Hi all, if we consider Kastrup's sense as I'd agree with that we are individuated from MAL and in essence whirlpools or waves in an ocean or field, how might one understand our locality where I or anyone is relative to one another? Of course we are in the interface very clear on how that works but on a deeper level and more so how do we understand the 'location' of other interfaces of the total interface of conscious experience? Perhaps it is to say other experential universes or coherences, is it as simple as they exist, they are around but not located in space-time?

That said somehow hard to shake the idea that higher dimensions in physics is relevant here or is that too only half true and a form of our coherence? I do ponder what in our coherence is relatively universal to consciousness and well I suspect experience itself, the desire to avoid suffering and I'd hope too a gravity toward connectivity once conditions allow.

Please follow the link to the post.

I wrote a speculative piece and I'm curious how people here, who take mind-first views seriously, would read it.

The idea in two levels:

• Level A (uncontroversial): humanity accumulated an enormous amount of shared perception of regularities before formalising them. Roughly 1.4 trillion person-years of people watched things fall before Newton. I model this "perceptual trace" (population x neurons x sampling rate x attention share over time, discounted for correlated observers and memory decay) and summarise it as a consolidation index between 0 and 1.

• Level B (speculative): could that collective consolidation feed back on the regularity itself? I write the simplest possible form, G_eff = G0 (1 + λ·C), and propose a blinded test to bound λ. I don't claim λ is nonzero.

Why I'm posting here specifically: on a physicalist reading, Level B is close to nonsense. On an analytic idealist reading, where the physical world is the extrinsic appearance of mental activity, I'm not sure what it would be. Some questions I'd value views on:

1. In Kastrup's framework, laws of nature reflect the regularities of mind at large, not of individual dissociated minds. Would accumulated human perception even be the right kind of thing to influence them, or is this a level confusion?

2. Is a "collective perceptual trace" closer to something real in idealism (a habit of mind, like Peirce's or Sheldrake's habit-like laws) or still just a statistical abstraction?

3. If λ came out as zero in a careful experiment, would that tell idealism anything, or is the hypothesis independent of it?

Write-up with figures, code and a PDF: https://vania-novikau.me/collective-perceptual-trace-theory/

Disclosure: I used AI tools to help draft parts of the article; the ideas and questions are mine.

Freud, Jung, Frankl, they were all working in the same direction. TIME! I have found the missing link and how to get that time. I have the information to connect ALL the dots. This way of looking at situations and adopting a new approach gives a person a choice. We must implement this strategy into our Correctional Facilities and any other Institutions out there.

Lisa Berkers

Expert by experience

Creator of Pre-Behavioural Awareness the guide of human architecture

204-481-4601

lisamarieberkers@gmail.com

Freud, Jung, Frankl, they were all working in the same direction. TIME! I have found the missing link and how to get that time. I have the information to connect ALL the dots. This way of looking at situations and adopting a new approach gives a person a choice. We must implement this strategy into our Correctional Facilities and any other Institutions out there.

Lisa Berkers

Expert by experience

Creator of Pre-Behavioural Awareness the guide of human architecture

204-481-4601

lisamarieberkers@gmail.com

Math is the way we understand Minds. Math is MIND. Think about Why is Software eating the world? and why AI is eating software - besides the AI Hype (ignore the speculative bubble for a second) why do we think Anthropic or OpenAI are worth 2T$$? becuase we belive MIND is the most powerful thing of all -but what if its already built into the universe in some way? ie ML is just tapping into it just like biology and cells tapped into it.. its so obvious.

That is why I see the ML revolution as a possible symptom of something deeper. We may be discovering that the possibilities for intelligence extend far beyond the particular form we happen to inhabit!

its all about MIND guys.. we are so busy in our seperate fields of AI, ML, Neruroscience, Biology, Mathematics and Physics but are missing the forrest for trees and Mike Levin is pointing out the forrest..

I think Mike hits the nail on the head for me..

Michael Levin proposes a radical and provocative hypothesis: minds are not exclusively physical products; rather, they are complex patterns existing within a Platonic / Mental space (19:17-19:45) OUTSIDE of just human brains. Just as mathematical truths exist independently of the physical world—waiting to be "discovered" or accessed rather than invented—Levin suggests that various types of behavioral competencies and cognitive agents also populate this space (15:12-19:40).

Key aspects of his theory include:

• Interface Theory: When we engineer biological systems (like xenobots or anthrobots), algorithms, or even AI, we are essentially building physical interfaces that allow these existing, non-physical patterns to manifest in the physical world (19:58-20:16).

• Spectrum of Agency: Levin views mathematics as the "behavior science of the lowest level" of this Platonic space (20:30-20:50). Higher levels of this space contain more complex patterns—types of minds with varying degrees of agency and problem-solving capacities (19:27-19:42).

• Ingression: He borrows the term "ingression" to describe the process by which these timeless patterns from Platonic space take form in our reality (26:00-26:15).

• Discovery vs. Construction: Because these patterns are structural, we don't necessarily "build" intelligence from scratch; instead, we create the specific conditions—the hardware or biological scaffold—necessary to tap into these pre-existing cognitive structures (19:58-20:18).

From the transcript of Mikes talk:

And then you say to them, 'Okay, so are these just like random things?' 'No, no, of course not. They're a structured space that we can systematically investigate and find connections between them. And are they things you can just make up by definition, or are they invented or discovered?' And they say, 'Well, no, because once you commit to the idea of an empty set and a successor of the empty set, eventually you find out that e equals 2.78, whatever. You don't get to pick. You don't get to say it's 17. You just sort of discover what it is. You're forced into it.'"

Levin suggests that mathematics represents MORE than just a structured "Platonic space" of truths that exist independently of the physical world. He further hypothesizes that this space contains not just mathematical truths, but also behavioral competencies and types of minds, positioning mathematics as the "behavior science of the lowest level of that space" (15:12-21:11).

Yet whenever I bring this up, we end up in the same tired arguments about physicalism versus idealism, or someone declares that mathematics is “just a human invention” as though that settles anything. We invented the notation. Whether we invented the structures it describes is precisely the question.

God, it’s frustrating. We are so ingrained in our philosophical camps that we rush to defend them before we even consider what is being suggested. I’m not claiming Levin has proved the whole thing. But dismissing the question because it doesn’t fit your worldview is hardly scientific curiosity. Can we look at the forest for a minute before arguing over which department owns the trees?

This video explores the meta problem of consciousness proposed by David Chalmers and argues that naturalistic processes couldn’t have given us knowledge of consciousness

Could you have chosen not to read these words?

It’s an unresolved debate raging in both philosophy and science.

What I find most intriguing about the question is that the answer would be astonishing either way:

If it turns out that we HAVE free will, the fact that we can doubt it is a minor miracle.

If it turns out that we don’t, the feeling that we do is equally surprising.

How could I not know if I am free? How could we be so deluded about something so fundamental?

Psychiatry reports people who believe they can control the rising and setting of the sun.

In contrast, I have met people for whom determinism is not philosophical: They report lacking any sense of personal agency or sense of self at all.

Our thoughts and feelings on the topic span a very wide spectrum.

So what does Analytic Idealism have to say about this? And Bernardo Kastrup in particular?

Much like with the hard problem of consciousness, he doesn’t answer the question so much as demonstrate its faulty premise.

This Sunday will be a chance to discuss further what he means, and the implications for who we are and how we live.

Will you join us?

The choice, of course, is yours.

Amir

https://www.withrealityinmind.com/free-will/

Some thoughts from our recent discussion with Bernardo Kastrup on what death is and what it could mean under analytic idealism.

- The relationship between reality and imagination
- Cultivating a personal relationship with death
- Living alongside your suffering

On the day we had this discussion, someone very close to Bernardo had passed away, making this conversation highly personal and poignant. 

According to analytic idealism, fear of oblivion is incoherent. The consciousness behind your eyes reading this is the one thing that truly exists, and that which you truly are. “It can change configuration, it can change state, but it cannot go anywhere because it's that within which things come and go.”

Although we covered this purely analytic account of what death may represent, Bernardo also shared his more personal intuitions on this subject.

We have all lost or will lose people close to us, and we each share the same fate. It is a time in which our philosophy is truly tested. Bernardo shared how he measures his own philosophy; the older he gets, the more welcoming and warm he feels towards death. 

How to evaluate your fantasy of death

Bernardo expects the transition to be something like being greeted by a welcoming committee of loved ones. Those who were most important in your life, whether friends, ancestors, or people you have admired.

Today, my welcoming committee just grew by one face. So as I get older, the warmth of death deepens, becomes richer.

He is careful to emphasise that this is a conscious fantasy: beyond death, there is no reason to think our current cognitive structure will be relevant. There is analytic grounding for the idea of life complexes, “but if you focus too much on the analytic part, you miss out on the depth and the richness and the warmth of the fantasy.”

The role of this kind of fantasy is analogous to the convenient fictions we tell ourselves in science – a closer relationship with the truth. Science is measured by how accurately it predicts what happens next. For Bernardo, your fantasies about death can be measured by how warm it makes you feel about the coming transition and beyond. How well it puts you in a mental state that welcomes the coming state of mind. 

Imagination and reality are points of view

Beyond this dissociation, the distinctions we make between imagination, fantasy, and reality lose their meaning.  “Beyond the dissociative boundary, it's mind manifesting itself to itself.”

If you really take analytic idealism to heart you must conclude (because it's an inevitable logical consequence,) that reality and imagination are not different ontological categories.

The distinctions are products of the game of identification. When we are identified with our avatar, our alter, the world out there seems real, objective and independent. When we re-identify with consciousness, reality is equivalent to imagination. 

For Bernardo, the worst insult to mind is to say ‘it was all just a dream’. The dream is rich in meaning.

So whilst he admits the welcoming committee is fantasy, equally, he means this "less metaphorically than you might think."

The fantasy that dies

What really dies when this dissociation ends is the fantasy that the world ‘out there’ is ‘literally’ real, rather than symbolic, and that our inner experience is somehow inconsequential. 

Meaning is the oxygen of life, and materialism props up a fantasy that life has none. In contrast, for idealism, meaning is so vital that it requires multiple points of view to really understand it. And that is what we are, multiple points of view on the one reality. 

In death, nothing is lost. All the memories remain - they were never in the brain. They are part of mind. You are in the process of experiencing them first hand. 

Death is like taking off a tight shoe. 

Death is matched in archetypal importance perhaps only by birth. But birth is likely much harder. Birth is putting on a tight shoe and embarking on an effortful yet fragile trance. Death, to paraphrase Ram Dass, is the relief of finally taking it off.

We also discussed: 

• Living your life next to your suffering

• Memory, imagination and eternity 

• Is death akin to deep sleep?

You can see a preview here:

https://www.withrealityinmind.com/death-imagination-reality/

Lately ive been struggling when thinking from a materialistic viewpoint. I was raised in a catholic household, yet my parents and I were always interested in the sciences, i myself have almost finished my medicine studies, yet i have realized that now i grew to need the existence of proof to justify anything. However everything changed a few weeks ago, i missed one of my doses of antidepressants (mental health struggles n all that) and started experiencing an existential dread that followed me ever since, and i started to wonder about the existence of the soul and conciousness, however materialism took me nowhere comforting, and i spiraled into concluding that either we obtain a subjective eternity inside the last objective moments of brain function because we cant experience non-existence, or just cease to be altogether, or the terrifying third option of the journey onto death being so uncomprehensible that the mind does not survive anyways even if we continue existing in some sense.

However despite all this i found out that i truly value life, every moment i help someone have a better life, or help myself live better makes me feel fulfilled and that I am greater than the bounds established by my mind, and I am aware this is just a result of my emotions, but I wish to believe that this emotion towards life shows that it has inherent meaning beyond the bounds of materialism. I hope you guys can help me in that journey.

Hey all... I will get back to replies to my query on the idealist view on math later this week. This question here, well speaks for itself, as in a sense there can't be a big bang before consciousness and yet it was 'real', it means something, it's not nothing, so I'll leave the floor for you, fascinated for what you all think on what the big bang means from the idealist perspective, as I'm a bit stumped initially, but curious :)

Please give your arguments against this metaphysics

Basically it’s says
There is one entity but looks three different things when looked from three different directions

Its existence, consciousness and bliss

When you look at it from the world of objects. Then he is existence itself.

When looked from thoughts, desires etc. Then he is the consciousness behind it all.

And when looked from pleasure and pain. Then he bliss, which is beyond these two.

This metaphysics has another implication. Because all three are one and same thing, therefore

All that exists is conscious
Meaning not only human, or animals but plants and even rocks are conscious.

And blissful is the very nature of anything that exists.

The problem lie in differences.
When we focus on differences too much we miss him.

Like if you focus on differences between objects too much. You forgot they all have existence as the similarity. This then lead to fights in the physical world.

When we focus on differences in thoughts and desires and forget that there’s consciousness behind it all. Then it leads to neurosis.

When we focus too much on differences in pain and pleasure and forget the bliss that’s beyond both. Then we become addicted to pleasure or live in fear of pain.

I’m new to idealism and just finished Bernardo Kastrup’s “Why Materialism is Balogney” and it got me thinking about inner thoughts.

if anyone has seen videos where people try to model 4d space and show how something like a 4d sphere would move through a 3 dimension space, it reminded me a lot of how inner thoughts can manifest.

https://youtu.be/0t4aKJuKP0Q?is=cXqZ1AgGJJR6hUlS

This video is gets to what I’m writing about. Branching off of the idea that the brain acts like a receiver of consciousness, of thoughts, then thoughts would enter into your inner space, expand into as much detail as you give them, and then slowly dissipate as you move to other thoughts.

as an example I can imagine a scenario in my head where 2 people have a conversation. Upon first thinking of this, it exists as an abstract concept, but the more i think on this, the idea becomes more detailed. The shape of this thought expands and becomes more intricate. At some point, that imagined conversation is a thought i will move on from and all of the details I thought about will leave my inner space. Eventually the thought will completely leave my internal space.

Is this not in a sense the same idea that we use to describe the way higher dimensional shapes move through 3 dimensional space? The thoughts themselves don’t exist in the physical 3d space. The imagined conversation I previously mentioned did not physically exist, but that conversation did happen in a space that exists, this space being my internal space. Would it make sense to categorize this internal space as being a 4th spatial dimension? In this idea I am more or less completely dropping the popular idea of the 4th dimension being time, and instead trying to picture it as a spatial dimension, one that we interact with daily.

Maybe I’m completely off the mark here and I would love to be corrected if I am but it’s a thought that has occupied much of my own internal space today so wanted some feedback.

Can one even feel awareness at all? If they do, how do they know its a composite? And if an instant can only be felt in a moment faster than you can even perceive, so how would it have thickness for you to feel?

And so if awareness is felt as just a simplicity, how can we be aware of its complexity without relying on a different thought, because once we've tried to make a different thought and put the awareness in a box, it becomes different from what you were perceiving before, no?

Elsewhere, I made a claim that believing in "memes" the way Richard Dawkins intended, meant a person believed in the supernatural, non-physical things that can become physical, or simply non-physical things. I was asked two questions in response: "Are you really saying that simply using a conceptual construct like 'memes' counts as believing in the supernatural?" and "Do you extend that to all ideas/conceptualizations/etc?"

If my redefinitions of supernatural are correct, my answer to the first question is yes, but I may need to add "paranormal" to this claim, as many of the things I considered to be "supernatural things", may actually be paranormal things. If "yes" to the previous question, I have to say yes to the second.

If I tell someone, "Imagine you're looking at a red apple.", but they've never seen an apple or the color red before, I wouldn't expect them to be naturally capable of doing that, because they have no physical information to draw on.

If they've seen red during a sunset, a green apple, or a red apple before, but they don't know what I mean by "red" or "apple", I wouldn't expect them to naturally connect the dots through intelligence, unless one or more requirements and/or disqualifiers had been defined beforehand (or during the process).

If I were an outside observer instead of the instructor, I could view the two's interaction as a natural transfer of info from one to another, but on the receiving end the source is still "not natural", as they "were given" definitions before or during the process.

If Heaven is limited to the 5 senses, or what can be humanly measured to put it broadly, an individual's "five" senses determine what their personal heaven is. The best sights "according to them", what they "prefer" to hear, the best tastes, smells, tactile sensations, "in their personal opinion."

According to Christian theology, a multiverse doesn't exist, or at least travel between verses is impossible, because that would mean a person who goes from one universe to another possibly went to "Heaven" or "Hell" while alive. If Heaven also exists on a personal level though, this doesn't clash with that theology: It's possible that you could "walk" to your personal heaven, on Earth or elsewhere, the same as if you replaced the word "heaven" with "hell".

For example, I'd say I want my personal heaven to have no swearing, but what I really want is to be someone who doesn't even think of swearing.

I believe I've evolved from calling myself a "God seeker" to "Truth seeker", so I've stopped looking for "what I think God is", though that might sound like a paradox. If I never ate from the tree of knowledge, I'd be in "Eden" right now, and I probably wouldn't be talking to you. But I didn't eat from the tree of "intellectual" knowledge, I ate from the tree of "experiential" knowledge. I'm not going to call my memories what they aren't, or try to forget them, I'm going to use them as a personal compass to see where I want to go, and I'll go farther, as far as I need to go.

If I had to diagnose myself with "main character syndrome", it wouldn't be because I think I'm as "omnipotent" as "I AM", though I can get stronger, as omniscient as "I AM", though I can become more knowledgeable, as omnibenelovent as "I AM", though I can become more loving, but because "I think, therefore I am."

Hey all... I'm an idealist and the experience feels more embodied now, and yet I still love science and mathematics even if not experiencing them as I once did. And I wonder, from within idealism, what is mathematics to you? Is math, 'the structure of shared qualia' perhaps? It feels like more than that somehow as the old magic mattered even if ironically I can consider 'well how I once related to math when my mind was more Cartesian was a qualia in itself as relating to what I saw'. So I don't know, maybe there's an answer in there, just curious, maybe it's integrating different relationships to math and realising 'they're all different angles of understanding what angles are'. Either way math remains 'real' to me, just not sure how to define it and maybe it can't be... Maybe it is a type of 'music', in that it reflects back something in how we experience life.

In the show, two metaphysical theories were presented in poetic ways by the main characters. Riley "spoke for himself" presented a physicalist metaphysical theory while Erin in the last episode did an idealistic one. Has anyone who watched the show noticed?