What is Analytic Idealism ? I don't know how you really believe
that phrase should be defined. As a sociological matter of fact,
most people using it have taken it to precisely mean : the long
bulk of Bernado Kastrup's personal opinions.
Okay, so, let's take it so, and try to condone the contradiction
between this personified conception of a philosophical topic and
the basic idea of analytic philosophy as opposed to continental
philosophy, which was presumably meant by its syntax. What next ?
So, who is this guy ?
Bernado Kastrup is a former CERN employee, and very popular across hundreds of spirituality podcasts. He also undertook to proclaim himself the Director of his own Foundation which he had the fortune to create, that is a web site attracting tens of authors and maybe millions of visitors.
Then what is the point of his success ?
The point is, first, that we happen to be in a world where many
institutions and media have accidentally mindlessly followed each
other in the foolish rumor of identifying science with materialism
(a physicalist metaphysics), as if there were good scientific
reasons to be materialist and deny the existence of afterlife. But
that rumor is actually from nowhere, if you look at it carefully,
and directly contradicts our basic existential intuitions.
A terrible state of affairs indeed.
Then Kastrup came as a modern hero of our time for a large public
who were feeling bothered by this aspect of life (the trouble of
feeling pressured by that ridiculous brand of scientific
popularization - therefore most of the time precisely a public of
non-scientists who only hear about science through
popularization), so flooded by that ridiculous nonsense in their
life, that they incidentally never had the chance to stumble on
any different news before. His heroic deed was to reveal to them
that public secret they were all guessing, that is, the
non-existence of those non-existing scientific justifications for
physicalism, a non-existence which so many people already knew or
intuited since long, but just could not dare to tell loud just
because, not being scientists themselves, they were missing a
chance to feel confident and scientifically serious saying it
loud.
So he is a great speaker and hero in the exhausting task of
repeating that news of non-existence over and over again across
thousands of podcasts all over the web. That is why millions of
people love him, and for that merit found it worth buying one or
more books from him.
So okay, if you really happen to feel so grateful and
enthusiastic for him to have done that herculean task, after all,
I have no objections.
But then, if you want to be somewhat more serious, is it really
worth buying and reading a book, just to explore there the
confirmation of the non-existence of those non-existing scientific
justifications for materialism you were already guessing in the
first place ? And why precisely him ? Did he really do great
original work, worth that fame ? I did not buy his books, as I
don't see the point for it, since I already know enough about his
ideas to see I do not need to look further.
Actually, the few most crucial key points of his view, those that he is so passionately adamant about and that oppose him with his favorite opponents, are not original. These points have always been more or less pervasive across religions, philosophies, the writings of countless authors, witnesses of diverse parapsychological and mystical experiences. The main links between consciousness and quantum mechanics have already been pointed out by some of the founders of quantum mechanics, before being incidentally ignored by the bulk of physicists and science popularizers for no good reasons.
In these conditions, I think, a respectable work across the
mediatic sphere could have consisted in paying due respect to
these old sources, and largely referring to them.
Instead of this, Kastrup chose to rather put forward the body of
his own personal thoughts and speculations, supposedly backed by a
few scientific observations from psychology oddly picked from the
much larger existing body of parapsychological data. But, how good
is that ? Which special new insight or added value does he claim
to bring ? Does he claim to bring one kind of new insight based on
one special skill or experience, or several independent ones ? But
if they are several original contributions which do not
fundamentally depend on each other, then what is the sense of
putting all of them into one big pack under a big seemingly
objective label of "analytic idealism", deterring people to unpack
and dissociate from each other, so as to possibly agree with some
points but not with others ? Indeed I do agree with some points
but not others, and I did not need him for anything.
The length of his writings would need to be sorted out into
different kinds. One factor of big length is the wasteful kind of
length : hype rather than actual content ; some detailed review of
the nonsense of materialism ; speculations of how much greater the
world would be if idealism would be more widely adopted. For
example, while I admit it could have been hard to explain the
actual content of the book "Analytic Idealism in a Nutshell" in
its synopsis, it is terrible to see all this synopsis itself
dedicated to hype rather than any proper content.
He has the merit of pointing out that there are such modes of
research called science, and that going such paths happened to
lead mankind to more effective progress and reliable knowledge
than the pure baseless fanciful speculations of traditional
philosophy. To this, I warmly agree. The problem is, does his own
work properly fulfill that standard ? Which fraction of that path
from the miserable standards of traditional philosophy to the
effectively needed ones of modern science did he make ?
Actually, this varies between his different books. Trying to
assess his book "Why materialism is baloney" out of a
long praising review, itself praised by Kastrup himself, the
presumed grounds for this praise are looking quite miserable.
Taking from there the quote from chapter 1
"According to materialism, what we experience in our lives every day is not reality as such, but a kind of brain-constructed 'copy' of reality...The outside, 'real world' of materialism is supposedly an amorphous, colourless, oderless, soundless, tasteless dance of abstract electromagnetic fields devoid of all qualities of experience. It's supposedly more akin to a mathematical equation than to anything concrete...there is no strong reason to believe that the 'copy' of reality you and I supposedly live in comes even close to what is really going on. Thus, the implication of materialism is that we're intrinsically limited to watching an edited and biased version of the film we're trying to make sense of. Yet, we derive materialism entirely from that very film!"
Why only "according to materialism" ? This is rather an
unavoidable fact just if you pay attention a little, regardless of
metaphysical options. So much for all the readers who need to be
lengthily told the obvious.
Chapter 2 seems to start by just repeating some old ideas of idealist philosophers, and end by making a fuss on a "filter hypothesis" which I cannot see how to qualify another way than childishly obvious, once the principle of cosmic idealism is compared with basic life experience.
Chapter 3 "For those readers coming to this topic for the first time, conditioned by and enmeshed within a materialistic worldview..." all right so the bulk of his care is to make popularization for nuts who previously put themselves in the ridiculous situation of never have informed themselves about any non-materialistic viewpoints before. This still says nothing about whether he is offering any really original contributions.
Chapter 4 expands on a fanciful metaphor in guise of an
explanation in reply to a supposed difficulty which I would never
have considered in the first place. Any serious attempt to do that
should have paid respect to the fact that a brain is a physical
system and that any discussion on the nature of physical systems
including brains needs to articulate with what is scientifically
known of them, namely that they follow the laws of quantum
mechanics. But insofar as such details seem to have been skipped,
I cannot see which value may remain in such a tentative
explanation.
Chapter 5 is openly presented as a long pack of baseless fanciful
speculations that "refers to a number of empirical experiments"
but that does not save him from the risk of insurmountable
discrepancies with a much larger body of NDE testimonies other
echoes from beyond.
Chapter 6 expands on still another more ridiculous metaphor in
guise of explanation. A quite oddly physical metaphor in guise of
explanation of some non-physical issues.
In chapter 7 he wonders
Well, maybe because there are some laws of physics which the body needs to follow ?"If the body is an image of a process of consciousness localization, then when that process stops the image should disappear, just like the whirlpool...The body doesn't disappear instantly, like the whirlpool does. How come?"
"Under the worldview developed in this book, such a conception of ghosts is difficult - if at all possible - to support." (speaking here of "quasi-physical entities that can interact with matter.")...How come should his personal random speculations be considered more authoritative that any other source ?
A short section is devoted to the seemingly non-materialistic outlook of traditional cultures. Aldous Huxley, in Appendix II of his Heaven and Hell, outlined his belief that nutritional deficiencies in such cultures, with attendant affects on brain chemistry, made them more susceptible to "visions" and "material" flowing into consciousness from 'out there', in Mind-at-large. Similarly, Mr Kastrup invokes this idea as an explanation as to why traditional peoples base entire cultures and societies on beliefs "that have never had any empirical basis on reality. ...There is a great deal of speculation in this chapter, as Mr Kastrup himself concedes
"Mr Kastrup makes a distinction separating the ego from the "sense of 'I' that underlies all of our experiences."He also asserts that only the "I" would survive physical death, unlike the ego. Still another baseless speculation. Does it have any empirical basis ? It does not seem to match the presence of reincarnation testimonies, where the personal identity with specific memories is preserved (though largely hidden) from one incarnation to the next. I also have a quite different perspective on the issue, by my analysis of the nature time as it appeared to me by an in-depth study of mathematical logic. Namely, I would translate his duality ["ego" vs "I"] into the duality ["past" vs "present"] and notice that this difference between the past and the present is just a matter of perspective.
On the other hand, he also somehow echoes some ramblings of
academic philosophers pretending that science would be too
scientistic and missing the lights of philosophy, a presumed
trouble which he sees responsible from materialistic
presuppositions. This ignores several facts, including that the
bulk of science is neither materialistic nor non-materialistic but
just unrelated with metaphysical issues, and that the main fuss
and flawed arguments effectively made on the side of materialism
and its presumed ties with science is actually made
by philosophers lacking proper scientific background (and
some science popularizers who somehow depart from the core of
science in their popularization activities).
He happened to work at CERN. This is a kind of experimental job.
The principle of experimentation is a key principle of science,
yet just being fond of that principle and sociologically familiar
with that activity does not make one a genius. Greater thought can
be found in the depths of abstract math and theoretical physics,
but that does not precisely happen to be his field. His knowledge
of physics is rather superficial, and quite irrelevant to the
biggest part of his writings which is more speculative philosophy
than science-related stuff.
Some aspects of his views seem to be mere effects of traces of
materialistic presuppositions, that he failed to question by lack
of familiarity with opposite information from spiritual sources.
Diverse details below.
One special aspect of his views, expressed in diverse videos, is
his way of talking about entropy, as if this concept was a general
key to metaphysics and the understanding of the depths of
consciousness. That aspect, which can successfully make him look
bright and "scientific" in the eyes of non-physicists, seems to be
original of him indeed, in the sense that most mystics and
idealist founders of quantum mechanics were not talking about it
that way, and, I think, for very good reasons. Indeed, I know
about entropy very well, and that is a very important concept of
physics, yet I cannot see how someone who really fearlessly
dismisses materialism and believes that consciousness pre-existed
the creation of a physical universe, could seriously and
coherently accept this physical concept as a key to understand the
features of the pre-existing, non-physical reality of universal
consciousness. Not to mention how genuine physicists properly
familiar with the concept of entropy may have good reasons to
laugh at how he misuses it in his arguments, especially his story
of a presumed issue with biology and the ability of organisms to
keep entropy below its maximum.
"Although re-representation is necessary for introspection, it is largely absent, for instance, in dreams(...) During ordinary dreams we simply experience, without consciously knowing that we experience."How can you tell ? Let me offer a competing proposition, which I draw as an impression from my personal life experience : during dreams we still have the fundamentally same ability of introspection (consciously knowing that we experience) as in waking states, with only some kind of different mood. Moreover in dreams we may eventually even have some memory of dreams from previous nights, so a conscious knowing of what we experienced in dreams from one night to another so as to continue the story, but this ability of remembering past dreams gets greatly reduced in waking states. In this sense, meta-consciousness can be in some way greater in dreams than awake.