Analytic Idealism

Philosopher Bernardo Kastrup's 'Analytic Idealism' is 'a consciousness-only ontology' that has refocused attention, within the philosophical community and more broadly, on metaphysical idealism, that is, an idealism that is grounded in philosophical argument as opposed to promoted by religious tradition or spiritual belief.

How to explain, under idealism, the correlation between inner experience and brain states? According to Kastrup, the brain and its patterns of neuronal activity are not the cause of inner experience, but the image, the extrinsic appearance of inner experience. In other words, brain activity is what inner experience looks like when observed from the outside. As such, he says, the correlations ordinarily observed between patterns of brain activity and inner experience are due to the trivial fact that the appearance of a phenomenon correlates with the phenomenon. And when this correlation is broken, as observed in the psychedelic state, the reason is that, unlike a cause, the appearance of a phenomenon doesn't need to be always complete—it can leave out much about the phenomenon it is an appearance of.

Kastrup maintains that idealism's key challenge is to explain how the seemingly distinct phenomenal inner lives of different subjects of experience can arise within this fundamentally unitary phenomenal field. This is called the 'decomposition problem', and it is the core problem Kastrup needs to address. Other challenges include how to reconcile idealism with the fact that we all inhabit a common external world; why this world unfolds independently of our personal volition or imagination; why there are such tight correlations between measured patterns of brain activity and reports of experience.

Kastrup's unabashed challenge to his metaphysical competitors is that an idealist ontology makes sense of reality in a more parsimonious and empirically rigorous manner than mainstream physicalism, bottom-up panpsychism, and cosmopsychism. He argues that an idealist ontology offers more explanatory power than these three alternatives, in that it does not fall prey to the hard problem of consciousness, the combination problem, or the decombination problem, respectively. Panpsychists seem to be taking the challenge more seriously than do physicalists.

Bernardo Kastrup is a Dutch philosopher and computer scientist known for advocating analytic idealism in consciousness studies. He challenges physicalism and argues that consciousness is the basis of reality. Kastrup is also the executive director of the Essentia Foundation.

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