A critique of Bernardo Kastrup's idealism

This originated as a response to a YouTube interview BK did (indicated below), in which he invited thoughtful criticisms of his philosophy.  The resulting comments assume some familiarity with both idealism in general and BK's analytic idealism in particular.

Bernardo Kastrup is one of the most popular advocates of philosophical idealism today (along with Donald Hoffman).  He calls his form of this philosophy analytic idealism, and has characterized his particular view as being partly subjective idealism, and partly objective idealism.**  I'm not going to offer a précis of these terms, nor of idealism in general (there's already a wealth of freely available material on this or any philosophical topic at your fingertips).  Instead, I'm going to respond very specifically to some salient points from a particular video interview he did about a year or two ago.  

But first, a little preamble:

I have misgivings about the merely instinctive, rudimentarily conscious ontological ground of Kastrup's form of idealism.  For me, the issue is that, as with materialism, this conception of idealism still entails the emergence of properties of metaconsciousness, intelligence and meaning from relatively primitive ground.  Merely calling this primitive ground consciousness or mind while denuding it of the most universally identifiable properties of consciousness or mind doesn’t seem to be much more than a semantic gesture.  There almost seems to be a kind of pre/trans fallacy in this conception of a nescient ontological ground. That is, he seems to believe that if the ground is not metaconscious (i.e., reflectively or reflexively self-aware), it must be merely protoconscious, without considering that it may transcend those categories entirely.

That said, the comments here are in reference to the video "Metaphysical Idealism - Dr. Bernardo Kastrup Interview", from the Digital Gnosis YouTube channel.  All time stamps are where referenced ideas and quoted passages immediately preceding them can be found in that video.

@42:07  If I were to play devil’s advocate and respond to this call for counter arguments, it would go like this: 

The problem with BK’s objective idealism is that, in rendering this transpersonal mind or mind-at-large as a blindly instinctive and unreflective ontological ground, it seems to suffer from a kind of hard problem comparable (not identical) to that of physicalism. The latter postulates that physical laws and inert matter combine in adventitious ways to eventually (but mysteriously) produce mind, whereas the former posits that transpersonal mind “unfold[s] according to natural patterns and regularities” (13:26) that eventually produce individual minds — a.k.a., dissociated alters. In both systems, laws are intrinsic to the ontological primitive, but in only one is mind intrinsic.  So what, exactly, is the defining characteristic of this mind once stripped of everything mind-like but unreflective instinct?  And what differentiates this from the brutishly nescient ground of physicalism?

A related problem is that in both metaphysical systems the final product is far more cohesively complex, intelligent and metaconscious than its precursors. This is interesting given that one of the idealist’s objections to physicalism is the absurdity of consciousness as an emergent phenomenon. So then, how is there anything more than a purely semantic distinction between saying there are physical laws underlying all reality, as in physicalism, and saying “there are natural laws that are intrinsic to what mind-at-large is” (16:32), especially when this mind-at-large is denuded of any properties typically associated with mind per se, such as intelligence and self-awareness? 

To continue on the devil’s advocate track: Bernardo claims that the reduced brain activity induced by psychedelics correlates with reduced dissociation of transpersonal mind (32:18).  But if reduced dissociation equates to expanded states of being (32:42), how does this square with his idea of transpersonal mind as a lesser, un-metaconscious reality characterized by mere blind instinct? 

A few additional thoughts on this talk: I think if you’re going to argue for idealism, you’re going to be hobbled as soon as you call yourself a naturalist and posit the existence of an objective reality that’s independent of any individual’s perception of it.  Just saying that this objective reality is being held in a sort of macro-quantum probability state by transpersonal mind seems awfully similar to Berkeley’s notion that anything unobserved is being held in place by the mind of God.  It smacks of trying to keep one foot in materialism and the other in idealism, probably to avoid being accused of promoting unmitigated woo.

“That’s the one key reason why intelligent people would reject analytic idealism, is their inability to conceive of one mind becoming many while remaining one." 

Speaking of unmitigated woo, there’s the more radical subjective idealism, which is probably the more internally consistent form of idealism to embrace, at least if you’re not trying to court paradigm-challenging debates and dialogues with materialist scientists and philosophers. The common hang-up here is the confusion with solipsism.  This is understandable, as solipsism can be seen as a sort of bastardization of the more profound and subtle premise of radical idealism: there is only one consciousness, which each individual is.  But the seeming paradox is that no matter how many individuals there are, each one is truly the only one because consciousness is one (or, to be more accurate, not two, not one).

"We cannot have final metaphysical certainty." 

Maybe he means you can’t have final intellectual certainty about metaphysics. I do think it’s possible to come to a “final metaphysical certainty,” but it’s through a sort of shift or transformation at the root of identity in which there’s no longer a felt split between subject and object (though distinctions are still made).  If you’re intellectually oriented, you can use that faculty to contemplatively deconstruct your way to the brink of this shift; but the shift itself isn’t mediated by the intellect, and the “certainty” in this case takes the form of an absence of nagging existential questions, doubt, or anxiety.  Be that as it may, this "certainty" still wouldn't be translatable as proof to anyone else.  Each has to come to it on their own.

**Kastrup's own brief definition of his form of idealism (taken from a different video):

"Analytic idealism states that at the bottom level of reality, there is a field [...] of simple subjectivity, and excitations of this field are what we call experiences."