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: the self is nominal only; it is emptiness; potentiality, not actuality; amorphous; reduced to a “sense of”.

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”, but it becomes clear after some analysis. A good starting point is on p. 153 of 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; any putatively real self is at best a “void”. Note too that it explicitly identifies that (non-distinct) 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 “the medium of mind” – is seen to be mere potentiality, not actuality; mere emptiness (albeit “dancing”) – again, a void. Again, its real (actual) existence apart from experience is explicitly denied.

Finally, consider this from p. 198 of WMIB (my editing brackets):

“[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.”

Here, the referent (“I”) to the self – “the sole subject of existence” – is seen as “amorphous”, and reduced to a “sense of”, where there is nothing real to sense. There is no “there there”, so to speak.

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

The only apparent possibility (endorsed in the above quotes) for a real self on Analytic Idealism is for experience (all that really exists on that theory; same caveat as before) to be the self, but this in fact is not possible, because to be and to undergo (experiences) are two incompatible relations: a self can’t “be” the same experiences that it undergoes; it is logically prior to them.

This is not mere semantics: the lack of a real self to ground experience is the most serious problem with this theory (but not the only problem).

(Feel free to skip the following elaboration if the preceding point is already clear:)

To say that only experience exists, ungrounded by any real self, is like saying that only red exists, with no real object that could be coloured red.

While it is valid to refer to and consider colour or experience in the abstract divorced from object or self (respectively), when colour or experience are not abstract but instantiated, then they require a real object or self with respect to which they are a property of or undergone by (respectively).

In other words, light can be cast on the nature of (being of) experience by comparison to properties or attributes, which have no existence independent of that of which they are a property or attribute: similarly, experience has no existence independent of the experient (self) who undergoes it.

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

🔗 The missing mind

Along similar lines, to the extent that mind and self are distinct (and I think that they are, or at least can be considered to be in certain contexts), Analytic Idealism does not recognise a real mind either, and, similarly, this can be difficult to grasp at first due to all of the lip service paid to the universal mind, mind-at-large, and "mind" in general, etc.

Again, on Analytic Idealism, there is no mind distinct from experience.

The mind, though, like the self, is not its experiences; rather, like the self, it undergoes experiences (and, in a sense, is permeated by – or with – experience). The problem here of the unreal (missing) mind is identical in nature to that of the problem of the unreal (absent) self.

🔗 The inversion problem for plural selves

Sticking with the theme of self: each of the (plurality of) apparent selves (“psyches” or “alters”) in the unitary ocean of experience of which Analytic Idealism conceives is explained as being a subset of that ocean of experience. This ocean is ultimately (in later works) conceived of as akin to a semantic network such as a relational database. An ordinary self such as you or me then is a grouping of related and connected, presumably atomic, elements of experience that persists over time.

This might be tenable if those selves were taken to be real and preexisting, but they are not: they are each taken to be the same, unreal (non-)self, and to be brought into existence by the subdivision of the ocean of experience.

Aside from the previously-noted problem of an unreal (non-)self, one problem here is that, after correcting for real selves, those selves would then have been brought into existence by subdivision. This, however, mistakenly inverts the relationship between self and experience alluded to above: the self precedes experience, not the other way around (to help see why this is so, consider that a self who is temporarily not experiencing can be coherently conceived of, whereas an experience that is not being undergone by an experient (self) cannot – it could be a “proto”experience at best). Subdividing experience, then, cannot in itself give rise to a new self.

🔗 The shift in metaphorical representations

It is worth noting that in earlier works (especially WMIB) on Analytic Idealism by its founder, Bernardo Kastrup, different metaphors than that of a relational semantic network (or database) were used, metaphors that implied or even outright stated (albeit with the qualification that they are just metaphors) that experience is dimensionally extended: whirlpools, vibrating membranes of mirrored tinfoil, etc.

In other words, that which might be referred to as “the extensional representation” has been replaced by the time of AIIAN[2] with that which might be referred to as “the network representation”, in which the nodes in the network might be referred to as “node experiences”.

Although I am not aware of any explicit disclaimer that the earlier extensional representation was misleading, there is a perhaps implicit recognition via the affirmation in the later work that “mentation is not extended” (p. 161, AIIAN); that is, that “you can’t take a tape measure to my next thought” (ibid).

I discuss these different representations in more detail in Appendix D: Metaphorical representations. Despite my having decided that it does not belong in the body of the critique, I do think that its insights are notable and important, so I encourage you to read that appendix.

🔗 The problem of causal experience

Another potential problem with the notion of self-as-subset-of-experience is that it seems to imply that experience is causally active in itself: that due to causal processes in a superset of experience, the effect is the subdivision of that superset into subsets.

I don’t think though that this is the right way to conceive of experience in causal terms. I think that the right view is closer to the right view of concepts and ideas in causal terms: they affect us not in their own right, actively initiating and/or perpetuating causal chains, but rather passively, via our own active engagement with (“reaching out” towards and apprehending) them.

Similarly, although not identically, experience is more passively than actively causal: our minds are the truly active causal agents, engaging with – and permeated by – experience.

🔗 A note on the decombination problem

One notorious problem for Analytic Idealism (and similar monistic idealisms) is the so-called “decombination” problem. I have relegated it to Appendix C: The decombination problem because I have come to realise that it misses the mark: it mistakenly assumes a conventional definition of “self” (in which selves really exist), whereas the effective definition on Analytic Idealism of “self” is “set of experiences (absent a real experient of them)”.

In any case, the previous section and the one two prior allude to one (potentially novel) form of the decombination problem: the “mechanistic” decombination problem as I have termed it, recapitulated in that appendix.

🔗 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 (its) experiences, and so we cannot “experience that we are experiencing them”, so to speak (my paraphrasing).

It is not clear though what makes one experience reportable and another unreportable. Presumably, the idea is that a subset of the (primary) subset of experience which each of us comprises becomes more loosely coupled to (or within) that (primary) subset, making them unreportable by the (primary) subset due to the loose coupling.

This, though, is the same process by which individual selves (“psyches”) are said to come into being (to become differentiated; to “dissociate”) in the first place. It seems, then, that, after correcting again for real selves, the subconscious on Analytic Idealism is a separate – though connected – self, and not strictly the (a) same self that any one of us otherwise is.

Although this is not in and of itself incoherent, it is unintuitive, and a more intuitive model is available, following up on the elaboration foreshadowed above.

What I mean by its being unintuitive is that it entails that there is a self – or selves – similar to our own self “shadowing” us, or maybe even popping into and out of existence as the need arises. Consider, for example, driving a car and going into a reverie. In that scenario, some other self – the (or a) subconscious-but-really-conscious self – takes over the driving while you entertain yourself with thought. Whether it just springs into existence as you start to drift off (in which case, the curious questions of just how far into the reverie you had to get before it was created – what precisely triggered its creation – and what the precise mechanism is by which it is so suddenly brought into being on demand are raised), or whether it was there all along, waiting to take over (in which case, the curious questions of what it was doing or thinking while it waited, and how the transfer of control of the vehicle is effected are raised), this is kind of weird, unexpected, and needlessly difficult to account for.

The 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 experiences and expresses its will, along with all of its other faculties.

On this more conventional view, not only can the self temporarily cease to experience, but it can also undergo subconscious mental processes which are truly not consciously – even albeit unreportedly – experienced.

🔗 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 experiences are not the sort of phenomenon that can actively reach out and apprehend; rather, they can at best be the outcome of a mind that does so (and that then undergoes them).

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 passive rather than causally active. Too, this seems to violate 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, 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, as I contend, that experience is not in itself causally efficacious in an active sense. Given this contention, there is no reason for one subset of experience to lead in any particular direction over time, let alone in an intelligent one.

🔗 The problematic (non-)accounting for causal efficacy

More generally, even if it is not granted that experience is not causally active, causal efficacy anyway seems to be denied on Analytic Idealism. On p. 160 of AIIAN, the experiences of any given self are described in (the metaphorical) terms of watching a moving object (a cat) through fence slats.

The point seems to be that there is only a sequence of prefigured moments or slices of perceived reality, none of which is causally determined by any prior (nor subsequent) moment/slice; there is only the appearance, but not the reality, of causation.

Unless I’m misinterpreting this imagery, it raises a problem in itself: the coherence of reality as a whole is left unexplained. At first glance, there is nothing outside of experience – noting that, on Analytic Idealism, experience includes all spacetime – that could have coherently ordered reality, but nor is there anything within reality that could do (or have done) so either.

At second glance though, it might be contended that Analytic Idealism, in addition to experience, recognises the reality of volition – of the (free) will – and that volition in combination with experience is sufficient to explain all mental faculties and the coherence of reality.

On this contention, the universal will orders reality (the ocean of experience, subdivided) such that it appears to be causal.

Whilst, perhaps, this is not strictly incoherent, it is unintuitive and implausible, for at least three reasons:

Firstly, because we experience our will as personal, not universal; secondly, because will seems, like experience, to be contingent on a self, a real one of which, again, is missing on Analytic Idealism; thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, because a will operating in a sense in isolation – that is, absent a real mind – does not appear to have the requisite cognitive and psychic resources to order anything coherently.

To elaborate on the latter: just as memory can be experienced but cannot be experience, so as for knowledge – which is predicated on memory-like storage. Thus, like memory, knowledge does not seem to exist on Analytic Idealism. Without knowledge, though – not to mention intelligence, which, per the above, also seems to be lacking on this theory – volition (the universal free will) has nothing to operate with in coherently ordering the network of experience.

🔗 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

Even the easiest entity – as the bridge between the mental and the physical – the brain, is challenging to account for, but, in any case, it foreshadows problems to come.

The brain on Analytic Idealism does not exist in a conventional sense: as a physical, mind-independent lump of wet tissue. Rather, it “exists” solely as an image in the perceptual experience of its percipient(s), and the perceived image mirrors (after some sort of translation) the set of experiences of the psyche whose “brain” is being perceived.

Several questions raised here are:

  1. How does one psyche – a set of experiences – perceive, albeit after translation, the disconnected (“dissociated”) set of experiences that is another psyche?

  2. In virtue of what is the brain image (relatively) consistent over time?

  3. Why, given the great variety of different experiences, does the brain image not seem to reflect that variety in any overt way?

  4. (Related to the above) Why, given its free will, does the brain image appear to generally follow the mostly deterministic laws uncovered by physics?

The first question pertains to the foreshadowed problems, and is not unique to the brain, so it is deferred to the next section on sensory perception (which could as well have been considered with mental faculties; it, too, is a sort of bridging phenomenon), and the remainder seem best left as rhetorical, except that question #4 is referenced again later.

🔗 Sensory perception

Here, potential answers to question #1 in the above section are considered.

At the highest level, the answer seems to necessarily include some sort of psychic-like, mind-to-mind transfer given that “mind” – really, experience – is all that exists, and is explicitly not a type of extended stuff, but rather akin to a semantic network of (dissociated) experience(s).

The existence, then, of sensory organs seems strange in itself. What need is there for them when perception is psychic in nature? They seem to make sense only in a physical reality that does consist in extended stuff, which “travels” into and through those organs, not in a reality of pure experience.

Too, as already noted: as with the self, there are no real minds on Analytic Idealism; a “mind” is merely a set of experiences, which do not leave open the possibility of – or at least make it convoluted to explain – true mental faculties, including psychic ones.

Even assuming that somehow these “minds” are psychic when it comes to sensory perception, that perception is difficult to explain. At a high level, Analytic Idealism proposes that the external “physical” world consists in the experiences of mind-at-large, which psyches (the “dissociated” personal selves like you and me) perceive after some sort of translation.

While it is impossible – per the tenets of Analytic Idealism itself – to know what mind-at-large’s experiences actually are, those experiences and the sensory perception of them seem to need to be something like this:

Its experience of the world is or implicitly includes a complex conceptual model, constantly updated in time in a manner consistent with the laws of physics, which themselves are part of the conceptual model. It is aware of the perspective on that model of each of the psyches (“dissociated” selves), and, for each psyche, it customises its conceptual model into an appropriate (contextualised) perceptual experience from that psyche’s perspective, which it then transfers telepathically to that psyche.

There is a variety of reasons why this is implausible aside from the above-mentioned redundancy of sensory organs:

🔗 The (remainder of the) body

As for the brain, the body does not exist in a conventional sense, only as an image in perceptual experience.

The difference with the brain, which, headaches and the like aside, is not directly experienced personally by the brain’s “proprietor” (so to speak), is that we do directly experience (the rest of) our bodies directly, and at will, except in rare cases like quadriplegia.

In combination with the similarity of accounting for the body on Analytic Idealism with that of accounting for the subconscious – that when we are not consciously experiencing it through our attention, the body is anyway being consciously experienced, albeit that we cannot report on those experiences – the overall accounting for the body on Analytic Idealism is at the very least strained.

It seems, again, that there must be some dissociated self or selves that either preexist(s) or is (are) created as needed to form the subset of experience of which the body – or its parts – is the external image perceived by the senses.

The same problems of unintuitiveness and implausibility ensue here as for the subconscious.

In addition, though, unlike for the subconscious, there is the problem that the body is not a purely internal phenomenon, but is perceived as an external image, an image the intricacy, detail, and complexity of which we do not capture in our conscious experience, even when we focus our attention on it.

Presumably, then, all of that must be captured in the unreported conscious experience, which, again, as for the subconscious, presumably consists in a dissociated (sub)self. It seems, then, that this (sub)self must persist, so as to maintain the complex flow of experience of which the body is the representation in perception.

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 perceive in a similar way in which we perceive the “external” “physical” world: through some sort of psychic, mind-to-mind process of translation from some other self (subset of experience), in this case a (sub)self dissociated from our primary self; in the case of the “external” world, mind-at-large.

This is even less intuitive and less plausible than the accounting for the subconscious: here, we are in a meaningful sense cut off – dissociated – from our own bodies.

Too, it is not even clear on this accounting why our bodies appear to function as they do if they are simply dissociated experiences with which our primary experience is intimately connected. What is the heart really, beyond its image, such that, should its image stop beating, we, the primary subset of experience connected to that dissociated subset of experience which includes whatever is behind the image of that now-still heart, cease to experience? What is it about that experience that is capable of causing the cessation of another experience?

More generally, what is the point of all of that complexity? If experience is all that exists, then what need of a body with the appearance of something beyond experience? Why the appearance of biology and physiology which in fact seems to be necessary for our existence here when it needn’t have been?

🔗 The problem of lawful continuity

It is worth taking inspiration from question #4 above under The brain at this point. There seem to be at least four domains of experience that the preceding critique has uncovered:

  1. The experiences of mind-at-large (which are translated into perceptions by psyches of the “physical” world).

  2. The reportable conscious experiences of each psyche (having the image of a brain when “externally” perceived by a psyche).

  3. The subconscious-but-really-conscious experiences of each psyche (unreportable by that psyche, but presumably also included in the image of his/her brain).

  4. The conscious experiences associated with each psyche’s body (but also unreportable by that psyche).

Now, each of these is in some sense dissociated from the others. At the same time, Analytic Idealism affirms the laws of physics, which thus must be continuous across all four domains. This seems to be contradictory, and is at the very least in need of cogent explanation.

More generally, why the laws of physics should apply across all four domains is in need of explanation given Analytic Idealism’s affirmation of free will, echoing that earlier question #4 in a broader context.

🔗 The virtues of Analytic Idealism

As a response to the intellectual vices of materialism (aka physicalism), Analytic Idealism succeeds in ways in which that theory fails: by elevating consciousness to primacy, it dissolves the so-called “hard problem” that so bedevils materialism, and it recognises and takes seriously first-person experience without trying to reduce it to – nor to identify it with – something which it is not.

As a modern variant of idealism – perhaps the preeminent one – that treats science, and the physical sciences in particular, as seriously as its ideological adversary does, it positions itself as a meaningful alternative to that ideology for those whose rational bent would otherwise lead them to adopt it.

These strengths make its deficiencies all the more significant and deserving of attention.

🔗 Summing up

The core, and, in my view, decisive problem with Analytic Idealism is that it not only treats experience as a substance (in the philosophical sense[3]) when it is not one, but also as the only substance. Further problems – arguably also decisive – arise from trying to account for all of reality solely in terms of conscious experience. The argument from parsimony for Analytic Idealism neither supersedes nor outweighs these problems, and more intuitive and plausible theories of consciousness and its relationship with reality are in any case available.

🔗 Appendix A: What is Analytic Idealism?

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’” (p. 198, 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” (p. 198, 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.

🔗 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, but do note the second-last paragraph, because the basic metaphor referenced in it is referenced in the main critique as “the ocean of experience”).

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 be an existence monism (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: As indicated above (see A note on the decombination problem), I have relegated this problem to an appendix because, although notorious, I have come to see that it misses the mark. Elaborating on my comments in that above section: if “self” is defined – as, in effect, it is on Analytic Idealism – as “set of experiences (absent a real experient of them)”, then there is no problem with there being both a singular self (the superset of experience aka “the universal self”) as well as plural selves (the multiple dissociated subsets plus the “left over” mind-at-large subset). It is only when the self is defined conventionally – as real – that this problem is a genuine one (because one real self cannot at the same time be subdivided into multiple real selves; that’s truly contradictory). That is not to deny that there remains a problem underlying all of this, because, of course, the very fact that the self is not defined conventionally, and in fact is absent other than in name, on Analytic Idealism, is a (the main) problem in itself.

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 selves (“psyches” or “alters”), and deriving a contradiction from their existence with that of the singular self (“the universal mind”), and the mechanistic decombination problem, which in contrast shows that the necessary condition under which these decombined selves could come into existence in the first place is 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 self (the universal mind), at the same time it posits a plurality of selves (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 self (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) selves (mind-at-large and the psyches, each of which must itself be structurally homogeneous so as to qualify as a coherent self 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 selves).

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 self (the universal mind) to be consistent with the plurality of selves (mind-at-large and the psyches) is that the stream of phenomenal experience of each self be identical with that of all others, and include literally everything being experienced by every self, 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 self is, therefore, not consistent with the plurality of selves.

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 self (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 self's subjective perspective is also by definition singular though. This is contradictory: a self'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 selves (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 self (and, equivalently, only one mind), because if there is only one self and mind to undergo experiences, then that one self and mind must experience everything that is being experienced.

Elaboration: This argument is also premised on the affirmation that a self'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 a self'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 selves could compose the perspective of the singular self, or, framed in reverse, the problem of how the perspective of the singular self decomposes into the perspectives of decombined selves. 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 self, he contends, is only “partially” grounded in (and by) the perspective of the (non-decombined) singular self. In other words, the fact that the singular self has a perspective, while relevant, does not fully ground the fact that decombined selves 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 self's perspective only partially grounds the plural perspectives, so the conditions of each plural self that give rise to its perspective only partially apply to the singular self, and thus the singular self 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. It is anyway, as I hope is clear from the body of the critique, already challenging - in fact, impossible, I contend - to derive a (subjective) perspective from a mere set of experiences ungrounded by a self, let alone by a mind, so it's all rather hypothetical and academic in the pejorative sense.

🔗 Taking stock after the numerical decombination problem

Where is the Analytic Idealist left after the numerical decombination problem (especially if (s)he recognises in the first place the need for a more than nominal self, and affirms real selfhood)?

At a minimum, (s)he is forced to accept that there must truly be more than one (real) self (and, thus, more than one mind) in existence. (S)he is forced, then, from existence monism into existence pluralism. At this point, though, it seems possible for the Analytic Idealist to nevertheless claim that the plurality of selves and hence minds did and does dissociate out of an originally singular self and mind (the universal mind). The mechanistic decombination problem, next, exposes the vulnerability of that claim.

🔗 The mechanistic decombination problem

The problem here is that there is no viable mechanism for the dissociation of the universal mind into psyches: given that experience is not in itself an active causal agent, yet that on Analytic Idealism it is all that exists, nothing is capable of causing experience to dissociate into subsets (“psyches”).

Again, this ignores the even deeper problem that experience is contingent on a (real) self (which – again, a deeper problem – is not actually present on Analytic Idealism), rather than the other way around, and thus that splitting experience off into a subset cannot anyway create a new self.

Potential response: The universal (free) will is the active causal agent capable of splitting experience into subsets.

Counter-response: Perhaps this is viable – it at least is not obviously incoherent – but it seems, as similarly discussed in the body of the critique, to be at least an unintuitive and implausible possibility.

🔗 Taking stock after the mechanistic decombination problem

Where is the Analytic Idealist left after the mechanistic decombination problem? At a minimum, assuming (s)he does not opt for volition as the causal agent of decombination, (s)he is forced to accept that the true plurality of selves in existence could not have dissociated out of a singular self: they must either have originated in some other way, or simply be assumed to exist.

🔗 Appendix D: Metaphorical representations

As briefly discussed in the body of this critique under The shift in metaphorical representations, over the course of the books that introduce and elaborate on Analytic Idealism, the metaphors used to represent it change in character, from what I have referred to as “the extensional representation” (used earlier, particularly in WMIB) to “the network representation” (my label again) of the latest (at time of writing), AIIAN.

In this appendix, I elaborate on those representations, what might motivate each, how they differ, and why neither, when taken as representative of Analytic Idealism's core concepts, suffices as a coherent, plausible description of reality.

The extensional representation is present right at the start, in the notion of a “vibrating” membrane. More specific analogies are laid out in detail in WMIB, from watery whirlpools to an ocean of mercury, to tinfoil membranes reflecting and vibrating in multiple dimensions.

That which all of them has in common is the notion of dynamic, dimensionally-extended stuff. The dynamic dimensionality (but not the “stuffiness”, so to speak) is made explicit on page 139 of WMIB where reference is made to “the medium of mind as a membrane with more than two dimensions vibrating in more than three dimensions of space”.

It is easy to see why these analogies are so appealing in this respect, because that is the natural way to explain the emergence of a psyche: via some sort of extended mental stuff that dynamically structures and restructures itself (thus dissociating from the mental stuff surrounding it) into that psyche. It is difficult to see how a psyche could otherwise dissociate, because subjective experience itself lacks the capacity to do so, as pointed out in Appendix C under The mechanistic decombination problem.

Nevertheless, even in WMIB, the point is driven home that they are not to be taken as implying the real existence of any dimensionally-extended stuff (page 66; my editing brackets):

“Many people [...] conclude [...] the existence of some kind of literal ‘mind stuff.’ [...] Well, there is no such stuff. [...] Instead, what idealism is saying is precisely that there is no stuff. There is only subjective perception”.

Even more explicitly, in this post of only two years later, Bernardo asserts (my editing brackets; emphasis in the original) that:

“When I talk of 'excitations' or 'vibrations' of consciousness I am making [...] an appeal in order to convey certain ideas. Clearly, however, this should be understood as a metaphor. Consciousness, of course, doesn't literally vibrate, since it isn't a thing; it's the experiencer.”

The problem here is that the absence (denial) of any sort of dimensionally-extended stuff in motion renders these sort of metaphors inapplicable, because that is the essence of what they convey. WMIB thus trades on the benefit that the extensional representation provides – an accessible and even visual way to account for and explain dissociation – while at the same time explicitly denying that essence by which it facilitates that accessible accounting and explanation.

The network representation – presumably developed in recognition of this problem, although this is never explicitly acknowledged – explicitly does away with any connotations of real, ontological extension, of stuff, of vibration, and of any sort of motion at all. Instead, its core metaphor is that of a relational database, where the relations are purely semantic.

This is much truer to Analytic Idealism's ontological schema, but the trade-off is that it is now much more challenging to explain dissociation: a static network by definition lacks any dynamism that could lead parts of the whole to separate (“dissociate”) from that whole. The dissociation – into what might be termed “subnetworks” – has to be presupposed, in a sort of preharmonisation somewhat similar to that of the monads 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.

Additionally, the discretisation of experience raises an unaddressed (so far as I know) question of its own: what is the scope of each node experience? (And, again, “node experience” is my term for each of the nodes in the representative network). Is it rich enough to represent the fullness of a psyche's entire subjectivity at an instant of time? If not, how is the set of node experiences “bundled” into that psyche's full subjectivity, and, moreover, in virtue of what is that bundling effectuated?

Depending on the answers to these questions, it is possible that something very like – if not identical to – the combination problem for panpsychism is recreated: the problem of how a large number of micro-experiences (node experiences on Analytic Idealism) could combine into a coherent macro experience (that of a psyche on Analytic Idealism).

In any case, here is a comparison of the two, at least in terms of their connotations, and sometimes per what the associated books explicitly say in context:

On the extensional representation On the network representation
Experience is extended. Experience is non-extended.
Experience is substance-like. Experience is semantic-like.
Structure is predicated on ontologically-real dimensionality. Structure is predicated on semantic-like relations.
Experience is continuous. Experience is discretised (into what I've termed “node experiences”).
Experience is dynamic; it “vibrates” and thus “moves”. Experience is static; the entire network structure is fixed for all time.
Experience is thus subject to time. Experience is not subject to time; rather, time is abstractly incorporated within ("as" even) the network structure of experience(s).

🔗 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. I graduated from high school with a Tertiary Entrance Rank (TER) of 99.95, the second-highest possible (100 was the highest possible at the time).

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)