrete ways of rectifying that error within our own ideational experience for the practical benefit of both ourselves and the Whole. Philosophy, spirituality, art, and science do not need to be forsaken, but integrated with each other, reunited in full consciousness, and thereby redeemed from modern abstraction. This will require a pardigmatic shift of thinking within the life of each individual who is genuinely desiring to experience such a transformation.

When thinking is kept completely distinct from the spectrum of phenomena, we have the inner duality between the philosopher, knower, who builds mental models of reality and the world that confronts us as a mystical dream image. When the thinking process itself is included in the spectrum of investigation we have the beginnings of spiritual science. Thinking is the place where the living Being of the Cosmos encounters itself. In philosophy the Being of the Cosmos splits from itself and thinks about its shadow which it calls the World. In livingly experienced thinking these two parts spiral into each other. We should appreciate how inadequate our modern intellectual habits are for this kind of activity. We're used of having the comfortable distance between the philosophizing activity and the object of investigation which should be fixated. When these spiral into each other it becomes rather uncomfortable because we feel as a dog chasing its own tail. We try to fix and objectify that which we're constantly changing. But who is to say that the goal has ever been to have a fixed model placed before the eyes of the intellect who secretly cognizes from its undisturbed vantage point? The Universe has never promised such a convenience. We need completely new skills if we are to consciously explore the flow where meaning precipitates into perception. This can be likened to spiritual steering. Instead of anchoring ourselves at rigid conceptual handles (packets of meaning), our flow of being becomes flow of creative will and imagination. The science no longer consists in making static sculpture of the supposed reality, explaining the existence of our will and imagination but instead we're dealing with completely phenomenological and practical science which investigates from the inside how our creative flow is resisted by the environment and how we can find new degrees of freedom of this flow. The picture of the environment is not built from the outside but from within, we touch the interior with our will and imagination and that's how we come to know of its rhythmic lawfulness.

This doesn't mean that we can transform our consciousness immediately. We'll need a long transitional period (speaking of evolution of humanity) where we're still using more or less rigid concepts which however should be grasped only as handles that can help us get a grip on the flow. We can liken this to riding a bicycle. When we try to teach someone to ride we explain "Hold the handlebars, step on the pedals, turn into the direction you seem to fall into" and so on. These are only quite static snapshots that try to capture the dynamics of a quite complicated process. One doesn't learn to ride when they simply learn these concepts by heart. Instead, they must act as guides for the will to enter into a special dance where the whole body must act. I suppose most remember the magical feeling when we first got the chance to feel "I get it, I get it!" Then we quickly forget the verbal instructions and understand that they are only rigidified descriptions of dynamic spiritual activity.

It's something similar with the evolution of consciousness. Above Ashvin said that the intellect can't grasp deeper reality. We should make sure we understand that rightly. The intellect can perfectly well speak in concepts about deeper reality. The "I" lives in that reality and crystalizes concepts which give some kind of reference points within the otherwise infinitely detailed spectrum of reality. What the intellect can't do is build reality by mechanically patching together such concepts, anymore that we can build bicycle riding from patching together the concepts of the instructions.

[Soul_of_Shu]

A question that comes to mind is this: Is BK's model proposing a subject/object dichotomy, or rather a subject><object dynamic conceived in and of Mind, seemingly integral to there being an evolving relational process, i.e. life. Does the lion hunt and devour the lamb, unless the lamb is objectified as a food source necessary to its growth/survival?—notwithstanding that the source of the ipseity of both is of the same Origin. It surely seems that this is an integral dynamic of Nature that takes precedence over any metacognitive philosophical error that conjures up some dichotomy, and that BK surely would be taking this into account in his own premise.

[lorenzop]

It's best to proceed with the assumption all ontologies \ metaphysics are flawed, they are 'merely' models and have different levels of utility - depending on the question at hand.
By flawed I mean - all ontologies will eventually result in contradictions or conflicting data.

[Lou Gold]

A question that comes to mind is this: Is BK's model proposing a subject/object dichotomy, or rather a subject><object dynamic conceived in and of Mind, seemingly integral to there being an evolving relational process, i.e. life. Does the lion hunt and devour the lamb, unless the lamb is objectified as a food source necessary to its growth/survival?—notwithstanding that the source of the ipseity of both is of the same Origin. It surely seems that this is an integral dynamic of Nature that takes precedence over any metacognitive philosophical error that conjures up some dichotomy, and that BK surely would be taking this into account in his own premise.

Yes, Dana. The seeming paradox is resolved by realizing that life/death, predator/prey, etc are an integrated process. One thinks of Goethe's aphorism on nature: "Life is her most exquisite invention; and death is her expert contrivance to get plenty of life." From an ecological POV dissociation (separation) promotes specialization, which survives by virtue of interdependence. Plants convert light into life; fungi convert detritus into life; plant-and-fungal interdependence supports human animals who conjure metaphysics. Perhaps it's time to loosen the grip of either/or ontological thinking (consciousness or matter) and focus instead on how both/and might promote the True, Good and Beautiful? If so, then it would seem that the bottom line question would be moral or ethical or finding "right action".

Having just reread this, I realized that I've somehow shifted the fundamental quest from "what is the best answer?" to "what is the best question?" Obviously, question and answer are also interdependent co-arising but at this critical juncture it seems that leaning into one or the other is a "difference making a difference."

[AshvinP]

A question that comes to mind is this: Is BK's model proposing a subject/object dichotomy, or rather a subject><object dynamic conceived in and of Mind, seemingly integral to there being an evolving relational process, i.e. life. Does the lion hunt and devour the lamb, unless the lamb is objectified as a food source necessary to its growth/survival?—notwithstanding that the source of the ipseity of both is of the same Origin. It surely seems that this is an integral dynamic of Nature that takes precedence over any metacognitive philosophical error that conjures up some dichotomy, and that BK surely would be taking this into account in his own premise.

It's not about what BK is consciously proposing, but how his 'objective idealism', with 'dissociated alters', functions for all intents and purposes. As the OP says, it makes the exact same abstraction of materialism-dualism, but in the form of "atomized subject beholding ideas of Big Subject across a dissociative boundary". So now we practically have conceived the ontology with a subject/object (or subject/Subject) divide, and we end up with the same hard problems and the same abstraction of 'ideas' into illusory and acausal floating thought-forms which foam up into Consciousness upon dissociation (birth) and dissolve back into it upon death.

[Soul_of_Shu]

It's not about what BK is consciously proposing, but how his 'objective idealism', with 'dissociated alters', functions for all intents and purposes. As the OP says, it makes the exact same abstraction of materialism-dualism, but in the form of "atomized subject beholding ideas of Big Subject across a dissociative boundary". So now we practically have conceived the ontology with a subject/object (or subject/Subject) divide, and we end up with the same hard problems and the same abstraction of 'ideas' into illusory and acausal floating thought-forms which foam up into Consciousness upon dissociation (birth) and dissolve back into it upon death.

Well, how is it the 'exact' same abstraction? Under materialism, that which is deemed to be 'out there' is of an entirely discrete ontological category, which would exist were there no consciousness at all. Under idealism, it's subjectified and objectified aspects of one ontological category, i.e. Mind, in dynamic relationship. Again, why should this be defined as a 'divide' rather than a 'dynamic'?

[Lou Gold]

A question that comes to mind is this: Is BK's model proposing a subject/object dichotomy, or rather a subject><object dynamic conceived in and of Mind, seemingly integral to there being an evolving relational process, i.e. life. Does the lion hunt and devour the lamb, unless the lamb is objectified as a food source necessary to its growth/survival?—notwithstanding that the source of the ipseity of both is of the same Origin. It surely seems that this is an integral dynamic of Nature that takes precedence over any metacognitive philosophical error that conjures up some dichotomy, and that BK surely would be taking this into account in his own premise.

It's not about what BK is consciously proposing, but how his 'objective idealism', with 'dissociated alters', functions for all intents and purposes. As the OP says, it makes the exact same abstraction of materialism-dualism, but in the form of "atomized subject beholding ideas of Big Subject across a dissociative boundary". So now we practically have conceived the ontology with a subject/object (or subject/Subject) divide, and we end up with the same hard problems and the same abstraction of 'ideas' into illusory and acausal floating thought-forms which foam up into Consciousness upon dissociation (birth) and dissolve back into it upon death.

Or, with birth emerge dissociated illusory separatist thought forms (abstract ideas) that are mere temporary representations of appearances and which separation will dissolve upon death.

[Lou Gold]

It's not about what BK is consciously proposing, but how his 'objective idealism', with 'dissociated alters', functions for all intents and purposes. As the OP says, it makes the exact same abstraction of materialism-dualism, but in the form of "atomized subject beholding ideas of Big Subject across a dissociative boundary". So now we practically have conceived the ontology with a subject/object (or subject/Subject) divide, and we end up with the same hard problems and the same abstraction of 'ideas' into illusory and acausal floating thought-forms which foam up into Consciousness upon dissociation (birth) and dissolve back into it upon death.

Well, how is it the 'exact' same abstraction? Under materialism, that which is deemed to be 'out there' is of an entirely discrete ontological category, which would exist were there no consciousness at all. Under idealism, it's subjectified and objectified aspects of one ontological category, i.e. Mind, in dynamic relationship. Again, why should this be defined as a 'divide' rather than a 'dynamic'?

While I'm with you in thinking that "process" is a better modeling than "product", I'm also aware that 'divide-or-dynamic' simply introduces yet another dichotomous dualism or new horizon to be overcome. Perhaps this is the language way. Perhaps naming is the way of manifestation. Perhaps silence is the way to know God.

“The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be named is not the eternal name.
The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth.
The named is the mother of ten thousand things.
Ever desireless, one can see the mystery.
Ever desiring, one can see the manifestations.
These two spring from the same source but differ in name;
this appears as darkness.
Darkness within darkness.
The gate to all mystery.”

Embracing this mysteriousness gives us experiences like pleasure/pain, light/dark and many more of the feelings of being alive. It's glorious and there's no free lunch. Clinging attachment will produce suffering.

[Soul_of_Shu]

...

Sure, in speaking at all we're forced into the nominal. Name it yin in dynamic relationship with yang, I still find no dichotomous duality, or actual boundary ... at least no more a boundary than the 49th parallel.