It astonishes me that anyone can still get articles through peer review defending the dead philosophy of Idealism. As I documented before in my series testing the standards in academic philosophy, the field’s reliability is not that great. Which is inexcusable. It could be doing better than this. After all, eliminating Idealism is one of the great achievements in philosophy proving that that field actually makes progress in human knowledge (see my survey of this point in Is Philosophy Stupid?).

This doesn’t mean that physicalism is settled philosophy. I think that’s trending well on the side of probable by now. There is a reason 52% of all philosophers are physicalists and that this becomes 68% of all philosophers when you exclude delusional theists. But Idealism is still the least likely alternative. There are theisms more likely; and those are pretty damn unlikely. Yet nontheist alternatives do even better still—nonetheist nonnaturalisms (like Taoism) outperform theism; and nonphysicalist naturalisms (like emergent qualia dualism) outperform those. So Idealism is right up there with “Faerie Abductions” or “Lizard People Secretly Rule the Earth.”

I’ve already covered this from the other side of the equation before:

• The Argument from Specified Complexity against Supernaturalism
• Naturalism Is Not an Axiom of the Sciences but a Conclusion of Them
• The Argument to the Ontological Whatsit
• We Are Probably Not in a Simulation

And in respect to mental facts in particular, in The Mind Is a Process Not an Object: On Not Understanding Mind-Brain Physicalism and Bayesian Analysis of the Barkasi-Sant’Anna Defense of Naive Memory Realism. More as I go.

Bernardo Kastrup: Idealist from the Paleozoic

The article I will be analyzing today is from (the somehow still) Idealist philosopher Bernardo Kastrup, who is a real philosopher with a website and a publication history with Scientific American, but also a whackadoodle theist, crypto-Catholic, infamous pseudoscientist, and magical immortalist who literally wrote a book called Why Materialism Is Baloney, while believing UFOs are remnants of advanced Paleozoic civilizations. He sounds like a Peterson-style Jungian about Christianity, but is nevertheless confident that “evidence for” the “existence of a conscious, omniscient, omnipresent and omnipotent agency” is “literally all around us” and that “the survival of consciousness beyond physical death is, in fact, a direct implication of our most basic common sense.” Right. So, basically, Deepak Chopra with a philosophy degree.

The “serious” article from Kastrup I will address is “An Ontological Solution to the Mind-Body Problem” from Philosophies 2.1 (2017), which is the peer-reviewed version of an earlier and more rambling essay from his website, “On why Idealism is Superior to Physicalism and Micropsychism” (which I also consulted). Kastrup has been criticized before (e.g. by Philip Goff, Paul Austin Murphy, and Jerry Coyne), but usually from varying and limited perspectives (and often having to cope with his arrogant and bombastic rhetoric). I will simply treat this one peer-reviewed study as if it were a serious, self-contained argument worth the bother of paying attention to. It isn’t. But I do this for a living. And I do that, so you don’t have to. You’re welcome.

As I proceed, you might think you’ve heard this sort of crazy before. And you’d not be wrong. It shares a lot in common (methodologically and metaphysically) with the peer-reviewed ramblings of The Blondé-Jansen Argument from Consciousness. They aren’t arguing quite the same things. But they certainly (figuratively) belong to the same club. And both are crank pseudoscience that should not be getting past peer review—and as long as this stuff continues to be, it makes it hard to take philosophy seriously as a professional field of knowledge.

From Thesis to Model

Kastrup posits a “spatially unbound consciousness” as “nature’s sole ontological primitive,” i.e. a boundless, pure consciousness is the ground of all being, and everything else is (in one fashion or another) a causal consequence of that; and he aims to argue that this is more “parsimonious” and has more “explanatory power” than alternatives. I am being nice and leaving out all his weird vocabulary, like how you are a “dissociated alter” and your enfleshed skeleton and the chair you’re sitting on and the cat summoning you to feed it down the hall is just the “appearance of phenomenality surrounding” you. As an actual analytical philosopher, my approach is to get past gobbledygook like that and boil down what he is claiming to its communicable essentials, and see where he might be going wrong—either in his employment of logic, or his treatment of evidence.

Kastrup first purports to present the basic facts, with a bunch of weird acronyms and diagrams (Part 1), then outlines how his model of reality explains those facts (Part 2), then responds to some “criticisms” (Part 3), and then compares his model to “Physicalism” (which he defines as “that all ontological primitives, in and of themselves, are unconscious, consciousness arising only at the level of complex arrangements of primitives”) and what he calls “Bottom-up Panpsychism” (which he defines as “that at least some ontological primitives are conscious in and of themselves, their combinations leading to more complex consciousness”), while throwing in an illogical rant at the end about the impossibility of general AI (Part 3). Yes, that comes out of left field. It’s weird. But we’ll take it seriously and get to it eventually.

I won’t bother with his discussions of “Bottom-up Panpsychism.” That’s just as much nonsense as his alternative (I’ll let the Stanford Encyclopedia sort you out on that). Not all panpsychists take the view Kastrup describes. And even if we included them, adding physicalists would still leave us with a lot of alternatives still unaddressed here (from Taoism to emergent qualia dualism, and even Traditional Theism). So Kastrup appears more concerned to “take down” what he perceives as his most vexing enemies: the most popular view in professional philosophy, Physicalism, and the quite unpopular view that nevertheless appears to get chucked at him a lot: Bottom-up Panpsychism (I assume from Whataboutism, where people shout “But what about Bottom-up Panpsychism!?”). It’s a position really only of interest to him. Competent philosophers have long since moved on.

Conceptual Problems

Kastrup says that “according to the ontology of idealism, physical entities exist only insofar as they are in consciousness,” but the principal problem with such ontologies is that they don’t inherently fit observation, and thus have to be “gerrymandered” with epicycles to fix that disagreement with the evidence. I discussed this long ago in response to a Christian apologetical argument that atheists should be metaphysical constructivists, a similar view (see Defending Naturalism as a Worldview: A Rebuttal to Michael Rea’s World Without Design). What I pointed out there applies here: if reality were mind-first, it should act like it. But it doesn’t. Our thoughts and beliefs cannot alter or even affect reality, except through physical machinery. Our minds are trapped by physics; physics is not derivative of our minds. This is exactly what we expect on physicalism. Whereas, as I wrote last time, “since many other outcomes are possible on the theory that the properties of objects are in any way mind-dependent—for instance, the world could behave like a cartoon,” or a dream or fantasy novel, what we actually observe is less probable on any mind-first ontology. That we have to “rig” Kastrup’s thesis with cherry-picked epicycles in order to get it instead to result in—weirdly—exactly what we would expect to observe on physicalism, pretty much disproves Kastrup’s thesis.

We can mic drop right here. But I’ll give him a full hearing anyway. As we proceed through his article, we descend into ever more egregious logical and empirical mistakes, thus explaining his ever-accelerating slip into his absurd worldview. So it profits to see where and why he goes wrong.

For example, Kastrup is aware of the problem I just mentioned. He admits physicalism is “prima facie more easily reconcilable with [empirical] facts than idealism.” He mentions, and concedes, mind-brain correlation, shared universe, mind-independent physical laws, and atomic and particle physics. Which are all inherently predicted by physicalism (you can see how this is the conclusion, for example, of any sound Argument from Consciousness, both negatively and positively). But Kastrup misses the point. For example, he frames the question as “How can there be such tight correlations between observed brain activity and reported inner experiences” without physicalism, which makes it look like all he needs is any other theory that would explain that. But that’s not how empirical logic works. The real question is “Why is there even a brain?” Physicalism explains this. Idealism does not. The same reframing topples his every other point: every aspect of universal atomic and deterministic physics goes the same way.

For example, Kastrup thinks he only has to answer the question, “How can [the universe] unfold according to patterns and regularities independent of our volition?” But in fact he has to answer the question, “Why should it even do that in the first place?” In other words, he doesn’t need any just-so story he can make up. Rather, he needs to make this observation a deductively probable outcome of his model. But he cannot do that without epicycling it death. Which tanks its probability. Contrary to what Kastrup later claims, physicalism is actually more parsimonious because it doesn’t need any ancillary hypotheses to explain this at all (much less hypotheses so finely tuned to exactly fit all the hyper-specific evidence). The mere simple proposition of physicalism logically entails this explanation. So why do we need another?

And this problem is legitimately asymmetrical: physicalists do not need to predict specifically “quarks,” for example, because their model entails that it should be something like that at the basis of every solid thing we know; but idealism does not predict even that it should be something, which means the idealist does need to explain why, specifically, all matter reduces consistently to quarks. What need does any cosmic mindspace have for those? And how does it keep it that the same strange thing for everyone? Indeed, even when there aren’t observers (as the evidence “it’s quarks” extends into deep cosmic time). All cosmic history and direct human conscious experience could proceed entirely without quarks (or at least something akin)—unless, it can’t, which is physicalism.

Likewise, when we get to asking questions like “What decided it would be that way?” and “What keeps it steady?” physicalism predicts it will be a fundamental physical ontology of some reductive kind (the ultimate units of existence will be extremely simple and not elaborately complex—whereas minds are elaborately complex). But idealism does not predict this. So how do you get it to, without making it elaborately complex? And that would be going in the wrong direction explanatorily. To explain one complex thing by appeal to an even more complex thing actually makes your explanation less probable. Whereas reductive explanations gain probability hand-over-fist.

Physicalism plus science can thus explain the weirdly complex machinery of the Periodic Table. But Idealism plus science can’t explain any of it. “But we can make up a bunch of add-ons to Idealism to get it to” simply trades a declining prior probability for a rising explanatory power—the net effect is a drop, not a gain, in probability as an explanation. I explained this before with the example of Cartesian Demons, which Kastrup’s worldview essentially is: he posits an invisible cosmic mind that tirelessly everywhere maintains the presentation of a world to us that weirdly looks exactly like a physicalist one, while hiding all evidence of its doing so. That’s literally the least likely explanation of anything.

Empirical Problems

This is not the only sign that Kastrup is prone to a delusional blindness to the actual obligations that logic places on his model (or indeed any model). For example, he argues that it is a fact that “if a neurologist performs a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scan or an electroencephalogram (EEG) of a person’s brain activity, the measurements are only known insofar as the neurologist—or someone else—sees them consciously.” So he wants to set a premise that those readouts don’t exist but for a closed loop with at least someone’s consciousness. But this is not relevantly true. We could, if we were so inclined, build an fMRI such that its signaling a patient is thinking of a human face (operating a circuit with a very identifiable location in the brain) would release a lever that set off a bomb that burned down a forest. No one would need to consciously observe any of this. The forest would burn up regardless.

This is an important point, because this is precisely what the physicalist thesis entails: brain activity is physically causal activity; and as such is so even through the mediation of its physical effects on everything else in the world—including, say, an fMRI attached to Rube Goldberg’s Amazing Forest Razer. This is how we can be sure the universe existed even when there were no minds yet to observe it (such as one second after the Big Bang; or even three hundred million years after). The idea that somehow we back-caused all the evidence of such a cosmic history the moment we opened our eyes does not make any coherent sense of the evidence we actually have. Whereas the long grind of cosmic history leading to the generation of minds fits the evidence perfectly, without such pointlessly bizarre miracles (see, for example, How the New Wong-Hazen Proposal Refutes Theism—because it refutes Kastrup just as well).

It only gets worse from there.

Using his contrived idea of a TWE [That Which Experiences, i.e. the World Mind], which by various epicycles he gets to mean “each individual person” (individual experiencers), Kastrup argues that Idealism is more parsimonious because then “TWE and experience are of the same essential nature. More specifically, experience is a pattern of excitation of TWE.” Which “avoids the need to postulate two different ontological classes for TWE and experience, respectively.” Kastrup does not seem to understand that physicalism already enjoys this epistemic virtue, and therefore his Idealism cannot claim it.

His silly new agey phrase “pattern of excitation” can simply be unpacked as “pattern of excitation of electron chemistry in the brain” and you get mind-brain physicalism: experience and experiencer are not ontologically separate entities, but entirely identical (see Touch, All the Way Down: Qualia as Computational Discrimination and Holm Tetens, Dinesh D’Souza, and the Crazy Idea of the Mind Radio, as well as, again, The Mind Is a Process Not an Object). To experience a thing is to be an experiencer of that thing. And vice versa. You cannot separate them. You cannot ontologically have “experiences” apart from an “experiencer” on physicalism, nor the other way around. As Philip Goff noted, Kastrup mistakes Chalmers as arguing against this, but in fact Chalmers is making exactly my point: his zombies paradox is meant to prove either that dualism is true (and thus physicalism is false) or physicalism is true and therefore the mental is identical to the mechanical. In other words, if physicalism is true, that has to be the case. The only way to avoid it is to avoid physicalism (such as with some kind of dualism; or, of course, Kastrup’s upside-down monism).

That Kastrup does not understand this destroys his entire argument. His lynchpin premise is obliterated. We could mic drop here, too. But, we’ll trudge on. Because Kastrup makes errors like this a lot.

For example, he declares that “it is impossible to conceive—even in principle—of how or why any particular structural or functional arrangement of physical elements would constitute or generate experience,” merely citing for this assertion other unreliable panpsychists who make all the same mistakes (the blind leading the blind). The assertion is simply false. Numerous physicalist models of conscious experience exist (from Dennett to Melnyk to Kim to Cottrell to Churchland). I recently proposed a hybrid model based on them, in Touch, All the Way Down: Qualia as Computational Discrimination. So it is not “impossible even in principle” to conceive of physicalist explanations of qualia. (This mistake is routine among anti-physicalists, who typically don’t even read physicalists and thus don’t actually know what they have or have not done. If your only argument against physicalism is “it’s impossible, therefore false,” that is generally a sign that you are a bad philosopher.)

Similarly, “TWE [That Which Experiences, i.e. a person] is an ontological primitive, uncaused and irreducible” is not just analytically false, it’s empirically false. The entire field of cognitive science has long since refuted any such notion. Personal identity and personal experience is not irreducible but in fact extremely fragmentable and deconstructable, causally built out of countless parts, and entirely dependent on physical parts for every mental part. It therefore cannot be an ontological primitive, and certainly not an “uncaused” one. It is only ever found as the causal product of an extremely complex physical process.

You might be noticing by now what I alerted you to earlier: as we move deeper into Kastrup’s paper, his assertions become more and more implausible and pseudoscientific. Yet these are the very premises he rests his argument on. So, once again, we could mic drop here, too. But we will trudge on.

You’ll see his paper reach a crescendo of the absurd when Kastrup actually pseudoscientifically references intergalactic structure as evidence the universe is a mind. He asks and answers his own question on this: “Is there any circumstantial empirical evidence for this kinship? As it turns out, there is: a study has shown unexplained structural similarities—not necessarily functional ones, mind you—between the universe at its largest scales and biological brains.” He thus even mentions the fact that this is not a functional similarity, which means it is completely incapable of evincing any point he intended to make, yet he proceeds in the paper as if it has done that. He has delusionally erased from his mind his own words. Egregious errors like that should certainly never pass peer review—much less all the other errors; least of all, all combined! This is why philosophy has a rep for being stupid.

Needless to say, the reason the brain (actually, only the cortex; the rest of the brain does not share this structure) is organized similarly to the universe (and in fact similarly to social networks, too) is that these structures are following the same physics. The cortex evolved to maximize network efficiency. Evolving cosmic gravity-wells do the same thing. By analogy, you can find that trees grow in the same fractal structure as coastlines. But that does not mean coastlines are alive or produce fruit or will catch fire. The distribution of network nodes in the universe is random with respect to computational function, rather like if we took your brain, kept its structure, but randomly connected every synapse instead—and left out methylation of the DNA in their attached neurons that governs the I/O protocol. The result would not be conscious. It would just be meat.

With this egregious misstep, Kastrup turns on a dime to conclude that because experience and experiencer must be identical (even though that’s also true on physicalism), and fractal structure is shared between the human cortex and galaxies (even though that has nothing to do with function and thus consciousness), all this “must be interpreted parsimoniously as implying solely that all activity in the physical universe is accompanied by conscious inner life at some level.” This is non sequitur after non sequitur, built atop scientifically illiterate falsehood after scientifically illiterate falsehood. None of these premises leads to any of Kastrup’s peculiar conclusions. His entire argument is devoid of logic. It’s just all the worse that it’s ignorant of the relevant science.

A House of Collapsing Cards

An Ontological Solution to the Mind-Body Problem

Kastrup puts all these errors together and cites another nut falsely claiming there is “good reason to treat entangled systems,” like the cosmos, “as irreducible wholes” and so “if the cosmos is an irreducible whole,” Kastrup affirms, “then TWE,” meaning, again, personal consciousness, “which is associated with the entire cosmos,” per that previous stream of non sequiturs, “must be unitary.” This is a travesty of error, the bulk of which I have already illuminated. But now we get an equivocation fallacy: that patterns are irreducible does not mean the things that manifest them are. The specific pattern of the brain that distinguishes you as a person from anyone else is irreducible in the analytical sense that you cannot take it apart and still have you. Just like you cannot take away the sides of a triangle and still have a triangle. The pattern that is “triangle” is, qua triangle, irreducible.

But this is an analytical property, not a physical one. Obviously, while the pattern that is you is irreducible, you certainly are reducible. You know we could kill you by tearing apart the pattern of your brain. Because the pattern of a brain cannot think, just like the pattern of a heart cannot pump blood. To do these things, the patterns have to be instantiated in a material. And that instantiating material is reducible, not irreducible. So it is not possible to get from “the cosmos is an irreducible whole” in terms of its pattern of arrangement to “the cosmos is irreducible” in terms of what it is, much less to “the cosmos thinks or is the product of thought.” There are no logical connections establishing any of these assertions.

By this point, Kastrup’s entire argument is dead, collapsed into a pile of nonsense and nonsequiturs. But he is oblivious to this (as were all his peer reviewers), and instead he rambles on, such as to explain why, if mind is the basis of existence, we don’t share thoughts or experiences, with a completely made-up analogy to psychological disassociation (whereby people psychologically compartmentalize what they know, producing “alters,” multiple disconnected selves). He never explains why this should be the case. Why is the Great Mind doing this to us? Why would it ever? (Much less always?) And if mind is primary, why can this never be overcome? Physicalists can explain actual dissociation in terms of neuronal pathway switching (such as produces any other delusion). But how does that work if neurons are a product and not a cause of thought? Kastrup imagines (like any tinfoil hatter) that if he can come up with any cockamamie reason for a thing, then magically, it becomes true. Never mind why or how, or even what evidence there is for any of it (much less why literally everyone should be insane in precisely this way).

And that last point is the most fundamental: when you are making grand claims in physics (and that is what Kastrup is doing), you are obligated to present scientific evidence for those claims. You can’t just sit in the armchair, invent wildly bizarre and complex ontologies, and then declare them true. This is one of those things philosophy is supposed to have made progress on and put in the past: a reliance on unempirical armchair “science.” By contrast, we can cite a lot of real science casting Superstring Theory as a likely model of reality—and still we don’t conclude it is therefore true. It is promising. It is far more probable than most alternatives. And it is all those things on a basis of scientific evidence. But Kastrup wants to jump the queue and claim his wild theory is better than even Superstring Theory, and not only better, but surely correct—when Kastrup’s theory lacks every epistemic virtue Superstring Theory has, and yet competent intellectuals don’t even consider Superstring Theory to be “confirmed.” Kastrup’s theory is even less confirmed than that—and by vast degree, since it rests, as I just showed, on egregious failures of logic and misunderstandings of science.

Cascading Logic-Fails

I won’t bother analyzing Kastrup’s elaborate and ridiculous theory of alters and disassociation, because none of it connects to reality. He presents no evidence for any of it. And he never explains why reality would be like that (instead of some other way). It’s just a gerrymander, to explain why his theory does not predict what physicalism does—such as why I can’t experience what your brain is experiencing. That is already empirically known to be because your and my brains are not physically networked together, and are running physically separate self-constructs. We don’t need some weirdo theory about widespread cosmic disassociation magic.

But his crazy theory then sticks him in even deeper weeds. As he himself admits, how do we determine what entities have alters? What sets the boundaries between experiencing agents? “What about plants? Rocks? Atoms? Subatomic particles?” he says. Are they conscious agents? Kastrup settles on “metabolizing organisms” (which would make even every individual bacterium conscious) but he never gives any empirical or logical reason for this. Physicalism has already answered this question, and empirically: conscious experience requires complex integrated computation; consequently, boundaries between conscious agents are created by the physical boundaries between complex integrated computations.

So, your physical brain is necessary to experience things—it has the requisite complexity and computational integration. But it is physically separate from my physical brain. So we don’t share its direct outputs (my brain is not in your brain, nor connected to it in any pertinent way). It is also physically distinct from a bacterium, which lacks sufficient components even, much less specific organization, to produce complex integrated computation. It is a computer. But it is vastly simpler (closer to an everyday machine) and thus does not build and navigate world models (much less self-models), because it cannot. That would require an immensely more complex organ, specifically organized to produce that output—which is why brains exist and are so large, voracious, and complex: you can’t have conscious experience without them.

Here we see his most embarrassing failure of reasoning. The only reason Kastrup gives for concluding it is all and only metabolizing organisms that are conscious (and somehow, by magic, causing themselves to be alters separated from the grand underlying consciousness of the universe) is that (and I kid you not) “we are the only structures known to have dissociated streams of inner experiences” and when our metabolism “slows down or stops the dissociation seems to reduce or end” and “these observations alone suggest strongly that metabolizing life is the structure corresponding to alters.” Holy balls. Let’s count his mistakes:

1. He literally just conflated humans with “metabolizing organisms.” But the latter include all animals, plants, and bacteria, which are not “known” to generate self-consciousness. To the contrary, all scientific evidence entails plants and bacteria don’t, and indeed can’t, generate experiences at all, while most animals don’t, and indeed can’t, generate self-conscious experience.
2. He literally just committed a fallacy of Affirming the Consequent: “we observe that if something is conscious, then it is a metabolizing organism; therefore, if there is a metabolizing organism, it is conscious.” Um. No. By that reasoning, “we observe that if there are cats, there is poop; therefore, if there is poop, there are cats.” And thus we deleted dogs from the universe (along with all other animal life).
3. And incredibly, in the very same sentence he also committed a fallacy of Denying the Antecedent (!): “we observe that if there is a metabolizing organism, there is consciousness” (from the fallacy of affirming the consequent I just called out), “therefore, if there is no metabolizing organism, there is no consciousness” (which fallacy becomes the basis later for his asserting the impossibility of AI). By that reasoning, “we observe that if it is snowing, it is cold outside; therefore, if it is not snowing, it is not cold outside.” Just because all the computers most of us are familiar with are electronic, does not mean you can’t make computers without electronics.
4. And then, because of his Affirming the Consequent and Denying the Antecedent, he conflated “having a metabolism” with “being conscious,” which confuses necessary with sufficient causes and overlooks the fact that having a metabolism is neither, unless you define it so broadly that even computers have metabolisms (computers convert energy into function, disperse waste heat, and can repair damaged software, and even learn and thus functionally “grow”; and even in terms of physical components, there are already self-repairing robots now). But when narrowly defined, a metabolism is merely a sufficient, not a necessary, cause of experiences, since anything that handles energy and waste flow and learns can be conscious. But not everything that does that is conscious. Being able to “handle energy and waste flow and learn” is a necessary cause of experiences, but not a sufficient cause. To have a sufficient cause, you must combine “handling energy and waste flow and learning” with a suitably complex integration of computation (you need world-model building; and for self-consciousness, you need to turn that around into self-model building: see Ten Years to the Robot Apocalypse).
5. Kastrup thus fails to notice that what makes the difference between “having a metabolism” and “having experiences” is the latter (a computer), not the former (a metabolism). That’s why we don’t negotiate social contracts with bacteria or grass. So while removing a metabolism (or equivalent) will conk-out experiencing (just as removing the gas will conk-out a car’s engine), this does not mean the metabolism is the thing that produces experiencing (any more than the gas is “the thing” causing the car to move forward: you also need an engine for that). And this is empirically confirmed: you can conk-out a person’s consciousness without taking out (or even slowing) their metabolism. You can also destroy it (brain dead patients can be kept alive on machines; and brain damage can substantially degrade one’s ability to have experiences or integrate a self, while leaving their inherent metabolism running fine). Thus, it’s the structure, not the metabolism, that demarcates experiencers from each other. This is proved negatively (bacteria and plants have metabolism but inadequate structure) and positively (some unconscious humans have adequate metabolism but lack adequate structure).

So, “these observations” do not even at all, much less “alone,” suggest “that metabolizing life is the structure corresponding to” what demarcates persons from each other computationally (and thus experientially). Hence he forgot conjoined twins are a thing, with one metabolism, yet two minds (oops!). To the contrary, computational structure is “the structure” that demarcates persons from each other computationally (and thus experientially). Kastrup’s secondary theory is thus also refuted. He can’t fix his broken theory with this epicycle, because all scientific evidence refutes every component of his reasoning to that conclusion. So we are looking at pseudoscientific crackpottery here. Not competent philosophy. Why would anyone allow all this to be published in their journal and still expect to maintain anyone’s intellectual respect?

The nonsense continues with such nonsequiturs as that microbes and plants compute things (they engage in rudimentary intelligent action, e.g. plants can move toward light and amoebae can manufacture shells), therefore they “have dissociated streams of inner experiences.” By that logic, so do desktop computers and factory robots; even your wristwatch. There is no logical connection here between computing (processing an input into an output) and experiential computing (building and navigating world models, or self-models, either of which being necessary to being an experiencer and thus having experiences).

That Kastrup is blind to this point is shown by the fact that he thinks things “engineered by humans to merely simulate the behavior of living beings, such as robots” are categorically different from microbes and plants. They are not. They are all computing machines. And there are computers now that surpass the computational abilities of microbes and plants. That simply isn’t enough to generate a specific kind of computation, any more than having an exaFLOP supercomputer constitutes having the world’s most awesome run of Dwarf Fortress. You would, but only if that’s the computation you configured it to run—rather than, say, just storing in it a digital library of third-rate romance novels, or making it play pong with itself trillions of times a second. Even metabolism itself is a form of computation—just not of building world or self models (and thus, not an experiential computation), but running mechanical logistics (merely moving things around, like any other robot, to keep an organism alive). Merely keeping an organism alive is empirically not the same computation as generating experiences, just as Pong is empirically not Dwarf Fortress.

Things gets even more into gibberish when Kastrup tries to distinguish perceptions from thoughts, so as to argue that before individual “alters” formed (for some inadequately explained reason), the cosmic mind only had thoughts, not perceptions. But…why? Why would a fundamental mind need physical organs to “perceive” when physical things don’t even exist in the first place, except as thoughts of the world mind? Of course Kastrup never explains how that is even possible (much less presents any evidence that it is true). Without perceptions (such as in the imagination), what would thoughts be about? How can you have “thoughts” without any kind of perceptions for those thoughts to reference and catalog? It is not enough to separate active perceptions from imagination, since those aren’t different in any way relevant to the point (and indeed, in the human brain, they run on the same machinery—you might remember Thomas Ward got theology into the same weeds here). Imagining a democracy or an apple is just as much a perceptual event in the experiential sense; and you cannot think about democracies or apples without any way of perceiving what those things are. Even emotions constitute discriminations in a perceptual field. To feel sad or in pain is to make a perceptual distinction between two states of being, and that is in fact what all thoughts are doing, which is not categorically different from distinguishing red from blue or sound from color (see my discussion in Touch, All the Way Down).

Kastrup descends from there into pages of sheer quackery devoid of any evidence or logic, all to build a Rube Goldbergesque contraption to explain how his model can explain observations (like, why thoughts feel different from perceptions, which is no different from asking why colors feel different from sounds), which is all made-up, and mostly nonsense. It’s all armchair gobbledygook. Which all ignores (and often contradicts) the actual evolutionary history of human perception and reasoning (see The Argument from Reason and Why Plantinga’s Tiger Is Pseudoscience, and, again, Touch, All the Way Down).

In the process, Kastrup contradicts even himself, frequently basing his explanations on things like physics and biology (relying on everything from “the second law of thermodynamics” to what “helped our ancestors survive and reproduce”), when those aren’t supposed to exist so as to control what the mind-substrate thinks or does. If mind was the base of reality, why would there be a “second law of thermodynamics” or things that “help our ancestors survive and reproduce”? Why is there even surviving and reproducing (an operation of physics), much less things that can physically help or hurt and thus select new forms of biology? Why would entropy be a problem that has to be addressed, when a mind can just do without it? Being irreducible, it cannot be subject to entropy itself. So why would it make a physical world subject to it? Why would it produce a physical world at all?

What the hell are quarks for?

Concluding Observations

Needless to say, intellectually, this is all garbage. But I’ve only described the first half of Kastrup’s paper. The second half devolves into more just-so storytelling, articulating a ridiculously elaborate expansion of his model to account for what he had previously listed as basic facts. As I already noted, he does not justify any of what he makes up here. There is no evidence presented. There are no logical entailments presented. He just makes stuff up, a massive and bizarre architecture, and never explains why the world should be that way. It’s all instead invented just to force his Idealism to fit the facts. It is not justified in any way. Indeed, he adds epicycles for everything, even to explain Libet experiments with a convoluted theory of nested disassociation for which he has no evidence and that is needlessly complicated compared to the far simpler explanation of physicalism.

It’s very much like Ptolemy’s geocentric model: a bizarre and elaborate contraption to force the facts to fit the model, without any explanation of why anything should even be like that. Why are the planets stuck in stacked circular epicycles? Why are they arranged in such a bizarrely convoluted way? Why are they even where they are? Why do they move at the theorized velocities they do? All of these things are automatically entailed and thus explained by the vastly simpler theory of Newtonian heliocentrism. So why are we trying to defend Ptolemy’s geocentrism? It’s a crap explanation compared to Newtonian heliocentrism. Ptolemy at least had the excuse that he didn’t know about that alternative, and lacked a foundation in the needed science to come up with it himself (e.g. he was not convinced of inertial theory or universal gravitation; although those were known ideas of his time, they had not yet been empirically proved, in the way they had been by Newton’s time). But Kastrup lives in a world vast with the empirical wealth of the sciences and replete with physicalist theorizing about consciousness. He simply doesn’t consult any of it, and consequently gets almost all of it wrong, and comes up with quack ideas in their stead, all on a repeated basis of blatant fallacious reasoning.

When Kastrup gets around to what he is supposed to be doing (but almost never does in this paper), trying seriously to disprove his thesis before believing it, he stumbles into fundamental errors of reasoning that serve to sustain his delusion but can’t produce a rational conclusion. For example, he claims “physicalism is inflationary” because “In addition to experience itself—the one undeniable ontological class—it postulates the existence of stuff outside and independent of experience,” but as I explained, that’s not true. As even Chalmers conceded, if physicalism is true, it does not posit two independent ontologies, but reduces experience to fundamental particle physics just like everything else. As I explain in Touch, All the Way Down, physicalism entails experience is entailed by certain arrangements of matter, and thus makes experience a highly probable outcome of basic physics. There is only one ontological reality here: matter-energy patterned in space-time, all of which has been empirically confirmed to exist (matter, energy, patterning, space, and time). There is, by contrast, no evidence for the elaborate woo shit Kastrup is talking about. There is no evidence supporting even its plausibility. More to the point, while physicalism is thus in fact deflationary, Kastrup’s theory is the one that is inflationary (he just wrote up pages and pages of weird epicycles to get his theory to work). His theory is thus the one that violates parsimony. Like angels pushing the planets, we have no need of his theory. It multiplies explanations beyond necessity; it’s theoretically over-complex, and empirically under-evidenced.

Similarly, Kastrup claims physicalism lacks explanatory power because it “cannot” explain qualia (what he means by “experience”), which I already noted is false, but he is again reversing the cart. We have plausible explanations of qualia. But Kastrup lacks plausible explanations of anything. That’s why he had to devote so many pages to constructing epicycles to get his theory convoluted enough to explain why physics exists, why brains act exactly like mechanical computers, and other obvious facts. His theory lacks explanatory power. Physicalism explains far more things, with far fewer posits. That’s why so many philosophers are convinced of it, and why Kastrup has to defend the contrary with so many fallacies of logic and misconstrued science.

And that’s even before the fact that Kastrup’s imagined cosmic mind is inherently vastly more theoretically complex than physicalism, which can get to complex minds with just a few simple building blocks and statistically inevitable processes. Which explains why the world looks exactly like we’d expect it to look if there was no God or Mind behind any of it.

And all of that is why Idealism is a dead philosophy now, boosted today only by quacks and cranks. Philosophy cannot call itself knowledge if it does not acknowledge when it has actually made progress in knowledge. And that entails dustbinning shit like this. Just as astronomy moved on from astrology, so philosophy must move on from its every equivalent.