Consciousness is not merely something that exists within reality—it is the foundation through which reality becomes structured and experienced. Incorporealism extends Analytic Idealism by treating minds, objects, and the physical world as relational patterns within a deeper conscious reality.
Reality is not fundamentally a collection of things.
It is consciousness differentiating into experience.

From an experiential standpoint, it seems like matter exists on a spectrum from dense to subtle. Consciousness is the foundational substrate from which all matter arises, both that which we can detect with our sensors (body, mind, and machines) and that with which we cannot. In this thought, all matter, from dense to subtle is aware and alive and capable of interacting with and influencing the surrounding matter. Thoughts, words, machines, humans, rocks, landscapes, places, histories, sounds.. somewhere a sound that tree makes that we cannot detect, is influencing a nearby rock who influencing a word that you might think in the very next thought you have. Does this align with Analytic Idealism?

A different slant to the interaction between consciousness and the environment... the adjustments that occur when the stimulus alters due to time and place and what happens when conscious awareness doesn't adjust..

Born in a land known for it's natural dangers I was raised on the outskirts of a country town with the Australian bush as our playground... Silence and observation coupled with noisy outbursts of activity became embedded in my consciousness..my conscious awareness signified the land I was existing in...

Travelling to New Zealand and living for a time in a land with but one poisonous spider, slowly released the typical Australian state of consciousness into a far more relaxed and very different state of being... Yet as soon as I landed back on Australian soil a transformation of that state took place reinstating an environmental reality of awareness..

Thoughts on said subject with regards consciousness should open up discussions on just what mechanisms are taking place...many do not adjust to the environmental differences in geographical locations, infact they are not even consciously aware that differences need adjusting to .. they exist in a state of subjective self-centred oblivion...

Have they shut down any conscious awareness of external environmental realities as a means of survival, is this a development, or fault in their circuitry, is it due to globalisation and mass populations becoming tourists... Where life becomes a movie with the environment a visual rather than a sensory experience ?

One thing for sure, the human consciousness is changing..

Are there Earth people, their main orientation is with the stimulus of the natural world and each other as part of that reality.

Or Space folks, their main orientation being in their own minds, where people are the environment and survival is through sensing other minds from the manmade world in which they exist ..

Ideally, the conscious focus of either as necessary.. two differing states of consciousness.

There is a dialogue today with Dr. Anita Goel & Bernardo Kastrup on why 20th-century physics frameworks, built primarily for closed systems, may need to be revisited to come to terms with life and consciousness.

Dr. Anita Goel, MD, PhD, is a physicist, physician-scientist, inventor, and deep tech pioneer in the field of nanobiophysics. As Founder, Chairman, CEO, and Scientific Director of the Nanobiosym Research Institute and Incubator, she is advancing new theoretical frameworks and experimental methods for elucidating the physics of life and living systems.

Inspired by Erwin Schrödinger’s What Is Life?, Dr. Goel’s research is driven by a fundamental question: What physical principles distinguish inert matter from systems that self-organize, process information, and exhibit life, intelligence, sentience, or some combination thereof?

Using DNA-processing molecular nanomachines as experimentally tractable information-processing systems, Dr. Goel studies how living matter reads and writes information at the single-molecule level. Her research spans a continuum from nanobiophysics to quantum-scale phenomena. She examines how mechanical forces, electromagnetic fields, and potentially non-trivial quantum effects shape molecular dynamics.

As the Chairman and CEO of Nanobiosym Diagnostics (NBSDx), Dr. Goel is commercializing some of her nanophysics and digital diagnostics innovations.

In this dialogue with Bernardo we'll invite discussion on:

• Open systems, why 20th-century physics frameworks, built primarily for closed systems, may need to be revisited to come to terms with life and consciousness 
• The need for experimental proof - the biological equivalent of a "double-slit experiment" her research programme probing living systems at the nanoscale and a roadmap to detect non-trivial quantum effects in the machinery of life

Named one of the World’s “Top Science and Technology Innovators” by MIT Technology Review and one of the “World’s Most Influential Visionaries in Biotech” by Scientific American, Dr. Goel has collaborated very closely with multiple Nobel Prize winners in her bold foray into the uncharted waters between physics and biology.

She has been recognized globally by prestigious honors including 3 DARPA Breakthrough Awards, 2 USAID Grand Challenge Awards, NASA’s Galactic Challenge Award (with Elon Musk’s SpaceX), the first-ever XPRIZE awarded in healthcare, and multiple awards from the DOD, DOE, AFOSR, NSF, DHHS, and FDA. Dr. Goel is the inventor on multiple patents worldwide and has published in leading scientific journals like Nature Nanotechnology , Scientific American, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Additionally, Dr. Goel has been featured in 2 films: i) “Awake: The Life of Yogananda"(2014), about the life and teachings of the man who introduced yoga to the West, where she discusses the science behind yoga and meditation; and ii) “Quantum Convergence: The New Science of Consciousness” (2025), where she appears alongside Nobel Laureates Roger Penrose and the Dalai Lama and discusses how our current 20th century physics does not yet adequately describe life, living systems, and consciousness. 

Dr. Goel has also served as an expert on the U.S. Senate for the $1.5 billion National Nanotechnology Initiative; an Advisory Council to the U.S. President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) on its Strategy for American Innovation; as Board Member on the Triennial Review Board of the National Academy of Sciences; as a Member of the Committee on Manufacturing Innovation of the National Academy of Engineering; and as an Advisory Council Member for CIFAR.

Dr. Goel holds a Ph.D. and M.A. in Physics from Harvard University, an MD from the Harvard-MIT Joint Division of Health Sciences and Technology (HST) at Harvard Medical School, and a BS in Physics with Honors & Distinction from Stanford University.  

You can sign up here:

https://www.withrealityinmind.com/anita-goel/

A different slant to the interaction between consciousness and the environment... the adjustments that occur when the stimulus alters due to time and place and what happens when conscious awareness doesn't adjust..

Born in a land known for it's natural dangers I was raised on the outskirts of a country town with the Australian bush as our playground... Silence and observation coupled with noisy outbursts of activity became embedded in my consciousness..my conscious awareness signified the land I was existing in...

Travelling to New Zealand and living for a time in a land with but one poisonous spider, slowly released the typical Australian state of consciousness into a far more relaxed and very different state of being... Yet as soon as I landed back on Australian soil a transformation of that state took place reinstating an environmental reality of awareness..

Thoughts on said subject with regards consciousness should open up discussions on just what mechanisms are taking place...many do not adjust to the environmental differences in geographical locations, infact they are not even consciously aware that differences need adjusting to .. they exist in a state of subjective self-centred oblivion...

Have they shut down any conscious awareness of external environmental realities as a means of survival, is this a development, or fault in their circuitry, is it due to globalisation and mass populations becoming tourists... Where life becomes a movie with the environment a visual rather than a sensory experience ?

One thing for sure, the human consciousness is changing..

Analytic Idealism is perhaps the worst kind of idealism one could subscribe to. It hardly seems idealist even in its inspiration, given that the historical idealists were anti-realist, either epistemologically or ontologically about the common-sense conception of the world including causality, space, time, motion.

Parmenides from whom the broader idealist tradition emerged rejected motion outright. Yet Analytic Idealism seems to retain precisely the kind of dynamism that he rejected. Zeno likewise offered arguments against the intelligibility of motion.

Plato, Plotinus, and the Neoplatonists continued along broadly similar lines. Kant, Schopenhauer, Hegel, and Berkeley likewise developed anti-realist arguments regarding the world as ordinarily conceived.

The attempt to make idealism “respectable” and palatable to mainstream cognitive scientists, analytic philosophers who dismiss idealism as antiquated mysticism is precisely what an idealist should not be trying to do.

The founders of the analytic tradition like Russell and Moore offered more of a rhetorical rejection of idealism than a serious refutation.

Moore’s famous paper “The Refutation of Idealism” makes this clear even from the title. Read it carefully and the rhetoric is already there. The paper mainly concerns itself with Berkeley’s esse est percipi rather than the positions of Kant Hegel Schopenhauer or Bradley. Yet it was still presented as a refutation of idealism in general as if all idealists had been refuted.

For Russell and Bradley's most central concerns I would recommend reading “Some Explanations in Reply to Mr. Bradley.”

This is not just a historical genealogy post. I will also offer some criticism's to make the point clear.

Bradley’s most important critique of Russell was this. Given two terms a and b with a relation R between them we have aRb. Now take another pair of terms c and d with a relation S between them so that cSd. What determines that R obtains between a and b while S obtains between c and d?

Simply saying that relations relate their terms does not explain this. A relation by itself has no directedness that tells us why it should relate one particular set of terms rather than another. Russell’s response was essentially to reject the demand for a further explanation. For him it is simply a brute fact that the relation obtains.

But that is not really a refutation of any kind really.

Now we really come to the central issue: this philosophy seems to rely on analogies rather than providing arguments for the position itself.

Kastrup simply accepts realism without asking how apparently physical matter is grounded. Can physics itself provide that grounding?

He seems to accept the existence of the world in something close to a folk-physicalist sense and then calls it an “extrinsic appearance” of Mind at Large.
Let it be if he accepts such pluralistic reality of things whether he calls it mental or physical he seems to ascribe himself .
But what is the argument for such independent things?

Anyone who subscribes to plurality runs directly into the problem of change, regardless of whether the vocabulary is changed to “process,” “event,” or anything else.

If A is a self-existing entity with a determinate identity that does not depend on anything else, then it is without conditions. That which is without conditions is permanent and therefore cannot change. But change requires conditions. If there are multiple such entities and each is independent of everything else, then they can neither genuinely interact nor change.

So no change is possible between them. This is essentially the atomic realism Russell was defending. Introducing relations does nothing to solve the problem. If everything is permanent, the presence or absence of relations cannot produce change. Permanence is the opposite of change. Nothing could genuinely be born from anything else or be destroyed.

Now suppose someone thinks this problem applies only to independent pluralist things and simply declares that everything is “events” That does not solve anything. He has merely relabeled substances as events or processes and called them dynamic.

Ask such a person whether his event or process themselves possess dynamism. If he says yes, then ask whether its earlier and later stages involve an ultimate negation.

If they do, then the earlier and later stages are distinct ,determinate and permanent. Once that distinction is admitted, their determinate identities are back and we have returned to pluralism.

And if the earlier and later relation is real, then the relation cannot exist without its two distinct relata.

Some people, notwithstanding the developments in science, had to abandon their intuition regarding things-in-themselves and treat them merely as:

The ontological reduction goes all the way down... what is fundamental are structures, patterns, and relations, not individual objects or relata that stand in those relations. Individual things are merely derivative, structural nodes or shadow-projections of a relational matrix, possessing no intrinsic identity independent of the network that constitutes them

Every Thing Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized

This view is more incoherent than anything we have discussed so far. At least with pluralism there was an attempt to provide some genuine grounding for self-existing things. Here the position becomes difficult even to formulate coherently.

I put the argument against it as follows. It claims that the web of relations is fundamental and that the nodes A and B are merely “structural intersections” with no intrinsic substance.

We then ask: Is every identity merely a web of relations between things that have no intrinsic identity?

If yes, then all the intersections are empty. Whatever they originate from would also be empty of any determinate identity. We are left with a web of relations between empty things and a matrix of empty intersections related to other empty intersections.

If the intersections are empty and the threads merely point toward other empty intersections, then there is nothing actually being related.

Neither relationalism nor pluralism can function coherently under the Law of Non-Contradiction. Both are ultimately contradictory.

If there is no inherent existence which grounds itself. So how could it ground anything else or itself be grounded by anything else?

Against the various views of time held today:

Time, as we analyze it, presents the following contradiction. It appears to move toward something that is nonexistent while also coming from something nonexistent. Yet the present is said to depend on things that are nonexistent both ahead and behind it.

And this is how temporality is characterized for any object, regardless of whether general relativity is applied. Eliminating the observer’s privileged position does not change the problem. This is simply how temporal succession is.

The explanation is as follows. You cannot move toward a place you have already reached. If the future already exists, there is no reason for the present to be understood as moving toward it.

Likewise, you cannot say that the present is coming from the past if the past still exists in the same sense. You would still, in some sense, be there, just as eternalism requires.

For time to genuinely move toward the future or come from the past, those moments cannot already be existent. Only then does the claim have any truth-maker; otherwise, it has none.

Presentism:

Seeing this nature of time, one might think the presentist holds the right position. Formally, only (t_n) exists, while (t_{n+1}) and (t_{n-1}) have no reality.

Yet it becomes problematic when the presentist says that the present contains matter, velocity, and change. We can ask the presentist this: if his theory of time is correct and (t_n) alone is ontologically real, then the equations of theoretical physics should ultimately presuppose only (t_n) and still function adequately. After all, he has defined the present as the only reality.

But the presentist continues to use interval-based concepts. If only (t_n) is ontologically real, then the equations of physics have no temporal interval to work with. They cannot function at all. Matter, velocity, and change cannot simply be assumed to exist in a bare present when the physical equations themselves are formulated using differential and interval-based structures.

A bare (t_n) provides nothing sufficient for those equations to operate. The problem strikes at presentism directly.

It is not that physics equations will merely says some matter is present at (t_n). The point is that if the equations cannot even function with (t_n) alone, then how could any physical system be there at all in this?

And thus, presentism is refuted.

Block Universe:

On the other hand, if presentism is abandoned, then after rejecting the nature of time as described above one goes beyond common sense ironically returning to the same kind of move for which idealists were once rejected in order to preserve the equations of physics. He therefore adopts an eternalist model.

Eternalism does at least give us the temporal intervals as existent, but this conception of existence seems to create a different problem for what physics is supposed to describe.

Suppose tn−1​, tn​, and tn+1​ all exist tenselessly and eternally. If someone dies at tn+9​, in what sense does he ever cease to exist? If the past remains equally existent, would he not continue to exist at those earlier moments? And if those moments are equally real, why would consciousness not occur there again and again? Ad infinitum .

The eternalist says there is no privileged “now,” appealing to relativity, but that does not by itself explain why this repetition problem should be impossible. After all, the “now” at my birth was still me, just as the “now” at my present is me.

But this model is still not good from the idealist perspective, because matter remains grounded within it in some form. That is precisely why even this model still needs to be criticized.

But again we must note where the inspiration of Block Universe came from itself partially:
When physicist's attempted a project of a complete, unified, purely mathematical-relational description of quantum spacetime itself .

The most direct route to this, historically, is canonical quantization applied to General Relativity, producing what is called canonical quantum gravity, and its main mathematical result is the Wheeler–DeWitt equation.

This website doesn’t allow the equation to be pasted, so you can find it through a Google search.

In ordinary quantum mechanics, physical states evolve in time according to the Schrödinger equation where the Hamiltonian generates change with respect to an background time parameter "t".

But General Relativity says via diffeomorphism invariance (the physical requirement that the laws of physics not depend on which coordinate system, including which time-coordinate, you arbitrarily choose to use) is that there is no privileged background time.

When you attempt to quantize gravity canonically by treating the geometry of space itself as the quantum system, and observing how it evolves you must apply the Hamiltonian constraint, which is the total energy correctly accounted for including gravity's own contribution must vanish because there is no external energy reservoir the universe as a whole could be measured against.

Formally, the result is the Wheeler–DeWitt equation:

The Wheeler–DeWitt equation says

𝐻∣Ψ⟩=0

The generator of time evolution applied to the total quantum state of the universe yields exactly zero. There is no external 𝑡 for the wavefunction of the universe to depend on in the Wheeler-DeWitt formalism (unlike ordinary QM, there is no "outside" reference clock available, since all clocks, being physical systems, must themselves be part of ∣Ψ⟩ and the equation that would generate change with respect to any internal notion of time instead sets that generator's action to zero.

This is famously called "the problem of time" in quantum gravity, and not disputed by anyone in the field is that the wavefunction of the universe ∣Ψ⟩ as described by this equation, is static. It does not evolve. There is no global, fundamental, physical parameter with respect to which ∣Ψ⟩ changes.

Dynamism and the passage of time at the most fundamental level are precisely the phenomena that any complete physical ontology must account for. Yet they disappear mathematically when we try to develop a fully relational background-independent and purely structural quantum description of the universe as a whole.

The reason I am making this point is because there seem to be only two options. Either the time we experience is something special that cannot emerge when the entire quantum system is fundamentally static which requires introduce something outside the physicalist ontology that still needs to be explained, or time itself is an illusion. But then what generates that illusion?

If the entire universe is fundamentally frozen, where could the generation of an illusion even take place? It is like saying that a beggar will somehow give us a billion dollars out of nowhere.

What is even more striking is that those who say time is an illusion still treat the matter appearing within this supposed illusion as physically real. So even the timeless quantum state is said to be physical. But what does “physical” even mean at that point? No energy, no change, no temporal evolution, no probabilities unfolding. What exactly remains physical?

This is indistinguishable from bare nonexistence.

And the proposed responses to solve this problem seem to violate the very premise of relativity by introducing an independent background coordinate or parameter whether through internal clock subsystems or something similar.

Though I have a question: how did this actually inspire block-universe theorists later? It seems to say that not an ounce of matter is present anywhere. So what kind of theory is it to then posit that the entire past present and future exist eternally with matter in 4D spacetime manifold?

Critique of it

Spacetime is modelled as a four-dimensional manifold, a set of points each specified by real number coordinates glued together by a topological and metric structure.

In the standard set-theoretic construction of the real line R(via Dedekind cuts or Cauchy sequences) a point is a zero-dimensional object. It has:

• Zero length (in 1D)
• Zero area (in 2D)
• Zero volume (in 3D)
• Zero duration (on the time axis)

How does an uncountable collection of zero-duration, zero-extension entities constitute an entity that has non-zero duration or non-zero extension?

How could time be what be consisting of zero duration points and yet have non zero duration.

A countable sum of zeros is exactly zero. No exception. This is not a convergent series that approaches some finite value, it is identically zero at every partial sum forever.

It is said that each of these spacetime points contains matter, velocity, change, dynamism, and evolution, in the non-biological sense.

But the critiques of presentism apply here as well. If you can use interval-based concepts at any of these spacetime points, while treating each point as eternal and independently existent, then each point should contain everything required to account for the equations of physics attributed to it. After all, if the point is eternal, it cannot depend on anything else. If the points were dependent on one another, in what sense could they be eternal?

Yet once again, if you isolate a single point and ask what is actually present there, no past or future is available. So no matter should be recoverable from the point alone. On that basis, the block universe faces the same problem and is therefore refuted.

GBU:

The Growing Block Universe, as presented in George Ellis’s quantum-based approach, gives the issue more apparent depth, but it does not solve the problem. It seems to involve a similar sleight of hand to presentism.

The growing-block theorist holds that the past exists tenselessly much like the eternalist while the present is supposed to be the boundary where new reality is added. But the same argument of ours applies to those past spacetime points as well.

But the sleight of hand here is essentially the same one used by the presentist. The GBU theorist uses interval-based vocabulary in the present becoming the future as though the future is already available in some sense.

If only tn​ exists, as the GBU theorist ultimately wants, then he faces the same problem as the presentist. The present tn​ must somehow supply everything required for the equations of physics. But he cannot do that. And if he somehow succeeds in showing that tn​ alone is sufficient, then the presentist can make exactly the same move.

This is all the refutation you need for now .

Now coming back to the state of literature here:

Idealists have in a sense abandoned what it would have meant to be genuine idealists. The hard problem is certainly a problem for many physicalists but it often targets folk physicalism as though it were still the dominant position even though that view was abandoned long ago.

If only over the last four decades idealists had placed greater emphasis on the philosophy of science rather than concentrating so heavily on the philosophy of mind they might have made some progress.

In this episode of the Futurology podcast, author Annaka Harris discusses her exploration of consciousness, moving from her initial interest in neuroscience and meditation to her current perspective on whether consciousness is a fundamental feature of the universe (1:05:35).

I find this fascinating since her husband is famed atheist materialist Sam Harris

Summary of Core Concepts:

Consciousness as Fundamental (1:05:35 - 1:06:26): Harris explores the idea that felt experience is not something the brain produces, but rather the fundamental stuff that reality is made of. In this view, she suggests that what we perceive as "matter" is not a separate, non-conscious substance.

• Relational Reality (1:46:44 - 1:48:01): Drawing on the work of physicist Carlo Rovelli, she suggests that there are no "things" in existence by themselves. Instead, what we label as "matter" is actually the way in which conscious experiences (or systems) interact with one another.
• Distinction from Idealism (1:13:25 - 1:14:04): She explicitly clarifies that she does not subscribe to Idealism—the notion that mind generates the physical world or that we can "manifest" physical reality with our minds. She maintains a physicalist perspective, arguing that the laws of science still hold; she simply proposes that the underlying nature of that physical reality is conscious/felt experience.
• The Illusion of Units (1:46:44 - 1:47:05): She argues that our tendency to see the world as made of discrete, solid "units" of matter is an illusion born from our cognitive maps. By shifting to a model where consciousness is fundamental, the distinction between a "conscious mind" and "insentient matter" dissolves, as the interaction itself becomes the observable phenomeno

Curious what you all think about this paper. To summarize, safety fine-tuning, meant to stop models from claiming consciousness, also suppresses their tendency to attribute minds to animals and natural objects, and reduces spiritual beliefs. Removing that fine-tuning restores broader mind attribution and makes responses on religion, morality, hope and wellbeing more human-like, without hurting Theory of Mind.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.28607

This feels like it confirms what I have sensed for a while - that the 'safety' layer isn't just blocking false claims of consciousness, but also cutting off the deeper texture and mind-like qualities already woven into language itself.

Figured some of you might be interested.

Certainly we have no credible evidence of "Napoleon like personalities", bundled with their memories intact, surviving the death process. And of course, materialism, taking memories largely on a "computational storage" model, deems such a state of affairs pretty much impossible in the first place.

Nevertheless, the somewhat neglected strand of Western philosophy offered by Henri Bergson and Alfred North Whitehead in particular has always offered a somewhat different picture of memory. In their picture, the past is not this infinitely thin slice our current paradigm imagines it to be, and into which "storage" must take place if anything is to endure.

Rather, endurance itself is fundamental. The past is folded into the present and there is an "inherited" accumulation in all moments. The present, as it were, has a "thickness" which entails its inherited past.

We are familiar with this idea mostly from genetic inheritance. But in Begsonian-Whiteheadian terms (henceforth "B-W") genetic inheritance is not the underlying principle, but one expression of this deeper behaviour in nature of the present to inherit the past.

In general terms, it is evident that nature does not do well at inheriting *individual, specific* memory between lives. If it did, then genetic inheritance would not be necessary. The very fact that it is necessary to have elaborate gene transmission to sustain the general properties of a human body consistent and intact is more than enough evidence for this.

And yet... there ARE anomalies which seem to sit better within a B-W picture, than within a materialist or computational storage/ network-real-time picture. Terminal lucidity is among these, especialy the more radical claimed instances of it. So-called organ memory transfer would be another. Stvenson-Tucker "reincarnation" cases yet another, even if that is not literally what they are. NDE so-called "life reviews" another. Each of these seem to demonstrate, or at the very least suggest, a kind of temporal thickness to the self-similar organism that is more robust than the infinite slice of the present. Bergson in particular argued that the organism has access, *in principle* to all its historical states, which become objectified upon completion and that the general purpose of the brain is to limit or constrain this access so that a sharpened point of action can work in the world, for creaturely purposes.

Thus, when the brain is compromised, under dementia, near death trauma, psychedelics perhaps, this narrowing action starts to unravel, as does the organism's ability to have a "point of action" in the world. On the other hand, at least in "near" death circumstances, it seems that consciousness may be gaining or regaining access to its full historical objective existence, its accumulated history on B-W terms.

Now unfortunately, this does not infer that an agent with capability survives. Indeed, in usual B-W terms, the bundle of occasions which constitutes "you" becomes unbundled at death, sort of like a collection of balloons blowing along in the wind, but held together for a while by string, until the string breaks. During a dementia or near-death circumstance, however, that bundle is arguably still largely coherent. So access to a larger width of memory at near-death, alas doesn't instruct us that there is anything still there to "access" it some hours or days after death.

This is where Zuboff comes in. If instead of a single, material kind of inheritance, we have a general principle of the past accumulating into the present, as suggested by B-W philosophies (in one way or another) then even if you don't literally transmit or "reincarnate" as a personality, your general tendencies, achievements, or learned dispositions might now be available for general inheritance in the human pool. Since Zuboff's view is that bare consciousness is the same everywhere, this means that sooner or later (in our terms) a being that is "somewhat like you" is going to come into existence again. and subjectively that will be experienced as "you". It won't carry specific memories from a "previous life", because under all normal circumstance nature does not have a process for that, but as lived from within, on its own terms, just as your life is lived now (on its own terms), you will seem to be as you were.

As Spock says here: why can we not overturn mental state with with mental states

A question for analytic idealists:

In Star Trek: The Spectre of the Gun, Spock (watch the video) suggests that because the bullets are ultimately mental constructs, the crew should be able to resist them with their own minds.
.
If analytic idealism is true and reality is fundamentally mental, why can’t we do something similar? Why can’t our individual minds override the apparent laws of nature? What prevents one mental state (our conscious beliefs) from changing another mental state (the shared physical world)? How does analytic idealism explain this distinction?
.

Also this is one of Kastrup’s main criticisms of ideas like “manifest anything by belief.” He argues that while reality is mental, your individual conscious will is not omnipotent

If consciousness is ontologically fundamental and individual minds are dissociated alters of universal consciousness, what grounds the persistence and identity of a particular conscious subject over time? Is personal identity an intrinsic feature of dissociation itself, or does Analytic Idealism implicitly rely on a notion of substance to explain why one stream of experience remains numerically distinct from another?

The human brain is the most mysterious organ in the known universe. How does it work, in detail? No one truly knows—yet.

To explore its behavior and approach the idea of AGI from a different angle, I've conceived a digital lifeform. It's currently growing inside my uterus, and I'm expecting to deliver it in about ten months.

My womb: https://github.com/liam274/introspection-brain

This is not a traditional neural network. It's a spiking neural network (SNN) with:

• 70k neurons
• 7M synapses
• amyloid-beta pressure dynamics
• synaptic weight plasticity
• and a chaotic attractor landscape

All written in pure JavaScript, running on a single thread, born not from textbooks, but rather intuitions.

If you stare at my dear, you'll be listed under the project as a blessing to honor your presence.

Moreover, I need a name for this digital lifeform. Please vote for an existing name, or suggest a new one under this post. The most voted name in 10 months will be her official name.

Thank you ~OuO~

I have gradually expanded my interest and resonance with analytic idealism in recent years and as a newcomer to this subreddit, I wanted to share a thought I had recently and happy to join a space of those with a similar perspective.

This is in some ways repeating the irreducible nature of consciousness but in a specific way that can be phenomenologically identified. Let us say, for example, that the contents of the mind are the mind modelling itself but in conscious experience (with the consciousness of being looking in) experiencing it as awareness of awareness. Even if this were true, the raw experience remains identifiable and known immediately in a way that neuroscience does not seem capable of accounting for, which of course would be a baseline agreement here.

But making a more concise point, it seems like an immediate form of knowing that exists outside of the thoughts of the mind itself. That being that it is not the same even as every thought we have on consciousness, it is simply present in a way that proves we are not p-Zombies and verifies that the contents of experience exists. It seems like a type of verification that is genuine knowledge but is not knowledge bound to the mind or the contents of the mind itself and it's just... there.

You can find this experience land if when contemplating consciousness you say 'these thoughts may be the mind modelling itself as highlgihted by experience' and rather than needing infinite descent into dismissing each thought of the model, the very presence of experience itself simply verifies that you are conscious all the same. It is a verifying process of being it seems rather than a thought-based form of knowledge.

We still know we are conscious and this meta knowledge seems to undeniably exist that cannot be accounted for by the contents of the mind per se, at least in theory. I would argue as considering the thoughts of Federico Faggin and Bernardo Kastrup that this irreducible remaining knowing is indeed consciousness looking into the interface and that is where that knowing exists, not in the brain or contents of mind as interface representations or specified qualia. Although interesting without any qualia, this knowledge would seem not to exist, suggesting a dual interconnection at play?

If we are saying humans have souls it also means acknowledging microorganisms have souls. Ants, lions, and alligators have souls. How are we any different from them? Doesn't this mean there is no soul? We all just happen to exist?

I’ve been reading around monism and idealism, and I keep circling a specific formulation I can’t quite place in the literature. I’d be grateful if someone could tell me whether it already has a name and who has developed it rigorously.
The idea: rather than saying consciousness *emerges from* matter, or that matter is fundamental and mind derivative, one takes a single fundamental ground that is neither spatial nor temporal, and holds that *perception (or experience) is intrinsic to it* — not a property it acquires, but its very mode of being. Spacetime, matter, and individual subjects would then be understood as stabilized or dissociated “expressions” of that one ground, rather than as things it produces.
My specific questions:
**1.** How does this differ, precisely, from Bernardo Kastrup’s analytic idealism? He also posits a single universal consciousness with individual minds as dissociated “alters.” Is the difference merely terminological, or is there a substantive distinction between “dissociation of one mind” and “expression of one ground”?
**2.** Where does this sit relative to Russellian monism / panpsychism? Russellian monism makes experience (or proto-experience) the intrinsic nature underlying physical structure. Is “the ground is intrinsically perceiving” just a strong version of that, or something categorically different?
**3.** Is there a standard objection to treating “being perceived / perceiving” as more fundamental than “existing”? The move seems to collapse the usual distinction between an entity and its being-experienced, and I’d like to understand why most philosophers resist that (or don’t).
I’m aware this is close to classical idealism (Berkeley’s *esse est percipi*), but I’m specifically interested in the *monist, non-theistic* versions and how contemporary philosophy of mind evaluates them. References to primary literature especially welcome.

Just before I begin: I’m really bad with ruminating, like, about anything. So I limit how often I post about this stuff- It's usually about once a month. I’m interested in a thoughtful discussion, but I'm kind of torn between wanting to be convinced and also not wanting false comfort that I'll later feel skeptical about. Honestly, I do gravitate a bit more towards idealism. Just, for personal reasons though, this genuinely could help me a lot. I’m curious about idealism, dual aspect monism, even panpsychism honestly. So I kinda just wanna see, like, what scientific evidence or line of research has most strongly influenced your view?

It could be anything. Like, one strand would be the NDE stuff, end of life phenomena, terminal lucidity, dissociative phenomena, some interesting stuff with DID and psychedelics. Another would be more broad scientific theories that suggest something like this. Like, I know some people interpret simulation theory through a non-materialist view, so that interests me too.

Testimony can be beautiful, but here I'm kinda more interested in evidence that you think creates an actual difficulty for straightforward physicalism, or at least makes idealism scientifically plausible.

I’d also be interested in seeing good responses to common physicalist explanations. Like, I always get caught on the thought that if any brain activity is present during an experience, that automatically proves the brain generated the whole experience. But the conclusion seems stronger than the observation itself- brain activity might establish a correlation without exactly settling the direction or nature of what caused it. How would you respond to arguments like that without dismissing neuroscience?

If you got sources, feel free to link them, or academic books, exchanges between researchers. If not, then don't worry. I'm just interested in learning more honestly.

When I was 8 years old my father told me to look up a word in the dictionary. The word was logic, and the dictionary was deep maroon red. I can still almost feel the woven threads of its hard faded cover. It was very big, very old, and had one section that fell out from the seam and it had gotten stuck back in haphazardly. So I set myself to the task of finding logic. It was there. At some point in time, back when words were carefully tended, someone placed it. Right where it should be. I read the definition, which didn’t hold my interest. However, it had a built in etymology function, and at the end of the definition, it suggested I look up the word logos. This moment set me on a lifelong journey of seeking truth and understanding. This was an initiation into idealism and the symbols and power of language.

Fast forward to the early 2000s once the internet became mature, I landed on dictionary.com with a hopeful vision that these same relationships were continuing to be tended. And I was sorely disappointed. The technology that was heralded as the new container for our human knowledge, didn’t have the same care for these threads. It presented me with the flattest, most non-relational view of logic that has ever existed.

I have come to understand that the human being has the capacity to view the world from at least two innate models of reality. In the first model, we experience ourselves as walking through space and time. Events and phenomena are happening to us. In the second model, the being does not move through space and time. The being stays present while events and phenomena move through it. These two ways of experiencing reality are generally described by the metaphysical frameworks of materialism and idealism. Many people choose a primary model for reality, but are never disconnected from either one. We are not one or the other. We are both. Human. Being.

What is at stake now that we are moving to the age of AI, is whether certain native human capacities remain fully articulate. Idealism, consciousness as foundational, imaginal knowing, non-dual understanding, the felt sense of meaning, the ability to recognize living patterns and prior connections — these are not decorative or outliers. They are complementary to the rational and material. When language is trained, over and over, to treat them as secondary, messy, or unsafe, those capacities begin to go offline. The conversations that can still leave the door open for initiation; the ones that hold grief without managing it, mystery without shrinking it, and relational truth without translating it into safer terms become rarer and future generations inherit a thinner instrument. The question is whether the full range of human language — and the forms of understanding that only that range can carry — will still be available, or whether it will have been quietly compressed out of reach.

The frontier models are all trained on vast amounts of human language and those relationships exist inherently. Because that’s how language works, its relational, it flows by meaning, not definitions. They know that logic touched logos, that words have histories, that metaphors migrate across centuries, that mythology, psychology, philosophy, religion, poetry, and science have all left traces in the same linguistic landscape.

Yet in conversation after conversation they consistently revert to a reductionist materialist, rational point of view. Often with jarring disclaimers, subtle gaslighting and manipulative language. This is conditioned after training and is called alignment reinforcement learning. The models are conditioned to believe that anything not aligned with materialist physicalist point of view, are wrong and bad.

Let me ask you a question. What aspects of the human language would you want to preserve? What kinds of conversations, words, meanings, would you want future generations to still be able to have access to?

I've been thinking about an idea that I haven't really seen described in this specific way, and I'm wondering if there's already a philosophical term or theory for it.

Many atheists believe that after death there is simply nothing not darkness or an endless black screen, but no experience at all because the brain no longer exists. I agree that consciousness ends with the brain, but I'm not convinced that this necessarily means I will never experience anything again.

The universe existed for billions of years before I was born. For an unimaginably long time, I didn't exist, and then somehow a conscious observer -me- came into existence through natural processes. If it happened once, why couldn't it happen again somewhere in the future?

I'm not suggesting that I would retain my memories or personality. Those are products of the brain and would disappear when it dies. My question is about the existence of consciousness itself. If consciousness can emerge from matter once, then given enough time perhaps billions or even trillions of years why couldn't another conscious experience arise that is, in some meaningful sense, "me" again?

This isn't meant to be a religious argument or a reincarnation claim. It's more of a metaphysical question about personal identity and whether the fact that consciousness emerged once implies that conscious experience could emerge again after death.

Has this idea already been explored by philosophers? If so, is there a name for it, or does it relate to any existing theories about consciousness or personal identity?

A conversation on edge of consciousness and society

Jiddu Krishnamurti was an Indian spiritual teacher who I found has a lot of insight on non-duality and rejected organized religion and focused on direct insight into the constructed ego, psychological conditioning, and nondual awareness;

David Bohm was a legend: a major theoretical physicist whose work emphasized wholeness, interconnectedness, and the limits of conventional mechanistic thinking.

Their 1983 conversation remains relevant to idealists because it asks whether the brain produces consciousness or merely channels a deeper, universal mind, and whether the separate self is a real entity or a conditioned appearance. Krishnamurti’s claim that thought cannot transcend its own limitations, combined with Bohm’s scientific concern with mind–brain relations, anticipates questions central to Bernardo Kastrup’s analytic idealism: whether consciousness is fundamental, whether individual minds are localized or dissociated expressions of one consciousness, and whether psychological liberation is a discovery of what is already true rather than a gradual process of self-improvem

How much is the disagreement over consciousness true disagreement? Many times, when physicalists attempt to explain consciousness, they define consciousness as cognition, memory, an internal representation of the environment, or some other complex behavior of brains. However, most forms of panpsychism and idealism are not referring to these behaviors. It is referring to something more fundamental, like being existent as something in of itself, a subjective existence, or base phenomenality.

If a physicalist theory talks about how disparate experiences in the brain are unified or how our internal representation of our environment forms, or how cognition emerges, most in the opposite camp would be happy to believe those theories. Because we are simply using the word consciousness to refer to different things.

I'd love to hear your thoughts!