[continued from previous message]

The key insight of Friston, Sengupta and Auletta can be paraphrased as follows:
a hypothetical organism with perfect perception — that is, able to perfectly mirror the phenomenal states of the surrounding external world in its internal states — would
not have an upper bound on its own internal entropy, which would then increase indefinitely. Such an organism would dissolve into an entropic soup. To survive, organisms must, instead, use their internal states to actively represent relevant states of
the outside world in a compressed, coded form, so to know as much as possible about their environment while remaining within entropic constraints compatible with their structural and dynamical integrity. This way, my hypothesis is that the qualities of
perception experienced by an alter are just compressed, coded repre­sentations
of how surrounding thoughts of cosmic consciousness are experienced from the concealed perspective. As such, while there must be a correspondence between perception and
surrounding thoughts, the respective experiential qualities do not need to be the same. In fact, they will be very different if it helps organisms resist entropy. Our perceptions do not feel like thoughts because they are coded representations thereof.

12. Explaining the Correlations between Brain Function and Inner Experience
A principal argument for the mainstream physicalist position that the material brain somehow constitutes or generates consciousness is the empirically undeniable correlation between measurable brain function and inner experience (e.g. Koch, 2004). The
way the idealist ontology proposed here accommodates this fact was already implicit in the previous section: a metabolizing body — which includes a functioning brain — is simply the revealed appearance of the dissociated phenomenal field of an alter.
The former correlates with the latter simply because the former is what the latter looks like from across a dissociative boundary. Indeed, this can be empirically substantiated in a rather direct manner.

In a 2014 study of dissociation (Schlumpf et al.), 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 extrinsic appearance. In other words, there is
something rather particular that dissociative processes look like. This further
substantiates the notion that living organisms such as you and me are the revealed appearance
of cosmic-level dissociative processes. After all, we now know empirically that
dissociation is identifiable when observed from across the dissociative boundary. Metabolizing bodies are to dissociation in cosmic consciousness as certain patterns of brain
activity are to DID patients.

Let me elaborate further on this important point. For any given alter A1 of cosmic consciousness, it is the phenomenal contents surround­ing A1 that cause
its perceptions of the world around it. Dissociated phenomenal contents corresponding to another
alter A2 can be part of the phenomenal environment surrounding A1. As such, the
inner experiences of A2 can also indirectly stimulate A1’s boundary — by impinging on their shared phenomenal environment — and thereby cause A1’s perceptions of A2.
This is what gives A1 access to the revealed appearance of the inner experiences of A2 in the form of A2’s metabolizing body. See Figure 4. And since A2’s brain is integral to its body, it follows that A2’s inner experiences cause the perception by
A1 of the activity in A2’s brain. This causal link explains the correla­tions between inner experience and corresponding patterns of brain activity.

Figure 4. A metabolizing body is the revealed appearance of an alter’s dissociated phenomenal field.
In essence, the claim here is that there is nothing to a metabolizing body but the revealed side — the extrinsic appearance — of the corresponding alter’s inner experiences. Yet, one may object to this by arguing that many parts of the body seem
entirely unrelated to inner experience: whereas certain patterns of brain activity correlate with subjective reports of experience, a lot seems to go on in the brain that subjects have no introspective access to (Westen, 1999; Hassin, Ulleman and Bargh,
2005; Dijksterhuis and Nordgren, 2006; Augusto, 2010; Hassin, 2013). Moreover, what kind of inner experience does, say, liver function correspond to? What about big-toe function?
The answer to this objection is precise and compelling, but elaborate and specialized enough to have required its own paper (Kastrup, 2017b). Here, I shall simply remind the reader that a subject’s lack of metacognitive access to an experience
precludes reporting of the experience to self or others, but does not imply absence of the experi­ence from the subject’s qualitative field. With the emergence of no-report paradigms in neuroscience (Vandenbroucke et al., 2014; Tsuchiya et al., 2015),
we now know that much is experienced that cannot be reported even to self, for subjects are often not aware that they have certain experiences. Moreover, as mentioned earlier, there are normal internal dissociations in the human psyche — the founda­
tional claim of depth psychology — that render much of its phenom­enal contents inaccessible to the reporting ego (Kelly et al., 2009, pp. 301–34). So the hypothesis I am positing here is not defeated by the objection: all bodily metabolism — yes,
even liver and toe function — can still correspond to concealed phenomenal contents, even though these contents may not be introspectively accessible.

13. Explaining Our Shared World
The final explanatory burden that needs to be addressed is the undeniable empirical fact that we all inhabit seemingly the same environment, and that the
laws that govern the dynamics of this environment operate independently of our personal volition.
After all, if the world is imagined — as implied by idealism — how come we are all imagining seemingly the same autonomous world?
Notice that the existence of a phenomenal environment wherein all metabolizing organisms are immersed — a shared world — is a direct implication of the argument already developed. To bring this out, we simply need to extend Figure 3 to multiple
alters, as illustrated in Figure 5. All alters are immersed, like islands of a single ocean, in the thoughts that constitute the concealed side of the inanimate cosmos. These thoughts surround all alters and cause their mutually-consistent perceptions by
impinging on their respective dissociative boundaries. And since the volition of an alter is a phenomenal content also dissociated from the rest of cosmic consciousness, it follows that alters cannot change the laws of nature. From the dissociated
perspective of alters, the world is thus autonomous.

Figure 5. Alters are immersed in a common phenomenal environment.

14. Conclusions
Copyright (c) Imprint Academic 2018For personal use only -- not for reproduction
I have elaborated on an idealist ontology that 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 revealed appearance of these thoughts. The living
organisms we share the world with are the revealed appearances of other dissociated alters. This idealist ontology makes sense of reality in a more parsi­monious and
empirically rigorous manner than mainstream physical­ism, bottom-up panpsychism, and cosmopsychism. It 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.

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