The Idea of the World by Bernardo Kastrup

Author:Bernardo Kastrup [Kastrup, Bernardo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-78535-740-4
Publisher: John Hunt Publishing
Published: 2019-03-28T16:00:00+00:00

8.16 Conclusions

Idealism is a unique ontology in that, unlike physicalism and panpsychism, it asserts that physical structures are circumscribed by consciousness, as opposed to the other way around. Yet, analytic philosophy has traditionally considered idealism implausible. In this essay, I have argued that the alleged implausibility of idealism is based on misconceptions, such as:

• Unfounded intuition—e.g. taking the concreteness of the world to indicate its independence from consciousness, or asserting the implausibility of universal inner life;

• Lack of philosophical imagination—e.g. assuming that multiple private minds and a stand-alone world cannot be coherently reduced to a single universal consciousness;

• Demonstrably wrong assumptions—e.g. that all mental activity is acquiescent to volition;

• Question-begging—e.g. arguing that different people cannot share a dream because their bodies are separate, and arguing that the universe cannot be in consciousness because it existed before conscious life first arose;

• Anthropomorphization—e.g. taking all conceivable processes in consciousness to necessarily be unstable and disorderly;

• Failure to understand the implications of idealism—e.g. asserting that a field of phenomenality outside personal psyches is equivalent to a physical world outside phenomenality;

• Unexamined assumptions—e.g. that the physical is in some sense distinct from, yet causally effective upon, the phenomenal;

• Conflation—e.g. conflating consciousness proper with self-reflection, conflating unconsciousness with failure to recall phenomenality, and conflating idealism with solipsism.

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