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Analytic Idealism in a Nutshell: A straightforward summary of the 21st century's only plausible metaphysics
As the failures of physicalism begin to shake the confidence of even the most biased of its supporters, a new view on the nature of reality is establishing itself as the only tenable Analytic Idealism. According to it, there is a world out there independent of our individual minds, but such world is—just like ourselves—also mental or experiential. While being a realist, naturalist, rationalist, and even reductionist view, Analytic Idealism flips our culture-bound intuitions on their head, revealing that only through understanding our own inner nature can we understand the nature of the world. This book embodies its author's years-long experience on how best to explain Analytic Idealism to someone who has never studied it before and has no background in the technical fields involved. It meets the listeners where they are, holding their hand as they are shown—through a series of evocative metaphors—how to see through their own unexamined assumptions, so to realize how the impossible dilemmas of physicalism disappear when nature is regarded from a slightly different slant. The conclusions have tremendous implications for our values and way of life, as well as our understanding of purpose, self, identity, and death.
176 pages, Paperback
Published November 1, 2024
82 people are currently reading
287 people want to read
About the author
Bernardo Kastrup
28 books611 followersBernardo Kastrup is the Executive Director of Essentia Foundation and Founder/CEO at AI systems company Euclyd BV. His work has set off the modern renaissance of metaphysical idealism. He has a Ph.D. in philosophy (ontology, philosophy of mind) and another in computer engineering (reconfigurable computing, artificial intelligence). As a scientist, Bernardo has worked for the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) and the Philips Research Laboratories (where the 'Casimir Effect' of Quantum Field Theory was discovered). He has also been creatively active in the high-tech industry for almost 30 years, having founded parallel processor company Silicon Hive (acquired by Intel in 2011) and worked as a technology strategist for the geopolitically significant company ASML. Most recently, he has founded AI hardware company Euclyd BV. Formulated in detail in many academic papers and books, Bernardo's ideas have been featured on 'Scientific American,' the magazine of 'The Institute of Art and Ideas,' the 'Blog of the American Philosophical Association' and 'Big Think,' among others. His most defining book is 'Analytic Idealism in a Nutshell: A straightforward summary of the 21st-century's only plausible metaphysics.' For more information, visit www.bernardokastrup.com.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 36 reviews
February 3, 2025
I should state I went into this without a stance. This book was recommended by someone I know online, who knows I take an interest in metaphysics and neuroscience. I should have known what the insides would be like when I read the cover, “The 21st Century’s only plausible metaphysics.” There are a lot of other statements in this book that are just as presumptuous.
Immediately there is a lead in question at the beginning of the book with careful use of the word “or.” Presenting various choices behind what reality is, while neglecting the possibility that it may be all three. Physical, informational, and mental. The use of that word bothered me here, enough to stop and take note of it.
He then explains the various terms, making it clear what he means when using them. Something which is beneficial in any area of science when homographs are so common.
It’s at this point things take a turn for the worst. He spends a good majority of the book insulting physicalists. Going so far to suggest that those who disagree with him, don’t understand the subject well enough. At times, the tone of the book is extremely condescending, and there was a repetitive theme of insults should anyone disagree with anything he said. It was as if he was trying to intimidate people into believing and following his stance rather than presenting factual evidence for it. Suggesting to them that if they didn’t agree, they were inferior in some way. At one point it even suggests that psychology is not a form of science, when the very word means love of wisdom and it’s labeled in the dictionary as a science of the mind.
There was also a point in the book where he blatantly neglects neurochemistry and biology in relation to human emotions, and the fact that SPECT scanners exist and are fully capable of showing us what is going on in the brain. Especially in cases of disassociation, something which is brought up later but was neglected at the point in which I’m talking about. He also doesn’t entertain the idea that suppressed memories are stored in the body and can be accessed through biochemical reactions triggered through careful re-creation of the emotional setting from when they were created.
This isn’t to say the book was bad. I was intrigued by what he had to say about psychotropics, and I look forward to future studies on that. It’s something I would have never known had I not read this book. I also appreciate his comments on the similarities between the brain and the structure of the universe, as the biological universe is a theory I think about often. But that topic wasn’t touched upon here.
The overall presentation of the book came off as belittling, and presented itself from the perspective of someone who is extremely hostile toward alternative views. Especially those from a physicalists perspective. At no point was physicalism proved wrong, as I expected it might be from his many belittling’s of it.
As a person who still has no definitive stance on the subject, I would have been more open toward this perspective if it hadn’t been given in such an adversarial way. There was a lot of preemptive defensiveness which hints at the amount of conjecture the writer was likely subjected to on their stance. I’d recommend starting this book at the chapter titled Analytic Idealism, and reading on from there. The chapters before this point were unnecessary to get the point across. The end is also a little over the top. It is bold to claim a person is something they say they aren’t simply because they pose challenging questions during interviews. For many interviews the point is to challenge stances so that those watching have a better perspective on their foundations and reasoning.
Beyond that, the goal of any good scientist should be to prove themselves wrong. Like when Carl Sagan was told the topic of the episode they’d just finished filming was proven wrong. Rather than refilming, he used it as an opportunity to show the world that this is how science works, and why it’s so exciting. Bernardo Kastrup seems to have very strong emotional beliefs linked to his stance, which is what makes it so difficult to believe him. Many scientists throughout history have rejected and even suppressed alternative stances when they go against their established theories. I fear to think what his reaction might be should he ever be proven wrong.
Immediately there is a lead in question at the beginning of the book with careful use of the word “or.” Presenting various choices behind what reality is, while neglecting the possibility that it may be all three. Physical, informational, and mental. The use of that word bothered me here, enough to stop and take note of it.
He then explains the various terms, making it clear what he means when using them. Something which is beneficial in any area of science when homographs are so common.
It’s at this point things take a turn for the worst. He spends a good majority of the book insulting physicalists. Going so far to suggest that those who disagree with him, don’t understand the subject well enough. At times, the tone of the book is extremely condescending, and there was a repetitive theme of insults should anyone disagree with anything he said. It was as if he was trying to intimidate people into believing and following his stance rather than presenting factual evidence for it. Suggesting to them that if they didn’t agree, they were inferior in some way. At one point it even suggests that psychology is not a form of science, when the very word means love of wisdom and it’s labeled in the dictionary as a science of the mind.
There was also a point in the book where he blatantly neglects neurochemistry and biology in relation to human emotions, and the fact that SPECT scanners exist and are fully capable of showing us what is going on in the brain. Especially in cases of disassociation, something which is brought up later but was neglected at the point in which I’m talking about. He also doesn’t entertain the idea that suppressed memories are stored in the body and can be accessed through biochemical reactions triggered through careful re-creation of the emotional setting from when they were created.
This isn’t to say the book was bad. I was intrigued by what he had to say about psychotropics, and I look forward to future studies on that. It’s something I would have never known had I not read this book. I also appreciate his comments on the similarities between the brain and the structure of the universe, as the biological universe is a theory I think about often. But that topic wasn’t touched upon here.
The overall presentation of the book came off as belittling, and presented itself from the perspective of someone who is extremely hostile toward alternative views. Especially those from a physicalists perspective. At no point was physicalism proved wrong, as I expected it might be from his many belittling’s of it.
As a person who still has no definitive stance on the subject, I would have been more open toward this perspective if it hadn’t been given in such an adversarial way. There was a lot of preemptive defensiveness which hints at the amount of conjecture the writer was likely subjected to on their stance. I’d recommend starting this book at the chapter titled Analytic Idealism, and reading on from there. The chapters before this point were unnecessary to get the point across. The end is also a little over the top. It is bold to claim a person is something they say they aren’t simply because they pose challenging questions during interviews. For many interviews the point is to challenge stances so that those watching have a better perspective on their foundations and reasoning.
Beyond that, the goal of any good scientist should be to prove themselves wrong. Like when Carl Sagan was told the topic of the episode they’d just finished filming was proven wrong. Rather than refilming, he used it as an opportunity to show the world that this is how science works, and why it’s so exciting. Bernardo Kastrup seems to have very strong emotional beliefs linked to his stance, which is what makes it so difficult to believe him. Many scientists throughout history have rejected and even suppressed alternative stances when they go against their established theories. I fear to think what his reaction might be should he ever be proven wrong.
November 22, 2024
Knowing what I know now I recommend starting with the last chapter Analytic Idealism and then go to the beginning. The chapters leading up the last chapter are different theories of reality that Bernardo refutes. It's difficult at times to understand his position while he dismantles the other theories. So start with the last chapter, then read through the book and you will a better grasp of his arguments. Do your brain a favor and read all of his books.
December 19, 2024
Los primeros capítulos dejaron mucho que desear desde mi punto de vista. Creo que hay algunos argumentos que no están del todo bien desarrollados o que los datos empíricos podrían ser interpretados erróneamente. Sin embargo, el caso en contra del fisicalismo me parece bueno aunque no el más sólido que he leído. Lo que sí me sorprendió bastante es la poderosa objeción contra el panpsiquismo, me parece un ataque casi de muerte. Por otro lado, su explicación de los centros de consciencia individuales dada la consciencia fundamental es interesante y me gusta el uso que le da a las investigaciones neurocientíficas sobre las disociaciones. Algo que me frustró bastante, sin embargo, fue su constante activismo contra el fisicalismo, entiendo lo que quería hacer pero yo esperaba un libro de metafísica, no activismo filosófico. Por último, su explicación del sentido de la vida, el tema del espacio-tiempo, y las relaciones semánticas como lo más fundamental del mundo me pareció increíblemente brillante, valió la pena por esos últimos capítulos.
No me convenció del todo pero sí que me da una mejor perspectiva del idealismo que tanto me interesa y pues me llevo la tarea de investigar más sobre estos sistemas.
No me convenció del todo pero sí que me da una mejor perspectiva del idealismo que tanto me interesa y pues me llevo la tarea de investigar más sobre estos sistemas.
February 21, 2025
If you think consciousness is caused by brain activity, read this book. Of all of Kastrup's books I've read, I'd probably recommend this one first. It's a succinct but thorough walkthrough of all the reasons metaphysical materialism can't be the case, how it's incompatible with modern physics, and how analytic idealism easily makes sense of the hard problem of consciousness and dovetails with empirical science. Will definitely read again. And again.
June 25, 2025
enlightened. purposeful. rigorous.
if bernardo stopped giving his books silly names, wrote in a poetic language, and combined all of his work into a single 600 page tome with a cool ass obscurantists title, like "the known and the knowing" or something like that, would he be canonized? maybe. probably not.
anyways, time to insightmaxx.
if bernardo stopped giving his books silly names, wrote in a poetic language, and combined all of his work into a single 600 page tome with a cool ass obscurantists title, like "the known and the knowing" or something like that, would he be canonized? maybe. probably not.
anyways, time to insightmaxx.
November 22, 2024
A great way of highlighting the limitation of physicalism and materialistic scientific community. I did not enjoy the intellectual pride/poshness on the background tho.
April 14, 2025
Kastrup is brilliant, and this book provides an excellent exposition of the metaphysics behind his cosmology. His theorizing usefully dispatches several of the nuttier directions that dogmatic physicalism has taken. Along the way, he provides an excellent elucidation of what information theory is and what it isn't. I've been craving that since forever. Not to mention putting A.I. in its place.
The trouble is that although he claims Occam’s Razor as his guide, he introduces still more needless complexity with his flip-flop from physical to mental; thinking that he’s reduced complexity by claiming that all of reality might reduce to a single principle, which is mind.
I have more than a little sympathy for this maneuver, but in fact Kastrup glides past a more basic distinction between perceptual and conceptual reality. By replacing the substance of physics with mind-only, Analytic Idealism actually re-enters woo-woo mysticism rather than to escape from it.
In the end, Kastrup has conducted a sleight-of-mind 'against' himself; he fools himself in almost the way that he accuses physicalist scientists of doing.
Kastrup is right about many things, and his insights have enabled him to challenge accurately many of the stranger cosmologies of his physicalist colleagues. But that doesn't quite stop him from his own weird conclusions.
In brief, Kastrup substitutes an inside/outside duality for the now antique mind/body duality for which Descartes generally receives credit or blame, depending on one's disposition. Mind/body maps to concept/percept while inside/outside creates an entirely unnecessary complication about that aspect of mind which cannot consistently be claimed to be inside, and that which is demonstrably outside.
Kastrup’s usage of his newer term "alter" to describe our individuated interiority is useful, though not meaningfully different from Descartes' usage for mind once inside and outside are introduced.
In Kastrup’s “analytic idealism,” alters exist in a field of “subjectivity,” built on the analog of a possible grand unification theory for quantum electrodynamics, where there would be a single quantum field upon which all that we perceive as physical has no separate ‘substance’ from the field. A wave is an action on water and is nothing without the water. It has no substance, and is the very meaning of abstraction once we call it into being. Abstraction is a conceptual maneuver whereby concepts are taken from physical reality.
No actual circle exists in nature, any more than numbers can be imposed there without some degree of abstraction. But the concept of the circle and the power of numbers to help with prediction and therefore with understanding are both undeniable. Sure, a circle is the stuff of mind, while we may perceive only approximations. It’s the matching of percept with concept which composes understanding.
While there may not be any actual and perfect circles in what I would still call the physical world – the world of substance – there are plenty of structures whose description is equivalent to their actuality. Molecules, for instance, whose structure is identical from one to the next such that each is individually indistinguishable. But they do have a describable form.
‘Field of subjectivity’ is only meaninglessly different from ‘field of objectivity.’ The meaningful distinction is between conceptual and perceptual reality.
As do many who descend from the world of information technology, and in his case also the kind of Quantum Electro Dynamics which energizes CERN, where he once worked, Kastrup uses the inaccessibility of personal thoughts to others/outsiders – the secrecy of our thoughts and feelings – to prove his inside/outside distinction.
He then goes further, and for me beyond the pale, to replace the sensible apprehension of the boundary of skin with a fairly, to me, specious metaphor of a “dashboard.” In many ways - and this is surprising to me - Kastrup is himself stuck in the Western set of imperatives as much as are those physicalists that he ridicules.
"Alter" is his metaphor for how individuals - chips off the cosmic mind of analytic idealism - are individuated. We are likened to the seemingly separate selves of those who suffer dissociative identity disorder, or what used to be called multiple personality disorder.
One of the weirdest of Kastrup's moves is that he posits a reality apart from perceptual reality (as conventionally considered) that is more real than what we perceive. I suppose the metaphor is that the physically real is composed of unperceivable parts; subatomic particles, in a vast emptiness, say, pervaded only by a quantum field.
According to him, those “particles” are actually eddies in the subjective field without substance of their own. Quantum fields may be more both/and than he thinks though, which might even scotch the dream of completion for a Grand Universal Theorem. Not every literate human culture is quite so obsessed as the West is with history as unitary progress toward completion.
He attributes our misperception - our inability to perceive actual reality - to the perceiver inside our perceptual apparatus having only a dashboard by means of which to perceive. We can’t see reality in itself. Well, of course we can’t. Reality as we perceive it is also composed with concepts, which are mind extended into matter.
But Kastrup then goes so far as to say that the things of our lived experience from behind our dashboard wouldn't exist without someone there to perceive them. They exist in mind and not in matter, remember. He thus reintroduces the gracefully moribund mind inside the mind corroborating sensory inputs. The mind behind the inner screen is a free floating "alter." A mind inside a mind in infinite regress.
Abstraction is real. The physical is real. One is conceptual while the other is perceptual. Putting both on the same side in a universal field of subjectivity is where Kastrup stops following the principle of Occam’s razor. Analytic idealism is far more complex than a metaphysics allowing for both conceptual and perceptual reality; both mind and physical stuff.
In my usage, the only meaning for interiority is that there must be a physical divider for perception to occur. That's not the same as to say that there must be a perceiver "inside" or behind some screen. There is no real locus for the self inside of mind. Kastrup’s replacement of skin with screen, and mind with alter recreates a superfluous and unnecessary confusion.
Perception happens to a body as divided from the rest of reality by a skin and its organic involutions which form our perceptual organs. The mind of the perceiver has never been confined there, inside our skin nor certainly inside our skull. Kastrup and I seem to agree on this.
As do most scientific thinkers, Kastrup - who talks about emotion more than most scientists do, and certainly more than most devoted materialists ever would - still relegates emotion to being epiphenomenal to consciousness. He often conflates thoughts and feelings as things without extension. He claims to deproblematize the puzzle of consciousness by positing that mind is the whole shebang. So, no problem with consciousness being transformed or transmuted out of physical stuff!
But really, consciousness is just the apprehension of both conceptual and perceptual reality. A lizard knows a hawk when it sees one. Evolution adds the quickening of emotion to the apprehension of a hawk to short-cut conscious thought.
At some level higher than a lizard, something like re-cognition occurs, bringing choice along with reaction.
I confess that I don’t see the need for the usage of “qualia” that many philosophers see. Just because colors and flavors don’t exist in the thing itself, the fact that such so-called qualia are almost universally shared should be sufficient to put them on the perceptual side of things. Niggling about the marginal cases seems not much different from mistaking distortions for wholesale misperception, as Kastrup tends to do.
Those perceptions assigned to the category of qualia are rather more complex than simpler perceptions. I would say that the proof for their objective existence is simply that we can talk about them. And animals respond to qualia much further “down” the line.
I would say that concepts exist outside the individual mind, and that, therefore, emotion is fundamental and even primordial. Indeed, mind cannot be described without emotion. Any mind is as much about emotion as it is about cognition. I’ll even grant that Kastrup might agree with this.
But emotion requires at least as much definition as physical forces do. Here’s my radical maneuver: emotion is both real and as outside of mind as perception is.
In my usage, emotion is rather more like the false definition of gravity as a simultaneous force acting at a distance. That sort of physical simultaneity is better defined by a shared 'curvature' of space-time, as Kastrup urges us to understand. Emotion is defined by actual simultaneity without any physical force involved. Emotion is engendered by conceptual/mental and not perceptual/material movement. Emotion involves no physical force but is engendered by the matching of concept with percept, the apprehension of new concepts or the transformation of old ones. It is not a process which can exist within an asocial individual. For humans, emotion takes as much learning as does cognition. But unlike perception, emotion is felt directly by the mind. If mind is outside the skin, then so is emotion.
And furthermore, morality is no more a part of Kastrup's purportedly comprehensive analytical idealism than it is a part of physicalism. Kastrup’s ethics might be something like “we have to keep contributing to the cosmic mind.” In the same way, a physicalist might use the imperative to understand as the highest purpose for humanity.
But in fact, conscience is more a matter of fellow feeling. For humans, the recognition which engages conscience is enhanced by the highly individualized nature of faces and voices and stature and skin coloring.
Being me is still about outside and inside, and a bat or a human only knows what it's like to be me from the outside. And yes, I mean that I don't know what it's like to be me from the inside. I can't know myself without you who help me to know myself. Cogito ergo sum is nonsense, as we all know. My good friends know my thoughts much better than I do. That sometimes hurts. Don’t we hide from ourselves as much as we have secrets? And having secrets doesn’t indicate a thing about the privacy or insidishness of our mind. Sure, we put some of our thoughts behind a blind, and sometimes we blind even ourselves.
To repeat myself again and again, I make my claim for his fooling himself in part because of his strange - to me - reliance on the hackneyed usage of an instrument panel to describe our distance from understanding or even describing the world as it fully is. Like a computer screen and its icons as related to the workings of the actual computer, another of the metaphors he uses, we only know what is presented. Trying to interact directly with the inners of a computer could only get in the way of its usefulness. This "interface" between inside and outside is identical, I would say, to the dualistic distinction between mind and body, and equally useless as an explainer of anything.
His screen metaphor confuses our perpetual shortfall from full understanding with a perceptual shortfall from full seeing. Indeed, I don't believe any adequate description for 'understanding' exists in his arguments.
Sure, there is more complexity to the world than what we can know, but almost none of this regards what most of us will continue to call the physical world. The contours of the physical world are as real as the conceptual relations beneath or behind or within those contours. Those interior contours of reality are, yes, mental, but as with the surfaces, they are the same to every understander. Instruments on a panel may refine our perception, but they almost never change its outlines.
The complexity we miss from behind our screens is really mostly social and intellectual. The sort of complexity that it's always hard to understand without actual engagement. It is indeed our physicalist researches which have, by way of measurement and calculation, enabled us to refine our understanding according to the materialist scientific method, to the extreme that we have.
Of course, there is complexity to the physical world which we cannot see directly. But we can certainly understand it by way of instruments connected to a dashboard.
Sure, we are limited in our perceptions by the fact that we don't see all frequencies of light, nor hear all frequencies of sound, nor taste all that might be tasted. But when we do extend our perceptions by use of those instruments which compose his metaphor, we have no reason to expect that the invisible - meaning not fully perceived - world would be drastically altered [sic] from that part of it which we do perceive.
And to perceive is not to understand. Instrumentation and numbers enable a deepening of our understanding of the physical world. There is no reason to suspect that the physical world is substantially different or other from what we perceive directly. And you will never know me by my guts. Do we see through or with a telescope? Our instruments allow us to make better predictions. The best part is that quantum physics puts a stop to our dreams of complete understanding. We cannot and do not stand outside the real world.
Understanding is a match between conceptual and perceptual reality. As regards the material world, that would involve the ability to predict behaviors based on an understanding of properties. Emotional reality depends, differently, on mutuality and simultaneity of a sort which can't exist in the physical world.
For a conscious agent having free will, emotion impels both physical motion away or against or toward at the same time that it instigates a mental quest for understanding. It is telling that Kastrup is involved in developing hardware for Artificial Intelligence. But, mirabile dictu, he is not so mystified by it as are those whose most precious dream is to get fabulously rich and powerful off it. Kastrup’s explanation about what AI is and isn’t is just as good and clear as is his explication of information theory.
If mind is all, then there can be no fundamental difference in mind depending on its substrate. Kastrup avoids the trap that the brain is the house of the mind. It's not just that AI has a difficult time with emotion. It's that the on/off nature of silicon logic gates divides such quasi-thinking from the extension that living mind has to the universe all around. Kastrup gives us this and then takes it away with his dashboard.
As the mind researcher Riccardo Manzotti urges us to understand, our memories are not contained in our brains, which instead loops our actual perceptions of actual things. Our memories are all around us. Visit a former habitation if you can find one that hasn't changed too drastically, and feel the memories rush in. Our brain generalizes from multiple perceptions to form concepts. Those concepts are also out in the world. We prove this easily by the languages which create our social being. We share conceptual reality.
It is specifically this conceptual reality which mind "imposes" on what we perceive. We organize the world into lions and tigers and bears, never mind that these are not always so distinct as our mind would like them. Those objects still exist if conceived differently by others. Sure, there is some raw stuff not yet conceptualized. But the reality that we've already conceived is as real as real can be, despite Kastrup's protestation that evolution requires distortion of our perception. Distortion does not make the world that we perceive unreal. Distortion is correctable.
Emotion is as real and external to us as is measurable and detectable physical reality. Indeed, the reality of emotion falls out naturally from Kastrup’s definition of reality as cognition. Mind before matter, as it were. And emotion before cognition.
I do think his discarding of matter complicates rather than simplifies his cosmology. Of course, matter is something, but it is not everything. Neither is mind. Contrasting with his usage for the parsimony of Occam's razor, I would say that to maintain the yin/yang of both mind and matter is the parsimonious course. Get rid of static outside/inside. Reality moves.
As illustration, consider that evolution has a direction which is, in rough terms, opposite to the direction of physical entropy. Indeed I would say that the physical enactment of time's arrow is defined by that interplay, and I would call the direction of life's evolution something akin to love or eros (for the materialists).
On-line, Kastrup has described his own uncanny experiences, which are nothing other than meaningful coincidence, which probably can't be proven or disproven, since it's only meaningful to those who find it so. But Kastrup has described his openness to such happenings after being convinced by his own analytic idealism. Likewise, evolution depends on random mutations - on happenstance - which is no longer so meaningless when taken in the aggregate.
Apart from the metering of entropy, material science has no explanation for time's arrow. And yet for all his analytical idealism, Kastrup still treats time in the way that historians do, and supposes a before and after for everything. Having experienced death a few times, I have the revelation that before and after collapse into a lifetime fully present. Kind of the way the Big Bang might or should be conceptualized, instead of trying to measure its distance from now across time. I would love to disabuse Kastrup of his fear of death.
Love is indeed the hardest guide for humans to follow, though most of us know it easily enough in opposition to, say, hate. From there, everything about morality can be built, no man-made dictates from a man-made God required. However, why not call the non-alterial [!!] all of analytic idealism - the cosmic mentation, if you will - why not call that God? What else to call cosmic mind? It does remain other to us, and always shall be. And God won’t be conscious until or unless there’s another cosmos. Ha! Bernardo and I agree!
Is it any wonder now that the world is in the thrall of conscienceless individuals? These are people without fellow-feeling, sometimes believing that they are following God’s dictates, and sometimes obeying the false consciousness of transactional materialism.
The trouble is that although he claims Occam’s Razor as his guide, he introduces still more needless complexity with his flip-flop from physical to mental; thinking that he’s reduced complexity by claiming that all of reality might reduce to a single principle, which is mind.
I have more than a little sympathy for this maneuver, but in fact Kastrup glides past a more basic distinction between perceptual and conceptual reality. By replacing the substance of physics with mind-only, Analytic Idealism actually re-enters woo-woo mysticism rather than to escape from it.
In the end, Kastrup has conducted a sleight-of-mind 'against' himself; he fools himself in almost the way that he accuses physicalist scientists of doing.
Kastrup is right about many things, and his insights have enabled him to challenge accurately many of the stranger cosmologies of his physicalist colleagues. But that doesn't quite stop him from his own weird conclusions.
In brief, Kastrup substitutes an inside/outside duality for the now antique mind/body duality for which Descartes generally receives credit or blame, depending on one's disposition. Mind/body maps to concept/percept while inside/outside creates an entirely unnecessary complication about that aspect of mind which cannot consistently be claimed to be inside, and that which is demonstrably outside.
Kastrup’s usage of his newer term "alter" to describe our individuated interiority is useful, though not meaningfully different from Descartes' usage for mind once inside and outside are introduced.
In Kastrup’s “analytic idealism,” alters exist in a field of “subjectivity,” built on the analog of a possible grand unification theory for quantum electrodynamics, where there would be a single quantum field upon which all that we perceive as physical has no separate ‘substance’ from the field. A wave is an action on water and is nothing without the water. It has no substance, and is the very meaning of abstraction once we call it into being. Abstraction is a conceptual maneuver whereby concepts are taken from physical reality.
No actual circle exists in nature, any more than numbers can be imposed there without some degree of abstraction. But the concept of the circle and the power of numbers to help with prediction and therefore with understanding are both undeniable. Sure, a circle is the stuff of mind, while we may perceive only approximations. It’s the matching of percept with concept which composes understanding.
While there may not be any actual and perfect circles in what I would still call the physical world – the world of substance – there are plenty of structures whose description is equivalent to their actuality. Molecules, for instance, whose structure is identical from one to the next such that each is individually indistinguishable. But they do have a describable form.
‘Field of subjectivity’ is only meaninglessly different from ‘field of objectivity.’ The meaningful distinction is between conceptual and perceptual reality.
As do many who descend from the world of information technology, and in his case also the kind of Quantum Electro Dynamics which energizes CERN, where he once worked, Kastrup uses the inaccessibility of personal thoughts to others/outsiders – the secrecy of our thoughts and feelings – to prove his inside/outside distinction.
He then goes further, and for me beyond the pale, to replace the sensible apprehension of the boundary of skin with a fairly, to me, specious metaphor of a “dashboard.” In many ways - and this is surprising to me - Kastrup is himself stuck in the Western set of imperatives as much as are those physicalists that he ridicules.
"Alter" is his metaphor for how individuals - chips off the cosmic mind of analytic idealism - are individuated. We are likened to the seemingly separate selves of those who suffer dissociative identity disorder, or what used to be called multiple personality disorder.
One of the weirdest of Kastrup's moves is that he posits a reality apart from perceptual reality (as conventionally considered) that is more real than what we perceive. I suppose the metaphor is that the physically real is composed of unperceivable parts; subatomic particles, in a vast emptiness, say, pervaded only by a quantum field.
According to him, those “particles” are actually eddies in the subjective field without substance of their own. Quantum fields may be more both/and than he thinks though, which might even scotch the dream of completion for a Grand Universal Theorem. Not every literate human culture is quite so obsessed as the West is with history as unitary progress toward completion.
He attributes our misperception - our inability to perceive actual reality - to the perceiver inside our perceptual apparatus having only a dashboard by means of which to perceive. We can’t see reality in itself. Well, of course we can’t. Reality as we perceive it is also composed with concepts, which are mind extended into matter.
But Kastrup then goes so far as to say that the things of our lived experience from behind our dashboard wouldn't exist without someone there to perceive them. They exist in mind and not in matter, remember. He thus reintroduces the gracefully moribund mind inside the mind corroborating sensory inputs. The mind behind the inner screen is a free floating "alter." A mind inside a mind in infinite regress.
Abstraction is real. The physical is real. One is conceptual while the other is perceptual. Putting both on the same side in a universal field of subjectivity is where Kastrup stops following the principle of Occam’s razor. Analytic idealism is far more complex than a metaphysics allowing for both conceptual and perceptual reality; both mind and physical stuff.
In my usage, the only meaning for interiority is that there must be a physical divider for perception to occur. That's not the same as to say that there must be a perceiver "inside" or behind some screen. There is no real locus for the self inside of mind. Kastrup’s replacement of skin with screen, and mind with alter recreates a superfluous and unnecessary confusion.
Perception happens to a body as divided from the rest of reality by a skin and its organic involutions which form our perceptual organs. The mind of the perceiver has never been confined there, inside our skin nor certainly inside our skull. Kastrup and I seem to agree on this.
As do most scientific thinkers, Kastrup - who talks about emotion more than most scientists do, and certainly more than most devoted materialists ever would - still relegates emotion to being epiphenomenal to consciousness. He often conflates thoughts and feelings as things without extension. He claims to deproblematize the puzzle of consciousness by positing that mind is the whole shebang. So, no problem with consciousness being transformed or transmuted out of physical stuff!
But really, consciousness is just the apprehension of both conceptual and perceptual reality. A lizard knows a hawk when it sees one. Evolution adds the quickening of emotion to the apprehension of a hawk to short-cut conscious thought.
At some level higher than a lizard, something like re-cognition occurs, bringing choice along with reaction.
I confess that I don’t see the need for the usage of “qualia” that many philosophers see. Just because colors and flavors don’t exist in the thing itself, the fact that such so-called qualia are almost universally shared should be sufficient to put them on the perceptual side of things. Niggling about the marginal cases seems not much different from mistaking distortions for wholesale misperception, as Kastrup tends to do.
Those perceptions assigned to the category of qualia are rather more complex than simpler perceptions. I would say that the proof for their objective existence is simply that we can talk about them. And animals respond to qualia much further “down” the line.
I would say that concepts exist outside the individual mind, and that, therefore, emotion is fundamental and even primordial. Indeed, mind cannot be described without emotion. Any mind is as much about emotion as it is about cognition. I’ll even grant that Kastrup might agree with this.
But emotion requires at least as much definition as physical forces do. Here’s my radical maneuver: emotion is both real and as outside of mind as perception is.
In my usage, emotion is rather more like the false definition of gravity as a simultaneous force acting at a distance. That sort of physical simultaneity is better defined by a shared 'curvature' of space-time, as Kastrup urges us to understand. Emotion is defined by actual simultaneity without any physical force involved. Emotion is engendered by conceptual/mental and not perceptual/material movement. Emotion involves no physical force but is engendered by the matching of concept with percept, the apprehension of new concepts or the transformation of old ones. It is not a process which can exist within an asocial individual. For humans, emotion takes as much learning as does cognition. But unlike perception, emotion is felt directly by the mind. If mind is outside the skin, then so is emotion.
And furthermore, morality is no more a part of Kastrup's purportedly comprehensive analytical idealism than it is a part of physicalism. Kastrup’s ethics might be something like “we have to keep contributing to the cosmic mind.” In the same way, a physicalist might use the imperative to understand as the highest purpose for humanity.
But in fact, conscience is more a matter of fellow feeling. For humans, the recognition which engages conscience is enhanced by the highly individualized nature of faces and voices and stature and skin coloring.
Being me is still about outside and inside, and a bat or a human only knows what it's like to be me from the outside. And yes, I mean that I don't know what it's like to be me from the inside. I can't know myself without you who help me to know myself. Cogito ergo sum is nonsense, as we all know. My good friends know my thoughts much better than I do. That sometimes hurts. Don’t we hide from ourselves as much as we have secrets? And having secrets doesn’t indicate a thing about the privacy or insidishness of our mind. Sure, we put some of our thoughts behind a blind, and sometimes we blind even ourselves.
To repeat myself again and again, I make my claim for his fooling himself in part because of his strange - to me - reliance on the hackneyed usage of an instrument panel to describe our distance from understanding or even describing the world as it fully is. Like a computer screen and its icons as related to the workings of the actual computer, another of the metaphors he uses, we only know what is presented. Trying to interact directly with the inners of a computer could only get in the way of its usefulness. This "interface" between inside and outside is identical, I would say, to the dualistic distinction between mind and body, and equally useless as an explainer of anything.
His screen metaphor confuses our perpetual shortfall from full understanding with a perceptual shortfall from full seeing. Indeed, I don't believe any adequate description for 'understanding' exists in his arguments.
Sure, there is more complexity to the world than what we can know, but almost none of this regards what most of us will continue to call the physical world. The contours of the physical world are as real as the conceptual relations beneath or behind or within those contours. Those interior contours of reality are, yes, mental, but as with the surfaces, they are the same to every understander. Instruments on a panel may refine our perception, but they almost never change its outlines.
The complexity we miss from behind our screens is really mostly social and intellectual. The sort of complexity that it's always hard to understand without actual engagement. It is indeed our physicalist researches which have, by way of measurement and calculation, enabled us to refine our understanding according to the materialist scientific method, to the extreme that we have.
Of course, there is complexity to the physical world which we cannot see directly. But we can certainly understand it by way of instruments connected to a dashboard.
Sure, we are limited in our perceptions by the fact that we don't see all frequencies of light, nor hear all frequencies of sound, nor taste all that might be tasted. But when we do extend our perceptions by use of those instruments which compose his metaphor, we have no reason to expect that the invisible - meaning not fully perceived - world would be drastically altered [sic] from that part of it which we do perceive.
And to perceive is not to understand. Instrumentation and numbers enable a deepening of our understanding of the physical world. There is no reason to suspect that the physical world is substantially different or other from what we perceive directly. And you will never know me by my guts. Do we see through or with a telescope? Our instruments allow us to make better predictions. The best part is that quantum physics puts a stop to our dreams of complete understanding. We cannot and do not stand outside the real world.
Understanding is a match between conceptual and perceptual reality. As regards the material world, that would involve the ability to predict behaviors based on an understanding of properties. Emotional reality depends, differently, on mutuality and simultaneity of a sort which can't exist in the physical world.
For a conscious agent having free will, emotion impels both physical motion away or against or toward at the same time that it instigates a mental quest for understanding. It is telling that Kastrup is involved in developing hardware for Artificial Intelligence. But, mirabile dictu, he is not so mystified by it as are those whose most precious dream is to get fabulously rich and powerful off it. Kastrup’s explanation about what AI is and isn’t is just as good and clear as is his explication of information theory.
If mind is all, then there can be no fundamental difference in mind depending on its substrate. Kastrup avoids the trap that the brain is the house of the mind. It's not just that AI has a difficult time with emotion. It's that the on/off nature of silicon logic gates divides such quasi-thinking from the extension that living mind has to the universe all around. Kastrup gives us this and then takes it away with his dashboard.
As the mind researcher Riccardo Manzotti urges us to understand, our memories are not contained in our brains, which instead loops our actual perceptions of actual things. Our memories are all around us. Visit a former habitation if you can find one that hasn't changed too drastically, and feel the memories rush in. Our brain generalizes from multiple perceptions to form concepts. Those concepts are also out in the world. We prove this easily by the languages which create our social being. We share conceptual reality.
It is specifically this conceptual reality which mind "imposes" on what we perceive. We organize the world into lions and tigers and bears, never mind that these are not always so distinct as our mind would like them. Those objects still exist if conceived differently by others. Sure, there is some raw stuff not yet conceptualized. But the reality that we've already conceived is as real as real can be, despite Kastrup's protestation that evolution requires distortion of our perception. Distortion does not make the world that we perceive unreal. Distortion is correctable.
Emotion is as real and external to us as is measurable and detectable physical reality. Indeed, the reality of emotion falls out naturally from Kastrup’s definition of reality as cognition. Mind before matter, as it were. And emotion before cognition.
I do think his discarding of matter complicates rather than simplifies his cosmology. Of course, matter is something, but it is not everything. Neither is mind. Contrasting with his usage for the parsimony of Occam's razor, I would say that to maintain the yin/yang of both mind and matter is the parsimonious course. Get rid of static outside/inside. Reality moves.
As illustration, consider that evolution has a direction which is, in rough terms, opposite to the direction of physical entropy. Indeed I would say that the physical enactment of time's arrow is defined by that interplay, and I would call the direction of life's evolution something akin to love or eros (for the materialists).
On-line, Kastrup has described his own uncanny experiences, which are nothing other than meaningful coincidence, which probably can't be proven or disproven, since it's only meaningful to those who find it so. But Kastrup has described his openness to such happenings after being convinced by his own analytic idealism. Likewise, evolution depends on random mutations - on happenstance - which is no longer so meaningless when taken in the aggregate.
Apart from the metering of entropy, material science has no explanation for time's arrow. And yet for all his analytical idealism, Kastrup still treats time in the way that historians do, and supposes a before and after for everything. Having experienced death a few times, I have the revelation that before and after collapse into a lifetime fully present. Kind of the way the Big Bang might or should be conceptualized, instead of trying to measure its distance from now across time. I would love to disabuse Kastrup of his fear of death.
Love is indeed the hardest guide for humans to follow, though most of us know it easily enough in opposition to, say, hate. From there, everything about morality can be built, no man-made dictates from a man-made God required. However, why not call the non-alterial [!!] all of analytic idealism - the cosmic mentation, if you will - why not call that God? What else to call cosmic mind? It does remain other to us, and always shall be. And God won’t be conscious until or unless there’s another cosmos. Ha! Bernardo and I agree!
Is it any wonder now that the world is in the thrall of conscienceless individuals? These are people without fellow-feeling, sometimes believing that they are following God’s dictates, and sometimes obeying the false consciousness of transactional materialism.
March 10, 2025
An upheaval of Western metaphysical biases. This book summarizes Kastrup's radically anti-physicalist metaphysical framework he calls analytic idealism. Physicalism - the view that reality can be exhaustively described by measurements of matter, and that consciousness is just an emergent property of physical processes in the brain - is assumed by many to be the "scientific" worldview, but Kastrup dissects physicalism and exposes it as nothing other than a culturally reinforced and arbitrary axiom we have asserted as our mainstream metaphysics, which upon further examination appears to be entirely unscientific and illogical. Kastrup has PhDs in both engineering and philosophy, and he uses his technical background to draw examples from physics, engineering, and neuroscience to back his arguments.
Analytic idealism essentially posits that reality is mental, and all that exists is the single mind of the universe, which he calls - inspired by Huxley - Mind At Large. Further, the world we perceive is a reduced, abstracted version of the objective reality-at-large; ie. our perception is not a transparent window into the real world. In fact, humans have evolved to create an abstract representation of the world in our minds in order to navigate it. He uses the metaphor of a "dashboard representation": the pilot in an airplane cockpit gets information about the plane's surroundings by reading a dashboard of sensors, displays, and dials, designed to accurately reflect the activity of the sky outside, but of course does not look like the sky outside. In Kastrup's view, human perception is a dashboard representation of the real world around us. It's clear that perception does not need to be a transparent window into the world - as long as our dashboard conveys the important information we need for survival, there is nothing more we need to perceive. He then asks, although it doesn't need to be a transparent window, is it possible that it is anyway? He argues via information theory that the answer is again no; if perception were a transparent window into the world, there would be no upper bound on our internal entropy, and unbounded internal entropy is incompatible with structural and dynamic integrity: by just looking at the world, we would "melt into a hot meat soup." It follows then that perception is necessarily a reduced representation of reality. A lot of existing phenomena that are mysteries under physicalism are answered by analytic idealism, eg. the "hard" problem of consciousness, transcendence, the placebo effect, clairvoyance, savant abilities, etc. easily fit within the framework of analytic idealism, but under physicalism they make no sense.
Subsequent sections discuss the differentiation of individual minds from the universal mind. He says that individual minds are analogous to dissociates of mind-at-large, akin to the kind of dissociation which occurs in those with dissociative identity disorder. We are all "alters" of the universal consciousness. In line with quantum field theory he posits that there is one single "field" of consciousness, and all individual experiences are points of excitation in the consciousness field. Death is the end of our individual dissociation, and at the point of death we go from perceiving mind at large to becoming mind at large; we live life as individual raindrops and death is just landing in the ocean.
The bulk of the volume of the book is in chapters 1-6, and it's in these chapters where he gives the entire argument for analytic idealism. Chapters 7-9 are a tone shift away from philosophical arguments to some very poetic reflections on life, death, and what analytic idealism means for the future of humanity, and I was really shocked by how beautiful this ended up being. I'm just going to copy here the last page and a half or so of chapter 7, Circumambulation:
I had exactly this cognition in a deep meditation when I was around 14 and I mean it when I say that this piece of insight has worked in the background as the motivation for everything I do since then - I decided back then that this was the meaning of life: for the universe to understand itself. We are here to experience, learn, and grow, and when we die it all gets harvested and added to the ever-growing library of universal consciousness. To see this written in the concluding chapters of a philosophy book I just happened to stumble upon years later was a meaningful moment for me.
Really glad to have found this only a few months after it was published and I recommend to anyone looking for a friendly introduction to idealism.
Analytic idealism essentially posits that reality is mental, and all that exists is the single mind of the universe, which he calls - inspired by Huxley - Mind At Large. Further, the world we perceive is a reduced, abstracted version of the objective reality-at-large; ie. our perception is not a transparent window into the real world. In fact, humans have evolved to create an abstract representation of the world in our minds in order to navigate it. He uses the metaphor of a "dashboard representation": the pilot in an airplane cockpit gets information about the plane's surroundings by reading a dashboard of sensors, displays, and dials, designed to accurately reflect the activity of the sky outside, but of course does not look like the sky outside. In Kastrup's view, human perception is a dashboard representation of the real world around us. It's clear that perception does not need to be a transparent window into the world - as long as our dashboard conveys the important information we need for survival, there is nothing more we need to perceive. He then asks, although it doesn't need to be a transparent window, is it possible that it is anyway? He argues via information theory that the answer is again no; if perception were a transparent window into the world, there would be no upper bound on our internal entropy, and unbounded internal entropy is incompatible with structural and dynamic integrity: by just looking at the world, we would "melt into a hot meat soup." It follows then that perception is necessarily a reduced representation of reality. A lot of existing phenomena that are mysteries under physicalism are answered by analytic idealism, eg. the "hard" problem of consciousness, transcendence, the placebo effect, clairvoyance, savant abilities, etc. easily fit within the framework of analytic idealism, but under physicalism they make no sense.
Subsequent sections discuss the differentiation of individual minds from the universal mind. He says that individual minds are analogous to dissociates of mind-at-large, akin to the kind of dissociation which occurs in those with dissociative identity disorder. We are all "alters" of the universal consciousness. In line with quantum field theory he posits that there is one single "field" of consciousness, and all individual experiences are points of excitation in the consciousness field. Death is the end of our individual dissociation, and at the point of death we go from perceiving mind at large to becoming mind at large; we live life as individual raindrops and death is just landing in the ocean.
The bulk of the volume of the book is in chapters 1-6, and it's in these chapters where he gives the entire argument for analytic idealism. Chapters 7-9 are a tone shift away from philosophical arguments to some very poetic reflections on life, death, and what analytic idealism means for the future of humanity, and I was really shocked by how beautiful this ended up being. I'm just going to copy here the last page and a half or so of chapter 7, Circumambulation:
"...Which is not to say life is meaningless. Whether nature has a plan or not, it is coherent to imagine we may find ourselves having a meaningful, productive role in it. As a matter of fact, I think we can go even further and identify what the role is. In the bloody course of the evolution of life on Earth, the more advanced organisms have developed high-level mental functions. Humans in particular seem to be unique in our ability to think symbolically, conceptually...If the four-billion-year-long evolutionary drama is pushing towards something, it seems to be these high-level mental functions.
Now notice that it is only through these high-level functions that nature can take explicit notice of itself; raise its head above the tsunami of instinctual unfolding and take account of what it is doing; perhaps even of what it is. It is only through life - through dissociation - that nature can 'step out of itself', so to contemplate itself with some degree of objectivity. As Jung put it, this meta-cognitive scrutiny is a second act of creation, for it bathes existence with the light of a new level of awareness
There is a sense, thus, in which we are 'spies for God.' We are in the unique position, after the unfathomable labor of four billion years of evolution, to contemplate nature from a vantage point not otherwise available to nature. Countless conscious beings have lived and died over countless eons, so we could stand here today, musing about the most profound questions of existence. And after a lifetime of insights in this regard, upon death - the end of the dissociation - we contribute those insights to the broader field of cognition that nature is.
It is difficult to imagine that this isn't a meaningful role, whether the arrangement was deliberate or not. The ancients seemed to have intuited this, since they chose to symbolize death as an agent - the grim reaper - wielding a harvesting instrument of all things. Even more remarkably, they also considered sacrificial offerings to God. Why would they think that? Why would the end of a life give God something it wanted or needed? Shortsighted and morally unacceptable as sacrifices are...the idea does seem to reflect a deep, spontaneous intuition about the value of life, and of death as the means for nature to bank or collect on that value.".
I had exactly this cognition in a deep meditation when I was around 14 and I mean it when I say that this piece of insight has worked in the background as the motivation for everything I do since then - I decided back then that this was the meaning of life: for the universe to understand itself. We are here to experience, learn, and grow, and when we die it all gets harvested and added to the ever-growing library of universal consciousness. To see this written in the concluding chapters of a philosophy book I just happened to stumble upon years later was a meaningful moment for me.
Really glad to have found this only a few months after it was published and I recommend to anyone looking for a friendly introduction to idealism.
February 25, 2025
Written in a way that many can approach and understand. I read this alongside a mystical Christianity book, which enriched and compliments the idea of universal mind, in my opinion.
Read it.
Read it.
January 19, 2025
This is Kastrup's tenth and latest book in his crusade against physicalism (aka materialism), the philosophy that everything derives from and can be explained in terms of physical units such as atoms, particles, and fields.
The book contains a compelling historical argument of how physicalism came to dominate our collective thinking. The main point is that it originally provided a bulwark against church dogma, basically by styling everything other than itself as no better than superstition. A caste of scientists and other "smart people" could then use this narrative to grab and maintain intellectual dominance, which Kastrup argues they've obviously done with great success.
Kastrup's major theme is that humans can't know reality, only a "map" of reality provided by the five senses, all of which damp down (or amplify) and shape the input data in various ways before passing it through to the brain, plus scientific measuring devices that add more "abstract data" to the mix. Kastrup likens these various inputs to banks of dials in an airplane cockpit that allow a pilot to fly through elements s/he can't rightly see or know. That's our relationship to reality according to Kastrup..
Is this convincing? Well, yes and no.
The strongest arguments against physicalism are probably those that raise the conundrum of how the dead can possibly create the living. Why would it bother? Pure Darwinism can't provide a teleological justification for anything non-living to create life. Darwinists seem inclined simply to look away rather than tackle the problem. But stating or implying that life happened purely by chance seems largely to beg the question of why we would settle for such a weak, unsatisfying explanation.
Another stumbling block is the eternality out of which anything was originally created. Trying to name matter as a definitive origin and basis of everything soon poses problems in naming anything definitively as having come first. Our purchase on the whole of cosmic history inevitably comes to seem all but infinitesimal. Eternity stumps us; we can't peer inside it to find origins in a human historical sense.
Kastrup puts the main thrust of his argument on the map-versus-territory dichotomy, returning again and again to the cockpit analogy. But is his a true dichotomy? Can't a map become a kind of territory and a territory a kind of map? I think Kastrup's main problem is not seeing his "map's" potential richness. It's not just dials providing cold data to one or two lonely, stressed, bored pilots. It could be a massive and complex entity, or hyperobject, constantly being redrawn and cross-checked by whole cultures and societies, its construction and maintenance not solitary exercises, but a large-scale opus by and for everyone on the planet, past, present, and (hopefully) future. Can anyone really deny that we all make our inputs to a collective map? In that light, might we not re-imagine Kastrup's "map" as something much more dynamic and comprehensive, one whose own potential reality claims should probably not be lightly dismissed?
It's interesting that Kastrup presents his idea of the Universe as very much a society. For different first-persons to act together to create a common map, they must be very intimately related. Indeed, Kastrup sees all first-persons as "alters" within a single (yes, One) universal quantum wave, in which all first-persons are conceivable as both parts and (who knows?) possible co-constructors of a universal map/territory. Whatever the theory, experience shows all these alters all working in apparent concert; otherwise we'd have some flavor of chaos, like that of Babel. Yet Kastrup undercuts any such cooperative accounting of a communal map by constantly re-emphasizing a firm dichotomy that seems to invalidate his recommended "map's" pertinence to the real.
Any epistemological explanation may very be bound to leave unanswered -- or unanswerable -- questions. Such as, what does it really mean to say that different people or alters experience the same world? What coordinating mechanisms would that imply? You'd think there must be many other gnarly part-versus-whole, and other, contradictions and unknowns, perhaps uncountably many. As Kastrup describes, physicalists claim they've excluded all theoretical gaps, thereby entitling them (the "smart people") to continue, unchallenged, as something close to secular gods. But that leaves a lingering question about Kastrup's own project: does he too intend to eliminate all unanswerables from his own Analytic Idealism? Wouldn't such an agenda risk making him just another "smart guy" seeking dominance, another example, if you will, of the collective hubris in our species that appears to be destroying the planet? Shouldn't gaps be left in even our most reasoned thinking to keep us in our place, in rightful awe?
The book contains a compelling historical argument of how physicalism came to dominate our collective thinking. The main point is that it originally provided a bulwark against church dogma, basically by styling everything other than itself as no better than superstition. A caste of scientists and other "smart people" could then use this narrative to grab and maintain intellectual dominance, which Kastrup argues they've obviously done with great success.
Kastrup's major theme is that humans can't know reality, only a "map" of reality provided by the five senses, all of which damp down (or amplify) and shape the input data in various ways before passing it through to the brain, plus scientific measuring devices that add more "abstract data" to the mix. Kastrup likens these various inputs to banks of dials in an airplane cockpit that allow a pilot to fly through elements s/he can't rightly see or know. That's our relationship to reality according to Kastrup..
Is this convincing? Well, yes and no.
The strongest arguments against physicalism are probably those that raise the conundrum of how the dead can possibly create the living. Why would it bother? Pure Darwinism can't provide a teleological justification for anything non-living to create life. Darwinists seem inclined simply to look away rather than tackle the problem. But stating or implying that life happened purely by chance seems largely to beg the question of why we would settle for such a weak, unsatisfying explanation.
Another stumbling block is the eternality out of which anything was originally created. Trying to name matter as a definitive origin and basis of everything soon poses problems in naming anything definitively as having come first. Our purchase on the whole of cosmic history inevitably comes to seem all but infinitesimal. Eternity stumps us; we can't peer inside it to find origins in a human historical sense.
Kastrup puts the main thrust of his argument on the map-versus-territory dichotomy, returning again and again to the cockpit analogy. But is his a true dichotomy? Can't a map become a kind of territory and a territory a kind of map? I think Kastrup's main problem is not seeing his "map's" potential richness. It's not just dials providing cold data to one or two lonely, stressed, bored pilots. It could be a massive and complex entity, or hyperobject, constantly being redrawn and cross-checked by whole cultures and societies, its construction and maintenance not solitary exercises, but a large-scale opus by and for everyone on the planet, past, present, and (hopefully) future. Can anyone really deny that we all make our inputs to a collective map? In that light, might we not re-imagine Kastrup's "map" as something much more dynamic and comprehensive, one whose own potential reality claims should probably not be lightly dismissed?
It's interesting that Kastrup presents his idea of the Universe as very much a society. For different first-persons to act together to create a common map, they must be very intimately related. Indeed, Kastrup sees all first-persons as "alters" within a single (yes, One) universal quantum wave, in which all first-persons are conceivable as both parts and (who knows?) possible co-constructors of a universal map/territory. Whatever the theory, experience shows all these alters all working in apparent concert; otherwise we'd have some flavor of chaos, like that of Babel. Yet Kastrup undercuts any such cooperative accounting of a communal map by constantly re-emphasizing a firm dichotomy that seems to invalidate his recommended "map's" pertinence to the real.
Any epistemological explanation may very be bound to leave unanswered -- or unanswerable -- questions. Such as, what does it really mean to say that different people or alters experience the same world? What coordinating mechanisms would that imply? You'd think there must be many other gnarly part-versus-whole, and other, contradictions and unknowns, perhaps uncountably many. As Kastrup describes, physicalists claim they've excluded all theoretical gaps, thereby entitling them (the "smart people") to continue, unchallenged, as something close to secular gods. But that leaves a lingering question about Kastrup's own project: does he too intend to eliminate all unanswerables from his own Analytic Idealism? Wouldn't such an agenda risk making him just another "smart guy" seeking dominance, another example, if you will, of the collective hubris in our species that appears to be destroying the planet? Shouldn't gaps be left in even our most reasoned thinking to keep us in our place, in rightful awe?
September 9, 2025
There are few contemporary philosophers whose work feels genuinely urgent. Bernardo Kastrup is one of them. Analytic Idealism in a Nutshell is not merely a summary of his body of work; it is its most potent and accessible expression. This book is a masterclass in philosophical clarity, and like all true masterpieces, its power lies in its ruthless economy of language. There is not a single misplaced or unnecessary word in this text.
Kastrup’s central thesis—that mind, not matter, is the fundamental ground of reality—is presented not as mystical speculation, but as the most parsimonious and empirically rigorous solution to the hard problem of consciousness. He systematically dismantles the absurdities of physicalism (the "outside-in" view) with the logical precision of a master programmer debugging a faulty ontology. But he doesn't stop at critique. He builds.
What makes this book exceptional is its structure. Kastrup anticipates every conceivable objection—"What about the consensus of scientists?" "What about the reality of the world?" "Isn't this solipsism?"—and dismantles them with breathtaking efficiency, not with rhetoric, but with superior logic. He carefully distinguishes his analytic idealism from other forms of idealism (e.g., Berkeley's) and from mere phenomenology, grounding it in a framework that is both scientifically respectful and metaphysically sound.
The chapter on the "dissociative process" as the mechanism by which a unitary mind becomes a multiplicity of seemingly separate alters (i.e., you and me) is worth the price of the book alone. It is here that Kastrup does something miraculous: he provides a metaphysical framework that perfectly accommodates the findings of depth psychology, particularly the Jungian model of the psyche. He gives a plausible, non-materialist account of the unconscious, of archetypes, and of the process of individuation. He doesn't just argue for idealism; he shows how it makes sense of our actual inner experience in a way physicalism never could.
This is not an easy book because the idea is not simple. It is a challenging, paradigm-shattering work. But it is a clear one. Kastrup’s prose is a scalpel, cutting away centuries of conceptual baggage to reveal a truth that feels, upon grasping it, shockingly obvious. It is the philosophical equivalent of being shown, once and for all, that the earth revolves around the sun.
I have read this book three times. Each time, I find another layer of depth, another elegantly placed logical brick in his argument. For anyone weary of physicalist dogma, for anyone who feels in their bones that consciousness is primary but lacks the philosophical vocabulary to prove it, for anyone interested in a rigorous reconciliation of science and spirituality, this book is not a recommendation. It is an imperative.
It is, in my opinion, the most important philosophical work of the 21st century, distilled to its essential, world-changing essence.
Kastrup’s central thesis—that mind, not matter, is the fundamental ground of reality—is presented not as mystical speculation, but as the most parsimonious and empirically rigorous solution to the hard problem of consciousness. He systematically dismantles the absurdities of physicalism (the "outside-in" view) with the logical precision of a master programmer debugging a faulty ontology. But he doesn't stop at critique. He builds.
What makes this book exceptional is its structure. Kastrup anticipates every conceivable objection—"What about the consensus of scientists?" "What about the reality of the world?" "Isn't this solipsism?"—and dismantles them with breathtaking efficiency, not with rhetoric, but with superior logic. He carefully distinguishes his analytic idealism from other forms of idealism (e.g., Berkeley's) and from mere phenomenology, grounding it in a framework that is both scientifically respectful and metaphysically sound.
The chapter on the "dissociative process" as the mechanism by which a unitary mind becomes a multiplicity of seemingly separate alters (i.e., you and me) is worth the price of the book alone. It is here that Kastrup does something miraculous: he provides a metaphysical framework that perfectly accommodates the findings of depth psychology, particularly the Jungian model of the psyche. He gives a plausible, non-materialist account of the unconscious, of archetypes, and of the process of individuation. He doesn't just argue for idealism; he shows how it makes sense of our actual inner experience in a way physicalism never could.
This is not an easy book because the idea is not simple. It is a challenging, paradigm-shattering work. But it is a clear one. Kastrup’s prose is a scalpel, cutting away centuries of conceptual baggage to reveal a truth that feels, upon grasping it, shockingly obvious. It is the philosophical equivalent of being shown, once and for all, that the earth revolves around the sun.
I have read this book three times. Each time, I find another layer of depth, another elegantly placed logical brick in his argument. For anyone weary of physicalist dogma, for anyone who feels in their bones that consciousness is primary but lacks the philosophical vocabulary to prove it, for anyone interested in a rigorous reconciliation of science and spirituality, this book is not a recommendation. It is an imperative.
It is, in my opinion, the most important philosophical work of the 21st century, distilled to its essential, world-changing essence.
November 27, 2024
(full disclosure: I was given a copy of this book to read by the publisher)
As far as books making a case for metaphysical conjectures go, Analytic Idealism in a Nutshell is highly readable. Dr. Kastrup uses language to paint a picture so well that when he's describing something, you might think it's actually there in front of you. Clear, concise, and generally well-argued. If only all books fit that description!
Unfortunately, Dr. Kastrup also has a tendency to belittle those who would disagree with him. If you enjoy reading books that don't just claim that your preconceived notions are silly, but also that you, dear reader, are silly for holding them, this book should provide ample entertainment in that regard. I say this knowing that the subhead including "the 21st century’s only plausible metaphysics" might have already clued you into that brash way of viewing this book's conclusion. There are also leaps of logic that the critical-minded reader would find frustrating and you might find yourself re-reading some parts to understand what is being said (something which Dr. Kastrup actually encourages readers to do, so it may be a feature not a bug).
Overall, this book will likely stretch you to think about things in a way you haven't before, and for that it ought to be commended. However, the writing itself, while usually engaging, is sometimes a bit dense and sometimes a bit alienating. As for Analytic Idealism itself, allow me to re-apply one of Dr. Kastrup's phrases from the book: "a notion grounded in a combination of grotesque epistemic arrogance and a complete abandonment of one's natural sense of plausibility" (34).
As far as books making a case for metaphysical conjectures go, Analytic Idealism in a Nutshell is highly readable. Dr. Kastrup uses language to paint a picture so well that when he's describing something, you might think it's actually there in front of you. Clear, concise, and generally well-argued. If only all books fit that description!
Unfortunately, Dr. Kastrup also has a tendency to belittle those who would disagree with him. If you enjoy reading books that don't just claim that your preconceived notions are silly, but also that you, dear reader, are silly for holding them, this book should provide ample entertainment in that regard. I say this knowing that the subhead including "the 21st century’s only plausible metaphysics" might have already clued you into that brash way of viewing this book's conclusion. There are also leaps of logic that the critical-minded reader would find frustrating and you might find yourself re-reading some parts to understand what is being said (something which Dr. Kastrup actually encourages readers to do, so it may be a feature not a bug).
Overall, this book will likely stretch you to think about things in a way you haven't before, and for that it ought to be commended. However, the writing itself, while usually engaging, is sometimes a bit dense and sometimes a bit alienating. As for Analytic Idealism itself, allow me to re-apply one of Dr. Kastrup's phrases from the book: "a notion grounded in a combination of grotesque epistemic arrogance and a complete abandonment of one's natural sense of plausibility" (34).
November 15, 2024
Everything Bernardo Kastrup writes is worth reading, and this book delivers his usual philosophical potency (every time I read one of his books, I can feel perception shift for days/weeks/months). That said, as a fan of his work, I found this one a mixed bag.
While it aims to be the definitive guide to analytic idealism and succeeds in being more rigorous in places, I preferred the style and accessibility of earlier books (Why Materialism is Baloney, The Idea of the World).
Some arguments (like those about spacetime not being fundamental) were tough for me to follow. I missed the inspiring "world as metaphor" implications that made his other works (and analytic idealism in general) so compelling.
If you're new to Kastrup, I would start elsewhere. And if you're already a fan, just know that while this is still worth your time, it might leave you missing the more balanced approach of previous books.
While it aims to be the definitive guide to analytic idealism and succeeds in being more rigorous in places, I preferred the style and accessibility of earlier books (Why Materialism is Baloney, The Idea of the World).
Some arguments (like those about spacetime not being fundamental) were tough for me to follow. I missed the inspiring "world as metaphor" implications that made his other works (and analytic idealism in general) so compelling.
If you're new to Kastrup, I would start elsewhere. And if you're already a fan, just know that while this is still worth your time, it might leave you missing the more balanced approach of previous books.
March 7, 2025
Zoals altijd levert Kastrup een meesterlijk staaltje retorisch redeneren. Hij laat zien hoe en waarom wat wij ‘realiteit’ noemen, in wezen een mentale constructie is – niet enkel van ons als individu, maar van een gemeenschappelijk bewustzijnsveld (zij het niet te letterlijk te nemen).
In zijn argumentatie combineert hij wetenschappelijke inzichten met neurologische fenomenen zoals gespleten persoonlijkheden en hallucinaties, aangevuld met een vleugje Jung. Het resultaat? Heerlijke lectuur – boeiend en toegankelijk – én een overtuigende bouwdoos voor de analytische filosofie als mogelijke metafysica.
Het enige dat me enigszins stoorde, is de soms laatdunkende ondertoon jegens andere vormen van metafysica. Maar goed, dat is misschien te verwachten wanneer je uitgaat van je eigen sluitende logica.
In zijn argumentatie combineert hij wetenschappelijke inzichten met neurologische fenomenen zoals gespleten persoonlijkheden en hallucinaties, aangevuld met een vleugje Jung. Het resultaat? Heerlijke lectuur – boeiend en toegankelijk – én een overtuigende bouwdoos voor de analytische filosofie als mogelijke metafysica.
Het enige dat me enigszins stoorde, is de soms laatdunkende ondertoon jegens andere vormen van metafysica. Maar goed, dat is misschien te verwachten wanneer je uitgaat van je eigen sluitende logica.
December 7, 2024
Outstanding! Makes a logical case for Analytical Idealism in the most rational manner. Concise but profound. The first half is more of a recap on his debates vs. Physicalism, which are not new to me, and potentially to many other readers. I enjoyed the second half much more, specially the Circumambulation chapter, where Bernardo tackles with brilliance and a bit of wit, the key questions on Death, God, etc. The chapter on space and time at the end is very strong and engaging too. I identified a couple of errors or unclear paragraphs where I think he meant the opposite of what the sentence sounds like. Example: Page 35 where he says “even though natural selection”. I think he meant “even that” or something different.
March 24, 2025
Excelent, fully recommended. One of the best introductions to idealism, and I hope it helps society to understand why materialism makes no sense and how can we live according to this obvious but surprising view. As it is an introduction, it's not hard philosophy, so I think everybody can understand it perfectly.
Not sure if better than "why materialism is baloney", because although the idea is the same, the style is very different, so I would recommend both.
Not sure if better than "why materialism is baloney", because although the idea is the same, the style is very different, so I would recommend both.
July 3, 2025
Kastrup goes through great lengths to metaphorise dominant materialist epistemologies in physics, highlighting their perceptual shortcomings. Thereafter, he makes a strong, "parsimonious", and pretty irrefutable case for analytical idealism based on the ontological primacy of consciousness. Very accessible and well-written. I was hoping to find some of his more "esoteric" reflections in his public engagements expanded on here.
January 5, 2025
Very good metaphysics book that can be extremely compelling. The first part of the book is a tad too informal (and full of rage towards Physicalism), but everything comes together in the back end. I would have loved to read a more developed account of time, space, and structure... But that probably requires a whole book in itself.
April 30, 2025
Probably more in depth than some would like and not as in dept as others would but delivers in conveying the general idea of analytic idealism and the problems with physicalism.
I'd still suggest Why Materialism is Baloney as most people's starting point if you have some experience with philosophy and the issues at hand. I believe the whirlpool metaphor to be a lot more digestible.
I'd still suggest Why Materialism is Baloney as most people's starting point if you have some experience with philosophy and the issues at hand. I believe the whirlpool metaphor to be a lot more digestible.
July 25, 2025
My Nutshell
Water is, and a!ways has been and will always be, water.
Yet, "Water becomes a wave".
Any confusion arising from this is our own, not the water's.
I have read all of Dr. Kastrup's books. They have profoundly changed my mind and shown me a greater clarity. I am deeply grateful to him.
Water is, and a!ways has been and will always be, water.
Yet, "Water becomes a wave".
Any confusion arising from this is our own, not the water's.
I have read all of Dr. Kastrup's books. They have profoundly changed my mind and shown me a greater clarity. I am deeply grateful to him.
February 7, 2025
The tone of the 1st part which I would call "" the very personal rage against Physcalism " tends to be alienating and snarky. Skip to the 2nd part of the book for the juicy and fascinating thesis presented in easily understandable metaphores.
March 25, 2025
Analytic idealism is well explained and for me a viable ontology. The 'tone' of the author is a little bit to self-assured. He writes the way he also speaks on his varied (but highly interesting) youtube video's.
October 26, 2024
A mind-opener, liberator, and full filler. Best read ever!!
January 25, 2025
👏🍾🪈
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
February 5, 2025
Thought-provoking. This book has fundamentally challenged the way I think, as did the author's other title, "Why materialism is baloney." I have a lot to think about. Fascinating. Highly recommend.
March 23, 2025
Better to be well immersed in his numerous videos available on YouTube. There were some bonus insights in the book, though he gets a rather petulant when counter-evidencing physicalists.
May 18, 2025
Is life really a dream?
June 22, 2025
This is the accessible version of the prior book ‘The Idea of the World’. A Fantastic explanation of the subject however, read the former if you are already knowledgable on the subject
August 29, 2025
Wat een briljante geest!
August 30, 2025
Another book in the series. Clearer than anything I ever read doing my philosophy degree 25 years ago. Yet essential to the way I see the world.
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