Review of Analytic Idealism

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

"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?"

Well, maybe because there are some laws of physics which the body needs to follow ?

"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.")...
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
How come should his personal random speculations be considered more authoritative that any other source ?
"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.

That book pretends to be trying to explain the appearance of materiality of the universe, yet it rather looks like a tentative explanation of a universe that follows the laws of Alice in Wonderland rather than those of quantum mechanics. So it seems to belong to the continental style of philosophy more than the analytic style.

It is good to see he seemingly made quite a deal of progress towards the analytic style of philosophy with his later book "Analytic idealism in a nutshell", yet I never saw him apologize for the deficiencies of his previous book which I guess keeps bringing him money for wrong reasons. By the way, there are several books he wrote, and with a few exceptions I did not see how they supposedly complete rather than repeat each other. If only one of these books was really great, then what would the others on the same topic be supposedly there for ? I guess, the reason to keep writing more books, and for readers to keep buying them, remains that the previous ones were unsatisfactory.

This progress towards modern science may be a nice try, and that may indeed be a great advantage for him over the bulk of academic philosophers indeed.

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.

In one of his blog articles he writes

"I think the world unfolds spontaneously, according to its own inherent dispositions (i.e., the observed regularities we call the 'laws of nature'), and without supernatural intervention from an outside agent beyond the boundaries of nature itself".

This fails to account for the fine-tuning of physics and all values of its constants, which required some full intelligence to be at play to choose all needed details for a physical universe, before actually creating this universe.

He puts forward a distinction between "consciousness" and "meta-consciousness", seems to see this distinction as something crucial, and seems to see incarnated life as having a special role in bringing about meta-consciousness as opposed to the supposedly non-refexive form of consciousness that was before. I can see no ground for such views, especially not any support from spiritual sources, which rather point out an open diversity of forms of consciousness. So that just appears to be random speculation from nowhere, and with no fundamentally different motivation than other brands of solipsism, such as racism and specism, or the optical illusion that the universe that we now see, where humans appear to be the masters, would be the bulk of what is.

Looking through his thesis, more precisely those points from there which seem to me the most crucial ones beyond the basic definition of cosmic idealism and the facts of quantum mechanics:

Section "3.11 At what level does cosmic dissociation occur"

I observe quite a deal of materialistic presuppositions in the way this question is asked and tentatively answered, as if consciousness had to be defined from the structures of physics.

section 5.4
"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.
As a conclusion, this reminds me a quote from Feynman, "You can take every one of Spinoza's propositions and take the contrary propositions and look at the world--and you can't tell which is right."

He appears to confuse the physical history of biological evolution, with the history of the evolution of consciousness. This is in conflict with spiritual information sources, which rather suggest a dissociation of these evolutionary histories. Namely, consciousness started to evolve before creating a physical universe, and keeps evolving in other realities separate from this physical universe ; many currently incarnated souls are just new to the physical as they previously evolved in different realities before coming to this one, so that our history of biological evolution is not their personal soul history; and even the physical itself contains parallel reality branches with different physical ages, between which souls may travel, so that even one's physical life history is not necessarily contained in our given physical past reality branch.

He pays respect to Integrated Information Theory, which is ridiculous materialistic pseudo-science.

He sees the division of consciousness into individuals as specific to incarnated life, and that it would end at death with individuals melting back to universal consciousness. While spiritual information confirms that some much easier connections with other beings and even some kind of universal consciousness are restored at death, this does not eliminate individuality.
Now if he wants to deny that persistence of individuality, does he have any grounds for this ? It appears he hasn't. He simply assumes that his personal random speculation on the topic can simply be presumed to be more authoritative than any other source or testimony he just could not see the point to care informing himself about because these are not the oppressing intellectual authorities he prefers to be struggling with (as he wrote "I am also not personally very interested in extraordinary phenomena because I find the ordinary mysterious and confusing enough").

He also has strange ideas about the nature of time, and I diverge with him on it as I explained in my work.

Conclusion

I admit, not all from him is worthless. I did find 2 suitable articles from him which I took as useful references, not that it would be amazing or original, just that it is aspects of the von Neumann Wigner interpretation that I found convenient to cite instead of re-writing or looking for another reference.

For the rest as I could see, Kastrup's work appears to be hardly more than a puzzle of the following components:

Related links

To some pages of mine
From Jane Robert's channeling From ChatGPT

To web sites of other authors