Recently Published Book Spotlight: The Idea of the World

This edition of the Recently Published Book Spotlight is on Bernardo Kastrup. He holds PhDs in both philosophy and computer engineering. He has authored many books and articles, both academic and popular, being a regular contributor to Scientific American. With his latest book, The Idea of the World, Bernardo has been leading the renaissance of metaphysical idealism from an analytic perspective.

What is your work about?

I defend a modern, analytic formulation of metaphysical idealism, according to which the ground of existence is phenomenal consciousness. Everything else—I maintain—is reducible to configurations and patterns of excitation of consciousness. This does not mean that spoons and home thermostats are conscious in and of themselves; that’s panpsychism. Neither does it mean that reality is in your or my individual mind alone; that’s solipsism. Instead, I acknowledge that other living beings have a conscious inner life of their own. I also acknowledge that there is something out there, beyond individual minds, which would continue to exist even if no one were looking at it. However, in my view, this ‘something out there’ is itself experiential in nature—that is, it consists of transpersonal mental activity. Such mental activity merely presents itself to us as the inanimate universe. From this perspective, my formulation of idealism is consistent with how David Chalmers defines ‘objective idealism.’

At the same time, I believe experimental results emerging from the field of foundations of physics make clear that, whatever is out there, beyond individual mentation, does not have a definite state before it is observed. In other words, the external environment, as it is in itself, does not comprise objects with definite form, position, momentum, etc. It consists instead of superposed possibilities or tendencies. Metaphysically, I interpret this as follows: the transpersonal mental activity that surrounds us is best understood as ambiguous thought processes of the kind we experience, for instance, when we weigh different possible decisions without being sure of which one to take. Therefore, although there indeed is a world out there, this world isn’t physical in the sense we ordinarily attribute to the word; physical qualities result, instead, from an interaction between our own mental processes and the transpersonal mental processes within which we live. This interaction is what physicists call ‘observation’ or ‘measurement,’ which cognitively amplifies one of the superposed possibilities out there, leading to the impression that we inhabit a definite physical world. As such, the physical world is merely an image in the individual mind of the observer; each one of us perceives our own physical world, as defined by the context of our own observations. My formulation of idealism can thus also be regarded as ‘subjective idealism’ with respect to physicality. But don’t get me wrong: I do believe we share a common environment independent of us all; it’s just that this common environment does not comprise, in itself, the qualities or properties we associate with physicality.

All this, of course, immediately raises the following question: What is our relationship, as minded individuals, to the hypothesized transpersonal mind that surrounds us all? As someone who considers parsimony a key guiding value in metaphysics, I believe there is ultimately only one,universal consciousness. I think we, along with all other living beings, are merely dissociated mental complexes—‘alters’—of this fundamentally unitary universal mind. This is akin to how a person suffering from dissociative identity disorder also manifests multiple disjoint centers of awareness. The boundary of dissociation is what separates us from our environment and each other. The way this boundary presents itself on the screen of perception is what we call our skin and other sense organs. As experienced from the inside—that is, from a first-person perspective—each living being, plus the inanimate universe as a whole, is a conscious entity. But as experienced from the outside—that is, from a second- or third-person perspective—our respective inner lives present themselves in the form of what we call matter, or physicality. Indeed, in my view ‘matter’—all matter—is merely the name we give to what conscious inner life looks like from across its dissociative boundary. That’s why there are such tight correlations between inner experience and measurable patterns of brain activity.

Finally, an important element of my views is that the transpersonal mental processes that underlie and ground the inanimate universe do not necessarily entail metacognition. This may need some brief unpacking: meta-cognition is our human ability to explicitly evaluate our own mental activity, which requires more than just raw phenomenal consciousness. An experience is metacognitive if, in addition to having the experience, the subject also knows that they have the experience. Metacognition enables deliberation, reasoning and planning. Purely instinctive thought processes, on the other hand, are those that lack metacognition. Now, because the laws of nature are seemingly stable and predictable, I am inclined to believe that the transpersonal mentation underlying the inanimate universe is instinctive, not metacognitive. After all, instinctive behavior is regular and predictable, just like the laws of nature seem to be. As such, universal consciousness does not necessarily have a plan; it may be doing what it is doing merely because it has the innate disposition to do so.

How do you relate your work to other well-known philosophies?

It’s fair to place my work in the historical context of German idealism, even though I do not necessarily endorse the view that universal consciousness is rational and deliberate. My ideas—as I’ve discovered relatively recently—are very well aligned with those of Arthur Schopenhauer, as discussed in his magnum opus, The World as Will and Representation (1818). Just as Schopenhauer thought that underlying all nature is a ‘blind’ will, which presents itself on the screen of perception as matter, I maintain that instinctive mental processes—most likely of a volitional nature, as the universe’s movements and evolution suggest volitional impetus—underlie physicality. With Schopenhauer, and departing from Kant, I believe we can make sound inferences about the nature of the noumena through personal introspection; for unless we are prepared to accept an arbitrary discontinuity in nature, if my inner mentation presents itself to outside observation in the form of the matter constituting my nervous system, then the matter of the rest of the universe, too, should be the extrinsic appearance of (universal) conscious inner life. As Schopenhauer put it, “we must learn to understand nature from ourselves, not ourselves from nature.”

In the context of contemporary analytic philosophy, my work can be regarded as an idealist variation of cosmopsychism. It is important to notice, however, that I do not look upon phenomenality as a fundamental aspect or property of matter, the latter also having other properties or aspects. No. To me what we call matter is merely the extrinsic appearance of inner phenomenality, as observed from across a dissociative boundary. There’s nothing more to it. To say the same thing in a different way, ‘matter’ is the handy label we give to the contents of a particular modality of experience: perception. Therefore, and paraphrasing Bishop Berkeley, as far as matter is concerned ‘to be is indeed to be perceived,’ even though the mental activity underlying matter continues to exist whether it is observed from the outside or not—that is, whether it is apprehended as matter or not.

Do you theorize anything akin to Kant’s categories of apperception, or Schopenhauer’s concept of representation? If so, how do they work (i.e. Are the concepts static or fluid? Are they passed along through culture, brain development, or something else?)

With Kant and Schopenhauer, I do think the contents of perception—by which I mean particular arrangements of perceptual qualities such as color, flavor, smell, etc.—are mere representations or phenomena of the world as it is in itself. What I have been calling ‘extrinsic appearances’ are thus at least largely equivalent to Schopenhauer’s ‘representations’ and Kant’s ‘phenomena.’ I maintain that these representations or phenomena arise from the interaction between our own private, dissociated mentation and the transpersonal mentation constituting the environment that surrounds us; in modern language, they arise from ‘observation’ or ‘measurement.’ In positing that representations or phenomena are what conscious inner life looks like from across a dissociative boundary, I am attempting to add to Kant’s and Schopenhauer’s insights: neither seems to have explained precisely how representations/phenomena arise from noumena/will, respectively.

Still with Kant and Schopenhauer, I believe spacetime itself is merely an evolved cognitive scaffolding in the perceiver’s individual mind, which is then populated by representations. The world as it is in itself—Kant’s noumena or Schopenhauer’s will—is incommensurable with spacetime and is not constituted by the qualities of perception. Running the risk of excessive anthropomorphization—which Schopenhauer himself guarded against—we could think of it as transpersonal thoughts driven by instinctive volitional urges. These transpersonal thoughts merely present themselves to us, at a glance, as a tapestry of color, flavor, smell, etc., because encoding our apprehension of the surrounding environment in this manner had significant evolutionary advantages. I discussed this more extensively in a recent paper.

I think the spacetime scaffolding and the basic percepts that populate it are cognitive mechanisms we evolved as a species. As such, they are built into the organism—not passed on by culture—being no more fluid than the organism itself is. Having said that—and backed by modern psychology—I do think our ordinary experience of the world entails much more than just basic percepts. What we actually experience is, in large part, a narrative we build with, and then project onto, the percepts. In other words, we don’t just apprehend raw ‘pixels’—meant here metaphorically and generally, so one could speak e.g. of auditory ‘pixels’—but partition, group and weave them together according to a story we tell ourselves subliminally. Unlike the basic percepts, this inner narrative is passed on by culture and education. It is precisely one such culture-bound story that leads most people today to look at the world outside and see discrete objects made of matter outside mind. After all, the discreteness of objects is merely nominal, whereas the mind-independent status of the world is merely a theoretical abstraction. This substitution of the concreteness of the world by abstractions would have sounded ridiculously absurd only a few hundred years ago.

Who has influenced this work the most?

An early paper by David Chalmers gave me the seminal insight that launched my philosophical career. Back in the mid-nineties, I was working at CERN, in Switzerland, on the data acquisition system of the ATLAS experiment. Although most of our work entailed using classic algorithms for recognizing potentially new physics in the experimental data, I also worked on a side-project attempting to use Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) for the same purpose. This side-activity turned into a personal hobby, which then evolved into the question of how to make conscious ANNs. For a long time I struggled with the question, eventually noticing that every hypothesis I postulated for how to give rise to consciousness already presupposed consciousness. All those different ANN architectures I devised were simply manipulating data in different ways, not giving me any reason to believe that such data manipulation—as sophisticated as it might have been—would be accompanied by experience.

And then I came across the paper by Chalmers, which was about the so-called ‘hard problem of consciousness.’ The key point was that there is nothing about physical properties or configurations, whatever they may be, in terms of which we could deduce the qualities of experience. The gap between these two domains—the measurable quantities of physics and the qualities of experience—is unbridgeable. When I read this, more than merely understanding and agreeing with it, I recognized it. Someone had finally identified, isolated and shined a light on the key issue, on the subtle and unexamined movement of thought that throws us completely off the trail. I realized that I wasn’t examining my implicit physicalist assumptions—taking them for granted instead—and that that was the problem. From then on, the progression of my philosophy has been a matter of pulling on the thread revealed by the recognition of the ‘hard problem,’ until reaching its inevitable end-point: metaphysical idealism. ANNs will never create consciousness because consciousness is already all there is to begin with; the ANNs themselves are created in consciousness, as experiences.

A couple of years ago, Chalmers modestly told me—and now I hope my memory does justice to his words—that his original ‘hard problem’ insight had just been a way to frame something people already knew and were already struggling with. Perhaps. But sometimes the framing of the problem is the key; it is already more than half of the solution. It is the appropriate framing that brings out the artifacts of thought leading to the problem in the first place, thereby giving us a chance to examine and revise them. There is genius in knowing how to frame things.

Which of your insights or conclusions do you find most exciting?

The notion that spatially-unbound phenomenal consciousness is the ground of existence is extremely exciting, for it circumvents all the insoluble problems of today’s metaphysics. The core of the ‘hard problem,’ for instance, is this: first, we infer that the world is made of matter outside and independent of consciousness; then we imagine that certain patterns of organization of matter—such as our brain—can, somehow, give rise to consciousness; finally, we infer that the material dynamisms of the external environment modulate the experiences generated by our brain through the mediation of the sense organs. The latter is what we call perception. The problem is that there is nothing about the abstract, quantitative parameters that describe and define material organization in terms of which we could deduce the qualities of experience. I could exhaustively describe the material system we call an ‘apple’ in terms of its constituent particle masses, momenta, charges, spatiotemporal positions, etc., but none of that would give me any insight into what it feels like to see the redness, or taste the sweetness, of the apple. We fundamentally can’t bridge the gap between physical quantities out there and experiential qualities in here.

Under analytic idealism, however, what is out there is experiences too, even though experiences qualitatively different from those on the screen of perception. In other words, what it feels like to be the world out there is qualitatively different from what it feels like to perceive such world. But bridging the gap between two different sets of qualities is empirically trivial: we witness it happening all the time. For instance, the qualities of our thoughts can translate directly into the qualities of our emotions: there is something it feels like to have the thought that, say, life has no meaning, which then translates into the felt emotion of hopelessness or despair. The quality of the thought, although different from the quality of the emotion, directly leads to the latter. Therefore, there is nothing difficult about the hypothesis that transpersonal thoughts out there, upon impinging on the dissociative boundary of our respective alter—whose representation is our skin and other sense organs—translate into the qualities of perception. There is no unbridgeable gap anymore.

The equally insoluble ‘subject combination problem’ of constitutive panpsychism is also circumvented by analytic idealism. There is no need to explain how fundamentally disjoint, microscopic subjects of experience—such as those hypothetically corresponding to the subatomic particles that form our brain—combine to constitute the seemingly unitary, macroscopic subject we seem to be. Analytic idealism already starts from a universal subject, so nothing needs to combine. The challenge it must then tackle is precisely the opposite: How does one universal consciousness seemingly divide itself up into multiple individual subjects, such as you and me? While this is a legitimate problem, it is one whose solution nature has already given us in the form of the psychiatric condition called dissociation. Whether we understand the inner mechanisms of the condition or not, we know empirically that mental space can seemingly split itself up into multiple, cognitively disjoint, co-conscious centers of awareness. I insist on ‘seemingly’ because we also know, empirically, that such split is reversible and merely apparent: patients have been known to overcome dissociation and re-integrate their alters into a unitary, internally-connected mental space. The suggestion here is that universal consciousness can undergo something akin to dissociation, thereby forming multiple disjoint alters, such as you and me. What we call ‘life’ or ‘biology’ is the extrinsic appearance, the representation of this dissociation; that is, life is what a dissociative process at a universal level looks like when observed from across its dissociative boundary. This, in my view, is all there is to life.

How is your work relevant to everyday life?

Our metaphysical views, even if implicit and unexamined, color every aspect of our lives, from our moral values to our sense of meaning. The notion that existence, at its most fundamental level, is sentient and unitary has tremendous implications for how we regard each other, the planet where we live and the universe at large. To mention one obvious example, the school of existentialism seems to presuppose separation, which analytic idealism fundamentally denies, even though it allows for the appearance of separation.

But the most relevant implication of analytic idealism has to do with how it informs our understanding of death. If life is the extrinsic appearance of dissociative processes at a universal level, then death—the end of life—is the end of dissociation; that is, the re-integration of our conscious inner life into a broader context. In an important sense, this flips our understanding of death upside-down: death is no longer the end or infinite constriction of consciousness, but precisely an expansion. As a matter of fact, there are compelling empirical indications that this is the case, as I once discussed on Scientific American.

What does your philosophy say about personal identity and its relation to both other entities and to death? Does any part of it persist through this “expansion,” does a new identity take its place, or something else?

As Schopenhauer already explained over 200 years ago, we each have a kind of double identity or “twofold existence,” as he put it. The first is what he described as “the eternal world-eye,” which “looks out from all knowing creatures.” Itay Shani described essentially the same thing in modern analytic terms under the label “core-subjectivity,” which is the “dative … of experience [i.e.] that to whom things are given, or disclosed, from a perspective.” Core-subjectivity entails no contents—no name, place of birth, profession, age, episodic memories, etc.—and no narratives of self-identity. Instead, it consists of an empty subjective space with its inherent, undifferentiated feeling of primal ‘Iness.’ You can imagine it as what it would feel like if you became completely amnesic, but still conscious, while in an ideal sensory deprivation chamber.

Because it’s undifferentiated and content-free, core-subjectivity is identical in each and all of us: we are all “the one eye of the world which looks out from all knowing creatures.” Indeed, it is because of the unbroken continuity of our core-subjectivity over time that we believe we are the same entity since birth, even though everything else about us—our body, thoughts, opinions, self-image, memories, etc.—has changed multiple times over since then.

Framing it in my terms, core-subjectivity is intrinsic to universal consciousness; there may even be an important sense in which it is universal consciousness. Therefore, death—the end of dissociation—changes nothing about it. Death happens within core-subjectivity, not to it. The recipient or “dative of experience” remains the same when the contents of our conscious inner lives become re-integrated into a broader context. The “eternal world-eye” is literally eternal.

But Schopenhauer also acknowledged that, while alive, we all have a second mode of existence corresponding to our physical body—that is, the extrinsic appearance or representation of our individual, dissociated contents of consciousness. This second mode, of course, will not survive death. Our narrative of self-identity will be seen through, just as we see through the identity of our dream avatars upon waking up.

Did you encounter any problems getting yourself published and, if so, how did you overcome them?

When I wrote my first book, my career had been mostly in research and development. Philosophy was a passion but a hobby. So it was difficult to find a publisher that would impartially judge my writing, as opposed to focusing on the fact that my professional life had very little to do with what I wrote about. Eventually I found John Hunt Publishing, a medium-sized publishing house based in the UK, with a couple of dozen imprints. They bet on me despite my lacking a platform and being thoroughly unknown to my target public. Since then, I have published seven books with them, with the eighth coming out in the summer of 2020.

My day job today still has nothing to do with metaphysics: I do corporate strategy for a living. On the positive side, it pays well, is relatively easy compared to the problems of ontology I wrestle with in the evenings, and gives me true philosophical independence. This latter point is important, for I have ridiculed—and continue to ridicule—mainstream physicalism, having even ‘psychologized’ its more vocal proponents in a paper published in a major psychology journal. Thank goodness my bosses don’t judge me based on my contentious claims outside work. On the negative side, however, I do not have the time to go on book promotion tours, make myself available to all events to which I am invited, etc. So my book contracts cannot tie me up in that regard. I still publish with John Hunt Publishing partly because they give me the flexibility I need, partly because they are good at what they do, and partly because of a sense of loyalty to the organization that believed in me when no one else would.

As a matter of fact, my relationship with them has grown to be so strong that, today, I am even the publisher of Iff Books, the academic and specialist imprint of John Hunt Publishing. I procure and evaluate book proposals for Iff, except of course for my own books, whose evaluation process I excuse myself from. So if philosophers reading this blog have ongoing book projects, they are welcome to send us a proposal via this link (select Iff Books in the pull-down menu and please mention in the submission that you found Iff through this blog post). We look for manuscripts that have already been at least substantially written, so we can evaluate them properly. And although we focus on scholarly topics in philosophy and science, it is important for us that books be of broad appeal and written in language accessible to the general reader (that means little to no technical jargon!).

What’s next for you?

My next book, coming out in the summer of 2020, will be about Schopenhauer’s metaphysics. True to the style I’ve developed over the past decade, the book is a frontal assault on the current status quo of Schopenhaurian studies. I argue that Schopenhauer has been systematically misunderstood and—worse yet—misrepresented, particularly at the hands of presumed experts. I offer an interpretation of his metaphysical thought that—I claim—brings his various contentions together in a coherent, internally consistent system. This should finally reveal the force and appeal of Schopenhauer’s metaphysics, which have somehow eluded us for the past two centuries.

As a follow up to the book on Schopenhauer, I am presently busy with a manuscript wherein I attempt to elucidate the metaphysical thought underlying the work of Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung. It is a much more challenging job, as not only has Jung written more than twenty thick volumes of material, he also overtly disclaimed having metaphysical positions. I hope to succeed in this difficult project, which should be published in 2021.

You can ask Bernardo Kastrup questions about his work in the comments section below. Comments must conform to our community guidelines and comment policy.

*

The purpose of the Recently Published Book Spotlight is to disseminate information about new scholarship to the field, explore the motivations for authors’ projects, and discuss the potential implications of the books. Our goal is to cover research from a broad array of philosophical areas and perspectives, reflecting the variety of work being done by APA members. If you have a suggestion for the series, please contact us here.