Consciousness and idealism

[Magical Realist]

https://player.fm/series/the-consciousne...do-kastrup

Intriguing podcast conversation with Dr. Bernardo Kastrup positing consciousness as a universal state of all the universe. Seeks to address some of the fundamental arguments of materialism and offers alternative more parsimonious explanations for them. Draws distinctions between idealism and panpsychism as well as between idealism and solipsism. A radically different take on consciousness as the lone ontic substrate. Give it a shot..

“materialism is a fantasy. It’s based on unnecessary postulates, circular reasoning and selective consideration of evidence and data. Materialism is by no stretch of the imagination a scientific conclusion, but merely a metaphysical opinion that helps some people interpret scientific conclusions.”
― Bernardo Kastrup, Brief Peeks Beyond: Critical Essays on Metaphysics, Neuroscience, Free Will, Skepticism and Culture

[C C]

. . . “materialism is a fantasy. It’s based on unnecessary postulates, circular reasoning and selective consideration of evidence and data. Materialism is by no stretch of the imagination a scientific conclusion, but merely a metaphysical opinion that helps some people interpret scientific conclusions.”
― Bernardo Kastrup, Brief Peeks Beyond: Critical Essays on Metaphysics, Neuroscience, Free Will, Skepticism and Culture

Traditional materialism surely went belly-up once the conception of matter shifted to fields -- with particles becoming excitations, nodes, vortices, etc in them (whatever word choices). Rather than chunky, microscopic puzzle-pieces that fit together in certain ways.

Even the experts don't seem to collectively agree on what replacement "physicalism" precisely is. But to whatever extent the latter rejects or ignores phenomenal properties, it seems to be that very conversion of the world of sensation to an abstract nature which constitutes its essence: Those technical descriptions, mappings of causal relationships, and measurements. (As if ignoring that products of reasoning are of mental nature, too.)

Accordingly, I occasionally feel like philosophers got it in backwards in the past, with the labels. It's conscious experience that sports concrete, corporeal bodies and tangible "substances" which one can feel as solid. Whereas it is ideas (concepts) that are rational entities and more in line with either immaterialism or an intellectual slash Platonic world. Even space and time (which are simply manifested in perception) are converted to their mathematically expressed counterparts in the rationalist's version of reality.

[Magical Realist]

Even the experts don't seem to collectively agree on what replacement "physicalism" precisely is. But to whatever extent the latter rejects or ignores phenomenal properties, it seems to be that very conversion of the world of sensation to an abstract nature which constitutes its essence: Those technical descriptions, mappings of causal relationships, and measurements. (As if ignoring that products of reasoning are of mental nature, too.)

Physicalist reductionism never arrives at some irreducible substance, but always comes down to patterns and mathematical relationships and laws that are just assumed to exist sui generis. It really is arriving at the sort of universal idealism or platonism it is constantly denying--of a reality based on a rationalist substrate of mental structures void of anything like a physical substrate.

[C C]

His recruitment of dissociative personalities as a metaphor is useful for how we'd be cut-off introspectively from each other and what the overall, non-human manifestation is to itself. Aldous Huxley also referred to the brain as a "reducing valve" that filtered out the overwhelming multifariousness of the world. Too bad the internet didn't exist back then -- he could have referred to psychedelics as enabling him to arbitrarily browse other websites in the phenomenological network.

Are we all multiple personalities of universal consciousness: Dissociative identity disorder (DID) is the current correct term for what used to be called multiple personality disorder. It's the mental condition in which a single person manifests multiple dissociated personalities, each of which is referred to as an "alter" [...] Alters are self-contained and internally consistent in terms of memories. They may even have different physical capabilities though they share the same body, as in the recently studied sighted woman who had blind alters. Kastrup writes, “Through EEGs, the doctors were able to ascertain that the brain activity normally associated with sight wasn't present while a blind alter was in control of the woman's body, even though her eyes were open. When a sighted alter assumed control, the usual brain activity returned."

Just as interesting—and the real source of Kastrup's interest in the condition—is that there's evidence multiple alters can be active—conscious—at the same time, aware of each other, and competing for control of their body. [...] alters can not only be concurrently conscious, but that they can also vie for dominance with each other."

Kastrup suggests that if the entire universe is one mind, the presence of dissociative personalities creating individual consciousnesses could answer questions that defeat other ontologies. In this view, each of us is an alter, and just like conventional alters are, we can be aware of and interact with each other without mentally overlapping or seeing into each other's minds.

Kastrup proposes our individual experiences in the physical world aren't an issue because they're not what they seem: In fact (he says), they're merely “patterns of self-excitation of cosmic consciousness." That's to say there is no physical world, no steering wheel in front of you—rather, “It is the variety and dynamics of excitations across the underlying 'medium' that lead to different experiential qualities."

This isn't as out-there as it may at first seem. We've written before about cognitive scientists who suggest that the reality that surrounds us could be very different than what we think since what we see, hear, feel, etc, are merely internally generated representations that help us survive external stimuli. In Kastrup's premise, it's not actual, physical things out there, but merely bursts of self-excitation coming from elsewhere in the cosmic mind: There is no out there out there.

This version of idealism, if true, resolves a bunch of issues that vex other perspectives, such as the hard problem, and the DID aspect handles the combination problem. In fact, Kastrup lists in his paper five concerns his ontology must, and he feels does, satisfy:

a) Grounding experience in cosmic consciousness: how do myriad, ephemeral experiential qualities arise in one enduring cosmic consciousness?
b) The decombination problem: how do private phenomenal fields form within cosmic consciousness? Why can I not read your thoughts by simply shifting the focus of my attention?
c) Reducing perception: how can the revealed order of nature (the physical world we measure) be explained in terms of its concealed order (its underlying thoughts)? Why are the respective qualities so different?
d) Explaining the correlations between brain function and inner experience: if brain function does not constitute or generate phenomenality, why do they correlate so well?
e) Explaining a seemingly shared, autonomous world: if the world is imagined in consciousness, how can we all be imagining essentially the same world outside the control of our personal volition?

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As an alternative to monistic or ontological idealism one could also use Philip Groff's cosmopsychism. It's arguably different than the micropsychism that Kastrup attacks.

A Critique of Bernardo Kastrup's Monistic Idealism
http://www.reclaimingart.com/journal/a-c...c-idealism

EXCERPT: Recently, Bernardo Kastrup posted an essay on his blog entitled “The Threat of Panpsychism: A Warning.” In it, he dismisses the recent rise of panpsychism in the philosophical mainstream as an “escape route” intended to save materialism from its imminent downfall. According to Kastrup, the evidence on offer makes idealism the only viable philosophical position today.

Matthew David Segall ... wrote a response to the essay, arguing that Kastrup was attacking only a caricature of panpsychism, ignoring other, more sophisticated models such as Whitehead’s metaphysics. Since that discussion is ongoing, I'm happy to leave any defence of panpsychism in Segall's more capable hands. While I do subscribe to the idea that “psyche” and “matter” constitute one “thing” that is reducible to neither of its "parts," I am not a systematic panpsychist. In fact I’m not a systematic anything. My basic belief is that the world is, ultimately, unknowable. The yin-yang oppositions that characterize the realm of experience, including the dualities of self and world, mind and matter, cannot, in my view, be reconciled by reason. Kierkegaard was right, I think, to say that no human-made rational system could ever do justice to the whole. The human intellect being by nature limited, it simply cannot access the limitless, i.e. ultimate reality or ultimate truth.

So, in this post, I'll try to argue that monistic idealism, Kastrup’s position, is no less of an abstraction than the materialism it seeks to replace. I do this because I feel it is a problem when a philosopher describes a rival view as an “extremely dangerous cultural threat” as Kastrup does in his "warning" against panpsychism. If the mystery of the real has not been solved, if the mystery cannot be solved, then all philosophical positions ought to be welcome or at the very least tolerated, including panpsychism and (dare I say it?) hardcore materialism. (MORE)