In his book The Idea of the World, Kastrup defends a version of idealism as superior to materialism (and also to panpsychism, but I will focus on materialism here). I think he makes interesting points.


1. The existence of our perceptions and thoughts is more certain than the existence of matter, since the concept of matter is constructed from our perceptions and thoughts. (same goes with energy, invisible fields, superstrings, ...)

2. We find regularities within our perceptions, which we summarize into scientific laws, but our perceptions do not include what other beings perceive, so our scientific laws model beings without their mind. Then postulating that these scientific laws govern a material world outside mind makes it impossible to explain how mind arises in that world. Mind cannot be reduced to explanatory abstractions that the mind creates (matter, energy, superstrings, ...)

3. The concept of objective matter is useful because: we all seem to inhabit the same world, that world seems to behave according to laws we can't change, there are correlations between observed brain activity and reported inner life. But these observations can be explained without resorting to objective matter:

a) If all is mind, then the material body is not the source of mind, it is how a mind appears to minds, and then what a mind experiences correlates with how it appears to minds. Then the world we see is an appearance of a greater mind we all belong to, which includes the whole world. When we explore the world, we are indirectly exploring that mind.

b) How can there be different minds within a mind? Kastrup invokes as an analogy what is called dissociation in psychiatry, giving as an example the case of a German woman who had personalities who claimed to be blind while others could see normally. Electroencephalograms showed that when she had a blind personality there was no brain activity normally associated with sight, even though her eyes were open, while when her personality wasn't blind that brain activity returned. In another example, several personalities are simultaneously self-aware within a single mind.

c) As to why we seemingly can't change the laws of nature, Kastrup invokes again dissociation: our minds which are part of the greater mind do not have control over the whole mind.

d) Some other potential objections are addressed, such as Libet's experiments in which brain activity is recorded before a reported decision to act, by explaining that we are not aware of everything that goes on in our own mind, so there is no need to assume a primacy of brain over mind.

There are other interesting insights in the book (for instance regarding brain activity during transcendent or psychedelic experiences), which can fit well with idealism while being hard to reconcile with materialism, but there's probably enough to focus on for now.


What do you think?