What Does the Philosopher Fear?
There is something of a horror series in contemporary philosophy of the mind: explanatory gaps are slain then resurrected, slain then resurrected… The combination problem’s had more sequels than Friday the 13th.
Panpsychism’s popularity grew in light of explanatory gaps associated with materialism (hard problem) and dualism (interaction problem). But to avoid having to explain how conscious particles combine together to create our consciousness—the combination problem—philosophers turned to cosmopsychism, which holds that the universe as a whole is conscious. Alas, the problem reappeared in reverse with the decombination problem, which asks how the universe’s consciousness decombines into our conscious states.
Attempting to ground our conscious perspectives in a single cosmic subject’s perspective runs into “epistemic” problems of explaining how a subject’s finite perspective, for example, the fear of dying, could be shared by the cosmic subject “in the know”—it seems a subject’s finite nature generates extra mental content that could not survive subsumption. Cosmopsychism must also explain how different, unique perspectives could be subsumed into a single perspective—if I can only see blue and you can only see red, how can a single subject only see red and only see blue? They may see red and blue, or perhaps purple, but the original perspectives are lost.
Philip Goff’s new approach—which he calls “hybrid cosmopsychism”—accepts the inevitability of explanatory gaps given the limits of our current understanding, he postulates yet-to-be-discovered fundamental physical laws of the universe ensuring that, in certain conditions, certain parts of the universe become conscious subjects. Subjects inherit “thinned-out” versions of phenomenal properties belonging to the universe-subject. This gives us a less detailed version of the universe’s mess of experience, from which we abstract experiences that make sense to us.
Must we live with Jason?
I do not think so. While Goff may be right to recognize that we cannot ground subjects-as-parts in a universal mind-as-whole (or vice versa)—at least without postulating new laws—we can use an altogether different grounding relation: manifestation.
Miri Albahari does just that with her Perennial idealism. Turning to the mystical tradition, specifically Advaita Vedānta, she holds that universal consciousness, which transcends spatio-temporality and subject/object duality, grounds both objects and subjects.
To intuit what it might be like to experience non-dual consciousness, she likens it to a cognisensory deprivation tank. “Each conscious perceptual input—sight, sound, proprioception etc., snuffs out one by one. Next, all conscious cognitive input, attentive or inattentive, goes too, eventually leaving no perceptions, thoughts, memories, imaginings, or emotions. But with the exit of each perceptual and cognitive input, it is conceivable that witness-consciousness, although increasingly less populated with objects, remains no less sharp or present.” If someone could achieve this non-dual state of being through meditation (which is possible according to many mystical traditions) they would, according to Albahari, “come to lose all identity as a solid, separate self, such that they now cognize the world very differently.”
The idea is that we no longer have to recover a subject’s individual perspectives in the cosmic subject, because there are no macro (e.g. human) or cosmic “subjects”, only Brahman. Instead, subjects and objects are grounded by manifestation from the non-dual Ultimate. This theory avoids the epistemic and perspective problems because “any contents that might arise within it are not presented as objects to a grand subjective perspective”.
Albahari’s Perennial idealism is akin to Bernardo Kastrup’s analytic idealism. Kastrup believes there is a fundamental cosmic consciousness, which “disassociates” to produce subjects—likened to “alters” of someone with dissociative identify disorder, or dream characters/avatars. A subject is an island of associated patterns of self excitation that has become dissociated from the wider conscious “field” or “medium”. But the dissociated alter—the subject—is not fundamental. “It is incoherent to say that they become separated from it; only an illusion of separation arises”, says Kastrup.
Thus, like Albahari, Kastrup does not need to use a part-whole relation to ground “subjects” and their experiences as the constitutive cosmopsychists do in a cosmic subject, since subjects and the objects of their perception are grounded by the same manifestation relation Albahari uses. In other words, human minds are nothing over and above the cosmic mind, while not being identical to it—they emanate from the eternal, immutable, self-excitatory conscious “medium”.
Advaitic idealism—a term which encompasses Perennial and Analytic idealism—transforms the problem of how the cosmic or fundamental mind gives rise to our subjective perspectives from a “hard” problem—like explaining mind in terms of matter—to an “easy” problem, akin to understanding integration of information by a cognitive system or the difference between wakefulness and sleep. These are difficult problems—we may never answer them—but they are, in principle, answerable—or “easy” according to Chalmers’ formulation.
But their greatest strength may be their undoing.
Kastrup says that subjects—“alters of mind-at-large”—are “illusory”. By this I take it he means that our feeling of separateness from mind-at-large is a false notion. We’re not really separate subjects. So what are we? According to Shani (2015), we inherit sentience and core subjectivity from the Absolute (mind-at-large). Kastrup says this is intuitively clear when dreaming. “Our dream avatar is dissociated from the part of our mind that conjures up the rest of the dream, he says. “When you wake up, you realize unambiguously that the core subjectivity of the avatar was your core-subjectivity.”
But it seems to me that my feeling of separateness from you, or the to-me-ness of my experience, is a crucial part of my consciousness. And, as Anand Jayprakash Vaidya argues in the recent Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Vedānta , if our conscious experience is partly illusory (or unreal) that would suggest, based on the logic of combining parts, that our conscious experience as a whole is an illusion (real+unreal=unreal). If so, how can we be justified in believing anything about consciousness if consciousness itself is an illusion? How can an illusion support the acquisition of knowledge? How could we believe the testimony of an illusion? Surely nothing unreal can support the belief in something real.
Vaidya used the words “unreal” and “illusory” interchangeably. But I would argue that illusions are real—they are experiences. The feeling of separateness from dream characters is a real experience, it’s just that upon waking you realize it was fundamentally illusory. I would say your experience as a dissociated dream avatar is real, just at a different level of reality than your integrated psyche—the ground of your dream. In the same way, your experience as a subject is real, just not at the level of the cosmic psyche—the ground of your waking dream. As Vaidya argues, posing subjects as real (even if grounded in something more fundamental), avoids the epistemological problems associated with more Advaitic views of subjects.
To make sense of this, I would suggest employing what Samuel Lebens calls “fictional and non-fictional operators”. A fictional operator (F) can be used to make sense of claims like “Hamlet is a Danish Prince” (P). When we say that S is true, we mean that it’s true under the scope of such an operator (since Hamlet wasn’t really a Danish prince). This would give us Fh(P), which means it is true, relative to the Hamlet story (H), that Hamlet is a prince of Denmark.
Similarly, claims like “Psychedral is a blogger” (B) is true under the scope of the F operator. F represents our level of reality—the reality of human subjects (S) (some of whom write pseudomonas blog posts). This gives us Fs(B). Similarly, when we’re dreaming (D), we create a fiction within a fiction—another even less fundamental reality. A claim such as, “I’m being chased by a monster” (M) in a dream could be described as Fs(Fd(M)), such that an internal fictional operator (representing the dreaming reality) is indexed to our fictional reality as disassociated human subjects. We can think of each level as “real”, just less fundamental than the level below—all the way to the most fundamental level: mind-at-large. In some sense, there are no “illusions”—only different layers of reality.
This multi-layered view of reality allows one to walk that fine line between the decombination problem of cosmopsychism (because macro subjects don’t combine—they are fundamentally illusory), and epistemological problems
(because macro subjects, despite being fundamentally illusory, are still real.
Thus, I do not think the view of subjects as fundamentally illusory is fatal to Advaitic idealism. But I am concerned with the broader existential implications of the view. Which perhaps are best expressed in this poem by Thomas Ligotti:
The human phenomenon is but the sum
Of densely coiled layers of illusion
Each of which winds itself on the supreme insanity
That there are persons of any kind
When all there can be is mindless mirrors
Laughing and screaming as they parade about
in an endless dream
Materialism entails meaninglessness because it reduces human consciousness to brain chemistry—nothing can truly matter when our actions are just the sum of unthinking and uncaring physical particles arranged in a configuration we call a brains. “Nothing is either good or bad, desirable or undesirable, or anything else except that it is made so by laboratories inside us producing the emotions on which we live”, says Ligotti.
Focusing on analytic idealism, mind-at-large is a non-cognitive consciousness with a proclivity for self-excitation—it conjures thoughts, which evoke other thoughts and so on. It is not meta-cognitively aware of its own thoughts—it can not reflect on its own experience. Kastrup does not believe that mind-at-large “intentionally” dissociates into separate subjects because, for example, it values our existence. He supposes that the unlikely fact of our existence can be explained by a version of the multiverse theory (where black holes create new universes with different laws), rather than fine tuning by an intelligent agent, for example. (More recently he has moved towards an equally nihilistic emergent model.) This means we are the product of an unthinking and uncaring cosmic consciousness. Is that an existential improvement on unthinking and uncaring stuff in our brains?
It is interesting that Kastrup is an admirer of Schopenhauer—a pessimist, like Ligotti, who thought human life was a “kind of mistake”. Even the dissociative identity disorder metaphor makes human life seem like a kind of psychiatric disease—the supreme insanity—within mind-at-large. I said previously that dreams are a good way to conceptualize analytic idealism. Yet when the dream ends, everything that just a moment ago felt totally real and of paramount importance falls away. You realize that it was just a dream—an illusion.
It’s not uncommon for lucid dreamers to “murder” their dream characters. Upon waking they may reflect on the fact that they weren’t really committing these heinous acts. They were doing it to themselves. Will we awake as mind-at-large with a similar realization that “our” actions were of no real consequence? The very idea of “consequence” supposes the existence of value. I cannot see how mind-at-large, being non-cognitive, could value anything. It’s more likely that any concern for our fellow creatures simply melts away as we become what we truly are—mind-at-large.
These questions force me to conclude that Kastrup’s analytic idealism cannot provide a basis for answers to life’s existential questions. While satisfying in terms of internal logical consistency and empirical parsimony, I’m left hoping—believing—there’s something more. The only way to save Advaitic idealism—since these criticism apply to Albahari’s approach too—from nihilism is to think of mind-at-large as something far more purposeful, transcendent and divine. Let’s take an example to illustrate the difference. On Kastrup’s view (at least according to my interpretation) suffering is real—indexed to our level of reality. But there’s nothing to ground the moral badness of inflicting unnecessary suffering—despite being real.
With divine idealism, there exists an objective standard to which they are measured—God. And I believe they matter at the more fundamental, Godly level of reality too. We may think of our actions affecting God akin to the way Tolstoy was affected by the death of Anna Karenina—he cried when he realized she would kill herself. Did Karenina make Tolstoy cry or did he do it to himself? I think both. Overall, Advaitic idealism feels like a reduction of our lives to something lesser—something non-cognitive, with no conception of value or meaning, which just happened to create a world in which living creatures could evolve. Divine idealism posits something far greater—a purposeful, perfectly (or perhaps “maximally”) good God that fine-tunes the universe for the existence of greatly valuable things: us. As far as empirical parsimony goes, divine idealism has a better account of the apparent fine-tuning of the universe (it does not need to posit additional worlds), at the expense of the evidential problem of evil.
There’s little metaphysically to choose between the two; but for me, I’m attracted to the existential answers divine idealism provides. I suppose the answer depends on what you truly fear: explanatory gap or existential void.
