A reflection on my engagement with Analytic Idealism, and why I have archived some pages

This page explains why I've archived older pages that I published on, or in the course of developing a critique of, Analytic Idealism, a metaphysical theory advanced by Bernardo Kastrup. They are all superseded by the critique of Analytic Idealism that I published at the end of 2025.

The reason is that rather than emphasising as core the insight that Analytic Idealism erroneously treats experience as a sort of structured substance, those pages either:

1. Tacitly endorsed that treatment and pulled their punches,
2. Implicitly leveraged the insight to develop weaker and sometimes misleading arguments,
3. Otherwise failed to develop the insight while pursuing an unfruitful analytic strategy,
4. Proposed an (that) analytic strategy that on reflection deserves better development independent of this context before (if) republishing,
5. Were otherwise of low enough quality, brevity, non-redundancy, or general interest to not be worth publishing, or
6. Need reflection, revision, and reformulation before potentially being republished in another context, i.e., outside of that of my exploration of Analytic Idealism.

The archived pages and the numbered reason or reasons that apply to each are:

• Consciousness experiences; experience is not consciousness: a review of Bernardo Kastrup's "Why Materialism Is Baloney" (reasons #1 and #3).
• Of parsimony and the universal mind: revisiting Bernardo Kastrup's "Why Materialism Is Baloney" (reasons #1, #3, and #5).
• A series on clear semantic modelling, ontology, idealism, and dualism (reason #4).
  • An introduction to clear semantic modelling (reason #4)
  • A mostly grounded clear semantic model of conscious reality (reasons #4 and #6)
  • Assessment of a mostly grounded semantic model of conscious reality for conformance with the criteria for clarity (reasons #4 and #5)
  • Contextualising common ontologies from the perspective of a mostly grounded consciousness-based semantic model (reasons #4 and #6)
  • An analysis of Bernardo Kastrup's semantic model of Analytic Idealism (reasons #1, #2, and #3).
  • The argument against Analytic Idealism from conflicting perspectives (reasons #1, #2, and #3).
  • Idealism as a network of minds (reasons #1, #5, and #6)
  • A theoretical dualistic model of conscious reality (reason #6)
  • The failed argument from idealistic misidentification by differentiability (reason #5)
  • The failed argument from idealistic misidentification by affect and intentionality (reason #5)

The reason that I am archiving these pages rather than deleting them is that I think that published pages should not be arbitrarily - i.e., without good reason - disappeared from the internet, and "In hindsight, this wasn't worth publishing" is not in my judgement a good enough reason.

Neither the archived pages nor this page itself are (any longer) linked to from my homepage, and search engines are instructed not to index them. This is because the primary point of archiving them is to make them generally inaccessible to the public (including via search engine), such that only people who already have a link will be accessing them, and will in turn be only accessing this broader explanatory page via them.

A brief history of my engagement with these ideas

It began in May 2015 on the Skeptiko forums in the thread 274. DR. BERNARDO KASTRUP, WHY OUR CULTURE IS MATERIALISTIC corresponding to the Skeptiko podcast numbered identically. This was the first I had heard of Bernardo and his ontological theory, which at that point he did not yet seem to have decided to name "Analytic Idealism". I had happened upon the Skeptiko forums serendipitously only a week or two prior.

Roughly a year later, having read his 2014 book, Why Materialism Is Baloney: How true skeptics know there is no death and fathom answers to life, the universe, and everything, I drafted a review critical of the ideas in it. I shared that review privately with a couple of people, but got cold feet and didn't publish it. That ended up being a good idea, because, while it had some strong ideas in it, and the basis of key parts of my final critique, it was also in parts conceptually confused and argumentatively weak.

More than 18 months later, when Skeptiko's host, Alex Tsakiris, was seeking input for another upcoming interview with Bernardo, I returned to my draft critique and mined it for ideas, which I then crafted into a "final", now-archived, critical review, Consciousness experiences; experience is not consciousness: a review of Bernardo Kastrup's "Why Materialism Is Baloney".

Unfortunately, that critique pulled its punches, tacitly endorsing the key error made in Analytic Idealism, the treatment of experience as a sort of structured substance. In 2019, dissatisfied because I knew that Analytic Idealism was untenable despite my conciliatory critique, I embarked on a rather fruitless analytic and writing journey in an attempt to explain its untenability without rescinding that prior critique's tacit endorsement of that key error. Had I rescinded that and explicitly identified the error - as I eventually did in my 2025 critique - all of that wheel spinning could have been avoided. At least that has now been accomplished, and my final critique at last, I think, gets it right.

The lesson

Don't second-guess yourself so much, nor pull your punches with that second-guessing. When you know that an idea is untenable and have developed a critique to that effect, if it doesn't quite hit the mark, don't then abandon its gist and whitewash the idea in an attempt at conciliation; rather, work on that critique until it does hit the mark.