Of parsimony and the universal mind: revisiting Bernardo Kastrup's "Why Materialism Is Baloney"

In my initial review of Bernardo Kastrup's Why Materialism Is Baloney, I suggested that we distinguish between consciousness and its experiences, and thus that we distinguish between consciousness proper, and the non-conscious, structured energy of shared reality through which that consciousness expresses and experiences itself. In this revisit of the ideas in the book, I use this distinction as the basis for exploring Bernardo's idealistic argument from parsimony and his positing of a universal mind ("mind-at-large").

To be clear: as outlined in my initial review, the broad duality that I have offered is compatible with some sense of idealism, but not with monism in the strictest sense. Though I note below various equivalences between Bernardo's monistic idealism and my broad dualistic schema, there is a point at which they break down. That point is, as outlined in my initial review, the point at which mind is claimed to be identical with its movements, or, in other words, the point at which consciousness and its experiences are conflated. This essay follows up on the consequences of accepting the duality that I think we are rationally compelled to accept whilst trying to otherwise be as inclusive of Bernardo's idealism as possible.

Combined, the words "parsimony" and "parsimonious" occur seven times in the Kindle edition of Why Materialism Is Baloney. Here, and elsewhere, Bernardo essentially argues that positing a genuinely existing, mind-independent reality is less parsimonious than positing that reality is all mind given that the former adds in an explanatorily-unnecessary category of being: mind-independent matter or physical stuff.

That argument can be expressed in terms of the conceptual schema that I suggested in my initial review, in which the distinction bears some elaboration. Basically, I suggest two fundamental categories of being at the most abstract level: firstly, "pure" individual consciousnesses (as subjects) - "pure" in the sense that there is nothing to them other than the capacity for both experience and volition (in Bernardo's schema, this might be seen to correspond to "the medium of mind at rest") - and then the "stuff" (structured energy) through which those consciousnesses experience and will (which might in Bernardo's schema be seen to correspond to the "excitations" of the medium of mind). This "stuff" constitutes personal experience (the "contents" of consciousness as structured energy), personal mental faculties such as cognition (also a structured energy insofar as each thought has unique qualitative properties and relationships with other thoughts and "stuff"), as well as the world "out there", insofar as chairs, tables, etc, are also in essence simply structured energy of some sort or another.

The basic, abstract picture I am painting then is one in which the consciousness of a conscious subject associates more or less closely with "bunches" of (non-conscious) "stuff", which constitute its experience. Through this association, consciousness proper (and pure), which has no structure of its own, gains structural capacity, including the capacity for both differentiated experience and cognition.

This picture leaves open the question of whether the "stuff" of which personal experience and cognition are comprised is the same as or of a different nature to the "stuff" of which "the world out there" is comprised. It is in this sense that it is compatible with idealism, which answers that both the "internal" and "external" "stuff" are the same, and are "mental" in kind. This is one way of framing Bernardo's argument from parsimony: that to posit different natures for the "internal" and "external" "stuff" of reality is to multiply categories of being beyond that which is necessary.

I quote "stuff" both because I don't intend to necessarily imply anything literally physical about it, as well as because Bernardo makes it clear that he does not endorse the existence of "mind stuff". However, the nature of that which I refer to as "stuff" need not be anything like that of the matter of a naive realism, and could be consistent with, per Bernardo's description, the "excitations" of "the medium of mind". I am using this word ("stuff"), then, simply as an abstract placeholder for whatever it is that lies behind the dynamic structure of both personal experience and the "external" world beyond our personal experience.

Too, I quote "internal" and "external" because although we can conceive of consciousness - being a property of a conscious subject which itself is analogous to a point - as analogous to an empty canvas upon which experiences are painted, this is only an analogy, and needn't imply any inner and outer in the conventionally-understood physical sense.

So, having acknowledged and framed Bernardo's argument from parsimony, what of his idea of a universal mind? I suggest, on this conceptual schema, that the universal mind ("mind-at-large") can best be conceived of as the sum total of the (mental) "stuff" of reality combined with the subject with which that sum total of "stuff" (corresponding to "excitations" per Bernardo's schema) is associated. The interesting question though is what (really, "who") that subject of this mind would be. Either one chooses a subject arbitrarily, or one asserts that all conscious subjects are identical, and thus that the subject of the universal mind is the same as that for all "psyches", which in turn share the same subject (a "psyche" is in Bernardo's terminology an individuated, personal consciousness).

Both of these options could, though, themselves be disqualified by a similar argument from parsimony to that which, as described above, Bernardo makes against a mind-independent physical reality. In the first case (some arbitrary subject), the argument runs that we have no need for any (given) subject of consciousness to be associated with all of "the stuff of reality" as an entirety: it serves no explanatory purpose and thus is unnecessary and unparsimonious. In the second, the argument runs similarly that whereas we have introspective knowledge that the universal subject of consciousness associates itself with the "stuff" of our personal minds, we have no knowledge that it associates with all of "the stuff of reality" as an entirety, nor any need to posit that it does.

In summary, whereas parsimony is an argument for Bernardo's conception of idealism in one sense - the sense in which it is explanatorily-unnecessary to posit that "external" structured energy is of a different category of being than that of "internal" structured energy - it is an argument against it in another sense: the sense in which there is no explanatory need served in postulating a universal mind.

This cannot quite be taken as an argument for dualism in its own right given that it assumes dualism in the first place (the duality between consciousness and that which consciousness experiences), and that it reframes Bernardo's argument from parsimony in terms of this duality, but it does at least illustrate a potentially consistent dualist perspective which I in fact endorse: that the dynamic structure beyond our "inner" world need not be associated with a mind at all.

Taking each argument from parsimony in turn, here is how I think dualism is supported better than monism. The first argument - Bernardo's argument from parsimony as I have framed it given my broad dualistic schema - could be seen to be flawed in that there does in fact seem to be good reason to believe that the nature of the "stuff" of the "external" world is meaningfully different than that of our "inner" experience. There does not seem to be any good analogy between our symbolic thoughts and anything that goes on "out there" on a broad scale; going in the other direction, there does not seem to be any good analogy between such external-reality phenomena as, for example, "inhabited planets" and that which occurs to us in our "inner" experience.

To elaborate: the point of inhabited planets is that they are... well, inhabited. There is nothing "inside" our minds that could inhabit a planet, even if our minds were capable of the "thoughts" that according to idealism constitute inhabitable planets - not to mention the thoughts that constitute the solar systems and galaxies in which those planets in turn can be found. At best, we can think about inhabitable planets; that we might have a thought that "is" in some meaningful sense an inhabitable planet - or a desk, or a chair, or any object from the "external" world - seems an... unlikely... proposition.

Similarly: the "thoughts" of the putative universal mind seem not to be symbolic but concrete. They seem, in other words, not to be of houses and cars and trees and stars, but rather to be houses and cars and trees and stars. These "external thoughts" then seem to be fundamentally different than our "inner" thoughts.

With respect to the second argument - that the positing of a universal mind is unparsimonious - whilst it might be suggested that the argument from the fine-tuning of the universe suggests that a great Mind was involved in the design of our universe, it does not seem plausible, for the reasons just suggested, that this Mind encompasses all of (really: is a "point" of consciousness associated with the rest of) reality. We associate minds with certain traits such as cognition, memory, and emotion: these do not seem to apply to reality as a whole.

I continue, then, to be of the view that dualism is a more tenable ontological view than monism, even though I think that the meaning of that statement needs to be carefully qualified, which I hope to have done through these two essays.

Update of 2019-08-06: I have clarified my ontological thinking and confirmed my hitherto private intuition that idealism is incoherent in a series on clear semantic modelling culminating in An analysis of Bernardo Kastrup's semantic model of idealism.

Update of 2019-08-11: I have now also developed that unresolved paradox at the heart of the incoherence referenced in the above update into a rigorous argument against idealism: The argument against idealism from conflicting perspectives.

Changelog (most recent first)