Contemporary Idealism

Thomas Nagel

The philosopher of mind Thomas Nagel, although long associated with a form of epistemological dualism concerning the body-mind relationship (the “dual aspect theory”), introduced himself in a book by 2012 as an idealist, in direct opposition to materialism and the neo-Darwinian approach to evolution. For him, materialism and naturalistic conceptions of the mind cannot account for the appearance of consciousness, any more than they can explain that the world is intelligible to us. This is what leads him to adopt a position close to Plato’s “objective idealism”:

”The view that rational intelligibility is at the root of the natural order makes me, in a broad sense, an idealist , broadly defined. However, I am not a subjective idealist, since I do not go so far as to affirm that all reality is ultimately only appearance, I am an objective idealist in the tradition of Plato and perhaps also of certain post-Kantians, such as Schelling and Hegel…  pure empiricism is not enough”

For Nagel, the existence of the mind and the intelligibility of the world cannot reasonably be envisaged as mere accidents. There is a necessary connection between the mind and the natural order which must be considered in its two directions: the first of these is given in the relation of production which goes from nature to the conscious beings which it produces; the second direction is given in the relation of adjustment which proceeds from the existence of a conscious mind to make the world something which can be understood by it: the mind, from this point of view, is doubly related to the natural order. Nature is such that it produces conscious creatures endowed with spirit and can be understood by them. These are fundamental characteristics of the universe and not by-products of contingent developments whose real explanation is given in terms which do not refer to the spirit.

Bernardo Kastrup

Bernardo Kastrup, philosopher of the mind and specialist in artificial intelligence, has been actively contributing since the 2010s to the revival of “metaphysical idealism” understood as “objective idealism”, affirming the mental character of reality independently of its relationship to a specific subject. He defends an ontology based on the double principle of a purely mental reality and a unique encompassing consciousness identifiable with the cosmos. This ontology, although it may seem extravagant at first glance, presents itself as more parsimonious and empirically rigorous than the two great theories put forward to solve the mind-body problem which are traditional physicalism and panpsychism.

While he unequivocally rejects physicalism, Kastrup agrees with panpsychism on the idea that “everything is mental”; he nevertheless considers it contradictory and insufficient in its two main forms which are bottom-up (“ascending”) panpsychism, founded “from below” on the basic elements of the physical world (the elementary particles), and cosmopsychism, or up-bottom panpsychism, founded “from above” on the notion of the cosmos considered as a Whole. According to Kastrup, idealistic ontology alone makes it possible to overcome the difficulties raised by these theories, in particular by unraveling the “difficult problem of consciousness” posed by physicalism, as well as the so-called “Combination Problems” and ” Decombination Problem” posed respectively by bottom-up panpsychism and cosmopsychism.

In Bernardo Kastrup’s metaphysical system, all sentient beings, including us, are mere modifications or alterations of a single cosmic consciousness, the effect of which is to individualize us as conscious subjects. The surrounding world is only an extrinsic appearance through which the thoughts of the cosmic consciousness manifest themselves not as they are, as is the case with the thoughts arising from our own consciousness, but from outside, indirectly. It is also in the form of external phenomena that the consciousness of other individuals is revealed, in other words, of other modifications of this fundamental consciousness which is the cosmic spirit.

Donald Hoffman

Donald D. Hoffman is a cognitive psychology researcher whose work focuses on visual perception, evolutionary psychology, and consciousness. He claims that the commonly held view that it is brain activity that causes conscious experience has so far proven to be unsolvable in scientific terms. The solution to the difficult problem of consciousness implies, according to him, adopting the opposite point of view according to which it is consciousness which causes brain activity and which creates, in a way, all the objects and properties of the physical world. To this end, Hoffman developed and combined two theories: one, epistemological, concerning the function of perception (Multimodal User Interface theory), the other, ontological, concerning the place of consciousness in the world (Conscious Realism).

According to Hoffman’s epistemological theory, perceptual experiences in no way correspond to the properties of the objective world, but they form a simplified interface, variable according to species, which forms a kind of screen between the agent and the world. Hoffman argues that conscious beings evolved not to perceive the world as it really is, but to perceive the world in a way that maximizes adaptive benefits. It uses the metaphor of office automation icons, the whole of which forms a functional interface so that the user does not have to master the programming or the underlying electronic operation, which are excessively complex. Likewise, the objects we perceive in time and space can be metaphorically interpreted as office icons that allow us to function as efficiently as possible without having to deal with the overwhelming amount of data coming from reality.

Hoffman’s ontological theory is a form of non-physicalist monism according to which consciousness is the fundamental reality from which the physical world emerges. The real world consists of “conscious agents” and their experiences whose existence does not depend on that of particles or physical fields. Together, Hoffman’s epistemological theory and ontological theory form the basis of an overarching theory that makes the physical world not an objective world but an epiphenomenon (secondary phenomenon) caused by consciousness, a position he himself calls “epiphysicalism”. Thus, although he does not explicitly claim idealism, Hoffman subscribes not only to the epistemological thesis of idealism according to which we perceive only our own representations, but also to the ontological thesis according to which the world is made of spirits (the “conscious agents”).

(Includes texts from Wikipedia translated and adapted by Nicolae Sfetcu)