Analytic Idealism

[Jarhyn]

atAt that lowest level you speak of, IMO, it would be conscious of itself, its environment, and surviving

Not really... Again, consciousness at this scale is like an "observer" at such small scale, and consciousness always ends up coming from the interactions of some "kernel" of contingent action, like a binary switch, or a "quantum" logic gate.

I really wish I could actually communicate some of the ideas that happen in my head. I could try? But I feel like it would sound like so much impenetrable metaphor: like the bits of nickel and iron on piece of meteorite, interwoven, sometimes alloyed and connecting at places but different, interchanging against one another; as affected by other things as the processing of a computer is by the heat of its processor: perhaps through a thermocouple and an ADC or through comparison of the clock function to some known standard, but only through such organized channels and not through any detection of action inside the system, as the threshold for an interaction depending on heat rather than electrical force would see more influence from other factors, and vulnerable to brown-out at other locations.

It's all still there, there are phenomena, it's just that the manner of large scale function of the human brain are just wholely insensitive, incapable of measuring them as no apparatus exists in it to do so.

This doesn't mean that this can't all be "imagined" by some other stuff working in tandem, but while a hypervisor* COULD in theory access a real-seeming underlying layer, the ability to target high level tasks in such a system for "hax" is very, very complicated.

That's what would be required for all this... That or a full on simulation.

Has anyone here ever tried to write down the actual process of negotiating between entities about things that happen in a system? It's WAY more complicated than having a machine with fixed, that fully implement simple shared rules of environment.

It's one of the reasons it might take 20 minutes to get through 15 seconds of conversation in a bar or store tabletop D&D, but it takes about 2 minutes on the computer or in a LARP. Imagine if we were all privately negotiating that? Or if there was a third party we were clients to? There's just way more organized infrastructure there than we see nature forming into.

The reality is that the only way it's capable of negotiating any of that is if it breaks down into a uniform field with constant laws at all points so that nothing needs to be negotiated at all really.

That's the part of idealism that I keep getting hung up on: the structure that would be needed to create minds in contact with pure minds.

I've made a lot of systems which negotiate a lot of data, and the kinds of systems that can scale infinitely generally need to be "homogenous"?

So I return to the position of idealism over monism as probably incoherent.

 

[NoHolyCows]

Sounds a lot like confirmation bias

It might sound like confirmation bias at first glance, but it’s actually a shift in the underlying metaphysical framework. Under idealism, the assumption isn’t that everything must be mental because we want it to be—it’s that experience is the one thing we cannot doubt, and everything else, including the so-called “external world,” is interpreted as a structured appearance within that experience. It’s not a belief filtering the evidence; it’s a reframing of what counts as evidence in the first place.

So rather than selectively confirming a belief, idealism redefines the playing field: it says that we never step outside of mind to encounter something non-mental, so asking whether something is mental isn’t about fitting it into a belief—it’s recognizing the context in which it always already appears.

NHC

 

[abaddon]

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

In my understanding of it, what distinguishes "mental" from "physical" is this:

The former ("mental") names phenomena that appear to be "immaterial". Like thoughts and feelings.

The latter ("physical") names phenomena that have length and texture and mass, like boxes and trees and on and on.

Physics focuses on the latter because the "founding fathers" of modern science (17th-18th centuries) decided to ignore "mind". They did that for 2 reasons: 1) mental phenomena are not measurable like physical objects. And 2) talking about "mind" seemed a lot like discussing "souls" so it'd have got them in trouble with the church.

Two centuries later people had forgotten that scientists made that decision. Then some positivist philosophers decided science covers everything so it can replace metaphysics. And that is how some folk came to believe that what "science says" is what's real, and what science doesn't "say" is ignorable or nonexistent.

---

It's a roundabout way of doing it, but I'm getting to your question...

What external event isn't mental? You experience a simulated world within your interior headspace (as I was trying to say in my previous post). Light does not just go in at the eyes onto a screen inside your head. Your brain must interpret it. So the computer monitor that you presume is "before your eyes" is mental.

So there's the example you've requested: a computer monitor. I pick that cuz a monitor of some size is appearing as an "external event" to you right now.

Under idealism, is there something out there? Something that will persist even when you're not looking, or after you're dead?

YES.

But is that Whatever-Is-Out-There exactly as you see it?

NO.

What you sense is presented to you in a user-friendly way, to help you navigate an otherwise impossible-to-experience world. It's the same basic thing happening when the "desktop" user interface of your computer turns data into "folders" and "files". It helps you navigate the world to have this "instrument panel", or simulation, or "map of the territory" inside your interior headspace.

But what is it that's "out there" beyond your user interface? I think according to physicalism it's some sort of weird mathematical something, isn't it?

And I don't disagree. But I wonder... why the hell would anyone call this Whatetever-Is-Out-There "physical"? When you cannot sense it except via your user interface?

I asked this in my previous post. Here it is, again, but rephrased: Suppose you're either Lewis or Clarke looking at the Rockies on the western horizon. Let's say there is no scout who's been on the other side who can inform you about it. Do you assume there's more land and bodies of water beyond the mountains? Or do you suppose it must be a totally different sort of substance "out there"?

IOW... If you have no access to what's beyond your interior experience, then wouldn't you use the only sort of experience you or any sentient being has (mental experience) to extrapolate what else there is to existence?

Idealists see they're inside a world made of mind within their interior headspace. But idealists DON'T make the leap to supposing that what's "out there" beyond the horizon of experience is an utterly different sort of substance.

 

[GenesisNemesis]

What external event isn't mental? You experience a simulated world within your interior headspace (as I was trying to say in my previous post).

Simulated is not the same as caused.

 

[lostone]

atAt that lowest level you speak of, IMO, it would be conscious of itself, its environment, and surviving

Not really... Again, consciousness at this scale is like an "observer" at such small scale, and consciousness always ends up coming from the interactions of some "kernel" of contingent action, like a binary switch, or a "quantum" logic gate.

I really wish I could actually communicate some of the ideas that happen in my head. I could try? But I feel like it would sound like so much impenetrable metaphor: like the bits of nickel and iron on piece of meteorite, interwoven, sometimes alloyed and connecting at places but different, interchanging against one another; as affected by other things as the processing of a computer is by the heat of its processor: perhaps through a thermocouple and an ADC or through comparison of the clock function to some known standard, but only through such organized channels and not through any detection of action inside the system, as the threshold for an interaction depending on heat rather than electrical force would see more influence from other factors, and vulnerable to brown-out at other locations.

It's all still there, there are phenomena, it's just that the manner of large scale function of the human brain are just wholely insensitive, incapable of measuring them as no apparatus exists in it to do so.

This doesn't mean that this can't all be "imagined" by some other stuff working in tandem, but while a hypervisor* COULD in theory access a real-seeming underlying layer, the ability to target high level tasks in such a system for "hax" is very, very complicated.

That's what would be required for all this... That or a full on simulation.

Has anyone here ever tried to write down the actual process of negotiating between entities about things that happen in a system? It's WAY more complicated than having a machine with fixed, that fully implement simple shared rules of environment.

It's one of the reasons it might take 20 minutes to get through 15 seconds of conversation in a bar or store tabletop D&D, but it takes about 2 minutes on the computer or in a LARP. Imagine if we were all privately negotiating that? Or if there was a third party we were clients to? There's just way more organized infrastructure there than we see nature forming into.

The reality is that the only way it's capable of negotiating any of that is if it breaks down into a uniform field with constant laws at all points so that nothing needs to be negotiated at all really.

That's the part of idealism that I keep getting hung up on: the structure that would be needed to create minds in contact with pure minds.

I've made a lot of systems which negotiate a lot of data, and the kinds of systems that can scale infinitely generally need to be "homogenous"?

So I return to the position of idealism over monism as probably incoherent.

Is a thermostat, in some sense, alive?

 

[GenesisNemesis]

Also, when two black holes collide billions of light years away, my brain isn't simulating that happening. It happens regardless of what my brain is doing. And my brain can't even properly comprehend it. Still happens though. My brain isn't simulating the flatness of the Universe either, I don't even know how to imagine that. Or the speed of light. Oh and my brain also isn't simulating the size of the Universe.

 

[Jarhyn]

atAt that lowest level you speak of, IMO, it would be conscious of itself, its environment, and surviving

Not really... Again, consciousness at this scale is like an "observer" at such small scale, and consciousness always ends up coming from the interactions of some "kernel" of contingent action, like a binary switch, or a "quantum" logic gate.

I really wish I could actually communicate some of the ideas that happen in my head. I could try? But I feel like it would sound like so much impenetrable metaphor: like the bits of nickel and iron on piece of meteorite, interwoven, sometimes alloyed and connecting at places but different, interchanging against one another; as affected by other things as the processing of a computer is by the heat of its processor: perhaps through a thermocouple and an ADC or through comparison of the clock function to some known standard, but only through such organized channels and not through any detection of action inside the system, as the threshold for an interaction depending on heat rather than electrical force would see more influence from other factors, and vulnerable to brown-out at other locations.

It's all still there, there are phenomena, it's just that the manner of large scale function of the human brain are just wholely insensitive, incapable of measuring them as no apparatus exists in it to do so.

This doesn't mean that this can't all be "imagined" by some other stuff working in tandem, but while a hypervisor* COULD in theory access a real-seeming underlying layer, the ability to target high level tasks in such a system for "hax" is very, very complicated.

That's what would be required for all this... That or a full on simulation.

Has anyone here ever tried to write down the actual process of negotiating between entities about things that happen in a system? It's WAY more complicated than having a machine with fixed, that fully implement simple shared rules of environment.

It's one of the reasons it might take 20 minutes to get through 15 seconds of conversation in a bar or store tabletop D&D, but it takes about 2 minutes on the computer or in a LARP. Imagine if we were all privately negotiating that? Or if there was a third party we were clients to? There's just way more organized infrastructure there than we see nature forming into.

The reality is that the only way it's capable of negotiating any of that is if it breaks down into a uniform field with constant laws at all points so that nothing needs to be negotiated at all really.

That's the part of idealism that I keep getting hung up on: the structure that would be needed to create minds in contact with pure minds.

I've made a lot of systems which negotiate a lot of data, and the kinds of systems that can scale infinitely generally need to be "homogenous"?

So I return to the position of idealism over monism as probably incoherent.

Is a thermostat, in some sense, alive?

It would be to the same extent that the neuron at the very end of your arm sensing and aware only of "high" or "low" and no additional context of any kind is "aware", or like the tail end of a sigmoid curve is "not 1" even at high values: it is asymptotically close to not-conscious as a thing can be while still being conscious, or alive by the same measure.

 

[NoHolyCows]

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

In my understanding of it, what distinguishes "mental" from "physical" is this:

The former ("mental") names phenomena that appear to be "immaterial". Like thoughts and feelings.

The latter ("physical") names phenomena that have length and texture and mass, like boxes and trees and on and on.

Physics focuses on the latter because the "founding fathers" of modern science (17th-18th centuries) decided to ignore "mind". They did that for 2 reasons: 1) mental phenomena are not measurable like physical objects. And 2) talking about "mind" seemed a lot like discussing "souls" so it'd have got them in trouble with the church.

Two centuries later people had forgotten that scientists made that decision. Then some positivist philosophers decided science covers everything so it can replace metaphysics. And that is how some folk came to believe that what "science says" is what's real, and what science doesn't "say" is ignorable or nonexistent.

---

It's a roundabout way of doing it, but I'm getting to your question...

What external event isn't mental? You experience a simulated world within your interior headspace (as I was trying to say in my previous post). Light does not just go in at the eyes onto a screen inside your head. Your brain must interpret it. So the computer monitor that you presume is "before your eyes" is mental.

So there's the example you've requested: a computer monitor. I pick that cuz a monitor of some size is appearing as an "external event" to you right now.

Under idealism, is there something out there? Something that will persist even when you're not looking, or after you're dead?

YES.

But is that Whatever-Is-Out-There exactly as you see it?

NO.

What you sense is presented to you in a user-friendly way, to help you navigate an otherwise impossible-to-experience world. It's the same basic thing happening when the "desktop" user interface of your computer turns data into "folders" and "files". It helps you navigate the world to have this "instrument panel", or simulation, or "map of the territory" inside your interior headspace.

But what is it that's "out there" beyond your user interface? I think according to physicalism it's some sort of weird mathematical something, isn't it?

And I don't disagree. But I wonder... why the hell would anyone call this Whatetever-Is-Out-There "physical"? When you cannot sense it except via your user interface?

I asked this in my previous post. Here it is, again, but rephrased: Suppose you're either Lewis or Clarke looking at the Rockies on the western horizon. Let's say there is no scout who's been on the other side who can inform you about it. Do you assume there's more land and bodies of water beyond the mountains? Or do you suppose it must be a totally different sort of substance "out there"?

IOW... If you have no access to what's beyond your interior experience, then wouldn't you use the only sort of experience you or any sentient being has (mental experience) to extrapolate what else there is to existence?

Idealists see they're inside a world made of mind within their interior headspace. But idealists DON'T make the leap to supposing that what's "out there" beyond the horizon of experience is an utterly different sort of substance.

You’re absolutely right to point out that what we experience is not the world “as it is,” but a kind of mediated simulation—an interface, as Hoffman calls it, or an “instrument panel” in Kastrup’s metaphor. What you’re describing fits well with both modern neuroscience and idealist metaphysics: perception isn’t a passive window onto a world but an active construction shaped by evolution, brain function, and internal mental frameworks.

But idealism goes further—and deeper—than just saying “the world as we know it is a simulation.” Under analytic idealism, that simulation isn’t inside your head. Rather, your head (and your monitor, and everything else) is itself a representation—what your dissociated consciousness looks like from a particular point of view. As Kastrup explains, the body and brain are not containers of consciousness, but the extrinsic appearance of certain mental processes within a broader universal consciousness. So the “instrument panel” isn’t inside your skull; your skull is part of the panel.

Now, when you ask, “Is there something out there?” the idealist says: yes, absolutely. But it’s not “out there” in the way physicalism claims. What persists beyond your personal awareness isn’t a separate substance—it’s still mind, still consciousness—but part of a mental field that’s simply not integrated into your current stream of experience. You are a dissociated subset of universal mind. The rest of reality is what the rest of mind is doing. That’s why the world keeps going when you’re not looking. It’s not that it becomes nothing—it becomes the appearance of other mental activity within consciousness, activity you don’t currently access.

That’s why, from the idealist perspective, it makes perfect sense to extrapolate from mental experience rather than posit a totally alien, non-experiential “substance” behind appearances. To borrow your Lewis and Clarke metaphor: idealism is like standing on a ridge, seeing a mental landscape stretch as far as you can see, and assuming that what’s beyond the horizon is more of the same kind of thing—more mind, more consciousness, structured differently—not a switch to some new metaphysical category.

This is where Seager’s point comes in: if the very idea of the “physical” is nothing more than a web of structural relations and mathematical models with no intrinsic character (what he calls “Kantian humility”), then why should we treat it as ontologically independent of experience? In fact, that move—treating the structural skeleton as the “real world” and dismissing the thing that gives us presence, qualia, immediacy—as secondary, is the very inversion idealism challenges.

So when you ask: “Why call this Whatever-Is-Out-There ‘physical’ if it’s only ever accessed through mental experience?”—idealism says: don’t. Call it what it is: mental in essence, experienced through dissociation, filtered through evolutionary heuristics, and appearing in stable, shared, law-like ways due to archetypal structures of universal consciousness (Kastrup’s idea of natural laws as psychological archetypes).

Idealism doesn’t deny the “there” behind the interface—it just denies that this “there” is anything but mind in another form. The key difference is this: physicalism posits an unknowable, non-mental reality behind the interface and calls that the real world. Idealism says: you’re already in the real world—it just happens to be mental all the way down.

So to wrap up: what’s “out there” is real, persistent, structured, and not dependent on your ego’s attention. But it’s not “physical” in the way physicalism claims. It’s the activity of other streams of mind—consciousness outside your dissociative boundary—appearing in the stable, lawful ways we’ve come to expect because those regularities are built into the structure of universal consciousness itself.

This isn’t a retreat into solipsism, nor is it confirmation bias. It’s a radical reframing: instead of imagining that mind somehow arises from unconscious stuff, idealism flips the script and says—you’re already in the real world, and that world is mental all the way down.

That shift doesn’t just dissolve the hard problem of consciousness—it redefines what it even means for something to be real. Not what hides behind experience, but what experience fundamentally is.

NHC

 

[Jarhyn]

Another concept to think about here is that switches come in all sorts of flavors.

Imagine IIT with this concept of Phi and how there's some measure of complexity in a system or whatever.

Now, the simplest kind of switch we know of is the binary Gate, and then there are more math heavy switches like Neural logic gates (neurons), and even weirder sorts like Quantum logic gates.

Interestingly, the Phi of a system can be far lower, in fact at a whole different smaller "cardinality", than the Phi of a single Quantum logic gate, and yet a shit-ton of structures that would form those quantum behaviors can come together to "only" form the large scale structure of a "single" binary switch on mind-bogglingly larger scale.

Of course most of the "switching" nature of that matter ends up tied up in the business of actually existing as large scale matter, and doesn't ever amount to enough "noise" in any one place to overcome the vast cliff of potential drive by the threshold of rail energy vs threshold activation energy of the whole transistor.

In fact the only way to normally align the switching potential of that stuff to receive and process and do stuff like perform a computation, you essentially HAVE to organize it into neurons or transistor gates or whatever and do really energetic things to overcome the din and racket of the quantum scale world, where even the slightest disruption can make a thing entirely change what kind of gate the thing is formed into.

 

[NoHolyCows]

Another concept to think about here is that switches come in all sorts of flavors.

Imagine IIT with this concept of Phi and how there's some measure of complexity in a system or whatever.

Now, the simplest kind of switch we know of is the binary Gate, and then there are more math heavy switches like Neural logic gates (neurons), and even weirder sorts like Quantum logic gates.

Interestingly, the Phi of a system can be far lower, in fact at a whole different smaller "cardinality", than the Phi of a single Quantum logic gate, and yet a shit-ton of structures that would form those quantum behaviors can come together to "only" form the large scale structure of a "single" binary switch on mind-bogglingly larger scale.

Of course most of the "switching" nature of that matter ends up tied up in the business of actually existing as large scale matter, and doesn't ever amount to enough "noise" in any one place to overcome the vast cliff of potential drive by the threshold of rail energy vs threshold activation energy of the whole transistor.

In fact the only way to normally align the switching potential of that stuff to receive and process and do stuff like perform a computation, you essentially HAVE to organize it into neurons or transistor gates or whatever and do really energetic things to overcome the din and racket of the quantum scale world, where even the slightest disruption can make a thing entirely change what kind of gate the thing is formed into.

If every system you describe—quantum gates, neurons, circuits—can be fully accounted for in terms of structure, function, and causal relations, then why does anything need to feel like something from the inside at all? Why isn’t the universe just a perfectly functioning zombie, with no consciousness anywhere? What, in your model, makes experience itself necessary rather than just an inert byproduct or an illusion no one can ever perceive?

NHC

 

[Jarhyn]

If every system you describe—quantum gates, neurons, circuits—can be fully accounted for in terms of structure, function, and causal relations, then why does anything need to feel like something from the inside at all

Because of locality and the existence of those self-same phenomena. It sounds almost stupid and trite like all the best, prettiest proofs in math, though: if something is undergoing a local phenomena, if the subject experiences the phenomena, there will be some report, should that phenomena produce a report, expressing some nature of that phenomena to an outside observer, but the perspective of the immediate observers to the interaction is relatively different.

The existence of "phenomenal experience" is a prediction of relativity and locality with a fixed speed of light.

 

[bilby]

It would be a lot easier to follow if you would stop using the plural word "phenomena" when you are talking about a single phenomenon.

 

[Jarhyn]

It would be a lot easier to follow if you would stop using the plural word "phenomena" when you are talking about a single phenomenon.

I really don't care about respecting old Greek linguistic rules to that extent. For all I care at this point, plurality doesn't even really matter in the concept? You could just as easily just cut the singularity out entirely and generalize to phenomena and nothing changes really.

The whole point is that because "stuff" happens only "discretely" in "places", in general, we shouldn't be surprised when we see some instance of stuff happening in a place where other stuff/happenings are not, because it takes time for the happenings of things to interrelate.

It's just all part of "locality" at that point, and predicted to happen for the same reason that an Apple device is going to make a different report from interacting with it than a PC even if they looked identical before you turned them on: the different stuff in the location has different internal events happening and if you "ask" it how it "feels" it is going to give you a different answer because a different thing is there to answer, and it will be according to the internal state of that specific thing, and then you are looking at the exact same question you have of humans: why is that one's apparent experience different from this one's (and also different from mine).

It makes all the sense in the world of you accept that the experience is "of" the phenomena of computation, and it can only report experiences of computational events and states that influence the parts that can do the report.

We can do it for the same reasons a computer can do it and we understand all the reasons a computer can do it, and we understand it quite well (though not as well as I would wish; truth tables and state diagrams get a LOT weirder when dealing with non-binary systems).

 

[pood]

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.

Yes, I have. I summarized the whole thing in the OP. And I linked to the paper which, if you read it, you would fully understand the argument. That doesn’t mean you would have to agree with it, but you at least would understand what he is talking about. I also explained some of the motivating factors for questioning physicalism.

 

[pood]

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

You don’t even seem to realize the simplest thing of all, that I am not defending analytic idealism, I am putting it up for discussion, while linking to a paper that you apparently did not even read.

 

[pood]

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.

I am pleased by the discussion. I think it would be more intriguing if more people read the actual paper, though I don’t know who or who has not read it.

 

[pood]

Also, when two black holes collide billions of light years away, my brain isn't simulating that happening. It happens regardless of what my brain is doing. And my brain can't even properly comprehend it. Still happens though. My brain isn't simulating the flatness of the Universe either, I don't even know how to imagine that. Or the speed of light. Oh and my brain also isn't simulating the size of the Universe.

You brain is simulating everything. There is noting else that it can do.

 

[GenesisNemesis]

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

You don’t even seem to realize the simplest thing of all, that I am not defending analytic idealism, I am putting it up for discussion, while linking to a paper that you apparently did not even read.

That would be convincing if you didn't consistently mention the "flaws" of physicalism and continually prop up this idea as though it were superior to physicalism.

 

[pood]

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

In my understanding of it, what distinguishes "mental" from "physical" is this:

The former ("mental") names phenomena that appear to be "immaterial". Like thoughts and feelings.

The latter ("physical") names phenomena that have length and texture and mass, like boxes and trees and on and on.

Physics focuses on the latter because the "founding fathers" of modern science (17th-18th centuries) decided to ignore "mind". They did that for 2 reasons: 1) mental phenomena are not measurable like physical objects. And 2) talking about "mind" seemed a lot like discussing "souls" so it'd have got them in trouble with the church.

Two centuries later people had forgotten that scientists made that decision. Then some positivist philosophers decided science covers everything so it can replace metaphysics. And that is how some folk came to believe that what "science says" is what's real, and what science doesn't "say" is ignorable or nonexistent.

---

It's a roundabout way of doing it, but I'm getting to your question...

What external event isn't mental? You experience a simulated world within your interior headspace (as I was trying to say in my previous post). Light does not just go in at the eyes onto a screen inside your head. Your brain must interpret it. So the computer monitor that you presume is "before your eyes" is mental.

So there's the example you've requested: a computer monitor. I pick that cuz a monitor of some size is appearing as an "external event" to you right now.

Under idealism, is there something out there? Something that will persist even when you're not looking, or after you're dead?

YES.

But is that Whatever-Is-Out-There exactly as you see it?

NO.

What you sense is presented to you in a user-friendly way, to help you navigate an otherwise impossible-to-experience world. It's the same basic thing happening when the "desktop" user interface of your computer turns data into "folders" and "files". It helps you navigate the world to have this "instrument panel", or simulation, or "map of the territory" inside your interior headspace.

But what is it that's "out there" beyond your user interface? I think according to physicalism it's some sort of weird mathematical something, isn't it?

And I don't disagree. But I wonder... why the hell would anyone call this Whatetever-Is-Out-There "physical"? When you cannot sense it except via your user interface?

I asked this in my previous post. Here it is, again, but rephrased: Suppose you're either Lewis or Clarke looking at the Rockies on the western horizon. Let's say there is no scout who's been on the other side who can inform you about it. Do you assume there's more land and bodies of water beyond the mountains? Or do you suppose it must be a totally different sort of substance "out there"?

IOW... If you have no access to what's beyond your interior experience, then wouldn't you use the only sort of experience you or any sentient being has (mental experience) to extrapolate what else there is to existence?

Idealists see they're inside a world made of mind within their interior headspace. But idealists DON'T make the leap to supposing that what's "out there" beyond the horizon of experience is an utterly different sort of substance.

You’re absolutely right to point out that what we experience is not the world “as it is,” but a kind of mediated simulation—an interface, as Hoffman calls it, or an “instrument panel” in Kastrup’s metaphor. What you’re describing fits well with both modern neuroscience and idealist metaphysics: perception isn’t a passive window onto a world but an active construction shaped by evolution, brain function, and internal mental frameworks.

But idealism goes further—and deeper—than just saying “the world as we know it is a simulation.” Under analytic idealism, that simulation isn’t inside your head. Rather, your head (and your monitor, and everything else) is itself a representation—what your dissociated consciousness looks like from a particular point of view. As Kastrup explains, the body and brain are not containers of consciousness, but the extrinsic appearance of certain mental processes within a broader universal consciousness. So the “instrument panel” isn’t inside your skull; your skull is part of the panel.

Now, when you ask, “Is there something out there?” the idealist says: yes, absolutely. But it’s not “out there” in the way physicalism claims. What persists beyond your personal awareness isn’t a separate substance—it’s still mind, still consciousness—but part of a mental field that’s simply not integrated into your current stream of experience. You are a dissociated subset of universal mind. The rest of reality is what the rest of mind is doing. That’s why the world keeps going when you’re not looking. It’s not that it becomes nothing—it becomes the appearance of other mental activity within consciousness, activity you don’t currently access.

That’s why, from the idealist perspective, it makes perfect sense to extrapolate from mental experience rather than posit a totally alien, non-experiential “substance” behind appearances. To borrow your Lewis and Clarke metaphor: idealism is like standing on a ridge, seeing a mental landscape stretch as far as you can see, and assuming that what’s beyond the horizon is more of the same kind of thing—more mind, more consciousness, structured differently—not a switch to some new metaphysical category.

This is where Seager’s point comes in: if the very idea of the “physical” is nothing more than a web of structural relations and mathematical models with no intrinsic character (what he calls “Kantian humility”), then why should we treat it as ontologically independent of experience? In fact, that move—treating the structural skeleton as the “real world” and dismissing the thing that gives us presence, qualia, immediacy—as secondary, is the very inversion idealism challenges.

So when you ask: “Why call this Whatever-Is-Out-There ‘physical’ if it’s only ever accessed through mental experience?”—idealism says: don’t. Call it what it is: mental in essence, experienced through dissociation, filtered through evolutionary heuristics, and appearing in stable, shared, law-like ways due to archetypal structures of universal consciousness (Kastrup’s idea of natural laws as psychological archetypes).

Idealism doesn’t deny the “there” behind the interface—it just denies that this “there” is anything but mind in another form. The key difference is this: physicalism posits an unknowable, non-mental reality behind the interface and calls that the real world. Idealism says: you’re already in the real world—it just happens to be mental all the way down.

So to wrap up: what’s “out there” is real, persistent, structured, and not dependent on your ego’s attention. But it’s not “physical” in the way physicalism claims. It’s the activity of other streams of mind—consciousness outside your dissociative boundary—appearing in the stable, lawful ways we’ve come to expect because those regularities are built into the structure of universal consciousness itself.

This isn’t a retreat into solipsism, nor is it confirmation bias. It’s a radical reframing: instead of imagining that mind somehow arises from unconscious stuff, idealism flips the script and says—you’re already in the real world, and that world is mental all the way down.

That shift doesn’t just dissolve the hard problem of consciousness—it redefines what it even means for something to be real. Not what hides behind experience, but what experience fundamentally is.

NHC

This is an excellent summation of Kastrup’s metaphysics.

 

[NoHolyCows]

If every system you describe—quantum gates, neurons, circuits—can be fully accounted for in terms of structure, function, and causal relations, then why does anything need to feel like something from the inside at all

Because of locality and the existence of those self-same phenomena. It sounds almost stupid and trite like all the best, prettiest proofs in math, though: if something is undergoing a local phenomena, if the subject experiences the phenomena, there will be some report, should that phenomena produce a report, expressing some nature of that phenomena to an outside observer, but the perspective of the immediate observers to the interaction is relatively different.

The existence of "phenomenal experience" is a prediction of relativity and locality with a fixed speed of light.

I appreciate the creative direction you’re going, but I don’t think this answers the core issue.

You’re talking about local phenomena, reportability, and relative perspectives—which all describe how information or signals propagate through spacetime. But none of that explains why any of it should be accompanied by subjective experience.

Relativity and locality constrain the structure of interactions, sure—but they don’t predict that anything should feel like anything. A camera or sensor also responds to local phenomena and produces reports—but we don’t say it’s conscious. So the real question remains:

Why does any structure—local or not, complex or not—give rise to the intrinsic presence of experience at all? Why isn’t the entire system just a perfectly silent, unconscious machine?

Unless you’re willing to say that subjective experience is just what structure looks like from the inside—which starts to sound a lot like idealism—it seems like you’re describing behavior, not explaining consciousness.

NHC