It’s always so funny to see Christians simultaneously talk as if God is an artist, a sophisticated mind, did all these complex things (and lives in a universe with all of this associated supernatural baggage like “sin” which then must trigger additional information about God – e.g. “God cannot change sin” or “God is unwilling to change the sin system”), and then argue that God is in fact maximally simple. You can’t go from talking about the grand mystery of the trinity which doesn’t make sense even to you to talking about how irreducibly simple this idea is.

And, of course, the error can be trivially responded to. “Okay, it’s ‘just God’ or ‘just ideas’? Great. It’s ‘just natural'”. One of the many errors is that they are ignoring (delusionally or disingenuously) the fact that they need a mechanism too . The immense success of naturalist explanations has made people forget that naturalist explanations providing actual non-mysterious mechanisms for action is not some irrelevant trait . How does God work? How does idealism work? What are the specific mechanisms? Those mechanisms are supernaturalistic, but just like any magic system in a fictional setting, they’d still be laid out, with specific limitation and delimitation. And in that, one gets at an immensely complex system even to just be internally coherent let alone to come close to predicting our reality.

You’re right. And this cuts to a semantic folly:

Idealists tend to confuse the simplicity of the indexer with the simplicity of the indexed. Just because I can write the words “love” and “quark” with a few letters does not make either simple. The proper Kolmogorov complexity of those things is the thing that has to be explained.

Even quarks, which structurally have a low Kolmogorov complexity (they only have a few properties and which are unambiguously defined), do not altogether have a low Kolmogorov complexity, because that must measure the selection of the quark to exist in that role, over against all other possibles. If you leave that unexplained, this complexity is vast (it is an extremely improbable arbitrary choice, especially for a mind that can just think things into existence and thus doesn’t even need particles, much less quarks), whereas if you have a structurally simple theory (like Superstring Theory) that makes quarks inevitable, you have considerably reduced their Kolmogorov complexity. That is what it means to have a successful explanation.

This is why the Presocratic notion that objects fall because they “love” the Earth is actually not a good explanation, because it simply buries under a verbal expression what hasn’t been at all explained. Idealism is just a runaway application of this same error.

Theists do exactly this same thing when they claim God reduces the Kolmogorov complexity of quarks because “it is inevitable” that God would do it with quarks. But they never present any reason to believe that that would be how he would do it. So they have simply “Mary Sued” the problem away, which is to say, they have simply hidden the problem under the rug of assertions, and not actually explained anything.

I make this point with regard to qualia in The End of Christianity: theists will say qualia exist and are as they are because God made us in his image and thus we experience consciousness as he does, but why should we believe a god would experience qualia at all, much less specifically those? They actually haven’t explained anything. By contrast, any explanation that would actually make this conclusion probable (such as in Touch, All the Way Down) never includes gods.

Yes. It’s like Yoda says, “luminous beings are we, not this crude matter.” The problem with his statement is that matter itself is not “crude”! We are “luminous beings” precisely because we’re made of matter! Because it’s the electrons in the atoms we’re made of radiating infrared photons that makes us “luminous beings”! I like to imagine myself radiating these infrared photons! It’s how the Laplacian Demon would see me! 🤩

It seems that, if the world were to be at all like the idealist would predict, the mechanisms of mental action would work perfectly. Models would match reality.

Instead, we live in a world where it is challenging to even imagine the nature of the underlying reality, where chaos theory and the calculus of things and quantum mechanics and uncertainty make the world complex in precisely the way the idealist never anticipates.

Kastrup would invent a bunch more epicycles and handwave with claims about all this physics and biology just being excitations of the world mind or something.

But ultimately, you are right. This is just another example of his self-contradictory starting assumption that physics (and hence physical biology) limits what the world mind can instantiate (all the way to driving it hopelessly insane and thereby generating endless alters cut off from the rest), when that should be impossible (since physics, and thus physical biology, cannot exist at all, much less in such weirdly specific ways, but for the world mind choosing to instantiate it—and with such ruthless consistency as to beg all explanation).

On one hand, you could say that TWEs have causal control over the universal super mind in some way. That they can do a specific ritual (a ritual that for the vast majority of time every human had to do in a very specific way that seems in no way predicted by idealism, but entirely predicted by physicalism) which forces some new dissociation that the new TWE did not instantiate. There’s no reason for this to be the case under idealism, certainly not without it ALSO being the case in all sorts of other ways that we do not see (if we can create a new TWE on our own, why do out thoughts control literally nothing else – especially when creating a TWE seems the MOST POWERFUL use of a mind in the first place). And then once you get into every procreative example not involving sex (IVF being the most obvious), how the hell are the new TWEs being created?

On the other hand (and given Kastrup’s pseudo-theism), you could say the universal super mind is simply watching all these rituals (sex) take place and deciding to dissociate a part of itself when some of them occur. Given most of those rituals don’t lead to a TWE (both from lack of fertilization and miscarriage), the super mind is either very discerning or random. It can’t really be the latter or else the whole idealism enterprise falls apart. So the super mind is very discerning… but how does that match anything we see? If the super mind is the one doing the dissociation (creating a new TWE), then the sperm, eggs, and biology should have no actual effect on the process. There should be no such thing as being infertile. But moreover, if it is the super mind doing all the discerning, then there should be no reason that people need to “try” more than once. If the super mind decides two TWEs should take care of a new TWE, starting the process in June rather than July makes what kind of difference?

Also, why then does genetic inheritance matter? Why are new TWEs so much like their “parents” in ways that can’t be explained by upbringing. In an idealistic universe, only nurture should actually matter (since we are only minds interacting with other minds truly). Maybe the super mind actively chooses the new TWE to be similar to the “parent” TWEs. Maybe the super mind actively brings the two TWEs together in some way because it had already planned for a similar TWE to come into being. I don’t Kastrup takes on libertarian notions of free will, so that at least fits. But there is just no mechanism for the super mind to make decisions based on the “physical” actions of TWEs rather than mental assent (seriously, how can unwanted pregnancies occur if the creation of a new TWE is a mental process).

I know I may be preaching to the choir on some of this. Idealism seems to fail the moment you scrutinize almost anything that occurs in the real world.

Good point.