The Idea of the World

A Multi-Disciplinary Argument for the Mental Nature of Reality

By Bernardo Kastrup

John Hunt Publishing Ltd.

Copyright © 2013 Bernardo Kastrup
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78535-739-8

Contents

Acknowledgments, ix,
Foreword by Menas C. Kafatos, 1,
Note to readers of my previous books, 4,
Preface, 6,
Overview, 10,
Part I: What is wrong with the contemporary philosophical outlook, 15,
Chapter 1: Preamble to Part I, 16,
Chapter 2: Conflating abstraction with empirical observation: The false mind-matter dichotomy, 19,
Chapter 3: The quest to solve problems that don't exist: Thought artifacts in contemporary ontology, 39,
Part II: An idealist ontology, 51,
Chapter 4: Preamble to Part II, 52,
Chapter 5: An ontological solution to the mind-body problem, 57,
Chapter 6: Making sense of the mental universe, 93,
Part III: Refuting objections, 123,
Chapter 7: Preamble to Part III, 124,
Chapter 8: On the plausibility of idealism: Refuting criticisms, 128,
Chapter 9: There is an unconscious, but it may well be conscious, 151,
Part IV: Neuroscientific evidence, 171,
Chapter 10: Preamble to Part IV, 172,
Chapter 11: Self-transcendence correlates with brain function impairment, 178,
Chapter 12: What neuroimaging of the psychedelic state tells us about the mind-body problem, 187,
Part V: Related considerations, 199,
Chapter 13: Preamble to Part V, 200,
Chapter 14: The physicalist worldview as neurotic ego-defense mechanism, 203,
Chapter 15: Not its own meaning: A hermeneutic of the world, 220,
Closing commentary, 240,
Afterword by Edward F. Kelly: Science and spirituality: An emerging vision, 261,
Appendix: The idealist view of consciousness after death, 266,
Bibliography, 278,

CHAPTER 1

Preamble to Part I

A natural and perhaps even necessary first step in a book that aims to offer an alternative account of reality is to highlight what is wrong with the current approaches. After all, why bother with alternatives if the status quo is fine? As such, my intent in the next two chapters is not to gratuitously attack my peers in science and philosophy, but to highlight the need and secure the intellectual space for what is later argued in Part II.

The fact is that the mainstream physicalist ontology fails rather spectacularly to account for the most present and sole undeniable aspect of reality: the qualities of experience (see the "hard problem of consciousness" in Chalmers 2003). Physicalism is also arguably irreconcilable with results now emerging from physics laboratories around the world (e.g. Kim et al. 2000, Gröblacher et al. 2007, Romero et al. 2010, Lapkiewicz et al. 2011, Ma et al. 2013, Manning et al. 2015, Hensen et al. 2015, etc.), unless one takes so many liberties with the meaning of the word 'physicalism' that its spirit is outright contradicted. So both in terms of its explanatory power and its consistency with empirical observations, our mainstream view of the nature of reality is found wanting. Academically popular alternatives, such as bottom-up panpsychism, face many of the same empirical challenges, as well as analogous limitations in terms of explanatory power (see, for instance, the "subject combination problem" in Chalmers 2016).

Yet, my purpose with the next two chapters is not to compile a long and tedious list of the empirical and philosophical challenges faced by current ontologies. These challenges are well known and recognized in scientific and philosophical circles, there being no need to further stress them. What I want to attempt here is something more ambitious and — hopefully — ultimately more constructive: to point out the failures and internal contradictions of the very thought processes that led to these flawed ontologies in the first place. Only by understanding these failures and contradictions, as underlying causes of our present philosophical dilemmas, can we hope to reform our thinking and eventually solve the dilemmas.

In this context, Chapter 2 discusses what is perhaps the root of our contemporary philosophical ailment: the tendency to attempt to explain things by replacing concrete reality with abstractions. Such attempts consist by and large of mere word games, played in thought with a rich phantasmagoria of concepts, and represent perhaps the single greatest threat to our ability to remain grounded in reality in the 21st century. In a cultural environment that, because of the gap left open by the loss of religious myths, tacitly expects the latest scientific and philosophical theories to dazzle and boggle the mind (see Kastrup 2016a), scientists and philosophers alike seem ever more willing to lose themselves in a forest of abstractions highly prone to category mistakes.

This cultural legitimization of explanation by ungrounded abstraction is a hydra with many heads. Chapter 3 represents my attempt to identify these heads and diagnose the specific intellectual afflictions behind quandaries such as the "hard problem of consciousness" and the "subject combination problem." I hope to show that these quandaries are merely artifacts of unanchored thought, with no grounding in non-conceptual reality.

Later in the book, in Parts II to IV, I attempt to back up the legitimacy of the criticisms laid out in this Part I by offering an alternative way of thinking, as well as corresponding ontology, which overcome the intellectual afflictions alluded to above. As such, I hope to not only talk the talk, but also walk the walk. Insofar as I succeed in fixing the errors they point to, the criticisms in the next two chapters are given validation. May these criticisms thus be judged not by their incisiveness, but by my ability to demonstrate that a philosophical approach exists that does not fall prey to them.

CHAPTER 2

Conflating abstraction with empirical observation: The false mind-matter dichotomy

At the time of this writing, this article was scheduled to appear in Constructivist Foundations, ISSN 1782-348X, Vol. 13, No. 3, in July 2018. Constructivist Foundations is an interdisciplinary journal published by Alexander Riegler (Free University of Brussels) and thirty board members. It is indexed in Thomson Reuters's Arts & Humanities Citation Index (AHCI) and, in 2016, held the second highest ranking (Q2) in the Scimago Journal Rankings, a well-recognized measure of an academic journal's prestige.

2.1 Abstract

The alleged dichotomy between mind and matter is pervasive. Therefore, the attempt to explain matter in terms of mind (idealism) is often considered a mirror image of that of explaining mind in terms of matter (mainstream physicalism), in the sense of being structurally equivalent despite being reversely arranged. I argue that this is an error arising from language artifacts, for dichotomies must reside in the same level of abstraction. Because matter outside mind is not an empirical fact, but an explanatory model instead, the epistemic symmetry between the two is broken. Consequently, matter and mind cannot reside in the same level of abstraction. It becomes then clear that attempting to explain mind in terms of matter is epistemically more costly than attempting to explain matter in terms of mind. The qualities of experience are suggested to be not only epistemically, but also ontologically primary. The paper highlights the primacy of perceptual constructs over explanatory...