Stumbles of His Claimed Solution to the Mind-Body Problem

In recent decades there has been an extremely lamentable tendency to describe problems of explaining the mind as "a problem of consciousness."  This speech tendency is an example of what I call shrink-speaking, which is when someone uses diminutive language with the intention of making some extremely complex or impressive reality sound like something simple or unimpressive.  A human mind is something vastly more than mere awareness. A person who speaks as if a human is just consciousness is like someone who tries to reduce astronomy into a mere problem of explaining comets. Just as explaining comets is only a tiny sliver of the job of astronomy, explaining consciousness is only a tiny sliver of problem of explaining minds. 

The silliness of people who pose a mere "problem of consciousness" or "problem of experience"  rather than a problem of human mentality is illustrated in the visual below. The word cloud on the screen shows a vast diversity of mental things to be explained: imagination, selfhood, ideation, appreciation, memorization, morality, recognition, consciousness, emotions, speech, comprehension, creativity, recall, insight, beliefs, reminiscence, trances, introspection, pleasure, pain, reading, writing, awareness, perception, knowledge,  attention, personality, fascination, interest, visualization, ESP, dreaming, volition, out-of-body experiences, near-death experiences and apparition sightings.. But the person in front of the screen has foolishly ignored this great complexity and phenomenal diversity, and has wrongly stated that all that he needs to explain is consciousness.

Generically, we should be extremely suspicious of any philosopher who attempts to explain the human mind by using language centered around the term "consciousness." Let's look at one example of such a thing. In his 2017 paper "An Ontological Solution to the Mind-Body Problem," a paper with too boastful a title, independent scholar Bernardo Kastrup advances an offbeat theory of mind which he summarizes like this in the paper's abstract:

"It can be summarized as follows: spatially unbound consciousness is posited to be nature’s sole ontological primitive. We, as well as all other living organisms, are dissociated alters of this unbound consciousness. The universe we see around us is the extrinsic appearance of phenomenality surrounding—but dissociated from—our alter. The living organisms we share the world with are the extrinsic appearances of other dissociated alters. As such, the challenge to artificially create individualized consciousness becomes synonymous with the challenge to artificially induce abiogenesis."

Right off the bat, we should be extremely skeptical of such talk. The first reason is that we have right at the beginning a reference to "spatially unbound consciousness" as an "ontological primitive." What we need to explain are human minds, and human minds are a very complex and diverse reality, not at all anything like a "primitive." There is no reason to think that we could explain the extremely complex and diverse reality of the human mind by referencing some thing that is called a "primitive."  But if you made the huge mistake of using shrink-speaking language that wrongly describes the great complex and diverse reality of the human mind by using the diminutive term "consciousness," then you might think that you had got a good idea by postulating that such a reality can be explained by appealing to a "primitive."  Similarly, if you made the great mistake of using shrink-speaking language that wrongly describes the enormously organized and functionally complex and hierarchically organized human body as "carbon stuff," then you might think that you had a good idea of the origin of such a thing by merely postulating a "carbon stuff source." 

The last sentence of the paragraph quoted above is an extremely odd statement: "As such, the challenge to artificially create individualized consciousness becomes synonymous with the challenge to artificially induce abiogenesis." Abiogenesis is the creation of one-celled life from non-life, something that has never been achieved. It is very strange to equate that with creating an artificial consciousness. 

Kastrup's paper takes an approach in which he describes some things he calls the Basic Facts of Reality, and then attempts to deduce things from such facts. This approach goes wrong at the very beginning, for the first of these claimed "basic facts of reality" is no such thing. Kastrup lists as his first "basic fact of reality" the claim that "There are tight correlations between a person’s reported private experiences and the observed brain activity of the person."  This is not correct. Contrary to the unfounded boasts of neuroscientists  scanned brains don't look different when people are thinking, learning or remembering.  For a review of the failure of attempts to provide evidence for "neural correlates of consciousness," see my posts here and here.  The results typically reported in studies looking for "neural correlates of consciousness" are fluctuations of about 1 part in 200. We would expect to find fluctuations of that size even if the brain does not produce the mind, and memories are not stored in brains.  

The next four of Kastrup's "four basic facts of reality" are pretty uncontroversial. Kastrup then proceeds to make some metaphysical deductions, which he strangely lists as "five other facts." The first of these he states as " Fact 5: irrespective of the ontological status of what we call ‘a person’, there is that which experiences."  This is not a fact at all. Strangely, Kastrup attempts to justify this assertion by stating this, using "TWE" to mean "that which experiences":

"This is self-evident and, as colorfully put by Strawson [1] (p. 26), not even a sensible Buddhist rejects such a claim. For clarity, notice that I am not necessarily making an ontological distinction between experience and experiencer here; in fact, soon I will claim precisely that there isn’t such a distinction. I am simply recognizing that experience necessarily entails a subjective field of potential or actualized qualities. TWE is this field."

At this point Kastrup just leaps from a list of mostly truthful facts to some strange metaphysical assertion that is not at all self-evident, and is not justified by the claim that it is self-evident.  Alas, a thousand metaphysicians have appealed to things they called "self-evident" but which were not at all self-evident. A good rule is: never trust a metaphysician claiming something is self-evident. "Field" is a physics term, and seems out of place in the type of discussion here, since nothing physical is being talked about.  

Kastrup then lists another assertion as a "fact," by stating this: "Fact 6: A person has private experiences that can only be known by others if the person reports them, for other people do not have direct access to these private experiences."  This is not a fact at all.  We have very good evidence for extrasensory perception or telepathy. A first person may have a private experience of thinking about something, which a second person is able to identify even though the first person did not report it.  I have personally experienced this effect quite a few times in my life, and the effect has been reported by innumerable witnesses. Experiments attempting to reproduce such an ESP effect have been massively successful for decades. 

Also extremely dubious is what Kastrup claims as "Fact 9" which he states as "A brain has the same essential nature—that is, it belongs to the same ontological class—as the rest of the universe," a claim that he justifies by stating, "After all, brains are made of the same kind of ‘stuff’ that makes up the universe as a whole." All cellular matter in human bodies is matter in an extremely high state of organization, and therefore different from 99.9999999999% of the ordinary matter in the universe, which is no such high state of organization. 

After listing nine things claimed as facts, three of which are not actually facts, Kastrup attempts to derive what he calls "inferences." His first inference he states like this (using TWE to mean "that which experiences"):

"Inference 1: The most parsimonious and least problematic ontological underpinning for Fact 5 is that TWE and experience are of the same essential nature. More specifically, experience is a pattern of excitation of TWE."

This doesn't seem to actually be any inference, but simply an arbitrary and very dubious metaphysical assertion. We can only wonder: why is Kastrup claiming that experience is "a pattern of excitation"? When I'm calmly lying in bed with my eyes closed, that is an example of experience. But it seems to be nothing at all like some state of excitation. 

Kastrup's next inference states, "TWE is an ontological primitive, uncaused and irreducible." Something has gone very wrong here.  A leap has been made to a claim about some uncaused reality, without any argumentative justification. Soon after making this claim, Kastrup says, "Substantial literature supports this view," referring us to three books which sound like metaphysical books. 

Very strangely, Kastrup keeps using the words "dissociated" and "dissociation," using such terms 77 times in his article. He seems to imagine some "ontological primitive" he calls "universal consciousness," and seems to claim that you and I are "dissociated alters" of such universal consciousness. Constantly using the term "dissociated" to describe humans, he ends up sounding very strange. A central reality of a human mind is its unity. So it sounds very strange for Kastrup to keep talking about humans as being "dissociated."   Kastrup evokes the term "alter" saying that it means one of the personalities of a split personality. He then attempts to use claims about split-personalities as a metaphysical springboard, claiming that each of us is an "alter" of "universal consciousness," with each of us being like one of the personalities of a split personality. This leaves his "universal consciousness" as rather sounding like some psychiatric case, like Sally Field's Sybil character, but infinitely more mind-fragmented.  Such reasoning is bizarre, and it ends up making each human sound like a psychiatric symptom. 

At the conclusion of his paper, Kastrup states this:

"I have argued for a coherent idealist ontology that explains reality in a more parsimonious and empirically rigorous manner than mainstream physicalism and bottom-up panpsychism. This idealist ontology also offers more explanatory power than both physicalism and bottom-up panpsychism, in that it does not fall prey to either the ‘hard problem of consciousness’ or the ‘subject combination problem’, respectively. It can be summarized as follows: there is only universal consciousness. We, as well as all other living organisms, are but dissociated alters of universal consciousness, surrounded like islands by the ocean of its thoughts. The inanimate universe we see around us is the extrinsic appearance of these thoughts. The living organisms that we share the world with are the extrinsic appearances of other dissociated alters of universal consciousness. As such, the quest for artificial consciousness boils down to the quest for abiogenesis. The currently prevailing concept of a physical world independent of consciousness is an unnecessary and problematic intellectual abstraction." 

This may sound somewhat impressive until we remember the very great folly of trying to reduce human minds and human mental experience to some bloodless abstraction called "consciousness." What we have to explain is not some mere abstraction called "consciousness" but the extremely complex and diverse reality of human minds, things such as imagination, selfhood, ideation, appreciation, memorization, morality, recognition, consciousness, emotions, speech, comprehension, creativity, recall, insight, beliefs, reminiscence, trances, introspection, pleasure, pain, reading, writing, awareness, perception, knowledge,  attention, personality, fascination, interest, visualization, ESP, dreaming, volition, out-of-body experiences, near-death experiences and apparition sightings. 

Idealism is the philosophical position that matter has no independent existence outside of minds that perceive matter. An idealist is someone who believes that the universe is just a collection of minds. An idealist is someone who thinks that instead of our minds existing inside the solar system, it's the other way around: the solar system is merely something that exists as a perceptual regularity inside of minds such as ours.

To someone who is not used to thinking as an idealist, idealism may initially seem absurd. But the case for idealism was advanced in a surprisingly forceful way in the eighteenth century, by British philosopher George Berkeley. In his classic philosophical work The Principles of Human Knowledge (which can be read here), Berkeley argued for immaterialism, the idea that matter has no existence outside of minds that perceive matter. 

Being a person who denies the reality of matter, an idealist needs to have a credible answer  to the question of why people report identical experiences of observing physical things that don't really exist according to the idealist.  For example, why do you and me and all of our relatives always have the same experience seeing a bright yellow thing in the sky during the day, and a bright white thing in the sky during the night? For a materialist or a dualist the answer is easy: because the sun really physically exists, and the moon really physically exists. But for the idealist who does not believe in the physical existence of the sun or the moon, this uniformity of observations is a problem. 

Berkeley got around this problem by imagining a divine reality (God) that causes such uniformity of perceptual experiences. So, according to Berkeley, when we look up at the sky and see the sun fairly often, it is not because there exists a physical sun independent of minds; it is instead because a divine mind is causing such perceptual regularities in our mind.  We know that movie directors cause people to have certain uniform perceptual experiences. So, for example, all of the people who saw Saving Private Ryan in the movie theater had the same perceptual experience.  So it's not too implausible that a divine power could cause humans to have certain types of uniform perceptual experiences. 

But it would seem that thinkers such as Kastrup have no good answer to the question of why humans would have uniform perceptual experiences of matter if matter does not exist. It seems rather implausible that some mere "universal consciousness" would cause you and I to have identical experiences of perceiving the sun and the moon if the sun and the moon did not materially exist.  The problem is that Kastrup has hitched his wagon to the bloodless, abstract, shrink-speaking term "consciousness,"  and imagined some "universal consciousness" which he describes as a mere "ontological primitive." Having done that, he is left with a "primitive" bloodless abstract "universal consciousness" that seems to lack any will or intention, and would therefore be incapable of intentional effects such as making sure that you and I have uniform experiences of observing the sky.  So it seems the idealism of Kastrup is not as credible as the idealism of Berkeley. 

I must emphasize that we should be extremely suspicious of any philosopher who attempts to explain the human mind by using language centered around the diminutive and minimalist term "consciousness." Similarly, we should be extremely suspicious of any philosopher who attempts to explain the human mind by using language centered around the minimalist term "Being." You should doubt that the armchair reasoning of ontology will yield an explanation of humans. 

Postscript: In a Scientific American article, Kastrup made the incorrect claim below about "dissociative identity disorder" (DID):

"Modern neuroimaging techniques have demonstrated that DID is real: in a 2014 study, doctors performed functional brain scans on both DID patients and actors simulating DID. The scans of the actual patients displayed clear differences when compared to those of the actors, showing that dissociation has an identifiable neural activity fingerprint."

To the contrary, the 2014 study failed to show any such thing.  It was a Questionable Research Practices study that involved a far-too-small sample size of only 11 subjects identified as having "dissociative identity disorder."  The subject was not a pre-registered study, failed to follow any blinding protocol, and failed to do any sample size calculation. Anyone searching for differences in brain scans can always find differences in one random group of about a dozen people and some other random group of about a dozen people.  Study group sizes far greater than 11 are needed for robust results. 

The way to get a reliable result would have been to first state (before gathering data) a specific hypothesis to be tested (such as a description of some specific difference in brains), and then to test for that exact hypothesis using an adequate study group size (determined by a sample size calculation), in an analysis done by analysts blind as to whether the brain scans come from the control group or the study group. 

Contrary to Kastrup's claims, split-personality cases are of no value in helping to establish the credibility of some claim that humans are "but dissociated alters of universal consciousness" (to use a phrase of Kastrup I quoted above).   The "alters" of people diagnosed as split personalities are not personalities existing at the same time, but personalities that may appear sequentially. An analogy is the channel dial on an old TV of the 1960's, which would only allow you to choose one channel at a time. The "alters" of the person with split personality are like "personality channels," and only one appears at any instant. As suggested in the diagram below, someone with a split personality may switch from Personality 1 to some different Personality 2, but such personalities do not appear at the same time. Such cases do nothing to help establish the claim that some "universal consciousness" has split up into billions of human minds that simultaneously exist at the same instant.  

Schematic diagram of a split personality