A critique of Analytic Idealism

The basic problem with Analytic Idealism[1] is that it is impossible to account for all aspects of reality solely in terms of experience, which is all that Analytic Idealism recognises as real (aside from volition). This critique explores some of those aspects. The most serious problem in this respect is that real experience entails a real experient (self), which – since it recognises only experience (same caveat) – is lacking on Analytic Idealism.

🔗 Table of contents

🔗 The absent self

On Analytic Idealism, there is no real self: rather, the self is emptiness; potentiality, not actuality; amorphous; reduced to an abstraction.

This is difficult to grasp at first because of all of the lip service paid to the idea of the self as “the universal subject”, etc, but it becomes clear after some analysis. A good starting point is on page 153 of Why Materialism is Baloney (WMIB)[2]:

“We can then say that all that exists is the movement of the void. Since the subject of all experiences is the medium of mind itself, it too only becomes actualized in the form of experience: the one universal subject exists only insofar as the experiences it has.”

Note carefully that this quote explicitly disclaims the existence of any self (the subject of all experiences) apart from experience. While a distinction is made grammatically here between the self and its experiences, the actual distinction is explicitly disclaimed elsewhere (see below), and, even here, any reality to the grammatical putative self undergoing those experiences is at best literally “void”. In further support of the unreality of this self, note further that the quote explicitly identifies that self (“subject”) with “the medium of mind”, and then consider the following quote from the same page in that light (editing brackets mine; footnote elided):

“So, on the one hand, it is entirely valid to say that only experience exists, for the medium of mind is merely a potential, not an actuality. It concretizes into existence only when it moves and, at that point, it is nothing but the corresponding experiences. On the other hand, it is also entirely valid to talk metaphorically about a ‘medium of mind,’ insofar as this is a reference to a potential, not an actuality. [...] In the same way that there is nothing to the vibration of a guitar string other than the string itself, ultimately there is nothing to experience – and therefore to existence – other than the void that vibrates. So everything is a void or, as Adyashanti brilliantly put it, ‘emptiness dancing.’ Existence is but a disturbance of the void and, thus, fundamentally empty.”

Here, the self – as that “medium of mind” – is seen to be mere potentiality, not actuality; mere emptiness (albeit “dancing”) – and, again, a void. Again, its real (actual) existence apart from experience is explicitly denied.

On page 109 of Analytic Idealism in a Nutshell (AIIAN) the explicit lack of distinction between experience and experiencer is affirmed:

“The analytic idealist does not differentiate experience from the experiencer; there is only the universal experiencer, all experiences being but patterns of excitation of the universal experiencer.”

The Analytic Idealist conception of self is further clarified on page 197 of WMIB, which refers (emphasis in the original) to

“the sense of ‘I’ that underlies all of our experiences. Indeed, experience intrinsically entails this sense of ‘I’: a subject that experiences. Therefore, the sense of ‘I’ is inherent to all points of the membrane of mind, regardless of topography or topology, since experiences can unfold anywhere in the membrane.”

Here, the fact that experience entails a self – “a subject that experiences” – is correctly emphasised, but note that this self is reduced to a mere “sense of”: inherent and omnipresent, but clearly no realer than allowed by the previous quotes. Note too the reference to topography and topology, which, in combination with the various references to “movements”, “vibrations”, and “patterns of excitation” in the prior quotes, have problematic connotations that this critique describes in a couple of sections.

On the next page, this conception is described further:

“[O]ur inner sense of ‘I’ is fundamentally independent of any story we could dress it up with. As such, it is entirely undifferentiated and identical in every person. It is formless. This undressed, naked, ‘amorphous I’ is inherent to the membrane of mind at large, the sole subject of existence. Not only does every person have the same inner sense of ‘I,’ I contend that every conscious being has it: cats, dogs, fish, etc. At the deepest, narrative-free levels, they must all feel exactly like us.”

In similar terms, the self here is described as “amorphous”, again reduced to an omnipresent “sense of”, where, per the previous quotes, there is nothing real to sense. There is no “there there”, so to speak.

In combination, these quotes demonstrate that the self of which Analytic Idealism conceives is merely nominal; abstract in another word; unreal in yet another. Analytic Idealism seen properly, in this light, is a no-self theory.

In effect, it takes experience to be primary, and, more precisely, recalling the reference to topography and topology, it takes there to be a “landscape” of experience (really, a field, on its own terms), of which subjectivity – but not an actual subject – is a property. Beyond the fact that this voids the self, this “landscape” connotation is highly problematic. It is addressed after the next section highlighting why the absence of the self matters.

🔗 The problem with the absent self

A semantic note: Analytic Idealism does not distinguish between “mind” and “self” (aka “subject”). I do in some contexts, in which mind in a broader sense includes not just the more limited self, instantiating its subjectivity and agency, but also connotes the possession and execution of such mental faculties and properties as memory, knowledge, recollection, reasoning, intelligence, personality, traits, and habits.

In that which follows, I use “mind” and “self” in those senses. Where it is irrelevant which applies, I use “experient”.

The problem here is that experience absent an experient is a fatally incoherent notion because experience is contingent on a (real) experient, and not the reverse; the contingency relationship is asymmetric.

To help to understand why this is so, in case it is not immediately and obviously apparent, here are three considerations:

Firstly, the logical point: experience is by definition subjective; that is, it is undergone by (had by) a subject. Experience, then, entails an experient – not an empty void, not amorphousness, and not merely in name.

Secondly, a thought experiment: a experient who is temporarily not experiencing can be coherently conceived of, whereas an experience that is not being undergone by an experient cannot – it could be a “proto”experience at best.

Thirdly, a demonstration of absurdity by analogy: to say that only experience exists, ungrounded by any real experient, is like saying that only red exists, with no real object – an apple, for example – that could be coloured red.

On Analytic Idealism, such an experient is lacking: the experient on Analytic Idealism is just an empty placeholder that is never filled in.

Further implications of this are presented in the context of the next section’s outlining of the aforementioned “landscape of experience” problem.

🔗 The equivocation on experience

On the one hand, Analytic Idealism explicitly acknowledges that experience is purely subjective. On the other, it portrays experience as a structured “field” (hence “topography or topology”). These are not compatible.

It does this because, in essence, it is a form of panpsychism with the matter removed but with the structure of matter retained. That structure must then be maintained in (as) experience. This is why experience is ultimately portrayed as a field: fields hold structure. Experience, though, as purely subjective and phenomenal is not structured. An experience can be of structure, such as our visual experience of a structured world, but that does not confer to the experience itself: the perception of structure is not itself structure.

The distinction here is between represented structure and constitutive structure. Represented structure is structure that merely appears in the phenomenal content of experience; constitutive structure is structure that inheres in experience itself, as it does in mind-independent matter (the putative substance denied on Analytic Idealism).

Analytic Idealism explicitly – given the pure subjectivity of experience – licenses only represented structure. Tacitly, though, it relies on constitutive structure to do its explanatory work.

This distinction can be seen via selected quotes.

On page 16 of WMIB, some examples are offered of (italics in the original; bold added):

“the properties of subjective experience – the redness of red, the bitterness of regret, the warmth of fire”.

Later, on page 66, it is affirmed that (bold again added):

“all reality we can ever know is a flow of subjective perceptions, thoughts, feelings and ideas in mind.”

These quotes license only represented structure.

Then, switching positions, it is affirmed on page 104 of AIIAN that (editing brackets mine):

“Under Analytic Idealism, [the] one resulting [quantum] field [of a grand unification theory] is, ultimately, a field of subjectivity, whose particular patterns of excitation—‘ripples’—are particular experiential states.”

This quote violates that licence: the structure here is constitutive.

The equivocation really bites on page 101 of AIIAN, where it is asserted that:

“our body is made of the same sorts of fundamental particles or—more accurately—fields as the rest of the universe”.

Compare ““made of [...] fundamental particles” with “the redness of red, the bitterness of regret, the warmth of fire”.

Clearly, Analytic Idealism has not eliminated the reductionist structure of materialism – of familiar subjective experiences forced into artificial correlation with patterns of particles – and self-admittedly so; it takes this to be an advantage in virtue of its consistency with modern science, and its appeal thereby to so-called rationalists.

The attempted solution to the reductive problem fails given the problematic equivocation. The dissimilarity of the collection of particles as excitations of an experiential field to the redness of red as a subjective experience is not resolved by explaining the particles as reflecting the structure of that experience when perceived externally. Again, this is because that particulate structure is constitutive, whereas the redness of red is represented, and Analytic Idealism on its own terms – “There is only subjective perception” (page 66 of WMIB; emphasis added) – does not license constitutive structure.

The starkness of the equivocation is not helped by Analytic Idealism’s explicit recognition that “mentation is not extended”; that is, that “you can’t take a tape measure to my next thought” (from page 161 of AIIAN). It is only a short step from there to the recognition that mentation is not structured either.

It is apparent that others have recognised – or at least intuited the basis of – this equivocation. For example, on page 66 of WMIB Bernardo writes (editing brackets mine) that in debating Analytic Idealism with him, “[m]any people [...] conclude that [it] implies the existence of some kind of literal ‘mind stuff.’”.

The inference here is natural and fair given the extensive portrayal in WMIB of experience as constitutively structured, presumably reflected in those earlier debates.

Similarly, from page 108 of AIIAN:

“When the analytic idealist speaks of a field of subjectivity ‘underlying matter,’ this shouldn’t be taken to mean that two irreducible entities are being proposed (namely, the field of subjectivity and matter). Doing so is an uncharitable and rather thick misunderstanding that, unfortunately, even professional philosophers and university professors are known to have been guilty of.”

In fact, here, again, it seems likely that the professionals and professors are onto something: experience is irreducibly subjective and thus only represents structure and has no constitutive structure. The equivocal rendering of experience as a field though entails constitutive structure, and thus is in effect to propose an irreducible something in addition to irreducible experience, something with which experience is in effect correlated.

This implies a dual-aspect monism, in which one aspect is experience proper (representing structure only), and the other is some sort of extended stuff (constitutively structured), which, potentially, is what these critics are getting at – they’d then just be choosing to call that extended stuff “matter” more specifically, which is fair enough.

In any case, this implied dual-aspect monism contradicts the idealist thesis, with the irony being that imagining something beyond experience proper is exactly what Analytic Idealism critiques materialism for.

Equivocation aside, in stripping matter from an otherwise variant of panpsychism, Analytic Idealism has made the situation even worse. A structured collection of matter could at least pose as an experient. A structured field of experience cannot; it presupposes an experient, which, as seen above, is missing – empty; void. Even if that experient was present, its experience could not be disunified, as pointed out in Appendix C under the structural numerical decombination problem.

Worse still, matter at least has causal power; remove matter, and you remove causality. The next section elaborates on this.

🔗 The causal inefficacy of bare experience

The secondary problem – from which follow wide-ranging tertiary problems – that follows given the reduction of reality to experience alone is that experience divorced from an experient lacks causal efficacy.

This is because, as noted above, experience is not a thing-in-itself, but rather is contingent upon a thing-in-itself: an experient. Any causal efficacy of experience is thus in turn contingent upon, and thus conferred by, the experient.

In case this point is unclear, it can be illustrated using the same analogy with properties used above there:

Like experience, properties are not things-in-themselves; a property is contingent on a thing-in-itself, the object of which it is a property. The redness of an apple, for example, is contingent upon that apple, and thus the causal efficacy of the redness is contingent on that apple. The redness absent the apple would be not just incoherent but causally impotent. Similarly, the experiences of an experient are contingent upon that experient, and thus lack causal efficacy in the absence of that experient, even when their independent existence is (incoherently) assumed.

A different analogy to concepts might also be helpful: in a similar but not identical way to experience, concepts, too, have no causal efficacy of their own; their causal effects exist solely in virtue (by proxy) of the experient who apprehends (“reaches out” to) them. The main difference is that experience is more intimately bound up with – indeed, as, crucially, has been affirmed already, is contingent upon – an experient, whereas concepts are rather more independent of, and of a more different existential nature than, experients.

To be totally clear, properties, concepts, and experience each represent a different category of phenomena. The analogies here are not intended to imply otherwise, and analogies by definition, of course, do not anyway entail identity.

Analytic Idealism’s equivocal conception of experience as a field tacitly introduces constitutive structure, which thus might seem to salvage the causal power otherwise lost through its excision of matter, but, as pointed out in the previous section, constitutive structure is not actually licensed on Analytic Idealism’s own terms, so nothing is actually salvaged here.

Now, it might be contended that Analytic Idealism, in addition to experience, recognises the reality of volition – “freewill”, the primary cause of the universal mind’s “motion” – which in combination with experience suffices for causal efficacy.

This contention fails though, for the same general reason: just as experience is contingent on, and thus cannot exist in the absence of, an experient, so will is contingent on, and thus cannot exist in the absence of, a willer (experient). Thus, the sort of will-in-itself proposed by Analytic Idealism is not even tenable (realisable) in the first place, let alone capable of independent causal efficacy.

Lest it be counter-asserted that its existence is not merely of itself, but that it is rather a property (or faculty) of the universal subject, recall that the universal subject is itself only nominal, not real, and thus that there is nothing real of which the universal will could be a (real) property or faculty, and, furthermore, even granting the universal will status as a nominal property or faculty of the nominal universal subject, that subject lacks any other mental faculties (on which, more below) for the informed, intelligent exercise of that will.

Moreover, along these same lines, another problem with a merely nominal experient in this context is that no entity exists to coherently bind together volition and experience; as contingent phenomena in the absence of that upon which they are contingent, they remain free-floating and isolated – abstractions in a sense.

Thus, on Analytic Idealism, there can be no causal efficacy at all. The next section shows that this is the case even on its own explicit terms.

🔗 The broader lack of causal efficacy

The above establishes that given that only a thing-in-itself can be causally efficacious, and that experience is not a thing-in-itself, therefore causal efficacy is lacking on Analytic Idealism, and moreover that “freewill” cannot rescue it. Nevertheless, it is worth pointing out that causal efficacy is anyway denied on Analytic Idealism: causality is in a sense nominal, like the experient.

On page 160 of AIIAN, causal reality is described in the metaphorical terms of watching a moving object (a cat) through fence slats:

But what about causality? Its central tenet is that effect follows cause in time, so what are we to make of it without extension? Philosopher Alan Watts once proposed a metaphor to illustrate the answer: imagine that you are looking through a vertical slit on a wooden fence. On the other side of the fence, a cat walks by. From your perspective, you first see the cat’s head and then, a moment later, the cat’s tail. This repeats itself consistently every time the cat walks by. If you didn’t know what is actually going on—i.e., the existence of the complete pattern called a ‘cat’—you would understandably think that the head causes the tail.

Behind extension, the universe is the complete pattern of semantic or cognitive associations—i.e., the complete cat. Our ordinary traversing of spacetime is our looking through the slit in the fence, experiencing partial segments of that pattern. All we see is that the cat’s tail consistently follows the cat’s head every time we look. And we call it ‘causality.’

The point here seems to be that there is only a sequence of perceptions of moments or slices of a prefigured, fully-formed, and whole reality, none of which is causally determined by any prior nor subsequent moment or slice; there is only the appearance, but not the reality, of causation.

Ultimately, then, the causal coherence of reality as a whole is left unexplained. While there is nothing within reality that could have coherently ordered reality, there is also, more importantly, nothing outside of experience that could do or have done so, noting that, on Analytic Idealism, experience includes all spacetime (supposedly, but in reality another instance of the equivocation).

The apparent causal coherence of reality, then, simply has to be presupposed on Analytic Idealism, as a sort of preharmonisation somewhat similar to that of Leibniz’s monadology. Unlike for Leibniz’s monadology, however, on Analytic Idealism there is no God outside of space and time to perform this preharmonisation.

Many of the problems subsequently described in this critique are essentially consequences of this absence both of causal efficacy and of even an accounting for apparently-causal ordering. The first of those, described in the next section, pertains to dissociation.

🔗 The causal (and structural) prohibition on dissociation

It follows from the absence of causal efficacy established above that nothing is capable of causing experience to dissociate into subsets (“psyches”). While dissociated psyches along with some merely apparent causal mechanism for their origination could simply be assumed, it would have to be as a brute fact, because, as also pointed out above, Analytic Idealism lacks the concept of any preharmonising agent outside of spacetime such as Leibniz had in God. Such a brute fact given the complex causal mechanisms involved is simply not believable.

Additionally, even the coherent appearance of a causal mechanism for dissociation is untenable given that, as pointed out above, experience is not constitutively structured, and thus cannot be individuated via some dynamic process of restructuring.

Thus, dissociated psyches can only be assumed as a brute fact without even the appearance of a causal origin story. This strays far from the parsimony and concomitant plausibility that motivate Analytic Idealism.

Note carefully also in the event of the retort, “But given the empirical existence of dissociative identity disorder (DID) out there in the real world, there must be a mechanism, so this problem is – somehow – necessarily misconceived”, that this retort simply begs the question that DID is explained via an analogous process as is dissociation on Analytic Idealism, and thus it does not withstand the argument developed in this critique against that process. Viable explanations of DID are possible outside of the monistic paradigm of Analytic Idealism.

As a side note, this problem is briefly recapitulated in Appendix C: The decombination problem under The causal-inefficacy mechanistic decombination problem.

🔗 The problem of accounting for mental faculties

Another set of problems arises in attempting to account for various of our mental faculties on Analytic Idealism, as follows.

🔗 The subconscious

An attempt to account for the subconscious is made via the notion of unreportable experiences: on this account, the subconscious is really conscious, but we lack introspective (“metacognitive” or “meta-conscious”) access to those (our) experiences, and so we cannot “re-represent” them, or, in other words (on my paraphrasing) “experience that we are experiencing them”, so to speak.

On analysis though, it turns out that rather than these “experiences” being unreportable, they are simply unreported: they can be reported on when we choose to pay attention to them, e.g., when we become aware of our breathing to which we had hitherto not being paying any attention (there are edge cases such as blindsight, in which we might not strictly be capable of choosing to pay attention to the unreported “experience”, but such edge cases don’t ultimately invalidate the analysis below, especially given that they are anyway readily accounted for via the intuitive alternative presented further below).

The (disentangled) idea here is that we are “really” experiencing these non-meta-conscious experiences even though we aren’t but could be if we paid attention to them. It is blatantly incoherent when put like that, but I do think that that’s a fair rendering of the idea after disentanglement, albeit one that adherents of Analytic Idealism are unlikely to be comfortable with. A more sensible rendering doesn’t seem possible given that Bernardo explicitly distinguishes “unreportable” experiences from “dissociated” experiences, and a reductive explanation of “unreportable” experiences in terms of dissociation seems to be the only candidate for a more sensible rendering.

The references in this context, then, to “re-representing” experiences and even to “reportability” and “meta-”consciousness or “metacognition” are a red herring: what is really being referred to here is simply that which is actually being experienced, not to (re-)“representations” of any experience(s) nor to “reports” of experience(s) nor even to any “meta” mode of experience; these are irrelevant diversions because, while we could, through metacognition, become meta-conscious of any experience we actually are having, and thereby re-represent or report on it, this applies universally, to all of our experiences; it is not a special case for any subset of them.

On a more intuitive model then, these “experiences” (that, incoherently, aren’t really being experienced) are in fact not experiences (which is why they’re not really being experienced) but mental states of a real mind. When the mind is real and not (as on Analytic Idealism) misdefined as merely a set of phenomenal experiences, then it can have real states that need not be experienced when attention is not placed on them.

The intuitive idea here is that these mental states undergird experience: they are a precursor to it but do not entail it. When attention is not placed on them, they do not blossom into experience; they simply form part of a subconscious mental process. As a precursor though, they clearly have experience-like qualities, because even when we are not paying attention to them, we can sometimes project our attention back into the very recent past where we can recall them as though we had experienced them. For example, if we are in a conversation but briefly drift off into a reverie of thought, and then snap back to attention and try to recall what our friend has been saying to us while we drifted off, we can sometimes grasp onto a few recent words and project ourselves backwards a little as though we actually had heard them consciously.

More generally, this more intuitive model affirms the reality of the self, which “clothes” itself, so to speak, in its (also real) mind, by and through which it both undergoes mental states and experiences, and expresses its will, along with all of its other faculties.

In limiting this essay to a critique, it does not elaborate much beyond this on that alternative intuitive model.

🔗 Recollection

A more challenging faculty to explain on Analytic Idealism is recollection, given that there is no mind in which to store memories; there is only experience. It might seem to be explained via psychic-like means, as the current subset of experience “reaching out” towards and apprehending – directly – a past subset of experiences in its own causal history, but experience is not the sort of phenomenon that can actively reach out and apprehend; rather, it can at best be the outcome of a mind that does so (and that then undergoes it).

It might then be contended that the past experiences project themselves into the recollecting experiences, but this does not work for a similar reason: experiences as such do not have that capacity; they are, as discussed above, causally active only in virtue (by proxy) of a mind that undergoes them, a mind that is missing on Analytic Idealism. Too, this violates the intuitive reality of the passing of time, by which long past events cannot directly affect the present.

🔗 Memory

As suggested by the preceding, memory itself does not seem to even exist on Analytic Idealism: while memories can be experienced (in the form of recollection), they can’t be experience.

🔗 Reasoning

Another challenging faculty to explain on Analytic Idealism is reasoning. Without a real mind capable of guiding the reasoning, nor even brain-matter with its corresponding causal power, it is unclear how and why any subset of experience would faithfully represent a chain of reasoning.

🔗 Intelligence

If reasoning in particular is challenging to explain on Analytic Idealism, then intelligence in general is even more so, given that experience is not in itself causally efficacious. There is, then, no reason for one subset of experience (noting again the incoherence of disunified experience in the first place) to lead in any particular direction over time, let alone in an intelligent one.

🔗 The problematic accounting for the physical self

Moving from accounting for mental faculties to accounting for the so-called physical self also leads, as might be expected, to difficult problems on this idealistic paradigm.

🔗 The brain

The reductive problem here has been pointed out already, above.

🔗 Sensory perception

Here, the relevant question is: how can one psyche – a set of experiences – perceive, albeit after translation, the pre-dissociated set of experiences of mind-at-large that underlie the “physical” world?

The basic answer is simply: it can’t. Analytic Idealism lacks any ontological means by which a transfer capable of yielding sensory perception could occur at all.

This is again because experience absent a real experient has no causal power. Thus, neither perceiver nor object of perception (both mere experiences, albeit dissociated) can affect the other.

This rules out the basic justification typically given for the possibility of perception on Analytic Idealism: that the contents of a single, albeit dissociated, mind are accessible across dissociative boundaries in virtue of it being, ultimately, a singular mind. That mind is merely nominal, nothing more than the experiences themselves.

It also rules out another possibility: some sort of psychic-like, mind-to-mind transfer. Similarly, there are no real minds who could possess and exercise psychic abilities.

Sensory organs, too, only make sense in a structured reality of extended stuff, which travels into and through those organs, not in a reality of pure (non-extended) experience.

🔗 The (remainder of the) body

The difference between the rest of the body and the brain, which, headaches and the like aside, is not directly experienced personally by the brain’s “proprietor” (so to speak), is that, when we pay attention, we can directly experience the rest of our bodies directly, except in rare cases like quadriplegia.

When we aren’t paying attention though, our bodies continue to exist in the sense that their metabolic processes continue and other people can perceive them. For this reason, Analytic Idealists propose that they are accounted for as dissociated experiences within psyches (which themselves are already dissociated).

Then, when we direct our attention at our body (feeling, for example, the tension of a muscle, or the beat of our heart, or the expansion of our lungs as we inhale), we must perceive via a similar, although more intimately connected, mechanism as that by which we perceive the “external” “physical” world. As pointed out above though, such a mechanism does not exist.

Our bodies, then, cannot affect us, nor we them. Not only is their metabolism redundant, but our existence is independent of it. Heart attacks are imprisoned cells.

🔗 Conclusion

As a modern variant of idealism that treats science, and the physical sciences in particular, as seriously as does its ideological adversary, materialism (aka physicalism), Analytic Idealism positions itself as a meaningful alternative to that ideology for those whose self-identified rational bent would otherwise lead them to adopt it.

Its ultimate failure then to position itself as a coherent alternative to materialism’s incoherence is all the more significant and deserving of attention in the marketplace of ideas on consciousness.

Its incoherence arises out of its taking experience to be all that exists, such that it thus arguably treats experience as a substance (in the philosophical sense[3]) when it is not one. Its incoherence manifests more specifically in the following forms:

Given that incoherence is fatal, the argument from parsimony for Analytic Idealism of course could not and thus does not supersede nor outweigh these problems.

On a generous reading of its less dogmatic forms, materialism asks, “Why bother with experiencing minds that are embodied in matter? Let’s cut out the middleman and just say that the matter itself experiences.” Panpsychism agrees, adding, “Yes, and all matter experiences.” Analytic Idealism replies, “I’ll take all of that and go you guys one better. I’m cutting out the matter too.”

Analytic Idealists are right that materialism breaks something and panpsychism doesn’t fix it. Their own fix only makes things worse though.

🔗 Appendix A: What is Analytic Idealism?

Note that this summary presents Analytic Idealism as charitably as possible, that is, as, and in the sort of terms that, an advocate might present it. The body of the critique explores the problem with this presentation on those terms.

Analytic Idealism is a theory advanced by the philosopher – among other things – Bernardo Kastrup. It posits that all that exists at the fundamental level of reality is mind, that the matter we perceive doesn’t in fact exist beyond (all-inclusive) perception, and that, despite there being many of us, only one mind truly exists.

In more detail, it posits that:

The fundamental substrate of reality is the medium of mind, a void that, paradoxically, vibrates. These vibrations are experience. They are caused by freewill, an intrinsic, basic, and irreducible property of the medium of mind. Freewill is not itself an experience, and nor can it be experienced directly, only indirectly, via its effects on experience.

This all-encompassing mind is referred to as universal mind (as distinct from “mind-at-large” – see below).

There is nothing to mind beyond these vibrations, and thus nothing to mind beyond experience. If, then, the medium of mind was to stop vibrating, and thus there was no experience, then mind would in a meaningful sense cease to exist, at least until the vibrations resumed.

Nevertheless, the other intrinsic property of the medium of mind is its basic, core selfhood, the “undressed, naked, ‘amorphous I’” (page 198 of WMIB).

Via complex, dynamic structures into which the vibrations have formed, personal minds, including our own, have dissociated (“decombined” more typically in the broader literature) from it. Each of these (each of us) consists in only the proper subset of vibrations that has so been structured, and is referred to as a psyche or, borrowing again from psychiatric terminology with respect to dissociative identity disorder (DID), as an alter. (A side note for those unaware: DID was formerly known as multiple personality disorder (MPD).)

The subject of all psyches is nevertheless identical: the referent of every “I” is “the sole subject of existence” (page 198 of WMIB); that is to say that the universal mind’s core selfhood is itself universal. All psyches are in this sense the same mind.

Nevertheless, for each psyche, the subset of experience via which it dissociates is not all that exists, and, in this sense, despite affirming the existence of only a single subject of a single mind, Analytic Idealism denies solipsism, the theory that there is no reality beyond that of any given psyche (such as the reader).

Each psyche appears to other psyches as a metabolising organism (a living body), which thus is the representation of the dissociated experiences (“vibrations”) of which a psyche is constituted.

The remaining subset of the universal mind which has not dissociated, mind-at-large, is the ultimate referent of that external, otherwise seemingly material world that we describe with physics. As mind, there is something that it is like to be it. Nevertheless, its own subjective experiences are not what we psyches ourselves perceive directly as the external world. Rather, its vibrations (experiences) impinge upon our own metabolic boundaries via our sensory organs, and we perceive it (via its “vibrations”) in an encoded and condensed form that has been optimised by evolutionary processes for our survival needs.

Despite all of the references to vibrations and structure, (the medium of) mind in fact does not consist in any sort of “stuff”, not even “mind stuff”, and nor is it even extended.

Rather than entailing the existence of any sort of “stuff”, these vibrations and structure refer to that which truly is simply experience as we understand it, in the sense of subjective perception, thoughts, and feelings, etc (albeit that the experiences of mind-at-large would probably seem very foreign to us were they to be our own).

Despite not being extended, (the medium of) mind is nevertheless structured – as it must be given the differentiation in reality – but this structure is not spatiotemporal; its structure is more like that of elements in a set (in set theory) or of entries in a database system, in which semantic units exist in relation to one another.

Following on from that, and as it suggests, (the medium of) mind is neither in nor subject to either space or time. Rather, space and time are within – are aspects of – (the medium of) mind and its “vibrations”, and, in a sense even, (the medium of) mind simply is spacetime.

In this sense, too, the medium of mind is analogous – or even identical – to the unified field of quantum field theory.

🔗 Primary reference works

My main (but not sole) references for the above summation are the Kindle editions of these three books by Bernardo:

In this critique, I refer to them (in their Kindle editions), respectively, as WMIB, TIOTW, and AIIAN. (Incidental note: at time of writing, TIOTW in fact isn’t quoted from nor otherwise referenced).

🔗 Appendix B: In context as a monistic idealism

(Note: Mostly, I have restricted philosophical jargon to this appendix and Appendix C: The decombination problem. That jargon and this section can be skimmed over or skipped if it doesn’t interest you).

As a form of monistic idealism, close relatives if not synonyms of Analytic Idealism are those other monistic idealisms going by (non-exhaustively):

By “monistic idealism” I mean an ontological aka metaphysical idealism that goes beyond being a substance[3] monism – which all ontological idealisms are via their affirmation that only one type of substance, the mental, exists – to also being an existence monism or at least a priority monism, via its affirmation that only one token of that substance – a mind – exists, allowing in the case of priority monism a plurality of derivative minds that nevertheless is fully grounded in that singular mind.

For further clarity: Analytic Idealism seems pretty clearly to present itself in terms that would make it an existence monism if they were taken at face value (although I am not aware of anywhere that this is made explicit), whereas cosmopsychism is explicitly a priority monism (at least as defended by Itay Shani).

Some of the relevant features that these sort of monistic idealisms have in common are that each of them is simultaneously a monism about:

One metaphor typically given to explain the posited common identity between a singular mind, a singular self aka subject, consciousness, and experience is that experience is “mind in motion” like a wave is “water in motion”: just as the wave is nothing more than a dynamic pattern of water, and in that sense is identical to the water, so experience is nothing more than a dynamic pattern of mind (as consciousness aka the singular self/subject) and in that sense is identical to mind (again, as consciousness aka the singular self/subject). One caveat given this metaphor is that mind can – at least theoretically – be at rest, in which case there is no experience (as noted already in Appendix A: What is Analytic Idealism?).

As a substance monism, monistic idealism is not to be confused with physicalism aka materialism, which, although also a substance monism, takes the single category of being in reality to be matter rather than mind (and which has fatal problems of its own).

🔗 Appendix C: The decombination problem

Prefatory note: I have relegated this problem to an appendix because, although notorious, I have come to see that it mostly misses the mark: mostly, it assumes a real experient who undergoes experiences, whereas on Analytic Idealism, the experient is merely nominal, and the experiences are all that really exist. Therefore, a real experient has to be conditionally assumed for it to work.

Analytic Idealism thus mostly has the means to respond adequately on its own terms, albeit that those terms of course include the fundamental incoherence of experience absent a real experient, to which Analytic Idealism has no adequate defence beyond denying the purely nominal nature of its experient, in which case it wouldn’t have the means to respond adequately to the decombination problem on its own terms after all.

In any case, the response available to it is presented after the presentation of the problem and its sub-problems.

In the philosophical literature, “the decombination problem” is sometimes also referred to as the “decomposition”, “derivation”, or “fragmentation” problem. These terms are all at least roughly equivalent with the preferred term on Analytic Idealism, “dissociation”.

Some of the – fairly similar – ways in which various scholars have characterised this broad and rather vague problem, of unclear scope, are that it “concerns the derivation of subjects from the absolute”[4], “asks how the cosmic consciousness can be built from medium-size individual consciousnesses”[5], and poses the questions, “How could medium-size individual consciousnesses be derived from the cosmic consciousness?”[5] and, (my editing brackets) “[H]ow can a subject and its experience decompose into other subjects and their experiences?”[6]

I have categorised it into two main sub-problems: the numerical decombination problem, premised on the existence of decombined experients (“psyches” or “alters”), and deriving a contradiction from their existence with that of the singular experient (“the universal mind”), and the mechanistic decombination problem, which in contrast shows that the necessary conditions under which these decombined experients could come into existence in the first place are not satisfied.

The subcategorising (dare I suggest decombining?) of the problem in this way, and the names I have given to the subcategories and their instances, are my own invention.

🔗 The numerical decombination problem (singularity ≠ plurality)

The problem: Whereas Analytic Idealism posits a singular experient (the universal mind), at the same time it posits a plurality of experients (mind-at-large and the psyches), and the only coherent solution to this contradiction – that what seems to be is not in fact the case, and, rather, that metaphysical solipsism is the case – is ruled out by definition.

The numerical decombination problem can be formulated or instantiated in more particular ways. The three formulations of which I’m aware are those with respect to the structure of phenomenal experience, the stream of phenomenal experience, and subjective perspective. These formulations follow.

🔗 The structural numerical decombination problem (homogeneity ≠ heterogeneity)

The problem: The posited singular experient (the universal mind) must be structurally homogeneous (lacking internal boundaries) so as to qualify as singular, yet it must simultaneously be structurally heterogeneous (containing internal boundaries) given that there are simultaneously multiple (dissociated) experients (mind-at-large and the psyches, each of which must itself be structurally homogeneous so as to qualify as a coherent experient of its own). This is contradictory: structural homogeneity is inconsistent with structural heterogeneity.

Clarification: By way of explanation, consider two phenomenal experiences, such as of eating a plum and of listening to the radio. These can be experienced either separately or together. When experienced together, they are unified, and consciousness (as phenomenal experience) is structurally homogeneous, with no internal boundaries (but presumably or at least potentially an outer boundary). When experienced separately, they are disunified, and consciousness (as phenomenal experience) is structurally heterogeneous, with internal boundaries (which serve as outer boundaries for distinct experients).

Source: The Decombination Problem for Cosmopsychism is not the Heterogeneity Problem for Priority Monism by Gregory Miller.

🔗 The streaming numerical decombination problem (streams ≠ stream)

The problem: A necessary condition for the posited singular experient (the universal mind) to be consistent with the plurality of experients (mind-at-large and the psyches) is that the stream of phenomenal experience of each experient be identical with that of all others, and include literally everything being experienced by every experient, but this condition does not obtain: not all of us have, and probably none of us has, a stream of phenomenal experience that includes literally everything being experienced by everybody. In particular, we do not each experience the contents of each other’s stream of phenomenal experience. This necessary condition not being met, the posited singular experient is, therefore, not consistent with the plurality of experients.

Source: Is noetic monism tenable? by Titus Rivas, which also lists potential refutations and explains why each fails.

See also: Post #5, by me, in the Essentia Foundation: It’s Time for Mindful physics! thread on the Psience Quest forums, which includes an explanation of the failure of an additional potential refutation based on multiple timelines and/or time-travelling.

🔗 The perspectival numerical decombination problem (perspective ≠ perspectives)

The argument: The experience of each psyche entails its subjective perspective, but when the posited singular experient (the universal mind) is also the subject of that experience, then the same subjective perspective is entailed for it, and thus its subjective perspective is a (conflicting) plurality. A singular experient’s subjective perspective is also by definition singular though. This is contradictory: an experient’s subjective perspective cannot be both singular and plural.

Note: This argument includes a controversial premise: that the universal self experiences the experiences of its dissociated experients (psyches). In practice, an Analytic Idealist might want to deny this premise, but then, (s)he would be implicitly denying that there is only one experient, because if there is only one experient to undergo experiences, then that one experient must experience everything that is being experienced.

Elaboration: This argument is also premised on the affirmation that an experient’s (unique) subjective perspective is entailed by the (unique) experience it is undergoing. This might not seem obvious at first, but it does seem to be the case: experience is all that exists on Analytic Idealism, and so there is nothing else that could entail an experient’s subjective perspective.

Potential response: Itay Shani’s defence[4] against the decombination problem, while not perfectly relevant here, is most relevant here given that he is most concerned with the decombination problem as it pertains to perspectives. Here is my summary of his defence, and my translation of it in context:

The problem framing: While recognising a broader decombination problem, Itay Shani focusses on the decombination problem as the problem of how the perspectives of decombined experients could compose the perspective of the singular experient, or, framed in reverse, the problem of how the perspective of the singular experient decomposes into the perspectives of decombined experients. Hence, his preferred nomenclature is the “decomposition” problem.

His counter-assertion: No perspective does either compose, nor decompose from, any other perspective: the perspective of each decombined experient, he contends, is only “partially” grounded in (and by) the perspective of the (non-decombined) singular experient. In other words, the fact that the singular experient has a perspective, while relevant, does not fully ground the fact that decombined experients have perspectives.

Its applicability: The closest – though not exact – match for the argument against which Itay is counter-asserting out of those I’ve presented is this one, the perspectival numerical decombination problem. Whereas his counter-assertion is premised on plural perspectives “composing” the singular perspective, this perspectival numerical decombination is based on the closely-related idea that each plural perspective must instantiate as the singular perspective.

His counter-assertion thus needs some translating to apply it to this argument. Perhaps Itay might say something like this: just as the singular experient’s perspective only partially grounds the plural perspectives, so the conditions of each plural experient that give rise to its perspective only partially apply to the singular experient, and thus the singular experient need not instantiate each of those plural perspectives.

At this level, it would be difficult to respond in turn to that potential response of Itay’s; we would need to get more specific about the conditions and when and why they do or don’t apply. Analytic Idealism is anyway, as the body of the critique makes clear, already badly incoherent, so it’s all rather hypothetical and academic in the meaningless sense.

🔗 The mechanistic decombination problem

The problems here relate to the lack of a viable mechanism for the dissociation of the universal mind into psyches, either logically, causally, or structurally. These reiterate unconditional problems from the body of the critique, and not (as above) appendix-only problems conditional on assuming a real experient.

🔗 The inverted-contingency mechanistic decombination problem

Taking the supposedly dissociated experients to be real, the logical problem here is that those experients have been brought into existence by the subdivision of experience. This, however, mistakenly inverts the relationship between experient and experience: the experient logically precedes experience, not the other way around; subdividing experience thus cannot bring into existence an experient contingent upon it.

🔗 The causal-inefficacy mechanistic decombination problem

Given the absence of causal efficacy on Analytic Idealism, nothing is capable of causing experience to dissociate into subsets (“psyches”). Given, too, that experience is not structured (it can only be of – i.e., perceived – structure), it is not divisible via dynamic restructuring, and thus cannot even appear to dissociate through a causal mechanism.

This is a terse reiteration of this problem as originally described in the body of the critique.

🔗 The response (mostly) available on Analytic Idealism’s own terms to the decombination problem

The numerical decomination problem and its subvariants assume conventional definitions of “self” and “mind”, in which experients really exist. As pointed out in the first substantive section of the critique above though, on Analytic Idealism’s effective conception, the experient is merely nominal, and its effective definition of “self” aka “mind” is “set of experiences (absent a real experient of them, with nothing but an omnipresent property of subjectivity)”.

On this effective definition, there is no problem with there being both a singular experient (the superset of experience misleadingly referred to as the universal “self”, being the entire “ocean” of experience) as well as plural experients (the multiple dissociated subsets of experience – the “whirlpools” in the ocean – plus the leftover mind-at-large subset of experience), because of course a superset can coherently contain a subset.

It is only when the self is defined conventionally – as real – that this problem is a genuine one, because one real experient cannot at the same time be subdivided into multiple real experients; as the numerical decombination problem rightly points out in all of its forms, that’s truly contradictory.

As emphasised already, the possibility of a coherent response to this problem on Analytic Idealism’s own terms is not to deny that ultimately Analytic Idealism is incoherent due to the problem underlying all of this, the absence of an experient other than in name, concomitant with the problem of trying to reduce all of reality to experience alone.

Appendix D: Metaphorical representations

Analytic Idealism portrays experience using a variety of analogies, which this critique originally discussed and compared here. I have removed that content because it confused – and was otherwise beside – the point, which is that, ultimately, Analytic Idealism needs experience to be structured, no matter how it presents that metaphorically.

🔗 Appendix E: Who am I, why did I write this, and why should it be taken seriously?

In one sense, I’m just a guy on the internet (with an opinion). While I’ve always been fascinated by both consciousness and analytic thought, I have never formally studied either, nor even delved deeply into the literature.

On the more positive side of the ledger, while I abandoned my university degree (in Computer Systems Engineering) after a downward spiral, I was a high-achiever academically prior to that spiral.

Too, this critique is the result of almost a decade – admittedly, very much on-and-off – of grappling with Analytic Idealism: developing ideas, abandoning them, developing new ones, returning to older ones, gathering more context, and refining and honing those which survived scrutiny. I have read and taken notes on the three books Bernardo has written explicitly on Analytic Idealism, as well as having consumed a variety of other media that he has published or been interviewed in.

I am confident that at this point, it is a mature, considered, and – most importantly – fair and honest critique, and probably one that comes from a perspective that not many others have taken in their own critiques of Analytic Idealism.

I decided to write it for two main reasons. The first is that over time, I have deepened my understanding of Analytic Idealism and realised where and why my previous commentary and critique has been inadequate or simply mistaken. As something of a perfectionist, I wanted to gather up all that I’ve learnt and gained insight into, and package it up into one comprehensive, fully up-to-date work.

The second is that reflecting on where and why Analytic Idealism goes wrong is very helpful in my own journey towards clarifying for myself a theory that is “least wrong”. I hope that in this sense, it has been time well spent.

🔗 Footnotes

🔗 Changelog (most recent first)