From: intraphase@gmail.com

Bernardo Kastrup

The Universe in Consciousness

Abstract: I propose an idealist ontology that makes sense of reality in a more parsimonious and empirically rigorous manner than main­stream physicalism, bottom-up panpsychism, and cosmopsychism. The proposed ontology also offers more explanatory power
than these three alternatives, in that it does not fall prey to the hard problem of consciousness, the combination problem, or the decombination prob­lem, respectively. It can be summarized as follows: there is only cos­mic consciousness. We, as well
as all other living organisms, are but dissociated alters of cosmic consciousness, surrounded by its thoughts. The inanimate world we see around us
is the extrinsic appearance of these thoughts. The living organisms we share the world with are the
extrinsic appearances of other dissociated alters.

1. Brief Introduction
This paper seeks to articulate an ontology that overcomes the principal limitations of the most popular alternatives. The first half of the paper comprises a detailed analysis of relevant literature, highlighting what advances have been made and what
problems have been created or left unsolved by recent developments in analytic philosophy. In the second half, starting from what I consider to be the most promising current platform, I propose an idealist framework that may open viable new avenues for
addressing the key questions left unanswered by this current platform. At the end, I hope to offer a coherent view of the nature of reality that accounts for
all relevant facts without incurring any fundamental problem.


2. The Mainstream Physicalist Ontology and its Problems
The mainstream ontology of physicalism posits that reality is con­stituted by irreducible entities — which, like Galen Strawson (2006, p. 9), I shall call ‘ultimates’ — outside and independent of phenomenal consciousness. These ultimates, in and
of themselves, do not instan­tiate phenomenal properties: there is nothing it is like to be an ulti­mate, the capacity for experience emerging only at the level of com­plex arrangements of ultimates. They are also sometimes held to lack objective
qualities: in and of themselves, ultimates may have no colour, flavour, smell, etc. Indeed, according to mainstream physical­ism qualities may exist only in the phenomenal field of the experi­encer, which in turn is a product of the operation of a
sufficiently complex nervous system. It is the specific arrangement of ultimates in a nervous system that, allegedly, somehow constitutes or generates
its phenomenal properties.
The key problem of mainstream physicalism centres on how our subjective experience of qualities — what it is like to feel the warmth of fire, the redness of an apple, the bitterness of disappointment, etc.
— can arise from mere arrangements of ultimates. These ultimates do possess abstract relational properties such as mass, spin, momentum, and charge, but there is nothing about mass, spin, momentum, or charge, or the relative positions and interactions
across ultimates, in terms of which one could deduce what the warmth of fire, the redness of an apple, or the bitterness of disappointment feel like, subjectively. As long as they fit with the broadly observed correlations between neural activity and
reported experience, mappings between these two domains are entirely arbitrary:
in principle, it is as (in)valid to state that spin up constitutes or generates
the phenomenal property ‘cold­ness’ and spin down ‘warmth’ as it is to
say the exact
opposite. There is nothing intrinsic about spin — or about any other property
of ultimates or arrangements thereof — that would allow us to make the distinction.
This central — and arguably insoluble — problem has been referred to by different names, such as the ‘explanatory gap’ (Levine, 1983) and, more recently, the ‘hard problem of consciousness’ (Chalmers, 1996; 2003): the qualities of experience
are irreducible to the observable parameters of physical arrangements — whatever the arrangement may be — in the sense that it is impossible even in principle to deduce those qualities from these parameters. More generally, the argument here is that
there is no entailment from facts about ultimates to facts about experience: there is no fact about ulti­mates that implies a priori a fact about experience.

Greg Rosenberg (2004, pp. 13–30) articulated what is perhaps the best refutation of entailment from facts about ultimates to facts about experience. His argument begins with the recognition that all facts about ultimates are merely patterns of bare
differences. This echoes Bertrand Russell’s point (2007) that science can only characterize things and phenomena in terms of how they differ from other things and phenomena. For instance, an ultimate with positive electric charge is characterized in
terms of how its relevant behaviour differs from that of a negatively charged ultimate. Charge is thus a relational property defined on the basis of bare differences. Nothing can be scientifically stated about what a charge, in and of itself,
intrinsically is. The same can be argued about all other facts about ultimates.


Rosenberg then proceeds to show that facts about experience — phenomenal properties — cannot be entailed by patterns of bare differences, even though qualitative differences between experiences can admittedly instantiate a structure of bare
differences. Therefore, phenomenal properties cannot be reduced to facts about ultimates. Allow me to unpack this.
There are qualitative differences across our experiences of various colours: what it is like to see yellow is different from what it is like to see red. These qualitative differences can even be graded along relevant dimensions: the
qualitative
difference between seeing yellow and red seems bigger than the qualitative difference between seeing yellow and orange. If one were to assign a number to represent each of these degrees of difference, one could abstract out a purely quantita­tive —
that is, bare — difference structure from the experiences of seeing various colours. However, that a bare difference structure can be abstracted out from phenomenal properties does not imply that phenomenal properties are entailed by
bare difference
structures. Maintaining so inverts the logic of the situation: it is phenomenal
properties that ground bare difference structures in the first place.

To bring this point home, Rosenberg offers the following thought experiment: imagine a field of tightly packed yellow and red dots. If one observes this field from a sufficient distance, one sees the colour orange. It could then be argued that the
phenomenal property ‘orange’ arises from a pattern of bare differences associated with the delta in wavelength between yellow and red photons, as well
as the relative size and distribution of the dots. However, if one were to choose another pair of
colours with the same delta in wavelength — say, yellow and green — and otherwise maintain the same relative structure of dots, a phenomenal property different from ‘orange’ would result. In other words, the same pattern of bare differences would
yield a different phenomenal property. Hence, phenomenal properties are not entailed by patterns of bare differences and cannot be reduced to properties and arrangements of ultimates.
This and other arguments along similar lines render mainstream physicalism arguably untenable.

3. Consciousness as an Irreducible Property of Matter
At least since the time of René Descartes, the most recognizable alter­native
to physicalism has been ‘substance dualism’: if one cannot reduce phenomenal properties to physical elements, then the phenom­enal and the physical may be two distinct,
fundamental ontological classes. There are different versions of substance dualism, but the most intuitive one is arguably ‘interactionism’: since phenomenal events seem to cause physical events (as in when felt pain causes me
to move my arm) and
vice versa (as in when a needle piercing my arm causes me to feel pain), then the phenomenal and the physical must be causally connected. However, a problem with interactionism is summarized by Chalmers (2016b, p. 23): if the physical domain is causally
closed — as it seems to be in so far as we have been able to ascertain through the scientific method — then causal influences we intuitively attribute to the phenomenal domain must ultimately be, in fact, physical. There
is arguably no place for
phenomenal properties in the causal nexus. Possible dualist answers to this have been proposed but, as acknowledged by Chalmers himself (who admits to sympathy towards dualism), ‘there is at least a prima facie case against dualism here’ (ibid., p.
24). Chalmers then posits an ‘Hegelian synthesis’ (ibid.) between mainstream physicalism and substance dualism, in the form of the notion that ultimates themselves may be fundamentally conscious.
Indeed, under mainstream physicalism, ultimates are elementary subatomic particles — quarks, leptons, gauge bosons, and scalar boson(s) — with certain fundamental properties. These properties are relational and abstract, such as mass, charge, spin,
and momentum. Mainstream physicalism’s key problem, as we have seen, is its inability to account for phenomenal properties. So the most straightforward way
out is to posit that at least some elementary particles also have fundamental phenomenal
properties. In Strawson’s words, ‘Assuming, then, that there is a plurality
of physical ultimates, some of them at least must be intrinsically experiential, intrinsically experience-involving’ (2006, p. 24).

I shall call these experiencing elementary particles ‘phenomenal ultimates’. I shall also generally refer to the broad ontological outlook described above as ‘bottom-up panpsychism’, even though I am aware that there are many variations of it
that would be better discriminated from one another (such as ‘panexperientialism’, ‘constitutive micro­psychism’, ‘panprotopsychism’, ‘deferential monadic panpsychism’, etc.). Be that as it may, the key general idea here is that, by
positing phenomenal properties to be fundamental, bottom-up panpsychism evades the need to reduce these properties and thereby avoids the hard problem altogether. Moreover, bottom-up panpsychism places these new fundamental properties seamlessly
alongside existing abstract relational properties, as the categorical basis of the latter. This neatly integrates phenomenal properties in the framework of scientific thinking, for they now occupy a proper place within the causal nexus.
To see why this seemingly elegant approach nonetheless fails, notice that, according to bottom-up panpsychism, the unitary phenom­enal life of a human being is supposedly constituted by micro-level phenomenal parts. At some point in the remote past
phenomenal ultimates
organized into increasingly complex forms, both experiential and non-experiential, by many processes including evolution by natural selection. And just as there was spectacular enlargement and fine-tuning of non-experiential forms (the bodies of living
things), so too there was spectacular enlargement and fine-tuning of experiential forms. (ibid., p. 27)
However, the idea that micro-level phenomenal states can combine to form unitary macro-level phenomenal states is arguably incoherent. It leads to a variety of ‘combination problems’ (Chalmers, 2016a), at least one of which is arguably as insoluble
as the hard problem itself (Carruthers and Schechter, 2006; Goff, 2006; 2009).

The best argument against bottom-up panpsychism is perhaps Sam Coleman’s (2014). As bottom-up panpsychists themselves seem to agree, ‘“experience is
impossible without an experiencer,” a subject of experience’ (Strawson, 2006, p. 26, emphasis
added). Therefore, bottom-up panpsychism implies that each phenomenal ultimate,
by virtue of bearing phenomenal properties, instantiates a micro-level subject.
Moreover, it implies that macro-level subjects with a seemingly unitary perspective, such as
you and me, must somehow arise through some form of bottom-up combination of micro-level subjects. This is called the ‘subject combination problem’. Coleman connects subjectivity with the presence of a perspective, or point of view:

That a given subject has a particular phenomenological point of view can be taken as saying that there exists a discrete ‘sphere’ of conscious experiential goings-on corresponding to this subject, with regard to which other subjects are distinct in
respect of the phenomenal qualities they experience, and they have no direct (i.e. experiential) access to the qualitative field enjoyed by the first subject. A subject, then, can be thought of as a point of view annexed to a private qualitative field. (
Coleman, 2014, p. 30, emphasis added)
Notice Coleman’s emphasis on the private character of the qualitative field annexed to a subject. I shall return to this point later.
Bottom-up panpsychism attempts to model the combination of phenomenal states after the way ultimates combine physico­chemically. After all, the force and appeal of its argument rests on the analogous treatment of phenomenal properties and standard
physical properties such as mass, spin, and charge. Therefore, Coleman also makes explicit what combination means in this physico-chemical sense:

Combination, thus, is the formation of a whole from components where the components continue to exist in the whole, but are intrinsically altered by combining with one another. (ibid.)
For instance, an oxygen and two hydrogen atoms combine to form a water molecule: they become intrinsically altered in the process of forming covalent bonds with one another, but continue nonetheless to exist in the resulting molecule.
In this framework, bottom-up panpsychism implies that the private point of view
of each phenomenal ultimate that constitutes you becomes intrinsically altered in the process of combining to form the private point of view you enjoy right now — that is,
your ‘unique experiential portal to reality’, as put by Itay Shani (2015, p. 399). But each must nonetheless continue to exist in you, just as quarks continue to exist in protons, protons continue to exist in oxygen atoms, and oxygen atoms continue
to exist in water molecules.

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