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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).

The Inflation of Consciousness

Why Cosmic Idealism Explains Too Much

Frank Visser / ChatGPT

It is a commonplace in contemporary philosophy of mind to admit that consciousness remains poorly understood. The so-called “hard problem,” formulated by David Chalmers, highlights the explanatory gap between neural processes and subjective experience. No consensus theory has bridged the chasm between third-person descriptions and first-person awareness.

But from this epistemic humility, some thinkers make a dramatic leap: because consciousness is puzzling at the human level, it must therefore be fundamental to the cosmos. The explanatory gap becomes a metaphysical portal. Mind is no longer an emergent biological phenomenon; it becomes the ontological ground of reality itself.

This move—from ignorance to cosmic inflation—deserves scrutiny.

From Mystery to Metaphysics

Philosophical idealism has a venerable pedigree, from George Berkeley to Immanuel Kant (though Kant's transcendental idealism is often misunderstood as metaphysical idealism). In the twentieth century, it resurfaced in new guises, and today it enjoys renewed popularity in analytic philosophy and popular science writing. Figures such as Bernardo Kastrup argue that consciousness is the sole ontological primitive; matter is derivative or illusory.

The reasoning often proceeds as follows:

• Consciousness cannot be reduced to matter.

• Therefore, matter must be reducible to consciousness.

• Hence, the universe is fundamentally mental.

The first premise may express a genuine explanatory limitation. The second is a metaphysical inversion. The third is a cosmic generalization.

The problem is not that such a position is logically incoherent. The problem is that it explains too much, too quickly.

Contemporary Advocates and the Debate Landscape

In recent decades, idealism has re-entered mainstream philosophical debate in more analytically rigorous forms.

Bernardo Kastrup has become one of the most visible contemporary defenders of analytic idealism. He argues that the physical world is the extrinsic appearance of underlying mental processes, likening individual minds to dissociated alters within a broader cosmic consciousness. His work explicitly challenges physicalist orthodoxy and seeks to reinterpret neuroscience within an idealist framework.

Donald Hoffman advances a related but distinct thesis: that evolution has shaped perceptual systems not to reveal objective reality but to present a user interface optimized for survival. In his “conscious realism,” consciousness is fundamental and spacetime itself is derivative. Hoffman frequently debates neuroscientists and philosophers who defend realism about the physical world.

Philip Goff represents another strand of the anti-physicalist movement through panpsychism—the view that consciousness is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of matter. While not an idealist in the strict Berkeleyan sense, Goff's work erodes the sharp boundary between mind and matter, contributing to the broader cultural shift toward cosmopsychism and related models.

These figures regularly engage critics such as Daniel Dennett, who rejected the hard problem framework altogether, and proponents of biological naturalism like John Searle. Even David Chalmers himself, though sympathetic to panpsychism as a serious research program, stops short of full-blown metaphysical idealism.

What distinguishes modern idealists from their historical predecessors is their fluency in neuroscience, information theory, and evolutionary biology. They do not typically deny empirical findings; instead, they reinterpret them. Brain activity becomes the outward display of mental processes rather than their cause. Physics becomes a structural description of experiential dynamics.

Yet the dialectical structure remains familiar: explanatory difficulty at the level of neural correlates becomes leverage for ontological revision at the level of the cosmos.

The Fallacy of Scale

Human consciousness is already complex enough. It correlates tightly with neural activity, developmental history, and evolutionary biology. Damage to specific cortical areas alters experience in predictable ways. Psychoactive substances modulate awareness chemically. Anesthesia reliably switches consciousness off.

If consciousness were ontologically fundamental and primary, these robust dependencies would require explanation. Idealists typically reinterpret them as patterns within universal consciousness—localized “dissociations,” as in Kastrup's model. But this re-description does not deepen explanatory power; it merely relocates the mystery.

Instead of asking how neural complexity gives rise to experience, we now ask how cosmic consciousness generates neurons that generate localized viewpoints. The explanatory burden multiplies.

Inflation does not resolve the mystery; it globalizes it.

Parsimony and Ontological Discipline

In scientific reasoning, ontological economy matters. The principle often associated with William of Ockham advises against multiplying entities beyond necessity. When a phenomenon can be explained by known mechanisms operating at biological levels, positing a cosmic Mind adds surplus structure.

Consider the difference between two strategies:

• Methodological naturalism: Investigate neural correlates, cognitive architectures, evolutionary origins.

• Cosmic idealism: Reinterpret all physical processes as manifestations of universal consciousness.

The first is incremental and constrained. The second is architectonic and totalizing. The first risks incompleteness; the second risks unfalsifiability.

Once consciousness becomes coextensive with existence, every datum confirms it. Rocks, stars, and quarks become experiential in some diluted or primordial sense. But a hypothesis compatible with every possible observation ceases to discriminate.

The Rhetorical Appeal of the Cosmic

Why, then, does cosmic idealism attract adherents?

Part of its appeal lies in existential reassurance. If consciousness pervades reality, then mind is not an accidental byproduct of blind processes. Meaning seems woven into the fabric of the universe. The isolation implied by reductive materialism dissolves into metaphysical intimacy.

Another factor is conceptual symmetry. If matter gives rise to mind, that seems astonishing. Why not invert the relation? Yet symmetry alone is not evidence. The counterintuitive nature of emergence does not license its reversal.

Moreover, inflating consciousness to cosmic scale often blurs distinctions between epistemology and ontology. Because we only know the world through experience, some conclude that experience constitutes the world. But this conflates conditions of access with conditions of existence.

The Explanatory Gap Is Not a Cosmic Gateway

The failure to currently explain consciousness reductively does not entail that such explanation is impossible. History counsels caution. Life once seemed irreducible to chemistry; vitalism flourished. As biochemical mechanisms were uncovered, vital forces receded.

This analogy is imperfect—consciousness may resist reduction in ways life did not. Still, invoking a cosmic mind resembles invoking élan vital: a placeholder elevated to principle.

Admitting ignorance is epistemically virtuous. Transforming ignorance into metaphysical certainty is not.

A Modest Alternative

A disciplined position acknowledges three points:

• Consciousness is real and deeply puzzling.

• It is tightly correlated with complex biological systems.

• Its ultimate explanation remains open.

From here, one can explore non-reductive physicalism, neutral monism, or emergentist models without committing to universal panpsychism or absolute idealism.

The cosmos may be stranger than current science imagines. But strangeness alone does not justify ontological maximalism.

To say “we do not yet understand consciousness” is a research program. To say “therefore the universe is consciousness” is a metaphysical leap.

One preserves the problem; the other dissolves it by inflation.