Analytic Idealism

[lostone]

I think it’s also worth mentioning that when the naturalist/physicalist claims that subjective experience arises from physical neuronal activity (without ever specifying how this happens, only that it does happen), it will become difficult for the physicalist to account for the fact that we have any number of cases of organisms that apparently think, learn, and adjust their behavior, without any neurons at all. For the idealist, accounting for this is no problem. Under idealism, subjective experience pervades everything, and in some organisms, neuronal activity correlates with (but does not cause) subjectivity, and is a kind of external representation (as on a dashboard, to use Kastrup’s metaphor) of inner subjectivity.

If, under idealism, everything is fundamentally consciousness and what we call the physical world is just the extrinsic appearance of mental activity, what empirical test or conceptual criterion could ever falsify this claim—or distinguish it from simply labeling all phenomena as ‘mental’ without adding explanatory value?

NHC

You could say the same thing for metaphysical naturalism/physicalism.

Panpsychism offers a middle ground, between physcialism and idealism, doesn't it?

 

[Elixir]

Panpsychism offers a middle ground, between physcialism and idealism, doesn't it?

None of those three things has any physical existence, y’know. The words refer to psychological states, not to the nature of any external reality. So their validity hinges on the results wrought by those states. What metrics should we use to compare those results? Happiness? Accomplishments? Creativity?
Tell me.

 

[lostone]

I think the biggest problem I have with the "idealism" approach, and honestly that whole ecosystem of "mind worship" or "god-mind worship" that comes from this push to be "one with all of nature" is this:

Not all "minds" are "sane".

We have all kinds of malicious minds out there, and self-destructively malicious to boot.

There are minds out there, constructive and destructive. They generally don't leave one another alone when they exist in proximity either. Any field/network which implements any sort of mind in any sort of disconnection from anything else (so processing ANYTHING other than chaotic noise) is going to create minds that don't really get along, that attempt to multiply without end, or even some that would multiply to no end and then stop because they dislike the chaos...

I will return to my earlier drug fueled woo about idealism and the forcible dissociation of "the first mind": imagine that instead of being born as a human with all your identity nodes in general agreement, you were born not just dissociative, but chaotically and randomly so, as "sane" as a neural network that just rolled off the RNG stage, not even pre-trained: you would get noise in, different noise out at most locations. It probably won't even be very interesting noise in either respect.

Imagine an alternative personality talking to you subvocally but instead of words it's just chaotic static and noise intruding on any thought you might want to hold or have about yourself or the noise.

That whole concept is untenable.

It would be no wonder why it would attempt a massive "dissociation", at every such point capable, into fixed uniform process. It is better to be "nothing, dissociated" than part of that din, and there would not remain the means to re-associate across these insulative voids, of mind stuff pointedly engaged in preventing any leakage of information through their state structures.

The scenario you cite sounds like a Boltzmann brain or HP Lovecraft's insane God Azothoth.

 

[lostone]

Panpsychism offers a middle ground, between physcialism and idealism, doesn't it?

None of those three things has any physical existence, y’know. The words refer to psychological states, not to the nature of any external reality. So their validity hinges on the results wrought by those states. What metrics should we use to compare those results? Happiness? Accomplishments? Creativity?
Tell me.

Here's one person trying to find ways of using observational science to test panpsychism:

http://www.gregmatloff.com/Edge Science Matloff-ES29.pdf

 

[Elixir]

Panpsychism offers a middle ground, between physcialism and idealism, doesn't it?

None of those three things has any physical existence, y’know. The words refer to psychological states, not to the nature of any external reality. So their validity hinges on the results wrought by those states. What metrics should we use to compare those results? Happiness? Accomplishments? Creativity?
Tell me.

Here's one person trying to find ways of using observational science to test panpsychism:

http://www.gregmatloff.com/Edge Science Matloff-ES29.pdf

“is stellar motion volitional?” Seems like a lofty question. The ensuing rationale for asking and answering that question go over my head though. I’d need a lot of enticement to even try to understand the argument. Is there a conclusion that lends to any action or the creation of a new paradigm of universal consciousness?

 

[pood]

Analytic idealism is not panpsychism or solipsism, both of which Kastrup rejects, but I will be interested to read and discuss that paper.

 

[Jarhyn]

I think it’s also worth mentioning that when the naturalist/physicalist claims that subjective experience arises from physical neuronal activity (without ever specifying how this happens, only that it does happen), it will become difficult for the physicalist to account for the fact that we have any number of cases of organisms that apparently think, learn, and adjust their behavior, without any neurons at all. For the idealist, accounting for this is no problem. Under idealism, subjective experience pervades everything, and in some organisms, neuronal activity correlates with (but does not cause) subjectivity, and is a kind of external representation (as on a dashboard, to use Kastrup’s metaphor) of inner subjectivity.

If, under idealism, everything is fundamentally consciousness and what we call the physical world is just the extrinsic appearance of mental activity, what empirical test or conceptual criterion could ever falsify this claim—or distinguish it from simply labeling all phenomena as ‘mental’ without adding explanatory value?

NHC

You could say the same thing for metaphysical naturalism/physicalism.

Panpsychism offers a middle ground, between physcialism and idealism, doesn't it?

Kind of? I'm a panpsychist, I so far as I think that the underlying nature of physical stuff exists as a sort of "basis of contingency", and it's really hard to discuss for me because it requires representation theory and I don't even know much about representation theory myself.

The gist, though, I THINK, is trying to develop a logical "kernel" that can process all models of change?

And then reality itself would just be characterized as a massive collection of such kernels 'talking to one another' by whatever rules this happens by.

The thing is, kernels can come together to be kernels for greater systems? They can together come to emulate new stuff, like a Turing machine does.

In this way, mind and consciousness is purely a result of their interaction, and would necessarily be happening everywhere, but the thing is... What would it be conscious OF? Noise? Itself? Where would the consciousness BE? It would be like randomized ideal neural network, like a circuit board with logic Gates connected every which way all willy-nillly everywhere with particular.

Anything that has any kind of thoughts NOT alien to us would be disembodied, and "in a void of chaos".

I think that the same logic is going to have to apply in that epoch of mind as in this one: those sections which agree to work together towards a goal in the mere "faith" another exists to work towards the same goal will have more success together than things which assume the whole universe must be fought.

To that end, the universe as we know it could very well have been born from this, and this is why I bring up Garth Nix and The Charter.

The problem is that it's actually a pretty big computational problem to out-game "senseless selfishness" in a "Conway's Game of Life" scenario, since aligned action is necessarily going to be rare in emergence and common in retention.

As a panpsychist, I'm a monist, and I think going forward, I'm going to just say that the kinds of mind-kernel that composes the universe, as an ideal, is mechanistic.

This allows both perspectives to remain compatible.

 

[GenesisNemesis]

With all the flaws in this idea here presented, and skillfully attacked by those who think it wooey nonsense, it still is an interesting concept, and a plausible alternative to both physicalism and standard religiousity. I don't buy it, but it is worthy of at least some consideration as a possibility among many.

Could you specify the flaws? Also, with due respect to others, I don’t think the idea was “skillfully attacked.” I got more of a sense of pre-emptive dismissal and a kind of knee-jerk invocation of “woo” charges. In fact, even if analytic idealism is wrong, it most definitely is not “woo.” A coherent metaphysics that is not obviously contradicted by evidence is never woo, even if one were to argue that there is little or no evidence in favor of it (and Kastrup argues that there is such evidence). If that were the case, then you can also write off the quantum multiverse and string theory, to take two obvious examples, as “woo.”

Personally I regard the multiverse hypothesis as speculation, same thing with the simulation hypothesis which I don't think very highly of either, in the sense that the Universe is supposedly a "computer simulation". It would also be speculation to say the Universe is eternal or that it came from nothing.

Yes, it’s all metaphysics. But I don’t think all metaphysical concepts are created equal. The physicist Sean Carroll has argued that the multiverse simply falls out of the most parsimonious modeling of the wave function. By contrast, the stepwise argument offered for the simulation hypothesis isn’t very persuasive, IMO. The real point for this purpose of this discussion is that metaphysical naturalism/physicalism is also an assumption, hence speculative. Keep in mind that idealist arguments don’t contest naturalist metaphysics, just the physicalist assumption. Naturalism overall as a thesis follows from our best evidence in contrast to supernaturalism, for which there is no evidence and no model of what “supernatural” is even supposed to mean.

And I would say even though I'm not necessarily convinced, Carroll's argument, which has mathematics backing it up and whatnot, looks far more convincing than some guy's drug induced episode.

 

[pood]

And I would say even though I'm not necessarily convinced, Carroll's argument, which has mathematics backing it up and whatnot, looks far more convincing than some guy's drug induced episode.

I have already explained that Kastrup‘s metaphysics has nothing to do — nothing whatsoever — with a “drug-induced episode,” nor is it “drug-fueled woo.” Such responses are nothing more than lazy little show-stoppers intended to derail discussion rather than facilitate it.

 

[pood]

This paper considers in detail pansychism, idealism and emergentism with respect to consciousness, noting in particular the deep flaws with physicalism.

 

[GenesisNemesis]

This paper considers in detail pansychism, idealism and emergentism with respect to consciousness, noting in particular the deep flaws with physicalism.

What's lazy is not at all explaining what nonphysicalism is and how it works. You've done nothing of the sort.

 

[GenesisNemesis]

In fact all you've done is just dismiss every physicalist explanation.

 

[GenesisNemesis]

Simple question. How do I determine an external event is mental?

 

[bilby]

Kastrup did not formulate his idea because of psychedelics — far from it — but he, as welll as many others, reports the subjective experience of ego death in these circumstances and a feeling of “oneness” with nature. These kinds of experience under different circumstances have been reported since antiquity. Analytic idealism points to the possibility that since everything is phenomenal, some kind of subjective experience may survive death even if it is not the “I” experience of the ego.

There cannot be any subjective experience of ego death. In the absence of a subject, all experiences must be objective.

People who report ego death didn't achieve it, because they report it as something they experienced, which implies that a "they" existed to do so.

People report all kinds of impossible things, particularly when taking mind-altering drugs; But we shouldn't take such reports seriously.

The experience reported not just through psychedelics but through mystical experiences that date to antiquity is having the sense of self dissolve into a kind of merging with some mysterious universal one-ness or consciousness. We can all make of that what we will, but it has been of an oft-reported phenomenon.

Sure, but this is entirely self; It's just a dream.

If these people are really becoming part of something universal, why doesn't everyone else (or anyone else) notice? It's an odd kind of universality that is only available to a single observer.

One might suggest that it's entirely illusory.

Dreams are individual, and unrelated to external reality. What makes this feeling different from a dream?

Now, if two people, physically isolated from each other, did the "merging with the universal consciousness" thing at the same time, and were repeatably able to successfully communicate something via their shared universal consciousness, I would have to reconsider.

If that consciousness is as external as it feels, this should be doable, and would make a worthwhile (and relatively cheap and easy) experiment.

It would also have incredible implications for long range communications. Spies would just need access to LSD to report back to their home countries, though they would have trouble securing that communication...

 

[steve_bank]

In the day there was the party side of LSD as detected in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Rest. The 'Merry Pranksters. West coast. Grateful Dead and the Dead Heads.

On the east coast Timothy Leary represented the intellectual drug experience. He turned LSD into a mysticism, dose the world with LSD and the world be a better place.

In the 60s a dolphin researcher John C Lilly combined LSD with a salt water isolation tank You float in a tank of salt water at body temp wearing a mask. You loose a sense of the boundary between your body and the world. Plus the LSD.

He reported vivid experiences, like having conversations in person with historical figures like Mises or Buddha or Jesus. I think at the end he believed in the paranormal.

I thought his book may have been the idea behind the movie Altered States.

Huxley''s book The Doors Of Perception about his experience with mescaline.

Then there is The Range Case Of Dr Jekyll And Mr Hyde. The original movie with movie with Spencer Tracy as Jekyll taking a drug to explore good and evil is a good watch from a more modern context.

Today wandering Sadhus in India still use cannabis.

According to Hindu beliefs, when a sadhu dies he leaves his body and floats off to Mount Kailash, the source of the Ganges River and the home of Shiva. There he goes about a life of doing pretty much what he was doing anyway: smoking heavenly hash and meditating in divine bliss.

 

[GenesisNemesis]

Kastrup did not formulate his idea because of psychedelics — far from it — but he, as welll as many others, reports the subjective experience of ego death in these circumstances and a feeling of “oneness” with nature. These kinds of experience under different circumstances have been reported since antiquity. Analytic idealism points to the possibility that since everything is phenomenal, some kind of subjective experience may survive death even if it is not the “I” experience of the ego.

There cannot be any subjective experience of ego death. In the absence of a subject, all experiences must be objective.

People who report ego death didn't achieve it, because they report it as something they experienced, which implies that a "they" existed to do so.

People report all kinds of impossible things, particularly when taking mind-altering drugs; But we shouldn't take such reports seriously.

The experience reported not just through psychedelics but through mystical experiences that date to antiquity is having the sense of self dissolve into a kind of merging with some mysterious universal one-ness or consciousness. We can all make of that what we will, but it has been of an oft-reported phenomenon.

There are also people who claim they saw Jesus appear to them. So what?

 

[lostone]

I think it’s also worth mentioning that when the naturalist/physicalist claims that subjective experience arises from physical neuronal activity (without ever specifying how this happens, only that it does happen), it will become difficult for the physicalist to account for the fact that we have any number of cases of organisms that apparently think, learn, and adjust their behavior, without any neurons at all. For the idealist, accounting for this is no problem. Under idealism, subjective experience pervades everything, and in some organisms, neuronal activity correlates with (but does not cause) subjectivity, and is a kind of external representation (as on a dashboard, to use Kastrup’s metaphor) of inner subjectivity.

If, under idealism, everything is fundamentally consciousness and what we call the physical world is just the extrinsic appearance of mental activity, what empirical test or conceptual criterion could ever falsify this claim—or distinguish it from simply labeling all phenomena as ‘mental’ without adding explanatory value?

NHC

You could say the same thing for metaphysical naturalism/physicalism.

Panpsychism offers a middle ground, between physcialism and idealism, doesn't it?

Kind of? I'm a panpsychist, I so far as I think that the underlying nature of physical stuff exists as a sort of "basis of contingency", and it's really hard to discuss for me because it requires representation theory and I don't even know much about representation theory myself.

The gist, though, I THINK, is trying to develop a logical "kernel" that can process all models of change?

And then reality itself would just be characterized as a massive collection of such kernels 'talking to one another' by whatever rules this happens by.

The thing is, kernels can come together to be kernels for greater systems? They can together come to emulate new stuff, like a Turing machine does.

In this way, mind and consciousness is purely a result of their interaction, and would necessarily be happening everywhere, but the thing is... What would it be conscious OF? Noise? Itself? Where would the consciousness BE? It would be like randomized ideal neural network, like a circuit board with logic Gates connected every which way all willy-nillly everywhere with particular.

Anything that has any kind of thoughts NOT alien to us would be disembodied, and "in a void of chaos".

I think that the same logic is going to have to apply in that epoch of mind as in this one: those sections which agree to work together towards a goal in the mere "faith" another exists to work towards the same goal will have more success together than things which assume the whole universe must be fought.

To that end, the universe as we know it could very well have been born from this, and this is why I bring up Garth Nix and The Charter.

The problem is that it's actually a pretty big computational problem to out-game "senseless selfishness" in a "Conway's Game of Life" scenario, since aligned action is necessarily going to be rare in emergence and common in retention.

As a panpsychist, I'm a monist, and I think going forward, I'm going to just say that the kinds of mind-kernel that composes the universe, as an ideal, is mechanistic.

This allows both perspectives to remain compatible.

At that lowest level you speak of, IMO, it would be conscious of itself, its environment, and surviving. A virus, prion, et al. The lowest level of what we call life. A purely physical being that arises from entirely physical, monistic, chemical processes.

 

[NoHolyCows]

Simple question. How do I determine an external event is mental?

If you’re aware of it, it’s mental—because everything that shows up in awareness is already part of mind.

Under idealism—especially as argued by Kastrup and supported in Seager’s analysis—there is no fundamental distinction between “mental” and “external.” What appears as an external event is simply a mental phenomenon presenting itself in a certain structured, seemingly external way. So if you’re experiencing it, it’s already mental by nature. The externality is a mode of appearance, not a sign of something non-mental.

NHC

 

[lostone]

Of course this will sound like standard woo to the materialist

Not to me.

It sounds like pointless, drug induced woo to me.

Of course, one might, in certain philosophical circles, consider the use of psychadelics to be 'standard'; But I would like to see a great deal more evidence that a "universal consciousness" is an actual thing than is found in some drugged up navel gazer saying "Wow, man, it's all just one universal consciousness!"

That taking certain drugs makes people feel as though they have an insight of this nature is old hat; It might help to provide an insight into why some people have irrational beliefs about gods, universal connectedness, and other woo, even in the absence of drugs - but even that stretch requires a lot more research before being taken too seriously.

Remind me again why we should care about anyone's solipsistic meanderings, particularly if those are reinforced by a drug-induced hallucination about an unevidenced feeling of interrelationship between everything.

I probably should have omitted the mention of the psychedelics, since that has precisely zero to do with his argument. It was basically in the nature of anecdote. The substance of his argument can be found in the linked paper. It has nothing to do with psychoactive drugs. I myself suspend judgment on all of this. I am only focused on the linked paper and curious about what others think of the arguments and evidence he adduces in it, which unlike peacegirl and her father’s book, I have summarized.

Your summary disinclines me to waste time reading the paper, largely because it seems to lack an argument at all. Saying "what if there was a universal consciousness of which we are all a part", is indeed standard woo, and wasn't interesting back when my flatmate in college espoused the idea (just before shaving off his moustache and smoking the clippings in a pipe, because he'd run out of dope but figured there must be a worthwhile residue of THC in his facial hair*).

In summary, assuming for the sake of argument that his thesis is (by some astonishing circumstance) absolutely, completely, and 100% correct in every detail, we are still left with the question that arises from all strictly non-materialist philosophy, including (but far from limited to) religious ideas about an afterlife: "So fucking what?"

The only answers to that question that I have ever seen are either some variation on the theme of Pascal's infamous wager, or are hollow promises that understanding can only arise after death.

Unless you can assure me that the paper holds some insight into the answer that falls outside those norms, it doesn't appear to be worth my time.







* There reportedly wasn't, but the flat stank of burned hair for a week.

I wasn’t particularly trying to summarize the argument as such but rather the result of it, his particular metaphysics. I found it definitely worth reading and intriguing, and I suspend judgment for now on it. I was more interested in opening a discussion about it. Those who wish can read it, or not, but to hold a discussion about the paper itself, as opposed to my brief summary (which as I noted is necessarily oversimplified and incomplete) obviously requires reading the paper.

OTOH, this discussion has kept us from the usual, oft-repeated, metaphysical theological arguments that we usually find ourselves engaged in here. That was one of your goals in bringing this up in the 1st place, as said by yourself in the OP, and to that extent, you have been very successful and should be pleased with the current discussions.

 

[GenesisNemesis]

Simple question. How do I determine an external event is mental?

If you’re aware of it, it’s mental—because everything that shows up in awareness is already part of mind.

Sounds a lot like confirmation bias.