Bernardo Kastrups Analytical Idealism and Ontological Substrates

[Scholar]

A major reason why Bernardo defines the external world as a mental state is because there is no reason, under the principles of philosophy, to assume that there is a second ontological category that is somehow different than the "mental".

 

This notion to me is in a way correct, but it truly confuses a deeper point about the nature of ontology in the first place.

The reason why the idealist calls reality fundamentally mental is because that which he has access to, which he defines as his experience, is something he labels as mental. The "mental" or "mind" is in that way a construct that stands in opposition to what is consider externality.

Once you collapse the inner and external in an ontological sense, the term "mental" loses all it's meaning. Whatever it's qualities would be, would actually just be qualities of reality.

 

But there is a more important point here, in that somehow Kastrup believes that even what he considers the "mental", meaning his own mind, is a singular ontological category. In essence this can be said to be true, given that ontology just equivalent to existence, but it overlooks reality about "mind" that leads to the recognition of Infinity.

The ontology of colors, of blueness, is as different in it's nature from the ontology of sound, or the chirping of a bird, could possibly be. They are entirely different ontological categories. They are literally impossibly dissimilar. No two things in all of existence could be more dissimilar to each other than sound and color is.

To call them mental is meaningless, because all that mental means is "of existence" or "existing". Ontology is existence, and the existence of redness is utterly foreign and unequal to the existence of the chirping of a bird. Both are existence, but they are not a "type" of existence. Redness is not mental. Redness is precisely one thing: Redness.

It is irreducable. It is no other category than that, it is itself. Every concept that you project upon it is not Redness.

 

So when an Idealist says the external world is mental, all that could possibly mean is that the external world is "of existence". What kind of existence it is, that is unknowable, as unknowable as colors are to a blind person.

 

Why is this so essential? It is essential because if you truly realize the utter dissimilarity of the ontology between redness and the chirping of a bird, you will immediately realize the radical nature of Infinity, and the radical nature of Existence. Any propositional explanation of reality will immediately be recognized to be absurd, Redness cannot be explained by anything. It cannot be explained by any account of the mind, any account of physicality, any account of anything that one could possibly understand or think about. The nature and existence of redness can only be accounted for in one way: In itself.

Redness is completely and utterly self-justifying, self-asserting. It is Absolute. The only thing that could allow for Redness to exist is Absolute Infinity, because it will contain Redness, it will contain all things.

Every ontological category which you call a sense, namely colors, sounds, concepts, feelings, temperature-perception. They are not mental, they are themselves. There are Infinite such ontological "categories", each infinitely and absolutely foreign to one another. Each of them indescribable, irreducable.

 

When we speak of the mind, we simply speak of existence, of reality. To call it mind is a remnant of dualism, which labels externality and internality as opposed to one another, as mental against physical. But this is a confusion, because reality simply is infinity. It is ontologically infinitely diverse. 

There are not two ontological category, but endless categories of them. But each of them, in a sense, are ontologically equivalent, given they are all simply existence, which means they are themselves (self-affirming existence or substance).

 

 

When it is said that something "feels" like something, all that really means is that something exists. That's literally it. The issue is that the human mind confuses predictive notions about reality with the ontological notions. So it employs the notions of "feeling" as they relate in terms ot metacognition to a function of survival. Nothing is felt, it simply exists. The projection of the "it is felt" notion has it's purpose in that it focuses the notion of "reality"  onto externility focused reality modeling. So the model of the physical world is given primacy, in the way it's illusion is consistent. The physical world doesn't change, the body and it's needs do change all the time.

So, changing things are defined as "feeling", and unchanging things are defined as reality (external world).

When individuals take psychedelics, the usually stable "existence" of the physical world model suddenly, for the first time, dissolves, and is shown to be as fleeting as what is considered other "feelings".

But what is actually happening is that reality is fleeting and fluid in that way. Reality can give existence to redness, and then give existence to something else. It is infinite, it can do anything, of course. However, that does not change that the ontology of all those things simply are themselves, they could not be anything other than themselves.

Edited 18 hours ago by Scholar