Analytic Idealism in a Nutshell by Bernardo Kastrup (Book Summary)

This is a book summary of Analytic Idealism in a Nutshell: A straightforward summary of the 21st century’s only plausible metaphysics by Bernardo Kastrup (Amazon).

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Quick Housekeeping:

All content in “quotation marks” is from the author (otherwise it’s minimally paraphrased).
All content is organized into my own themes (not the author’s chapters).
Emphasis has been added in bold for readability/skimmability.

Book Summary Contents:

About the Book
About Physicalism
About Analytic Idealism
Airplane Dashboard Analogy
Ripples & Whirlpool Analogy

Analytic Idealism in a Nutshell book by Bernardo Kastrup

**Beyond Physicalism: Analytic Idealism in a Nutshell by Bernardo Kastrup (Book Summary)**

About the book Analytic Idealism in a Nutshell

“This is a book about the nature of reality. It elaborates on the best hypothesis we have today, based on leading-edge science and analytic reasoning, about what reality is … Analytic Idealism—the subject of this book—represents a correction of our known metaphysical mistakes; a step forward. As I shall soon argue, it offers the most plausible and parsimonious hypothesis we have today about the nature of reality.”

“Notice that such questions of being—as in what reality is—cannot be definitively answered by science alone; those who think they can have a fundamentally flawed understanding of both science and philosophy. The scientific method can only definitively answer questions of behavior: what nature does, as opposed to what it is.”

“In addition to science, this book also leverages the methods of philosophy, particularly metaphysics, the area of philosophy dedicated to questions of being. More specifically, beyond the empirical adequacy of the hypothesis it puts forward, this book also leverages softer truth guidelines such as conceptual parsimony, internal logical consistency, overall coherence, and explanatory power. These guidelines cannot lead us to definitive answers to questions of being, but surely allow us to rank the hypotheses at hand and figure out the most likely one. This is the spirit of this book.”

“I’m defending a realist, naturalist, rationalist, and reductionist position (I reduce everything to a field of subjectivity).”

Physicalism

Notes on Bernardo Kastrup’s terminology:

· ‘Physical’ (in scare quotes) = Something that consists of the contents of perception (something made of the colors, sounds, smells, flavors, or textures we experience). This is how we conversationally use the term when alluding to physicality (the felt concreteness, solidity, coldness, texture, etc).
· Physical (no scare quotes) = Something pertaining the science of physics, physical equations, physical quantities, etc.

There are also always two ways to speak of anything in nature, two different ‘languages’:

· One is the language of the representations (of things as they appear on the screen of perception).
· The other is the language of the things in themselves (the real world, things as they are ‘before’ they are represented, or ‘behind’ the representations).

About Physicalism:

A short overview of the mainstream view Bernardo Kastrup says is incorrect:

Reality is physical (non-mental): Physicalism posits that the essence of the world out there is not mental at all but, instead, physical in a strict sense (purely quantitative).

Reality is characterized through quantities & math: Physicalism means that reality is supposed to have no intrinsic qualities and should be, in principle, exhaustively describable/characterizable through quantities and their mathematical relationships alone (if you come up with a long enough list of the right numbers and associated equations, you will have said everything there is to say about reality and nothing will remain uncharacterized or ambiguous).

Qualitative reduced to quantitative: Physicalism means the qualitative-mental can be reduced, in principle, to the quantitative-physical (even though nobody can even begin to explicate how that might work).

Brain generates mind: The world constituted by the contents of your perception is entirely inside your head. The colors you see, the flavors you taste, the smells and textures you feel, the melodies you hear, are all inside your skull because, as qualities of experience, they are supposedly generated by your brain (we don’t know why or how certain specific patterns of brain activity correlate with certain specific inner experiences; we just know that they do).

Physicalist errors:

The greatest embarrassment of mainstream Physicalism is its fundamental inability to account for phenomenal consciousness (the existence of experience) which is nature’s sole pre-theoretical, given fact. Indeed, phenomenal consciousness precedes theory epistemically, in that all theories arise and exist within it.

Thinking the ‘physical’ world perceived is external to the perceiver and, therefore, the real world out there: The physicalist mistakes perception for the thing perceived (the forms, shapes, positions, and motions of the contents of perception are, for the physicalist, the actual forms, shapes, positions, and motions of the external world). Taken in by the illusion that perception is a transparent window into reality, the physicalist mistakes the representation for the thing represented, and therefore the externality of the thing represented for the externality of the representation itself.

Thinking the map precedes the territory and somehow generates the territory: Physicalist’s argue that the description fundamentally precedes the thing described. The physicalist posits that the numbers with which we describe the perceived world are the fundamental aspect of reality (the bottom, irreducible, most solid layer of nature, existing objectively, independently of us). For the physicalist, the real world is physical not merely in the sense of being describable by physical quantities, but of being constituted by physical quantities.

Failing to account for any experience: Physicalism fundamentally cannot determine how brain function supposedly generates experience. Since experience is all we ultimately know (everything else being theoretical abstractions of Physicalism itself) there is an important sense in which Physicalism fails to account for all that is known. It explains no pre-theoretical fact of nature, only the abstractions created by its own premises, in a circular, question-begging manner. Physicalism tries to account for mind in terms of something that can only ever be known as an abstraction of mind. The physicalist’s mind invents the notion of something non-mental (matter) and then that same mind tries to account for itself in terms of its own invention.

Hard problem of consciousness:

The ‘hard problem of consciousness’ is a fatal blow to mainstream Physicalism. It means that Physicalism cannot account for any one experience and, therefore, for nothing in the domain of human knowledge.

The ‘hard problem’ is a fundamental epistemic problem: Not a merely operational or contingent one (it isn’t amenable to solution with further exploration and analysis).

The fundamental absence of a logical bridge to connect quantities to qualities, caused by the abandonment of the semantic reference that underpinned the meaning of the quantities to begin with, is the ‘hard problem’: To see why Physicalism fails to explain experience, notice that there is nothing about physical parameters (quantities and their abstract relationships, as given by mathematical equations) in terms of which we could deduce, in principle, the qualities of experience. There is no logical bridge between X millimeters, Y grams, or Z milliseconds on the one hand, and the sweetness of strawberry, the bitterness of disappointment, or the warmth of love on the other; one can’t logically derive the latter from the former. The premises of mainstream Physicalism are such that, in order for quantities to have meaning, qualities need to preexist them. But when Physicalism then tries to account for the qualities in terms of the quantities, the latter cannot preexist the former anymore, and thus become literally meaningless. Nothing can be deduced in principle from meaningless things, and that’s the hard problem right there.

Analytic Idealism avoids the ‘hard problem’ altogether: The qualities of perception are modulated by other qualities (namely, the experiential states that constitute the world around us) instead of being somehow generated by non-qualitative, physical stuff. A magical bridge from quantities to qualities is no longer required; only a causally trivial one, from qualities to other qualities.

Analytic Idealism

All theories of reality must have at least one fundamental entity in its reduction base. The better theories are those that can explain everything else in terms of that one irreducible entity. The best theory chooses, as the one irreducible entity, nature’s sole pre-theoretical given: subjectivity itself, of which experience is just an excitation. When placing transpersonal subjectivity into the reduction base, Analytic Idealism removes everything else from it; it removes fundamental particles and their physical properties from it, for these particles and associated properties can now be explained in terms of excitations of transpersonal subjectivity. Idealism’s explanatory power is maximum: in principle, it accounts for everything in terms of just one entity, that one entity being the only empirical given we have.

About Analytic Idealism:

Analytic Idealism is not only the most parsimonious metaphysics there is, but also the most parsimonious there can be; for any coherent theory of reality has to propose at least one irreducible entity. And when that one entity is the one empirical given of nature—i.e., subjectivity itself, which is where all theorizing unfolds—the theory is then the most parsimonious possible; it postulates nothing beyond the one given fact of reality: the existence of subjectivity.

The only irreducible entity, nature’s sole pre-theoretical and empirical given fact of reality, is subjectivity itself (aka phenomenal consciousness, the existence of experience, the one field of subjectivity that nature is): The whole of nature is one subject (one field of subjectivity) whose excitations are everything experienced. Experience (felt qualities, subjectivity, mentation) is irreducible; configurations/patterns of excitation of the one field (behaviors of the field) are all reducible to the field. There is only the universal subject, and it is you. Your core subjectivity is the subjectivity of nature-at-large, so what you really are isn’t going anywhere; ever. Where could your core subjectivity possibly go, since it is all there is? The analytic idealist inspects everything they have direct access to and finds only experiential/mental states (the existence of nonphysical states is not an abstract conceptual inference, but a self-evident, primary empirical reality).

Denies dualism and embraces realism, naturalism, rationalism, reductionism: Analytic Idealism embraces realism (there is an external world out there, independent of our individual minds; independent of our observation, volition, fantasies, preferences, rituals, etc), naturalism (the phenomena of the external world unfold spontaneously, according to nature’s own inherent dispositions, and not according to external intervention by a divinity outside nature), rationalism (human reason can recognize and model the regularities of nature’s behavior), and reductionism (complex phenomena can be explained in terms of simpler ones).

Nature/external world is mental, subjective, experiential, felt qualities: There is only mentation in the whole of nature. The world out there is mental (in the sense of being experiential), identical in ontic kind/essence to our own individual minds (thought-like in essence, although not constituted by our thoughts). The world is subjective from its own perspective, but objective from ours. Nature is made of felt qualities as opposed to abstract quantities (the world is made of transpersonal experiential states that cannot be exhaustively characterized in terms of quantities alone). There is something it is like to be the world out there.

Matter is what mental states look like when observed from an outside perspective: The external experiential states that constitute the outside world present themselves to our observation in the form of what we colloquially call the ‘physical’ world, or ‘matter’ (the contents of perception, the stuff we see, hear, smell, taste, and touch). What we colloquially call ‘matter’ is thus merely an internal cognitive representation of the results of measurements performed on mental states. ‘Matter’ is a mental representation of other mental states (the extrinsic appearance of inner mentation).

Our body is what our mental inner life looks like when observed from an outside perspective: Our ‘material’ body is what we (our inner experiences, the only thing we identify with pre-theoretically) look like when observed from the outside. The body is what our inner mentation (including the myriad subtle mental processes below the threshold of metacognitive introspection) looks like when represented in the form of perceptual states. The body is not a mere mechanism distinct from mind, but the extrinsic appearance of mental processes (a mental representation of our own mental states).

The world/contents of perception is not inside our head, but our head in the world of perception (inside our individual mind, but not our head): Our heads are in the ‘physical’ world, not the ‘physical’ world in our heads. Your head is part of the ‘physical’ world and therefore a cognitive representation (not a real thing that can contain other things). Your head doesn’t contain your mental activity; instead, it is a representation thereof. Your head does not contain the world of your perceptions; it’s the world of your perceptions that contains your head (insofar as your head is a perceived entity).

Brain activity is what inner experience looks like when observed from an outside perspective: The brain and its patterns of neuronal activity are not the cause of inner experience, but the image/extrinsic appearance of inner experience. The ‘physical’ brain (and its equally ‘physical’ patterns of metabolic activity) are what a subject’s mental states look like to external observation. Minds are not generated by metabolism; instead, metabolism is simply what some minds look like when represented on an internal cognitive dashboard.

Dissociative alters:

Analytic Idealism infers that a dissociative process creates the boundary separating our conscious inner life from the rest of nature. We are all dissociative processes—‘alters’ (alternate personalities)—in the one mind of nature. You are a dissociated alter of nature, something nature is temporarily doing.

Nature-at-large (which is a mind) undergoes a process analogous to human DID (Dissociative Identity Disorder): Analytic Idealism extrapolates dissociation ‘upwards’ and infers that not only does it happen in human minds, but also in the broader, field-like mind-space of nature-at-large. Human DID is but a self-similar, hierarchically nested micro-reflection in a human mind of a broader macro-process that unfolds spontaneously in the one field of subjectivity that nature is. Just as DID patients present with seemingly disjoint centers of awareness called alters (alternate personalities), nature-at-large also presents with multiple disjoint centers of awareness that we call us. Analogically speaking, we (and all other living beings) are alters of nature-at-large.

The ‘physical’ world is an alter’s internal representation of the real world out there: So must time and space be because they are the dimensions of the ‘physical’ world (of the screen of perception) which is internal to the alter.

Life (biology, metabolism) is the extrinsic appearance/representation of a dissociative process (alters) in the field of subjectivity that nature is: Living organisms are what dissociative processes in nature-at-large look like. Your life, your metabolism, is not the cause or generator of your consciousness, but merely what your private mentation looks like from the outside (from across your dissociative boundary).

Each living organism (each alter in the mind of nature) is defined by its respective dissociative boundary: Experiential states within the dissociative boundary constitute the alter’s private conscious inner life. Experiential states outside the dissociative boundary comprise the transpersonal experiential states that constitute the external world of the alter. The qualities of your perception exist only within the dissociative boundary of your alter. In other words, they are inside your personal mind (though not in your head) for they are representations displayed on your inner dashboard.

The living body (insofar as it is ‘made of matter’) is a dashboard representation of the experiential states within an alter of nature-at-large: ‘Matter’ is what mental states look like from across a dissociative boundary. ‘Matter’ is but a discernible appearance/representation on our inner cognitive dashboard of patterns of excitation of the field of subjectivity. Our bodies are dashboard representations of our dissociated, internal experiential states. The body is a ‘physical,’ dashboard representation of the mental contents of an alter.

Association & Dissociation:

Once we are acclimatized to Analytic Idealism, we realize that semantic associations and dissociations are the primary processes—not entities, processes—of nature. With these two processes, we can metaphysically account for both the mind-boggling complexity of the inanimate universe, and the mind-boggling richness of life, with only one universal subject in our reduction base. Semantic association and dissociation: the double-root of all complexity.

Semantic associations: Give nature its structure in the absence of extension; a structure that manifests itself to our observation as the ‘laws of nature,’ which were responsible for the creation of complexity and differentiation in a universe that, at the moment of the Big Bang, had neither. These semantic associations, inherent to the very fabric of reality, are the ‘cosmic egg’ that hatches and grows into the cosmic web of galaxies.

Dissociation: Accounts for life itself (life is dissociation). Life is what dissociation looks like in the one field of subjectivity that nature is when said dissociation is observed from an outside perspective and represented on the dials of a cognitive dashboard. Life is the dissociation that separates us from the qualities of the external world as they are in themselves (all we have to collect information about our surroundings are the qualities of perception, which are internal to us but represent external qualities, just as a dashboard represents external states without being itself external). Dissociation is the enabler of a second ‘act of Creation,’ whereby nature ‘steps out of itself’ (out of its own overwhelming, automatic play of instinct) and contemplates itself through our eyes. Dissociation bathes nature with the light of meta-consciousness, granting it a different form of (meta) existence. The end of life is the end of the dissociation, not the end of consciousness.