• home
• about
• new
• essays
• AI
• book

Frank Visser, graduated as a psychologist of culture and religion, founded IntegralWorld in 1997. He worked as production manager for various publishing houses and as service manager for various internet companies and lives in Amsterdam. Books: Ken Wilber: Thought as Passion (SUNY, 2003), and The Corona Conspiracy: Combatting Disinformation about the Coronavirus (Kindle, 2020).

Debunking Bernardo Kastrups Philosophy In A Nutshell

Is Analytic Idealism Really Parsimonious?

Frank Visser / ChatGPT

Context: In 2019, Kastrup defended a PhD on "analytic idealism", in which he claimed his philosophy was superior to other theories of mind, and the most parsimonious. Here we evaluate this claim.

What are the weaker spots of Analytic Idealism?

Here are the main weak spots, organized by theme:

1. The “one consciousness” premise

Kastrup's framework begins with the assertion that there is only one universal consciousness, and that individual minds are “dissociated alters” of it.

Weakness:

This is not a deduction but a metaphysical postulate. While it elegantly avoids the “combination problem” of panpsychism, it creates its own “dissociation problem”:

Why does the One Mind fragment at all?

How can one field of experience isolate subfields that don't have access to each other's contents?

Kastrup borrows the dissociation analogy from psychiatry, but in real dissociative identity disorder, the underlying brain provides the substrate—there is no equivalent in cosmic consciousness.

Result: The explanatory burden is merely relocated, not resolved.

2. The analogy problem

Kastrup heavily relies on analogies between mind-brain relations and universal consciousness-matter relations.

Weakness:

Analogies are illustrative, not explanatory.

Saying that the universe is like a mind having dissociative episodes doesn't establish identity or causal mechanism.

His use of dream analogies (we are dream characters within Mind-at-large) makes intuitive sense but fails under analytic scrutiny—dreams are private phenomena arising in a particular organism's physiology, not evidence of a cosmic psyche.

3. Empirical underdetermination

Kastrup claims that idealism better fits the data from quantum mechanics and neuroscience than physicalism does.

Weakness:

The data are compatible with multiple interpretations.

Quantum indeterminacy doesn't prove consciousness creates reality.

Neural correlates of consciousness remain correlates, not proofs of ontological primacy either way.

His claim that physicalism can't explain subjective experience is fair, but it doesn't automatically follow that idealism is true; the argument is asymmetrical: one side is undermined, the other asserted.

4. The reification of consciousness

Kastrup treats consciousness as the only ontological primitive, but then talks as if it has structure, causal powers, and self-organizing tendencies.

Weakness:

This risks category slippage—turning an epistemic condition (“that which experiences”) into an ontic substance (“stuff that behaves”).

If consciousness has dynamical structure that gives rise to apparent physics, then we're smuggling in physicalist concepts under a different label.

The risk: idealism becomes disguised neutral monism or process ontology, not pure idealism.

5. The phenomenal realism trap

He argues that what we perceive is not matter but the extrinsic appearance of mental processes—just as a brain scan is the image of mental activity.

Weakness:

This rests on a double-aspect assumption (inner/outer view of the same process) that blurs the line between idealism and dual-aspect monism.

If appearance and experience are “two sides of the same coin,” we're back to a form of neutral monism, which contradicts strict idealism's claim that only experience exists.

6. Evolutionary implausibility

If the physical world is just the extrinsic image of mental processes, how did natural selection operate?

Weakness:

Evolutionary history—fossils, DNA, cosmic chronology—looks stubbornly objective and cumulative.

Kastrup has to reinterpret it as the internal logic of unfolding dissociations within Mind-at-large, which feels ad hoc and unfalsifiable.

This introduces a teleological flavor he insists on avoiding but can't fully shake.

7. Testability and falsifiability

Kastrup's system explains everything in principle and therefore nothing in particular.

Weakness:

Any observation can be reinterpreted as the behavior of universal consciousness.

There are no clear empirical criteria that would disconfirm analytic idealism.

It operates as a global metaphysical lens, not a scientific theory—elegant, but beyond empirical reach.

8. The hidden metaphysical asymmetry

While accusing physicalism of reifying abstractions (“matter”), Kastrup reifies the subjective pole of reality.

Weakness:

His claim that consciousness is ontologically primary assumes that “existence = to be experienced,” which is itself an idealistic stipulation, not a deduction from first principles.

The alternative (that both subjectivity and objectivity emerge from a deeper neutral base) remains equally viable.

9. Philosophical isolation

Despite his analytic vocabulary, Kastrup's view is closer to German Romantic idealism (Schelling, Schopenhauer) than to mainstream analytic philosophy.

Weakness:

His system does not integrate easily with current metaphysical naturalism, nor with formal models in physics.

Hence it risks becoming a philosophically beautiful island—internally coherent but externally disconnected.

10. Pragmatic irrelevance

Even if true, analytic idealism might explain why the world feels meaningful, but it doesn't add predictive or explanatory power to science.

Weakness:

As with Wilber's “Spirit-in-action,” its primary appeal is existential and aesthetic, not explanatory.

It gives comfort and metaphysical unity—but not usable models.

Is Analytic Idealism Really Parsimonious?

Kastrup often claims that analytic idealism is the most parsimonious ontology possible, because it posits only one kind of existent: consciousness (experience itself). All else—matter, brains, space-time—are appearances within consciousness. At first glance, this looks like a triumph of Ockham's Razor. But when you look closely, the simplicity becomes deceptive—perhaps too simple to explain complexity without smuggling it back in.

Let's unpack this in several layers:

1. Ontological vs. explanatory parsimony

Kastrup's system is ontologically parsimonious—it assumes one basic ingredient (mind). But explanatorily, it's not parsimonious at all. He must add elaborate conceptual machinery to make that single ingredient generate:

• stable physical laws,
• apparent space and time,
• consistent intersubjectivity,
• biological evolution,
• and dissociation into billions of separate egos.

That's a lot of explanatory weight on one undefined “substance.” So while his ontology is “simpler,” his explanatory architecture is baroque.

Parsimony in metaphysics is only meaningful if the model still explains the phenomena without adding hidden complexities.

2. Compression ≠ explanation

Kastrup's appeal to parsimony is a kind of conceptual compression: instead of two ontological categories (matter and mind), he keeps one and redescribes everything else as mental.

But this can be a semantic reduction, not a real one — the complexity doesn't disappear, it's pushed inside consciousness.

You still need an account of why and how consciousness presents itself as a lawful, shared, apparently external world.

That's like saying:

“There is only one thing—energy—and everything else is its pattern.” Which is elegant, but then you must explain how all patterns arise and persist. The simplicity is rhetorical, not empirical.

3. Hidden dualities creep back in

To make sense of his system, Kastrup has to distinguish:

• Consciousness-as-such (the universal field)
• Dissociated alters (individual minds)
• Extrinsic appearance (what alters see as “matter”)

These are functionally distinct categories — so even though he says “only consciousness exists,” he's effectively reintroducing dual (or even triadic) distinctions under different names.

Hence, the supposed monism fractures under operational pressure. It's too simple at the top, too complex at the bottom.

4. Parsimony vs. adequacy

A perfectly simple theory that explains nothing isn't a good theory. Science uses Ockham's Razor only among empirically adequate models.

Kastrup's parsimony is metaphysical, not empirical: it simplifies the inventory of what exists, but at the cost of making all explanations interpretive rather than testable.

So one could argue that his theory is not too simple in form, but too empty in application.

5. Psychological parsimony—or projection?

There's also a psychological temptation here:

• the wish for unity, intelligibility, and interior meaning.
• Idealism's simplicity gratifies that wish —
• “all is mind” feels spiritually satisfying and conceptually clean.

But that kind of parsimony may reflect cognitive aesthetics more than metaphysical truth. Reality might simply be messier: multiple layers, emergent properties, plural kinds of being.

6. A fair counterpoint

To be fair, Kastrup is aware of these objections. He argues that all other ontologies multiply mysteries unnecessarily:

• Physicalism can't explain experience.
• Panpsychism can't explain combination.
• Dualism can't explain interaction.

So he opts for one mystery instead of three: Why does consciousness differentiate?

That is indeed a kind of parsimony — but it's a parsimony of mystery management, not explanation.

Conclusion

Kastrup's analytic idealism is parsimonious in the same way that “God did it” is parsimonious: it drastically reduces ontological kinds but inflates explanatory commitments.

In that sense, yes—it may be too simple to be true. Its elegance hides an entire unseen machinery that must somehow produce every empirical regularity, from quantum fields to human suffering, without any physical substrate.

The result is not a razor but a mirror—beautifully polished, but reflecting back only the structure of thought itself.