Intuitive Idealism vs. Analytic Idealism: A critique of Bernardo Kastrup’s formulation of idealism

Bernardo Kastrup is arguably one of the most relevant philosophers 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.

Enter Intuitive Idealism

I have so far tried to show the problems inherent in Bernardo Kastrup’s Analytic Idealism. My critique has been based on direct intuition, but also on the study and practice of Eastern and Western wisdom traditions, which (at least in my view) provide a much deeper insight into the nature of consciousness than anything contemporary Western philosophy and science can deliver.

The alternative formulation of idealism that I’m proposing here (Intuitive Idealism) shares a same basic tenet with Analytic Idealism: consciousness is fundamental; it is an ontological primitive, uncaused and irreducible. It also shares the recognition that all reality exists only as experience, and that experience is excitation in the boundless field of consciousness. There is no subject-object separation.

However, I depart from Analytic Idealism in two crucial points: I reject the notion of dissociative boundaries. And I reject the idea that the physical world we perceive is the extrinsic appearance of something else, or a simplified user interface, or anything other than what it appears to be.

I’m rejecting those notions not only because they are counter-intuitive: they are also, as far as I can see, completely unnecessary. It is perfectly possible to explain from an idealistic perspective all fundamental facts about reality in an intuitive and straightforward way, with no need to resort to any sort of far-fetched mental contrivance. This is Intuitive Idealism.

The main facts that need explanation from an idealistic perspective are these three:

a) Why do we all (seem to) share the same physical world?

b) Why does physical reality (our sense perceptions) follow regular, predictable patterns?

c) Why is there a close correlation between conscious experience and brain activity?

Easy-peasy. Let’s begin with the first one.

The law of consistency

If consciousness is all there is, if nothing exists outside consciousness (if consciousness is the “ontological primitive”), how can we explain the consistency of our perceptions of the world, the fact that we all seem to perceive the same physical universe?

Intuitive Idealism offers a ridiculously simple answer to this question. The reason for the interpersonal consistency of our perceptions of the physical world is that, without this consistency, there would be no physical world. If the sense perceptions of all living organisms weren’t perfectly consistent with one another, there would be no physical universe to begin with.

In other words, to ask “why are our perceptions of the world consistent?” is equivalent to asking “why does the physical world exist?”. The only possible answer to that would be something like “because universal consciousness has infinite creativity and curiosity, and it loves experiencing and knowing itself in all imaginable ways”. But maybe it would be wiser to just humbly appreciate the existence of the physical universe as an unfathomable mystery.

Intuitive Idealism doesn’t explain the ultimate purpose of the physical universe, but it explains what the physical universe is: the physical universe we inhabit is the result of the perfect consistency of the sense perceptions of all living organisms. That’s what it is. Nothing more, nothing less.

There is no pre-existing reality out there, causing our perceptions. There is only our perceptions. Our perceptions create the physical world. But this is only possible because our perceptions are consistent. This consistency is the fundamental and necessary condition for the existence of the physical world. In Intuitive Idealism, this is called the law of consistency.

The law of consistency accounts for all the regularities we observe in the physical universe. The predictability of physical phenomena is nothing but the unavoidable result of the law of consistency. All the laws of physics can be reduced to this single law, which is the only real, objective law underlying physical reality.

To help visualize all this, I can offer the following metaphor: the physical universe as a simulation (please beware: it’s only a metaphor!).

The simulation metaphor: the law of consistency in action

Imagine you are a genius computer game designer, with unlimited computing power at your disposal. You want to create a multiplayer virtual reality game where players can interact with each other and with their virtual environment. And you want to make the game so immersive that players will experience it as completely real.

The most obvious way to achieve this would be to create a virtual environment that all players can share. This virtual environment would consist of nothing but computer code, but it would be rendered on each player’s user interface as three dimensional shapes, colours, sounds, etc. (given that you have unlimited computing power, you could also introduce smell, taste, etc.). This model corresponds roughly to Donald Hoffman’s interface theory of perception (ITP). The only difference is that, in this thought experiment, the user interface wouldn’t be the result of natural selection, but of “intelligent design”.

But there are several problems with this approach. First, you would need to do a huge amount of engineering. You would have to carefully design every rock, every flower, every tree, every hill on that virtual world, in great detail, and make sure that everything would be rendered realistically on each player’s interface, without any glitches. This sounds like a lot of hard work.

Second, no matter how much work you put into the design, the virtual world you are creating would be limited. There is only a finite number of rocks, trees, hills, etc., that you would be able to create (let’s assume that although you have unlimited computing power, you don’t have unlimited time at your disposal).

Third, and most importantly, your players would be hopelessly trapped inside your virtual world. You could give them some limited capacity to transform their virtual environment as they interact with it (for example, they could cut down trees, use the wood to build houses, etc.), but there would be no way for them to escape the fixed set of rules (the “laws of nature”) encoded in your design. They would effectively be prisoners in your virtual reality game. Your virtual world would be a prison.

In short, you realize that this solution (designing a virtual environment that players would share) would be rather depressing. Even worse: it would be insufferably boring.

Luckily, you are a genius, so you have a brilliant idea: you won’t design anything. There will be no virtual environment in your virtual reality game. You will instead introduce one single rule, a rule that will apply to every player who enters your game: their perceptions have to be consistent with the perceptions of every other player. This is the law of consistency.

Every player will be wearing a helmet-like headset and full-body suit resembling a spacesuit, capable of reproducing all possible external stimuli: colours, sounds, three-dimensional shapes, tactile perceptions (texture, density, temperature, etc.), smells, tastes, etc. By default, this “game suit” or “VR suit” won’t provide any differentiated stimuli, but only a completely enveloping cloud of “white noise”.

Since it is, for obvious reasons, the easiest sense to visualize, let’s concentrate on vision. The default display on the headset would be that of three-dimensional multicoloured noise. We can picture it as a stereoscopic display of tiny pixels randomly fluctuating through all colours of the rainbow. To the player, this would look like an impenetrable, chaotic, iridescent fog.

Let’s assume that the players, struggling to find their way in this strange environment, would try to recognize patterns or regularities in this ever-changing multi-coloured fog. This would be akin to gazing at clouds, trying to find recognizable shapes.

We all know that if we look long enough at the changing contours of passing clouds, we will eventually see the vague likeness of a face, a horse, a fish. For the players in this virtual reality game, it would be like beginning to discern some faint, hazy forms half-hidden by the fog.

Here is where the real magic of the VR suit kicks in. It turns out that this super-advanced suit is not only a displaying device. There are special sensors at the back of the helmet that can detect any instance of “pattern recognition” performed by the player’s brain, and subtly reinforce it by echoing or mirroring it in the display (it doesn’t matter if this sounds rather unlikely: remember that this is only a metaphor).

So for example, if at some point a player would imagine to see the blurry shape of a tree wavering in the fog, the game display would mirror exactly that blurry image of a tree. This would encourage the player to try to discern more detail, starting a feedback loop that would eventually result (given that the player employed enough attention) in the crystal-clear three-dimensional image of a tree. Add touch, smell, etc., and we would have a tree that would seem completely real.

The game suits of all players are wirelessly interconnected, so that, following the law of consistency, the patterns or forms perceived by any player will instantly be potentially mirrored in the displays of all other players. Let’s see what we mean by “potentially mirrored”.

To simplify the thought experiment, let’s say that you are introducing a virtual space-time framework in your game, so that each player will find themselves at a particular location in that virtual space-time. This location will be randomly assigned to each player as they log into the game. Now, the location of one player relative to another will determine the degree to which the perceptions of one will be mirrored in the other’s display. If player A, say, is fifty (virtual) miles distant from player B, the trees or rocks that A sees won’t be mirrored in B’s display. But if A sees a full moon in the sky, that moon will also appear in B’s display… if B happens to look at the sky.

This is what “potential mirroring” means. A and B could be standing next to each other, but looking in different directions. Or B could be sitting reading a book, while A is gazing at the surrounding landscape. The law of consistency doesn’t limit in any way the freedom of the players to focus their attention wherever they choose. It only ensures that, if A and B happen to look at the same point in space-time, they will perceive the same (virtual) objects, as viewed from their respective locations. Their perceptions will be mutually consistent.

This perfect consistency will be maintained not only in space, but also in time. If A and B see some object (e. g. the moon) behaving in a certain way at some point in virtual time, C (located, say, at the same spot in virtual space but ten years later or earlier in virtual time) will perceive it behaving in the same consistent way.

This is how the law of consistency gives rise to the regularity of the observed world. At the beginning of the game, the players would be free to perceive the world around them behaving in any possible way they could imagine. As the game progressed, those perceived behaviours would become “natural laws”. The freedom of the players to perceive whatever they might would diminish, but their impression of being in a “real world” would accordingly increase.

So this is your completely immersive virtual reality game. It would enhance the players’ freedom and creativity. They would be unwittingly creating their own virtual world as they played. There is no way to predict what kind of world they would create. Each new set of players (you could relaunch the game as many times as you liked) would probably end up in a completely different universe. You, as the game designer, would save a lot of work. You could just sit back and watch. And the game would be anything but boring.

Back to reality

This simulation metaphor illustrates how the law of consistency is enough to explain the fact that we all share the same physical world (fact a), and the regularity and predictability we observe in that physical world (fact b). It won’t help, though, in explaining the correlation between conscious experiences and brain activity (fact c). To understand this third fact we need to abandon the metaphor and look at our actual situation.

We are not living in a simulation. We are living in reality. This is what our intuition tells us. This world we live in is real. And we obviously are not wearing special VR headsets or suits.

What do we have instead? Well, we have our physical bodies. To understand what this means, we need to answer two questions: What are our physical bodies? And who or what are we?

Let’s begin with the second question, which from the point of view of Intuitive Idealism is the easy one: We are consciousness. Universal consciousness. That’s what we are.

There is only one consciousness. In essence, we are all one. This unity of consciousness is what underlies the law of consistency. The law of consistency is not an arbitrary principle postulated to explain the unexplainable (the consistency and regularity of the physical world). It is a necessary corollary of this fundamental truth: there is only consciousness, and consciousness is one.

Done. We can now tackle the first question. What are our physical bodies? According to Intuitive Idealism, the answer to this is quite straightforward too: The physical bodies of all living organisms, taken as a whole, are the measurement apparatus consciousness uses to observe (and thus, create) the physical world.

I have explained in detail what this means in my essay “The Observing Universe”. In it, I propose a new (idealistic) interpretation of quantum mechanics, which I can summarize here as follows:

1. The physical world is the observed world. There is nothing to the physical universe but observation.

2. There is only one observer: universal consciousness.

3. Consciousness is nonlocal. In order to observe the physical world, it needs the localized physical bodies of living organisms, which as a whole configure a universal measurement apparatus. In other words, consciousness can’t directly observe the physical world. It can only observe the physical bodies (sensory systems) of living organisms.

4. Every time a living organism interacts with the physical world, it is making a measurement.

5. Every time a living organism interacts with a physical system, its physical body becomes entangled with that physical system.

6. The universe is a vast, complex chain of entanglement.

7. Entanglement is a particular aspect of the law of consistency. In physical terms, it means that, when two physical systems (A and B, say) become entangled, there is a precise correlation between the probabilities of measuring physical system A in certain states and the probabilities of measuring physical system B in corresponding states. In other words, when two physical systems become entangled they coalesce into a new, larger physical system.

8. The physical bodies of living organisms constitute a special class of physical system. What distinguishes them is that they can be observed directly by consciousness.

9. The collapse of the wave function is caused by entanglement between physical systems and the physical bodies of living organisms. In other words, whenever there is a precise correlation between the possible states of a physical system and corresponding states of the physical body (sensory system) of a living organism, that physical system is no longer in superposition: it “collapses” into a definite state.

10. The universal chain of entanglement enables consciousness to observe the universe from the point of view of all living organisms at once. Particular acts of measurement are irrelevant. Universal entanglement is enough to provide consciousness with a clear and definite picture of the physical universe. Measurement is local. Observation is nonlocal.

From this perspective, it becomes clearer what our physical bodies are. In very abstract terms, we can define the physical bodies of living organisms as localizations of qualia.

All qualia are experienced by the one universal consciousness. Every living cell is the localization of a particular set of qualia in a particular location in space-time.

Every living cell, and every living organism, is characterized by two elements: the potential for registering a given range of qualia, and the actual localization of a particular arrangement of qualia (within that potential range) at any given point in space-time.

To visualize this very abstract idea, we can picture our physical bodies as a sort of “registration device” used by consciousness to observe and create the physical universe. This utilitarian perspective may help us understand the relationship between consciousness and the physical brain: If our physical bodies are measurement tools capable of registering qualia in the form of raw sensory data, then our brains are information processing devices capable of organizing those sensory data in more or less sophisticated ways.

Yes. I’m afraid what I’m saying is that our brain is, after all, a sort of computer.

Brains are like computers

The notion that brains are “biological computers” is, with few exceptions, the default assumption in mainstream science (particularly in computational neuroscience). It may seem surprising that we could come to a similar understanding from an idealistic perspective. But if we use our intuition, there’s no doubt about it: there are obvious similarities between brains and computers.

Physicalists, though, have used those similarities to jump to absurd conclusions. Here is how their reasoning goes:

a) Brains are like computers.

b) Therefore, it must be possible to build a conscious computer.

This is a pathetic example of faulty logic. The correct reasoning is this:

a) Brains are like computers.

b) Therefore, either computers are conscious, or brains are not.

We all know, by direct intuition, that computers are not conscious. We have no ethical qualms about unplugging them when we don’t need them, or throwing them away when they stop working. Physicalists may argue that computers are not conscious “yet”. But if achieving “artificial consciousness” is a matter of degree (more complexity or whatever), then our current computers should be already somewhat conscious. And if it requires some yet unknown qualitative jump, then our current computers are nothing like brains.

From the perspective of Intuitive Idealism, the conclusion is clear: Brains are not conscious. Therefore, “artificial consciousness” is impossible.

Brains are not conscious. They are information processing devices, computation machines. Like machines, they can get damaged and malfunction. Like computers, they don’t produce anything. They just make calculations, computations, information processing. They certainly don’t produce consciousness.

Consciousness uses our brains in the same way we use our personal computers. The analogy is almost perfect. When I look at my computer screen, there is an exact correlation between the shapes, colours, words, etc., displayed on the screen and the content of my conscious experience. Since what appears on the screen is the result of the inner state of the computer, we must conclude that there is an exact correlation between the inner state of the computer and the content of my experience. This doesn’t mean that the computer produces my conscious experience. It produces the content of my conscious experience.

This is a crucial distinction. All the misconceptions about the nature of consciousness and absurd fantasies around the possibility of creating conscious artificial intelligence come from the inability of most Western scientists and philosophers to distinguish between consciousness and the content of consciousness.

Localization of qualia

When I look up at a clear blue sky, I experience the qualia of blueness, brightness, vastness, etc. Those qualia are not produced by the sky. They aren’t produced by my eyes, my optic nerves or my visual cortex either. They aren’t produced by anything. Qualia are a fundamental property of consciousness. Like consciousness, they are eternal, universal, uncreated. What the blue sky, my eyes and my visual cortex produce is a localization of qualia. They register a particular set of qualia in a particular location in space-time.

Consciousness has two fundamental properties: awareness (the experiencing of qualia) and basic knowing or discrimination (the direct recognition of qualia, which gives rise to information). It is possible (although rare for us) to have pure awareness, without discrimination (experiencing qualia without the recognition of those qualia): this is formless awareness, pure consciousness without content (only experienced in special states, like deep meditation). But whenever discrimination arises, there is content in consciousness, forms that can be registered as information.

There can be discrimination of qualia without localization, like in dreams. There can also be abstract discrimination without qualia, like in conceptual or mathematical thought. These are different types of content, different types of forms that can appear in consciousness. But there is one particular type of content of consciousness that gives rise to the physical universe: localization of qualia in space-time.

We can visualize this with the traditional metaphor of waves or ripples in water. Consciousness is like water, and localization of qualia is like ripples in water.

Consciousness has an infinite potential for experiencing qualia. Pure consciousness is a boundless field of undifferentiated awareness, an infinity of potential qualities of experience. (This can be directly witnessed in deep meditation or deep psychedelic states, as an infinite ocean of multicoloured light, multi-textured feel, multilayered sound. The “white noise” or “iridescent fog” displayed by the “VR suits” in my simulation metaphor provides an analogy for this experience.) When localization of qualia arises, particular qualia are registered in particular locations in space-time. These localized qualia constantly and harmoniously change their spatial location along the time axis, like in the movement of waves or ripples.

This wave-like movement of qualia is more than a metaphor. It can be experienced directly in altered states of consciousness. These altered states can be reached through concentration practices, or with the help of psychedelics.

I’ll try to describe here what this experience looks like, focusing on the visual dimension. Imagine that, rather than tiny cube-like three-dimensional pixels (like in the simulation metaphor), what we have is an infinity of luminous threads. These threads have no beginning and no end, they seem to span the whole universe. They cross your visual field, coming from infinity and disappearing into infinity. Wherever you look, these luminous filaments fill your whole visual field. There is nothing else. Each luminous thread seems to be made of multicoloured light. Without knowing how, you know this is the light of awareness. These threads are made of pure awareness, awareness aware of itself. They are in constant movement, a harmonious wave-like movement, like a dance. And as they move, the colours change their distribution along the length of each thread.

That is pure awareness: a boundless sea of iridescent filaments of light. Imagine now that, as you watch, these multicoloured luminous fibres begin to display a landscape before you. The colours along every individual thread begin to adjust according to that landscape. A filament will turn from blue to white to dark green to bright green as it crosses the sky, a drifting cloud, a tree, a grassy hillside. Since the threads are constantly moving, the colours constantly change along them. At first the effect is of a rippling, wavering, somewhat blurry landscape, but gradually the synchronization between the individual fibres increases, until you reach a sharp, clear, perfectly solid image of a real landscape surrounding you. You are back in the everyday world. Back in your ordinary state of consciousness.

This is not a metaphor or a thought experiment. It is a fairly accurate description of a very real experience that can be corroborated by anyone willing to do so. A sufficient dose of psilocybin or LSD would do the trick. The catch is, of course, that the visual aspect I described is only a relatively innocuous part of the total experience: it is accompanied, inevitably, by a poignant and often terrifying sense of losing one’s mind, and even one’s body. It feels like dying, like witnessing the end of the world. The psychological effects and ramifications of this experience, positive or negative, are impossible to predict. But that’s the price to pay. The only alternative is years of concentration practice, without any guarantee of success. Nature doesn’t reveal its secrets easily.

What brains do

The physical universe we perceive is nothing but the localization of qualia in space-time. This localization follows regular wave-patterns, evolving in space-time in consistent, harmonious ways, like ripples on water. It is important to realize that space-time is not fundamental: it doesn’t exist prior to or independently from the localization of qualia. It is the localization of qualia what gives rise to space-time. In other words, pure awareness is not exactly like water, because it isn’t located in space-time. Pure awareness is a boundless field of infinite potential for experiencing qualia. This infinite potential exists in all points of space-time. At any given point of space-time, only a particular set of qualia is actualized. Water ripples are created by the movement of water molecules in space-time. Awareness ripples are created by the evolving actualization of qualia in space-time. These awareness ripples constitute the physical universe.

The physical bodies of living organisms, like everything else in the physical universe, consist of localizations of qualia. The best way to visualize this is to start with the simplest example, unicellular organisms. A single-celled organism is nothing but a particular arrangement of qualia localized at a particular position in space-time. Imagine one such organism, capable of perceiving light, temperature, certain smells or tastes, etc. The physical body of this organism is defined by the actualization of certain qualia at precise locationswithin or outside it. Qualia pertaining taste and inner temperature will be located inside the physical body of the organism. Qualia pertaining touch, smell and outer temperature will be located on a boundary (the “cell membrane”, in biological terms) surrounding the physical body of the organism. And qualia pertaining vision will be located anywhere in space around the physical body of the organism.

The fact that visual qualia are located outside the physical body of the organism, and not inside it, may seem counter-intuitive at first glance. This is the result of the materialistic notion, ingrained in many of us through cultural indoctrination, that all the qualia we perceive must be located inside our heads. But in reality it is intuitively obvious that the visual qualia we experience are located at the exact positions where they appear to be. By perceiving those qualia, we are simply locating them in space-time.

The evolution of life saw how simple unicellular organisms became specialized in localizing precise sets of qualia, and how these single-cell organisms combined to form multicellular organisms like us. Every cell in our bodies is capable of locating a specific range of qualia. For example, the different types of photoreceptor cells in our retina are specialized to locate different colours and different intensities of light. To organize all these localized qualia into a coherent, complex mental image, multicellular organisms developed nervous systems and brains.

This is what brains do. They combine all the qualia actualized by the sensory cells of the living organism into a coherent whole. (Brains are also responsible for the coordination of locomotion and other functions of the physical body, of course. But let’s concentrate on perception here.) To achieve that, nerve cells (neurons) translate the localization of qualia performed by sensory cells into electrochemical signals. These electrochemical signals are nothing but qualia themselves. It’s difficult to imagine how it feels like to be an excited neuron, but it must feel like something; certainly something different from a neuron at rest. We can get a sense of this if we pay attention to the physical sensations inside our head: our brain feels quite different when there is a lot of thinking going on (a lot of neurons firing) than when we are in deep, silent meditation (most neurons at rest). This physical sensation of neural activity is very subtle and we usually are not aware of it, but it’s definitely there. However, the quality of these neuronal qualia is irrelevant. What matters is the information they transmit.

The nervous system uses these neuronal qualia as signals to convey information. The brain processes that information, creating a mental image, a computational model of the world. This representation of the world can be extremely simple, like in small invertebrates, or as complex and sophisticated as the models that human scientists create.

It is important to remember that human scientists and brains don’t actually do anything. It is consciousness, universal consciousness, that uses the sensory systems and brains of living organisms, including humans, to observe the physical world and create these representations.

Our mental representation of the world constitutes the main content of our everyday conscious experience. We usually pay more attention to our mental images, our ideas about the world, than to the actual qualia we are experiencing. This mental representation of the world includes our ideas and mental images about ourselves. Most of us see ourselves as physical entities, objects existing in a world of physical objects. We identify with our own mental model of ourselves, our self-image. This is ego-identity. All these concepts, ideas and representations are the result of computational information-processing happening in our brains. But they are not experienced by our brains. They are experienced by consciousness. Again: consciousness uses our brains in the same way we use our computers.

This explains the close correlation between brain activity and conscious experience. It also answers the question posed by some critics of idealism: “If everything is in consciousness, why can’t I know your thoughts? Why can I experience only mine?” This is like asking “Why can’t I look at two computer screens at the same time?” Well, of course, from the perspective of consciousness, which is our true I, there is no problem in experiencing two (or two million) different points of view at the same time, since consciousness transcends space-time. Consciousness knows the thoughts of all of us. But from the limited perspective of our individual consciousness, which is localized in space-time and linked to one particular body and brain, it is the content produced by that particular brain what gives form to (informs) our experience. There’s nothing mysterious in this. We don’t need to postulate dissociative boundaries, or anything else of that sort.

This computational understanding of the brain shouldn’t be confused with computational theories of consciousness, as proposed by cognitive scientists like Joscha Bach. The computational model explains very well how the brain creates our representation of the world and of ourselves. But we shouldn’t confuse the brain-created representation with the thing itself, the map with the territory, like all physicalists do.

The virtual model of the world created by our brain is not akin to the “user interface” postulated by Donald Hoffman. It is only a pale reflection of our actual experience of the world. To see this clearly, it is enough to do a simple experiment. Let’s assume that you are sitting in a room with a window. Go to the window, open it, and look out. Take in the view with all the attention you are capable of. Now close the window, sit down, close your eyes, and try to visualize that view you just saw through the window. Here is the question: is there a significant difference between the two experiences?

The answer is obvious: Yes, there is. There is a huge difference. For some of us (those with aphantasia), it will be completely impossible to evoke any mental image of the view from our window at all. There will only be the conceptual memory of what we saw: there’s a house to the left, a tree to the right, etc. The rest of us will be able to visualize the view to some degree, but it will only be a pale reflection, a comparatively vague and dim version of the real thing.

Let’s suppose that there is a blue sky. When I look through the window, I experience the quale of blueness. When I visualize the blue sky, there is still some pale blueness in my experience, but it is very dim in comparison. Mental images do have qualia, but these are only weak reflections, dim echoes of the qualia we experience when we look at the real world.

Neuroscientists probably have some understanding of how visualization works. It presumably involves the voluntary activation of the neural networks responsible for the processing of visual information in the visual cortex. If this is correct, visualization gives us a good insight into the nature of this information processing: into the nature of what brains do.

Brains don’t produce our experience of the world. They produce our thoughts and mental images, our representations of the world. The world we see, touch, smell, hear, taste, exists all around us, in consciousness. It is as real as can be. It is objective, since it is the same for all of us. It isn’t fundamental, because it exists in space-time. But it isn’t an illusion. It isn’t the image or user interface of something else. It is what it appears to be. It is real.

On the other hand, our thoughts and mental images of the world exist only in our brains. They are subjective. They are only a pale reflection of the real world.

The difference in nature between these two aspects of the physical world, direct experience and mental representation, is so obvious that it seems astounding how physicalist scientists and thinkers could get it so wrong. Physicalists believe that our experience of the world is created by the brain and exists only inside it. And they believe that our mental, conceptual representation of the world is the ultimate, objective truth, and exists out there, independently from our brains.

They got it completely backwards.

Sensation and perception

It’s always fun to jibe at physicalists, wondering at how stupid they can be. But they aren’t stupid, really. There is always a logical explanation for the errors in their thinking. In this case, there is a very good reason for the mistaken notion that our experience of the world is generated by our brains: the difficulty in separating the qualia we experience from the mental interpretation of those qualia.

When we look at the world, we have a direct experience of a large amount of qualia localized in space-time. Our nervous system instantly translates those qualia into sensory information (raw sensory data), and our brain swiftly organizes that information into a coherent picture. This happens so fast that it is almost impossible for us to separate the qualia (which are fundamental and objective, exist everywhere and, when localized, give rise to the physical world) from the mental image, the mental interpretation of those qualia (which is generated by our brain). When we move about the world, our brain is constantly projecting a mental image into the actual world of experience (the world of localized qualia). It does it so thoroughly that we are usually unable to distinguish the mental projection from the real thing.

In other words, our brain doesn’t generate our experience of the world, but it shapes it, it organizes it according to mental concepts and images. This is the actual meaning of perception.

In everyday usage, we often don’t distinguish between sensation and perception. This is obvious in the common term “sense perception”, which conflates both. But in our current discussion, it’s crucial to make a clear distinction between these two elements of our experience. Sensation happens at the level of our sensory cells (the photoreceptor cells in our retina, say), and it consists in the direct experience of localized qualia. Perception happens in our nervous system, and involves the translation of that direct experience into sensory information and the organization and interpretation of that information in the brain.

It is possible to make a distinction also between these two aspects of perception: organization and interpretation. Interpretation involves (at least in the human brain) conceptualization, and constitutes the most elaborate and sophisticated level of perception. It is culturally conditioned. Different human cultures interpret the world they perceive in different ways. In other words, on some level they perceive different worlds. Children learn from their parents and teachers how to interpret their sensations.

Organization of sensations, on the other hand, is the most basic aspect of perception. It is a natural process, biologically conditioned. It involves the organization of sensations coming from different cells in the body into a coherent whole.

We can stop the interpretation aspect quite easily, through concentration practices. With a little effort, it is relatively easy to gaze at a landscape, for example, without interpreting it in any way, without projecting any mental image into it. This provides a very interesting experience, in which an ordinary landscape transforms into something deeply mysterious and awe-inspiring.

In order to bypass the organization aspect of our perception, a much greater feat of concentration is required. This may take years of consistent practice. The only alternative is to use psychedelics as a shortcut. Let’s have a peek at how this may look like.

You are sitting on a grassy hilltop, waiting for the mushrooms to kick in. Gradually, the landscape around you begins to wave. The trees, the mountains, everything around you is waving, like an image reflected on the surface of a rippling sea. And the colours begin to run into each other. The green of the trees blurs into the blue of the sky, and vice versa, like watercolours on wet paper. The usual image of the world seems to be falling apart, dissolving in front of your eyes. The colours you see are brighter and crisper than ever, but they don’t form a coherent picture anymore.

This experience can be understood as the sensations (localizations of qualia) happening in each of your visual cells getting out of sync with each other. The brain, impaired by the psilocybin, can no longer organize them in a perfectly coordinated picture.

Something similar (maybe identical) can happen as a result of mental illness. A famous case is Van Gogh: some of his paintings depict in a quite poignant manner this unsynchronized movement of qualia all over the field of vision. Yet we don’t need to have suffered from mental illness or have tried psychedelics to recognize, at least on an unconscious level, that slightly chaotic visual experience: this is quite certainly the way small infants (whose nervous systems are still developing) see the world.

Emotion and thought

The brain, in short, is responsible for our perceptions, but not for our sensations. The brain is also quite obviously responsible for our thoughts. What about our emotions?

Physicalists, of course, believe that emotions are generated by the brain. Bernardo Kastrup, from an idealistic perspective, also postulates a direct link between emotions and brain activity. He doesn’t see it as a causal link, like physicalists do, but he maintains, for example, that the brain activity of a person experiencing love is the “extrinsic appearance” of the experience of love.

From the perspective of Intuitive Idealism, there is no direct correlation between our emotions and our brain states. There is only an indirect correlation, in the form of thought. When we experience an emotion, our brain recognizes and labels it: “this is love”, “this is sadness”, etc. Or more basically, “I like this”, “I don’t like this”, etc. This shows that consciousness uses the brain to interpret, evaluate and understand experience in general, not just physical sensations. In any case, if neuroscientists are able to find correlations between emotional states and brain states, it’s only because of this function of interpretation performed by the brain.

Emotions happen in consciousness. They are fundamental and universal. Actually, some emotions are more fundamental than others. Love, joy, peace, kindness, clarity, bliss, for example, are fundamental emotions. They are intrinsic qualities of universal consciousness. Other emotions, like frustration, fear, anger, doubt, regret, etc., only arise at the level of the individual consciousness limited by ego-identity.

This doesn’t mean that negative emotions like fear or anger are generated by the brain. They are triggered by the brain, or more precisely, triggered by the content (thoughts and interpretations of sensations) generated by the brain. As we saw when we discussed universal narcissism, consciousness becomes absorbed in the content generated by the brain and identifies with it. For example, it identifies with the mental image of a mortal body, a fragile physical object existing in a hostile physical world full of dangers. This identification brings up fear. The fear exists in the dissociated consciousness, not in the brain, which is nothing but a computational tool used by consciousness to process information about its experience and create a mental model of the world.

In other words, emotions are not part of the content of consciousness, like thoughts and perceptions are. Unlike thoughts and perceptions, emotions have no form. They are formless, fundamental qualities of consciousness. They can’t be translated into computational information, like sensations. They aren’t the product of computation, like perceptions and thoughts. We all know how inadequate our conceptual labels are when we try to describe our emotions.

This is a crucial distinction. It is possible, for example, to translate visual qualia, like colours, to precise computational, mathematical information (wavelength and frequency, RGB colour model, etc.). Nothing of the sort can be done with emotions. We can’t measure the intensity or wavelength of love, or sadness, or joy.

And yet, our emotions are inextricably entwined with our perceptions and thoughts. We watch the TV news and are filled with sadness or anger. We think of a loved one and feel love, or longing, or regret. There is always an emotional mood to our experience. Even if it is one of indifference or numbness. All our thoughts, all our memories, are tinged with emotion.

This is why neuroscientists may find a correlation between experiences of emotion and brain activity. The correlation is not with the actual emotion, but with the accompanying thoughts.

Outer appearances

I have defined physical reality, including our physical bodies and brains, as localizations of qualia. Up to this point, I have adopted a purely intrinsic perspective, showing how our inner sensations, perceptions and thoughts are the result of localizations of qualia inside and outside our bodies. But what about the extrinsic appearance of our bodies? Other living organisms, including the people around us, perceive our physical bodies from an extrinsic point of view, an outer perspective. How does Intuitive Idealism account for that?

The fact that when we look at the physical world we not only see inanimate objects, but also the physical bodies of other conscious beings, has been used by Bernardo Kastrup as an argument against alternative (and more intuitive) formulations of idealism (like this one). It is a good argument. If, like in Intuitive Idealism, we define the physical bodies of living organisms as localizations of inner experience (qualia), without adding anything else to them (like “dissociative boundaries” or whatever), why and how would it be possible to perceive these physical bodies from the outside?

Intuitive Idealism doesn’t have a simple ready-made answer in the style of “the physical bodies of living organisms are the extrinsic appearance of dissociative boundaries within mind-at-large” (whatever that may mean). I can’t provide that kind of explanation (or pseudo-explanation) simply because this isn’t a metaphysical question. It’s a scientific one. It pertains to the realm of physics and biology.

It would be perfectly conceivable, in principle, to have a physical universe populated (and collectively created) by invisible, intangible beings. There is no reason to believe that the inner experiences of conscious beings should have an “extrinsic appearance” perceivable by other conscious beings. To clarify this point, let’s go back for a moment to our simulation thought experiment.

One of the key elements in this simulation metaphor is that in the virtual reality of the game, there are no fixed, predetermined natural laws. The natural laws (laws of physics) are unwittingly created by the players themselves, following the only fundamental law: the law of consistency. In every iteration of the game, every new set of players would create a different set of natural laws.

So for example, a set of players could perfectly end up in a virtual world devoid of perceivable conscious beings. In this round of the game, the players would have no visible avatars. They would be like disembodied beings, witnessing an inanimate world. They would all see the same stars, planets, landscapes. But they would see no one there. Or maybe they would see the appearance of living organisms, trees and flowers growing here and there, birds and butterflies flying about, even people walking around this virtual landscape. But they would be illusory appearances, virtual plants, zombie birds and zombie people, with no inner experience. It would be an inanimate universe, devoid of life. The players themselves would wander around like invisible ghosts, running through each other without noticing it, unable to interact in any way.

This could happen, in principle. But it seems unlikely. After all, the players in this simulation metaphor are human beings wearing special VR suits. These human players would probably feel uncomfortable experiencing themselves as disembodied spirits. In the first stage of the game (the stage of the “multicoloured fog”) they would quite possibly begin by looking for their own bodies, before trying to find anything else in that fog. In the same way that when we suddenly find ourselves in utter darkness we typically try to see our own hands in front of our eyes, these players would very likely try to distinguish their own hands in the fog. Following the feedback loop performed by the VR suit, they would eventually find not only their hands, but also their arms, trunk and legs. They would be able to touch themselves, in this way perceiving their own heads too, and their backs, bottom, etc. The result would be a fully-formed avatar, resembling a human being (or any other conceivable creature).

The law of consistency would ensure that this particular avatar would instantly be perceivable by all other players. In this way, all players would individually create their own visible, tangible avatars, and would be able to interact with other players via these virtual avatars.

Perhaps some players would remain invisible. They would be able to see other players, without being seen. But the moment a player became perceivable, there would be no way back. The law of consistency wouldn’t allow capricious appearing and disappearing. Once visible, a player (or more precisely, their avatar) would stay visible.

It can be argued that our simulation metaphor doesn’t really clarify much in this context, since the whole thought experiment presupposes the existence of conscious beings with perceivable bodies (the human players). So let’s drop the metaphor and have a look at the real thing: the origin of life as we know it.

As far as we can tell, physical life as we know it (there may be countless other manifestations of life in the universe, physical and non-physical) began with small unicellular organisms. From an idealistic perspective, the evolution of life is not the evolution of physical bodies made of “matter”, but the evolution of perception. Therefore, the first question we should ask is not “What did these unicellular organisms look like?”, but rather “What did these unicellular organisms perceive?”. It’s almost certain that these first living organisms had no sense of vision. Their fist sensations were probably tactile. In other words, they didn’t look like anything. The origin of life happened in the dark.

Starting from the hypothesis that touch was the first sense to develop, it can be assumed that the sun was perceived by these primitive organisms not as visible light, but as warmth. These unicellular organisms would sense the warmth of the sun somewhere in their bodies. In other words, they would localize the qualia of “warmth” in their own bodies, for example on the surface of their cell membrane (this “cell membrane” would be entirely defined by qualia of touch at that stage). This would enable them to perceive their general orientation in relation to the sun, and so on.

Only much later, with the evolution of photoreceptor cells, would living organisms become capable of localizing the qualia of light outside their own bodies. (Note that this localization of qualia has two components: sensation and perception. Sensation is universal, shared by all living organisms as a result of the law of consistency. Perception varies greatly, since it involves mental interpretation. Animals will presumably perceive the sun just “up there”, children and unschooled people perceive it “up there in the sky”. Only educated modern humans perceive the sun “150 million kilometres away, at the centre of the solar system”.) We can hypothesize that, from the beginning, the qualia of vision and warmth were somehow linked. Thus, when living organisms became capable of vision, they not only saw the sun, which was the main source of warmth and light, but they could also see that same warmth and light reflected on physical objects like rocks, and on the bodies of living organisms (including their own).

In this way, we can suppose that it was the capacity of physical organisms to perceive warmth that ultimately made them visible, in a sort of roundabout way. This is just a (rather vague and sketchy) hypothesis, of course, but it is a fact that what we see when we look at another human being is the surface of their skin, which is where the sense of touch happens. If we look at the spot where vision happens, on the other hand, we see nothing: just a small black hole, the pupil. Another interesting fact is that, according to evolutionary biology, all body hair in mammals seems to have evolved from sensory hair (whiskers).

I don’t have the time or the knowledge to pursue this hypothesis any further. I just wanted to make clear that, like I said, this is a purely scientific question. This constitutes a whole area of research for evolutionary biologists: the evolution of perception, and its relation to the evolution of the perceivable shapes of living organisms.

If biologists abandoned the limiting metaphysics of materialism and embraced idealism instead, a whole new kind of science would open up. I think it is more interesting to investigate not how bacteria and protozoa look to us, but how they perceive themselves and the world around them. And it certainly would be less anthropocentric and more meaningful to try to find out, not how living organisms of the past like dinosaurs would have looked like to us if we had been there to observe them, but how they looked like to themselves and to their contemporaries. In their reconstruction of the past, most biologists incur in the same error that astronomers and other scientists do: they project the human perspective into a past where humans didn’t exist.

Science and Philosophy

One last and crucial difference between Intuitive Idealism and Analytic Idealism is that the former is not just a philosophical system, a metaphysics: it’s also a scientific theory. Analytic Idealism, on the other hand, is fundamentally non-scientific. I’m not claiming it to be unscientific, in the sense of not being consistent with the findings of contemporary science. On the contrary, Bernardo Kastrup is well aware of the most recent developments in the so-called “hard sciences”, especially in the fields of neuroscience and foundational physics, and has been very careful in making his metaphysical hypothesis compatible with all those developments. The problem is, his hypothesis would be compatible with any imaginable scientific theory. Analytic Idealism is scientifically neutral.

According to Analytic Idealism, the laws of nature are the extrinsic appearance of mental processes happening in universal consciousness or mind-at-large. This rather vague explanation could perfectly be applied to the Newtonian laws of motion, for example, or to obsolete Aristotelian notions about physical reality. Analytic Idealism is scientifically unassailable, unfalsifiable. This may look like a virtue, but it’s actually a weakness. It makes Analytic Idealism scientifically irrelevant. Most scientists will feel justified to ignore it.

Intuitive Idealism, in contrast, is completely incompatible with classical scientific theories. It’s entirely impossible, from the perspective of Intuitive Idealism, to make sense of Newtonian mechanics, for example. There are no self-existing objects out there, colliding mechanically with each other. There are no deterministic forces. In Intuitive Idealism we can’t interpret the forces and inanimate objects of classical physics as the outer appearance of a hypothetical universal mental activity, like Analytic Idealism does. We can only conclude that classical Newtonian physics is incorrect.

Only with the advent of quantum mechanics has Intuitive Idealism become compatible with contemporary Western science. Not just compatible. Intuitive Idealism provides, as far as I can see, the only coherent and intelligible interpretation of quantum mechanics there is. From the perspective of Intuitive Idealism, all the so-called “weirdness” of quantum mechanics disappears, leaving us with a perfectly straightforward and viable understanding of physical reality.

In my essay “The Observing Universe” I offered a detailed exposition of this idealistic and intuitive interpretation of quantum mechanics. I even proposed an actual experiment to test the validity of this interpretation, based on the fact that in some special cases it makes different predictions than (at least most of the) other interpretations. Since I’m not a physicist, I’m not qualified to judge the feasibility of that experiment, or to ascertain if there are other interpretations that would predict the same results. But the fact remains that, at least in principle, Intuitive Idealism is scientifically falsifiable. This gives Intuitive Idealism an undeniable scientific relevance.

The disheartening stagnation in the current scientific enterprise is the result of an artificial and disastrous separation between science and philosophy. The increasing compartmentalization of human knowledge could only lead to the confused and disoriented predicament we find ourselves in today.

All scientists are philosophers, whether they know it or not. The problem is, most contemporary scientists are appallingly bad philosophers. Their philosophical views are in most cases incredibly naive, prejudiced, superficial and inconsistent. This wasn’t the case in the first half of the 20th century, with the likes of Einstein, Bohr and Schrödinger. All great scientists know that science is the direct offshoot of philosophy, sharing with it its ultimate purpose: to understand the nature of reality. Science distinguishes itself from other forms of philosophical inquiry only in that it applies the scientific method.

Physics, mathematics, astronomy, chemistry, biology, psychology, sociology… These are all branches of philosophy, like ethics, logic, metaphysics or epistemology. Each has its particular focus and its own methods of inquiry, but all are part of one same project of discovery, one same magnificent movement towards nature’s self-revelation. (Eastern philosophy, and comparable currents in Western philosophy like Neoplatonism and Hermeticism, are of course also part of that grand movement.) It’s no longer possible, like it was at the time of Aristotle, for one single person to master all these branches of philosophy. The already acquired knowledge is simply too vast. But philosophers and scientist of all specialities should communicate with each other, work together in teams. This is the only way forward.

Bernardo Kastrup has often maintained that there is and should be a clear demarcation between science and philosophy, arguing that the role of science is limited to studying the behaviour of nature, leaving to philosophy the task of figuring out what nature actually is. This is not how it works. Like Einstein said in a famous discussion with Heisenberg, when the latter argued that what we can’t observe lies outside the realm of science, “It is the theory which decides what we can observe”. Intuitive Idealism even goes farther than that: our ideas and theories about the world not only determine the kind of experiments and measurements we make; they also determine, precisely via those measurements, the way the physical world actually behaves.

This is why Intuitive Idealism is a much more radical and revolutionary metaphysics than Analytic Idealism. According to Intuitive Idealism, if the scientific community at large would embrace this view, physical reality itself would open up and become malleable, responsive, not to the will of any particular individual, but to the collective will of the whole of humanity, as part of the Earthly community of living beings. The endless possibilities for the enhancement and optimization of life on Earth that this new science-philosophy would bring are difficult to imagine.

The worst effect of the materialist worldview on the human soul is a profound alienation. Most modern humans feel alienated, lost in a cold, meaningless, hostile universe, severed from their spiritual ground. Bernardo Kastrup’s Analytic Idealism addresses this alienation, but doesn’t completely resolve it. In Analytic Idealism, we are still alienated from an unknowable, inconceivable, unfathomable “mind-at-large”, separated from it by an insurmountable “dissociative boundary”, subject to the incomprehensible and inscrutable “mental processes of mind-at-large” that we passively experience as physical reality. Intuitive Idealism transcends all these illusory boundaries and separations: we are the one, universal consciousness. Nothing separates us from it. We are collectively creating the reality we live in.