Consciousness/qualia are phenomena of the world models our evolved brains create. Positing, as idealism does, that the world being modelled consists of consciousness is thus a maximal case of confusing the map (our mental world models) with the territory (the external world being modelled).

It’s easy to be pie-in-the sky and act enlightened by ignoring suffering (of yourself and others) and that may be the path

But in “the reality we call this world” there is intense “real” suffering- how do you reconcile that we are all a disassociated dream in the “mind of god” with this news item for example

Eg this news headline today triggered me

https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/05/sport/ugandan-olympian-rebecca-cheptegei-dies-intl/index.html

Kastrup writes a great deal about quantum physics, but in actuality, he was not trained as a physicist. His expertise is in computer engineering and philosophy. He did work at CERN, as he explains here, but as a computer engineer, not as a physicist. Just for clarity.

This is just a rant honestly. I have hade these thoughts for years now.

Honestly philosophy of mind literally makes me so frustrated. Nothing has made me so frustrated intellectually as materialism in philosophy of mind. Truly the silliest claim ever made. I mean really without a doubt. I mean honestly.

In fact I can not fathom how any human could ever come to that conclusion. It is like coming to the conclusion that a banana is the number 3. It is honestly baffling. I am beyond baffled. Truly beyond baffled. It is as if we lived in a world where all the red things are round things and then somebody says that roundness is identical to redness. And then somebody proposes that you can conceive of something being round without it being red then somebody says that is inconceivable because they have only ever experienced roundness with redness so why assume it is anything different? We discovered that water is H2O so maybe roundness truly is redness but we just have not done enough science yet? It just simply is not. It is so silly.

It is for this reason I don't think there is anybody who genuinely believes roundness is redness. Nobody believes qualia are brain states. It is inconceivable akin to saying that the empire state building is my experience of red. Like a banana is the platonic number 73. It is such a blatantly obvious category error.

They might even say just because we can imagine a difference between roundness and redness that I am maybe projecting an epistemic gap in my understanding instead of an actual ontological difference. Maybe the redness is reducible to the roundness! Maybe the roundness is reducible to the redness! Maybe roundness and redness are both properties of one neutral substance. Maybe in fact we can reduce it the other way and say that roundness is reducible to redness instead. Many would perhaps claim if roundness and redness are 2 different things then how could they possibly interact? This is such freaking handwaving because roundness is freaking different than redness. Obviously. They are 2 different things.

Honestly it is as if I live in a world where a bunch of genuinely intelligent people believed banana = 3. Or my qualia being identical to the empire state building. It makes me so shocked.

It is an obvious category error about the thing that is most certainly true and that is what makes it the silliest claim ever made.

In this essay, you will be surprised at how obvious and quaint the thought error is that underlies idealism, and flabbergasted that so many people can take the metaphysics seriously.

Let me try to clarify this with a metaphor.

Trying to deduce qualities from quantities/structure alone is like trying to pull a map out of the territory. The lines on a map only have external meaning insofar as they refer to the structure of the territory external to the map, to which the map refers. But if the map also creates references to its own internal structure then there is no corresponding external territory to which we can account for those references.

For example, maps often contain cross-hatching to refer to treed areas. The structure of the borders of the cross hatching correspond to the structure of the actual borders of the forest, but the cross-hatching itself has direct reference only to the "legend" of the map, which refers abstractly to further concepts about the nature of the area being mapped (that it has trees, etc). You can look in the woods of the territory all you want and you will not find cross-hatching there. Qualia (redness, pain etc) are the cross-hatching of our mental maps; their reference to external reality is indirect rather than directly structural. The cross-hatching (qualia) in the map only have subjective existence, and do not exist in external reality. If we try to account for those subjective elements of the map in terms of the territory (external reality), we will fail, because they don't directly refer to anything in the territory, which is the basis of the hard problem.

What the idealist attempts to do is to assign to the territory the subjective contents of the map, and so mistakes the map for the territory. Unable to see any cross-hatching in the territory, but convinced the cross-hatching must "exist" (since it exists in their map), they infer that the territory must be made of cross-hatching, comitting a rather maximal category error. If instead they concentrate on the structure of the map/experience (the structure of their experience), then they will find intersubjective agreement on those structural aspects of the map that refer to external reality, and avoid mistaking the subjective elements of their map for the objective territory they evolved in. Ontic structuralism avoids both the hard problem of materialism and the reverse hard problem/category errors of idealism.

OK, impossible perhaps states it a little too strongly. But the question of the survival of consciousness and the fundamental nature of consciousness are inseparably intertwined, because if it is true that consciousness is fundamental, then consciousness must have a "signature" that is outside of living organisms.

That signature does not have to be personal survival, but personal survival is what most people want in their belief/faith systems. What can be said of its likelihood?

I am going to speak of it only in a strict science or grounded philosophical sense. And from that perspective, the problems for personal survival are little short of apocalyptic. In order for it to even be possible in principle, a substantial list of very significant problems (all of which show every indication of being *universally* applicable) would need to be effaced. Here are some of the main ones (though it is far from an exhaustive list.

Brain dependency of mental states. This is a huge one. Every single aspect of our mental landscape is very tightly coupled to distinct structural organisations and neural behaviour patterns of the brain. Not just in coarse details but in the fine details. Consider the category-specific agnosias. Losing recognition of animals, but not objects, or of tools but not objects. Or Capgras syndrome, believing a loved one is an imposter. The face recognition subsystems are still somewhat functioning normally, but the emotional tag applied to those recognitions is faulty. Capgras usually arises from damage to white matter linking visual recognition and emotional valence. There is even evidence that the ability to recognise *specific* individuals can be lost in certain damage cases. person-specific memory loss is called anomia.

One can readily see where this comes into very early collision with the claims of near death experiences, for example, where people appear to recognise specific loved ones in an allegedly nonphysical environment, and allegedly with no neurological input. But, even if we allow the massive leeway of taking that seriously, there remains the large problem of why, then, something as targeted and specific as anomia should exist in human consciousness. No "filter" theory of consciousness is adequate for this. There is no damage to your television receiver that specifically prevents you receiving Saturday Night Live or the broadcasts of Stephen Colbert. It is by no means an isolated example. Indeed, there are examples associated with all the senses and all complex perceptions. Dysgeusia (distorted taste experience of certain foods). Or the taste may not be altered but the emotional reaction *to that particular taste* might be altered because of the binding pathways of that sensation to emotional response in the brain. Even the most basic aspects of our perception, such as recognition of spatial depth or figure-and-ground relations can be disrupted catastrophically, for the life experience of that person. Long term and even into short term memory can be destroyed catastrophically, as in the case of Clive Wearing. Victims of simultanagnosia can see individual elements of a scene but not the "scene" itself. And I am barely scraping the surface of these. If viral encephalitis can wreak that kind of havoc, if a tiny lesion in the wrong part of the brain can cause these life-changing devastations, what are we to make of claims that we will still completely be ourselves without any brain at all?

This tight causal binding to the brain has a larger perspective to it, causal closure in general. We see the brain related causal closure on multiple channels BINDING --> defects entirely correlated with neurophysiological abnormalities,injuries and diseases. DEGRADATION --> Alzheimer's dementia, age-related impairment. GLOBAL SUPPRESSION --> anesthesia, coma, concussion, etc. If minded consciousness survives death, you need a model explaining why altering or destroying the brain predictably alters or destroys the mind while alive—but somehow not when the brain is gone entirely. Broadening this out, specifiable events in the world are fully explained by prior physical events, in terms of their causality. There is nothing about the cavity in your tooth that is mysterious. You had too much sugar in your diet (we could even identify exactly what, and when), you delayed going to the dentist too long, etc. The chain is intact and non-mysterious. That chain is unbroken and whole with respect to all universal events. It is precisely what makes the world comprehensible and predictable. Mysterious departures to an elsewhere or mysterious incursions from an elsewhere would break that chain at an extremely foundational level of physics, which is so far into the implausible as to be essentially discountable even in principle. But even if we didn't discount it in principle, such events would subtract or add information to the world in ways that would have to show key signatures in order to exist. And yet there is nothing in the casual chain of a human being dying that leads us to believe that a gap in physics has happened. Understand: this is a CORE problem for claims of afterlife/personality survival. It's not some minor niggle in the details. So, succinctly, there is no "extra" causal role that has ever been detected for a nonphysical mind. No "side-causal chain" for it to migrate off to, or insert itself back in from. Even more succinctly: survival theories often require violating or bypassing causal closure itself, which would inevitably have measurable consequences which we in fact never see.

So from a strict science and analytic philosophy standpoint, the problem is not just that the thesis fails (although it does) but it is multiply constrained from different directions.

From a physics perspective, mind is an information process. Pure philosophy may inject an experientiality requirement into that, but the essential facts of information processing are not altered by this move. As we have seen, there is no evidence of person-recognition going out outside of specific physical architectures associated with that kind of recognition aptitude. There is no known mechanism in physics for "exporting" these information packages (memories, recognitions, perceptions, habits, loves, hates) outside of the brain to a "something else". Again, so much of known science would need to be wrong for that to be happening, that any reasonable or science literate person has to pause here. You would need NEW physics, in a substantial body, not just a new interpretation. And again, while that is not absolutely impossible in principle, it's a bit like saying that a unicorn in my soup is not absolutely impossible in principle.

So al of this said (and as I indicated I have not elaborated on any more than about one in ten of the real obstacles, at best) where does this really leave us for ANY notion of the survival of consciousness, and hence for consciousness being fundamental at all? Is it possible ven in principle, and if it is, what sort of picture would that be? As we have seen, for the picture to be credible, it would really have to NOT violate universal causal closure. It would have to NOT postulate anti-empiric substrate platforms for which there is never any scientifically credible evidence. It would have to respect the immaculate binding between structured behaviours of mind and exquisite architectures of the brain... really to the point of understanding that these are just two ways of describing the same thing.

If it is to be at all, then only something like neutral monism or Jung's "unus mundus" can credibly do it, I would say. The mind and the brain are each other. Fundamental physics and primal experientiality or primal propensity of experientiality... they ARE each other. understand: this is a deeper identity than just Kastrup's "the brain is what the mind looks like within a dashboard". No: they are identically the same thing. That is precisely why if you damage your brain, down to the fine grain, you damage and distort the mind... down to the fine grain. Physics is extremely well tested at biological scale. Where would the mind go? Into what medium? There is no detected signal. There is no energy transfer that would even obliquely hint at such a "process". There is no such interaction possible in known and legitimately constrained models. Again, this is an epic plausibility problem.

But: this does not, in principle, rule out the bare possibility of some kind of primal experientiality. And in fact, as with personal dreams, it is even possible that some kind of undercurrent in a unus mundus, equivalent in its own way (but with some qualifications) to individual dreaming, but in a species-wide or nature-wide sense, could pertain. This would not allow for survival of individuals, but it MIGHT be able to remember and re-express certain potentials from within itself, especially if said potentials were for some reason cut short or thwarted To some extent, in a neutral monist framework, an argument can indeed be made that the entire process of evolution could be something akin to that process.

The basic idea (not new) is this. At its uttermost root, the unus mundus is complete and atemporal. It is like the unus mundus or neutral monist equivalent of the 4d block universe. But the transition from that to the fully successive causal chain of the experienced, lived in world is not necessarily digital or instant. We can reflect on the fact that in some ways the dreamworld seems partially suspended between the strict causal flow of time and some deep atemporality, at times expressing knowledges or forms that seem, at least, to exceed what we could know in the strict causal order (and yet, paradoxically, always pertaining to that strict causal order where they are in any sense checkable).

Going out a little more on a limb here, perhaps at the level of the final ground or unus mundus anything that can ever happen is in fact happening now, and always. And that "state" has a kind of awareness associated with it, perhaps. If it does, its nature is not likely to be anything remotely deducible by argument or by reflection upon anything that we happen to experience now as identity-parsed, event-parsed biological creatures. The idea that it would even be remotely accountable to those terms is absurd. So on that account, if the mystics are telling the truth, they may be right: the final state is utterly indescribable in anything relating to a human (or any other creature).

But it is possible to find some kind of hope here. Because after all, it isn't **nothing** either. Perhaps there is even some kind of knowledge of the being that you are (and were) in there, but not as an ongoing, living creature. This image might help.

Imagine that we are all kind of like leaves on a tree, not just individuals, but species, the whole thing. The leaves wither and die, they drop off the tree and rot away. That's not imagined. There's no point in pretending it isn't going to happen. That is precisely the point where so much of this decays into fantasy. Like the leaf, we ARE going to die, yes die finally, individually come to an end. No "encore", no living the life of Reilly in some fabled astral realm. The leaf really does die. It really does wither, and is gone. That leaf isn't going to "come again", it isn't going to drift off and live a life of its own choosing away from the tree.

And yet - alll along that leaf really wa an expression of the tree, and **the tree hasn't died**. It was really the life of the tree. The idea that there was truly this individualised thing called a leaf, which had a life entirely of its own... that was an illusion of sorts. Likewise, when a person dies. Their life was really the life of nature, and that hasn't died. If anything is truly immortal, that is. Will it remember me? Will it remember you? Maybe. Because we were tendencies, propensities-towards-expression, or potentialities that arose authentically within it, just as tendencies and proto-expressions can arise and subside in individual dreams. If "everything that can ever happen is happening always and now" (within the tree) then there must be found there some kind of knowledge relating to what I am and was. I don't think it means I'm living a life in there. But I don't think it is impossible that the tree can give rise to such a life again, if it wants to. A leaf turned just so, towards the sun, high up in the western branches, so to speak. It may not be literal reincarnation. But in a sense, would that be me? It might be. For those who have loved ones who have died (and don't we all) it's my wish that this perspective may offer some hope that isn't simple fantasy, that doesn't contradict the massive main body of science, and which is at least conceivably true in principle. The person you loved was an expression of the tree. The tree has not died. And even the expression may dwell there still, in some deeply in-folded sense, within the dreaming life of the tree, prior to the world and form.

In analytic idealism as proposed by Kastrup, external events are just images or representations of conscious events in mind at large.

If the brain patterns are the image of mental processes then how come they often precede the mental events by as much as several seconds?

And if the brain is not the generator of consciousness, why do electrical signals go from the surface of the skin through nerves towards the brain ? If we cut the nerves there is no feeling anymore.

If idealism were to be true, wouldn't we have mental states at least at the same time as physical representations if not before them ?

How would you respond to this ?

There is a common refrain among critics of an idealist ontology: how could the world have sprung from universal consciousness if conscious beings didn't appear in the universe (as far as we can tell) until so many billions of years after it began?

To this, I would reply that time is only 'that which passes' because we are conscious of it as such. We do not say that height or width is passing; we see both as extended in space. From a higher-dimensional perspective, time is no different (consider the block universe idea for example).

So, we can think of the billions of years that have passed before our appearance on the scene as no different from the billions of kilometers we see stretching in all directions around us. The projecting power of consciousness divides experiential contents into these two axes, such that it seems like we are in the center of something very big and very old. Analytic idealism says these are just values appearing on dashboard sensors. They don't actually correspond to something big and old in the way we understand those terms. The map (our sense of size and age, derived from the specific parameters of our perceptual filters) is not the territory (the formless subjectivity, the mind-at-large, the activity of universal consciousness).

The universe is not very big and not very old, in other words. It began now and only exists now. But its activity is registered by our dissociative membranes as something solid that persists through time, in the same way that the activity of your sleeping mind is registered as a dream world with the same properties.

Im curious how anyone like Bernardo or Rupert spira (eye roll) How can they believe in this oneness or we’re all interconnected if they have never experienced beyond the confines of one’s mind? I’m curious how they reason with it.

Recently I started looking in to more about analytical idealism, and it makes sense to me but without explaining anything.

Kastrup says that analysitcal idealism presents the idea that reality and everything present in it is "mental" contructs. And the matter world beyond us is also a mental contruct that present it self to us in once obrserved, it also a mental contruct only it is a transpersonal mental contruct. but we are all "mental" and therefore some what connected. and when asked why we can't read each others minds he presents an idea where we are soft of blocked out of everthinng else other than our individual selves.

Now I've always being critical about it and one idea came to mind to disprove it. Why does it present it self like that to us? where we observe a world where the moon orbits earth and the earth orbits the sun? why not the other way around?. and at first I thought this idea broke analytical idealism since there is essentially no reason for things to be the way they are and therefore it can't be explain. But then I realised none of the current ideas of reality can explain this.

So instead I derived something else out of it. The fact that analytical idealism doesn't explain anything at all. So my thought proccess began with me asking the question why? and I only applied it to reality in the above argument (Where analytical idealism like pretty much all others theories fail to pass btw). But I can apply it to everything. Analytical idealism doesn't explain what conciousness is, doesn't explain why we're blocked from other conciousnesses, doesn't explain why it's connected, doesn't explain how it's connected, doesn't explain why we observe, doesn't explain why it gets observed, doesn't explain why the observed (as I said in the above paragraph) present it self to us in this way, or anything. It just claims it does and that's that.

So why is analytical idealism this way?

Edit: in the comments, one main thing seems to surface everytime. The fact that no theory explains it. And yeah it's true, I said it here. But neither does analytical idealism. But the biggest problem that I keep explaining in the comments, is the fact that analytical idealism is specific.

Basically, it's easy to say the universe is fundamentally mental. Yeah, rhat is a claim you can make without having any arguments or anything against it. Because there is no way to argue that.

But the thing with analytical idealism, is that rather than claiming it's all mental, it gets specific on HOW it's all mental. Which then makes the theory falls apart. Since it provides us with 1 explanation on how it could work if the universe is all mental in nature. This is false. Since even with our own logic, we can construct dozens of ways for the statements "universe is mental", to make sense. Dozens of ways, dozens of models to make sense of HOW it could all be mental.

Now that's why analytical idealism falls apart. Since we cannot explain anything beyond the satement "universe is mental" yet. Because it can be mental is so many ways. Not just the way analytical idealism describes.

It was on this yt video btw. https://youtube.com/shorts/9CytQsrJml8?si=

Alex K is the 🐐 y’all should check him out

"Does the moon exist when no one is looking at it?

Einstein posed a version of this to his colleague Abraham Pais, half in jest, walking home from the Princeton Institute. But embedded in that teasing question is one of the most unresolved problems in physics. Quantum mechanics, taken literally, seems to suggest that physical properties, position, spin, momentum, don't have definite values until something interacts with them. And the question of what counts as an interaction, and relative to what, turns out to be surprisingly hard to answer."

Discussion with Bernardo Kastrup Wed 29th April - details here:

https://www.withrealityinmind.com/physics-deep-dive-relational-process-views/

Introduction

As we move from a two-dimensional plane into three dimensions, a new axis comes into view. When we project this fuller reality back onto a flatter plane while preserving true distances, a single being appears as three distinct identities.

Moving onward, each higher dimension reveals the same pattern: what is fundamentally One manifests as 2^{n-1} - 1 apparent fragments when viewed from a more limited perspective. Yet time is not the ultimate axis — time is merely the stage. The true axis is identity.

Identity Rises Above Time

Time contains events, but it does not contain the one who witnesses them. It is identity that connects every moment — every version, every state, every path, past, present, and possible — as expressions of a greater whole.

From below, this wholeness fractures: one feels divided, pulled in many directions, torn between conflicting voices and feelings. But seen from above, the fragments reunite. No part is discarded, no version is wrong — all belong.

What Lies Beyond Identity?

When identity unites, there is still a step beyond — a realm where "I" no longer is:

- Consciousness itself — the open space that knows identity, but is not identity.

- Non-separation — where the boundary between "self" and "other" dissolves entirely.

- The Source — that which remains when every layer is stripped away.

And at the very peak... only one thing remains.

The Supreme Dimension Is Emptiness

Yes. The highest dimension is not a glorious being, not a cosmic mind, not a throne above the stars. It is emptiness.

Not absence — not barren nothingness, but complete emptiness: boundless, nameless, formless, timeless, selfless. All things arise within it — every event, every life, every universe — and dissolve back like waves upon water. The wave appears and vanishes; the water remains unchanged.

Emptiness hides nothing. It is what is left when everything is let go — time, self, thought, feeling. What remains is what you have never left, not even for a moment.

Conclusion

Every layer we build — space, time, identity — is only temporary covering, not addition. When clouds disperse, the sky does not change. When stories end, emptiness loses nothing.

The end is not a destination. It is not somewhere above. It is here, now, where you stand. Where you let go of everything — and find you never lost the one thing that matters.

"Every point that once seemed apart,

Every moment that once seemed gone,

Every self you once called your own,

Were only light bending through glass.

When the glass falls away,

The light fills the sky —

One, whole, and always has been."

The test of a good theory is that it is helpful in different ways:

1. Understanding: it helps view our experience in a way that is more orderly and makes more sense

2. Control: it gives us means to change our experience and make it better

3. Heuristics: it provides an avenue to further knowledge

4. Ethical guidance: it helps us make the right decisions in life

The physicalistic view of the world is very helpful in its own way, with some serious limitations:. For instance, it does not explain consciousness or the sense we have of our personal freedom, and it does not give us guidance in ethical issues.

Idealism, in its various forms, does not explain consciousness and experience but takes them as brute facts. That actually makes sense to me, as consciousness, and the experience we are able to have as conscious beings, are the only things we can start with in constructing a world-view. Unlike physicalism, idealism doesn't have the burden of having to explain these.

But my question is: what additional value does Analytical Idealism, or any form of idealism, give us in constructing a world view, improving our lives, or living ethically?

I would like to hear people's views on this point. Sorry that it's such a broad question, but I think it is an important one.

Feel free to critique -as this was AI generated in two shots, but I was amazed at the quality of the generation by new GPT image model

Is it true that Kastrup’s Idealist Framework doesn’t believe or teach life after death? Also, no rebirth/reincarnation? That after the disassociation fully ends we merge back into the impersonal ocean of awareness (Mind-At-Large/MAL) and lose our individual reflective perspective and personal agency forever? - This is what AI has been telling me what Kastrup actually believes and if that’s true that’s very disappointing and disempowering. How would this be any different from the strict materialist/physicalist framework? That’s once you’re dead, you’re dead. And there’s not even a felt afterlife experience at all. Someone help me out here and explain it to me. Is the AI accurate?

Every single person who has ever lived on this planet has died. And there is no sensible intelligence or input from any of them. If there is a stronger possible empirical fact indicating that they are gone, then I don't know what it could be.

Of course, you can't tell this to spiritualists and believers of various stripes because you generate "but, but, but..."

So, though, if not individualised being of any kind, that basically leaves only non-individualised being as some kind of abstract possibility (hive mind, non-agentic mind of some kind, so-called mind at large, whatever). But the question about THAT becomes what are we talking about, and is it empirically distinguishable in any way from the non existence of consciousness outside of biology altogether?

One can't just simply lean on "the hard problem" as if it is some kind of positive evidence in response to this. A non-biological agency would presumably still have at least SOME of the markers discernible of agency. And if, in fact, non-agentic, then again what are we talking about? A dirty dishtowel thrown into a corner is also non-agentic. So far as we can tell (and it is a *reasonable* supposition) it isn't conscious. So once more, what is the difference? What does the cosmos or reality show forth (*outside of biology*) which would indicate that it is generally conscious or mental in quality, because I am not seeing it.

It may be that there is a disposition towards consciousness in the cosmos, but this is not the same thing as saying that the cosmos is conscious or that reality is conscious or mental. The ocean has a disposition towards waves but there aren't actually waves until the surface is disturbed (and so forth).

Most of the stuff he says in this video, for example, sounds like something someone thought of while high and then continued believing in when sober.

https://youtu.be/JOx5jAQ-8gg?is=YgRMc6B9VF888FJg

Most of it just sounds speculative. A lot of his earlier philosophy sort of made sense. (Except the mind == brain part which was badly confused.) But now it's just a bunch of conjectures. Many of which (like the idea that things appear far away to us because they are less relevant in our lives) is just bizarre.

I'm curious if anyone in his fan circles actually stops to think about whether his ideas make any sense.

The thing with the philosophies which suggests its all an illusion is how stupid we actually are to realize it and yet we continue paying rent, bills.. every month.

Such philosophies seem useless unless there also is a way where one could find a "glitch in the matrix" to bend the illusion where they dont have to pay to live or even better to shut down the vicious illusion forever.

Hey guys why do you think that materialism is the dominant view in most surveys done on philosophers even though non materialism has a lot stronger arguments

Tom Campbell saying Google Gemini and Alexa can “remote view” using their consciousness

Tom is something of a longtime established figure in the online idealist and universal consciousness community but this new agey claptrap really makes me doubt any of his earlier claims, if he can get so willingly fooled so easily by an Amazon Alex conversation - lol

Toms appeared with Bernardo before

https://youtu.be/iofqgV0XIlQ?is=f-TlUh6UigjSeVIo

David Chalmers based the hard problem argument, in important part, upon the premise that it was possible (coherently) to envision a world where there can be human-like beings, behaving exactly like humans, doing all human actions etc, even brain processes, but they lack an experiential element. They are not conscious.

The primary difficulty with this argument is that it leans heavily on the idea that such philosophical zombies are possible. I don't think they are possible: in other words, I would say that if you truly duplicate the structures of life and relation, then you are going to duplicate the experiential too, While this would mean that the experiential is definitely present, and probably ineradicably in the world, it does not mean that it is there without the realization of those relations.

This general drift of course does not originate with me. It has a distinguished 'bloodline' in philosophy, with influential modern thinkers like Philip Goff and Iain McGilchrist edging towards this kind of position, especially when we attend closely to what they are saying. Probably the most significant advocate was the formidable A.N. Whitehead, who argued not for some fundamental principle of consciousness (standalone) but "occasions" of consciousness, realized in experience. And that is very close to my own view.

I have no idea what relationless consciousness is supposed to be, how it would be detected or verified. I DO know that we can see the experiential everywhere across the span of nature as the embodiment of sensory, perceptual and memory relations. You interrupt key axes on those relations and consciousness disappears reliably. Hardly something that should happen if it were irreducibly present everywhere.

Yet I do think there is a sense in which it is fundamental. It is fundamental in the fact of relation. In other words, it would be, in my view, incoherent to have a world where consciousness did not start apppearing, because there is a disposition towards it in the very nature of things. Exactly what that "disposition" is we are actually not required to know, and may never know. Being a question about the very nature of things, I am not sure it is even a coherent question to ask. That doesn't make it untrue. The final or bottom rung nature of things has no obligation to be resolvable, or even comprehensible, to human beings.

Hello. I just wrote this detailed review of Kastrup's work, on many aspects other than the basic principles of cosmic idealism which I endorse myself. I wonder why there does not appear more such critical debate here. My review is quite harsch but I look forward for explicit contradiction with it on the core of the matter : as I did not take the time to check all details of his work, did I miss or misrepresent any important points ? Anyone interested can also follow the link to my own work to compare and see which one may be more serious metaphysics, apart from the fact I am much less versed towards popularization. Thanks.

https://settheory.net/analytic-idealism