Bernardo Kastrup’s Analytic Idealism, Part 2

Yep, a total joke. If the tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it fall, it still makes a sound. If you wake up in the middle of the night and, still half-asleep, unconsciously stumble into the wall (which you neither observed nor perceived) and crack your head open, that is proof the wall exists exclusive of your consciousness.

Where does Kastrup go wrong?

In numerous places—too many for us to consider them all in our brief analysis of his work—but in this case, where he errs is by not comprehending that existence (physical reality) has primacy over consciousness in Maya (measured-out phenomenal reality). Hence, manifest existence exists prior to, and independent of, observers. When someone can go to Vegas and, through their mind-power, control the roll of the dice, I’ll reconsider my POV.

I’m neither a physicist (I had a year of physics in college 50 + years ago, prior to the Standard Model, and I’ve forgotten 50 +% of what I learned) nor a philosopher of science (like the popular Tim Maudlin); but I’m no dummy, and after having watched numerous educational physics videos at YouTube, I now recognize quantum crapola when I see it.

And speaking of quantum crapola and Maudlin, watch the short YouTube video “Bernardo Kastrup/Tim Maudlin: Non-Locality, Bell’s Theorem” at the YouTube channel Curt Jaimungal. In this video, Maudlin, a professor who specializes in the philosophy of science, quickly and cuttingly dismisses Kastrup’s idealism because it denies physical reality, yet depends on physical experiments as its basis for validation. The video is short, because after Maudlin confronts him with this contradiction, Kastrup, in a huff, exits the debate.

In the video, Kastrup contends that the 2022 Nobel Prize disproves local reality and physical realism, whereas Maudlin holds that it refutes local realism but not physical realism.

Actually, the 2022 Nobel Prize only refutes local realism if the wave function is real rather than a mathematical abstraction. Erwin Schrodinger himself, the Nobel Prize winning physicist (1933) renowned for originating the Schrodinger equation, which gives the evolution of a wave function over time, mocked the idea that quantum theory, which is based on probabilistic superposition (meaning that subatomic particles, prior to measurement and the supposed wave-function collapse, exist in indeterminate states that are “neither here nor there or both here and there”) applies to the real world. To express his disdain for what he considered a gross misunderstanding and misapplication of quantum mechanics, he posited his famous Schrodinger’s Cat thought experiment [Google it for a full description], which makes a mockery of the idea of superposition on a macro scale, because it, most absurdly, means that the cat in the box must be simultaneously dead and alive until its real state is revealed upon “measurement” (when the box is opened).

Maudlin himself fails to understand that the line separating locality and non-locality is blurred because there is no real entanglement (or causal, or “spooky,” action) between particles separated at a distance; there is only correlative information (such as knowing the spin direction of one particle of a pair based on that of the other). Hence, the distinction between local and non-local realism is a tenuous one.

Maudlin rightly contradicts Kastrup by making it clear that the 2022 Nobel Prize does not rule out superdeterminism (meaning hidden-variables theories that replace probabilistic quantum mechanics with versions of deterministic mechanics that yield the same measurement results). An example of such a deterministic theory is the pilot-light theory, also known as Bohmian mechanics. A more recent example is Harvard professor Jacob Barandes’s Stochastic-Quantum Correspondence, which rejects the wave function.

For links to more hidden-variables theories that yield the same predictions as QM, check out esteemed physicist Sabine Hossenfelder’s excellent YouTube video “Why Is Quantum Mechanics Non-Local?” Hossenfelder, like Rovelli and Maudlin, has little regard for Kastrup’s QM-based idealism.

The bottom line regarding quantum theory is that, although it remains canon because it efficiently yields very accurate predic- tions and measurements, it is (as iconic physicist Roger Penrose makes clear) internally inconsistent; thus it is destined to be su- perseded by a theory that not only yields just as accurate results, but which is not an affront to the principle of causal determinism, which is germane to every other canonical theory in science.

But until quantum theory is supplanted as canon, opportunistic philosophers, such as Kastrup and his bud Donald Hoffman, will continue to exploit its anti-realist weirdness to promote their own anti-realist theories.

Kastrup says that “matter outside mind is not an empirical fact.”

Kastrup’s unclear writing creates confusion. In his book, he fails to capitalize “mind,” which, in some places, blurs the distinction between impersonal, universal Mind (or Consciousness) and personal, individual mind (or consciousness). In the excerpt you quoted, he means universal Mind. Given that Mind is the illimitable, spaceless Substrate wherein all phenomena, including matter, arise, he is correct.

Kastrup contends that “The notion of dichotomy between mind and matter arises from language.”

Whether Kastrup is referring to universal Mind or to individual mind, the distinction between either of them and matter has nothing to do with language and everything to do with real ontological differences. Only a philosopher as delusional as Kastrup could imagine that the difference between mind and matter is merely linguistic.

It seems that the area where your idealism most significantly differs from Kastrup’s is that you accept, rather than deny, physical reality.

Yes. In accordance with Kashmir Shaivism, I view physical reality as real rather than an illusion. Moreover, unlike Kastrup’s flat idealism, which is bereft of a dynamic dimension, I explain the continuum from Mind (or Consciousness) to physical reality via Clear-Light Energy (Mind’s dynamic Shakti), which morphs into the full spectrum of stepped-down energies, some of which “crystallize” into matter.

Kastrup contends that “realism--the notion that there is an objective world—is meaningless.” He asserts that “physical objective matter is not an observable fact.”

There is no end to Kastrup’s disconnect from reality. My advice to him is this: Get your quantum-crapola ass on a scale, and the reading—shocking as it may be—will convince you that the physical matter you animate is an observable, measurable fact.

Kastrup claims that “The physical world we perceive isn’t merely discovered by observation, but created by it.”

I’ve got news for Kastrup: his, or anybody else’s, observations can’t create jack shit. Whatever world Kastrup lives in, it has little do with the real world.

To sum, Kastrup’s stilted highbrow academese and quantum-crapola analytic idealism will bedazzle the philosophic ignoranti, but the gnostic cognoscenti will patently reject it.