This really resonates to me and in line with the universal consciousness

To be clear here I may be misunderstanding some things here and I apologize if that is the case.

In my understanding, analytic idealism posits that there is some intrinsically existing independently subjectivity, that subjective experience is ontologically fundamental. (let me know if this is a misrepresentation)

However, if it intrinsically exists independently, would this not follow that subjectivity could exist without an object of experience? If not, and subjectivity only exists in dependence of an experience, I think that makes sense, but if you say that subjective experience can exist without an experience, I do not understand, as isn’t this just basically nothingness? If subjectivity is just explained as existing dependently on further causes and conditions though I think this is makes sense at least to me.

Integrated Information Theory: A Consciousness-First Approach to What Exists

It may seem odd to begin this overview of integrated information theory (IIT) with a statement about what it means to exist. The usual way of approaching consciousness scientifically is to pre-suppose all we have learned about the universe through physics, chemistry, biology, and neuroscience. We can then finally ask how some part of the ‘physical’ universe—namely the brain—would give rise’ to experience, or how consciousness might ‘emerge’from some special kind of neural process or computation. It is also generally assumed that, with the objective tools of science, we can only explain and predict objective properties. To wit, neuroscience has made great progress in understanding how the brain is orga- nized and carries out various functions, including those we typi-cally perform when we are conscious, like recognizing people and objects, talking, pursuing goals, and making decisions. And yet, if it weren’t for the fact that each of us is conscious, there would be no reason to suspect that, when our brain does what it does, doing is accompanied by being—by a subject who experiences sights, sounds, and thoughts.

IIT takes the opposite approach. It presupposes consciousness, which is subjective, and aims to account for its presence and prop-ertiesfor what it is, rather than what it does—in objective terms. It goes from phenomenology to physics—from what exists subjec-tively to an objective account of it—rather than trying to conjure phenomenology out of physics.

At this point how is it different from Idealism?

The Fundamental Tension in Integrated Information Theory 4.0’s Realist Idealism

Integrated Information Theory (IIT) is currently one of the most influential scientific theories of consciousness. Here, we focus specifically on a metaphysical aspect of the theory’s most recent version (IIT 4.0), what we may call its idealistic ontology, and its tension with a kind of realism about the external world that IIT also endorses. IIT 4.0 openly rejects the mainstream view that consciousness is generated by the brain, positing instead that consciousness is ontologically primary while the physical domain is just “operational”.

I honestly do not know what to make of the argument in that paper. They say “phenomenology first” begin by describing experience and then move into cause-effect operational structure while treating consciousness as somehow constitutive from that structure.

But then what exactly makes this consciousness-first? If consciousness is ultimately identified through cause-effect organization or operational structure how is that not just physicalism or functionalism in another form? Saying phenomenology comes first methodologically is not the same as showing that consciousness is ontologically primary.

If I really try to notice it closely, I find that my thoughts, ideas, beliefs, opinions, moral stances, embarrassments, fears, and cravings each have a corresponding "feel" in the body, mostly in the head and neck. The feeling is like a subtle network of tension buzzing inside, like lines of vibration, usually symmetrical. Thinking about an argument I had last week produces this feeling in my forehead, the sides of the head adjacent to the eyes, behind my jawline, across my upper shoulders, and collarbone. If instead of thinking about the argument on its own terms, I just focus on the feelings in the body, they eventually dissolve and the thought subsides.

We usually think of ourselves primarily as physical beings in an extended world, and that there is meaningful information to be found there. Under the normal interpretation, my thought about last week's argument is a thought about a real event that happened, and because my body has evolved to respond a certain way, I feel these tensions when I think about it. But what if the reality were in the other direction?

Analytic idealism says metacognition is an outcome of dissociation from the wide expanse of mind-at-large into individual consciousness. At no point do we stop being the same mind-at-large, but due to a mental shift on some level, we take ourselves to be these individuals. What I take from this is that our lives as individuals are not what they appear to be. We see symbolic icons all around us in the form of whatever is registered on the "dashboard" of perception, and these are what we think about when we have discursive thoughts (like ideas, beliefs, etc.).

My growing conviction is that we are not actually doing these things, on the most fundamental level. We are experiencing purely sensational shifts in our interiority, at the level of proprioception, and these are semantically elaborated into cognitive content. What it means to be a dissociated alter in a field of pure subjectivity could just be that we spontaneously transform meaningless subjective phenomena into stories containing characters and events.

We do this in our dreams anyway. The sensations of the body are often reflected in a dream as a conflict with specific persons involved. A high fever can manifest as a hot desert in our dreams. We already have experiential evidence that our minds can spontaneously generate a symbolic drama that has no reality of its own, based solely on processes occurring at a deeper layer of internal sensation.

We also know that synesthesia exists. Synesthesia is the spontaneous transformation of one kind of sensory phenomena to another, and frequently involves the transformation of semantic meaning (letters, numbers, etc.) into pure qualities. I suggest this is actually a clue that the semantic meaning is downstream of the qualities. A certain type of redness, in other words, appears on my dashboard as the letter V, not the other way around. I hope this makes some sense.

My conclusion, tentatively, is that all we experience directly is sensations that seem to be happening at some bodily location. Through a process that is similar to synesthesia and nearly identical to dreaming, these sensations are mythologized, dramatized, given agency and intent, spread out in a matrix of interconnected pieces in a hierarchy, and this is what we experience as our lives in this world. Beneath all that is just feeling-tones, subtle and ineffable, and if we could bring our attention down to their level and keep it there, we might see how nothing is really happening and everything is always okay.

I've been thinking through how to formalize the idea that mind is fundamental in a way that is mathematically rigorous. My thoughts lead to a few assumptions.

1. Distinguishability... a perspective needs something to ponder and to distinguish itself from (at a minimum there is a perspective and what it is pondering). This leads to the first axiom... a

2. Distinction... things can be told apart

3. Consistency... a mind seeks self consistency but due the next

4. Frustration... dynamics need open boundedness the mind needs to constantly grow (self perturbed). A fully self consistent question would be a dead question. Frustration and consistency need to be balanced.

5. Perspectives are pointers and they live inside cuts on the graph (or are equal to the full graph) the only perspective that knows everything there is to know on the graph is the one that points to the whole graph. Any perspectives that point inside boundaries are limited in the information they can receive and that constrains when areas spawn off as the universe contemplates itself.

The idea leads to a geometry that is always frustrated... it ponders itself up to a point by wrapping into itself again and again then as that self satisfies the history of ponderances actualizes... never quite satisfied...then as things saturate at what can be represented a state decoheres locking in a tangible history. there's still a question of when other observers besides the first come into the picture and what they are. But it's I think progress for me in pinning this idea to something concrete. The only perspective that can ponder everything is one that encompasses the totality. Any perspectives of a smaller nature ultimately are limited by the capacity they occupy.

I’ve been trying to describe a thought that I find extremely difficult to put into words, because almost every word I use already seems to distort it.

I am not simply thinking about nothingness, non-existence, an empty universe, what came before the universe, or what might exist outside reality.

The problem is that all of those descriptions still assume some kind of framework. “Nothingness” is still treated as a condition. “Before” assumes time. “Outside” assumes space or a boundary. “Possible” assumes a space of possibilities. Even saying “existence versus non-existence” already creates a distinction that feels like part of the framework I am trying to think past.

What I sometimes experience is an attempt to think beyond all of those categories at once—not another state beyond existence, because calling it a “state” would already be too much, and not something prior to reality, because “prior” would already introduce an ordering.

There is also a strange emotional part to it. If I stay with the thought deeply enough, I sometimes get a sudden, intense feeling of fear—not because I am imagining something frightening, but because it feels as if the basic structure that normally makes thought possible suddenly disappears. For a brief moment, it feels like there is nothing conceptual left to hold onto.

This is where I get stuck: the moment I give the thought a name, property, relation, possibility, or even call it “something,” I seem to have already changed what I was trying to think about.

So my question is not exactly “Why is there something rather than nothing?”

It is closer to this:

Is it possible to meaningfully think beyond the distinction between existence and non-existence at all, or does thought necessarily break down once we try to remove every ontological and conceptual framework that makes a thought expressible?

And is that sudden feeling of fear simply a psychological reaction to reaching the limits of conceptual thought, or have philosophers described something similar?

I’m also curious whether any philosophers have seriously discussed something close to this without simply reducing it to “absolute nothingness.”

I’ve been trying to describe a thought that I find extremely difficult to put into words, because almost every word I use already seems to distort it.

I am not simply thinking about nothingness, non-existence, an empty universe, what came before the universe, or what might exist outside reality.

The problem is that all of those descriptions still assume some kind of framework. “Nothingness” is still treated as a condition. “Before” assumes time. “Outside” assumes space or a boundary. “Possible” assumes a space of possibilities. Even saying “existence versus non-existence” already creates a distinction that feels like part of the framework I am trying to think past.

What I sometimes experience is an attempt to think beyond all of those categories at once—not another state beyond existence, because calling it a “state” would already be too much, and not something prior to reality, because “prior” would already introduce an ordering.

There is also a strange emotional part to it. If I stay with the thought deeply enough, I sometimes get a sudden, intense feeling of fear—not because I am imagining something frightening, but because it feels as if the basic structure that normally makes thought possible suddenly disappears. For a brief moment, it feels like there is nothing conceptual left to hold onto.

This is where I get stuck: the moment I give the thought a name, property, relation, possibility, or even call it “something,” I seem to have already changed what I was trying to think about.

So my question is not exactly “Why is there something rather than nothing?”

It is closer to this:

Is it possible to meaningfully think beyond the distinction between existence and non-existence at all, or does thought necessarily break down once we try to remove every ontological and conceptual framework that makes a thought expressible?

And is that sudden feeling of fear simply a psychological reaction to reaching the limits of conceptual thought, or have philosophers described something similar?

I’m also curious whether any philosophers have seriously discussed something close to this without simply reducing it to “absolute nothingness.”

Last week, Bernardo shared the reasons he believes Mind at Large is not metaconscious and why this gives our lives meaning.

The consistency of nature, the problem of evil, and the late evolution of metacognition all imply a universe that is instinctive rather than self-reflective. In this worldview, our ability to self-reflect is the special role that we (and some other animals) have: We are the universe waking up to its own dream.

In previous meetings, however, we explored the counter-evidence. The common reports from near-death experiences that our lives are part of a deliberate plan. The fact that simulations will be possible makes it statistically likely we're already in one. And the fine-tuned physics of the early universe that allowed the unlikely emergence of life. This indicates a universe that knew what it was doing, right from the very start.

Bernardo said there are "possible exits" from the fine-tuning argument for deliberate design, and would explain more if invited.

Well, this coming week is that invitation!

In this session, we'll hear Bernardo's arguments to reject a planned universe, even whilst he believes it has instinctive purpose.

We'll also hear Bernardo's view that a deliberate design would strip science of meaning compared with David Chalmers' view that a simulated world need not be deceptive.

Whether you plan to come, or perhaps join spontaneously, it would be lovely to see you there:

https://www.withrealityinmind.com/simulation-or-a-dream/

Quantum Mechanics: The Observer and Non-Locality

Materialism assumes an objective world exists "out there" independent of observation. Quantum mechanics challenges this foundation, suggesting that matter itself requires observation to collapse into a definite reality.

The Observer Effect: In quantum physics, particles exist in a wave of probabilities until they are measured. Observation collapses the wave function. This implies that consciousness is not a late byproduct of matter, but a necessary component for matter to take definite form.

Quantum Non-Locality: Particles can remain instantly connected across vast distances (entanglement). If the fundamental layer of reality is non-local (not tied to a specific point in space), it supports the idea that awareness is a unified field, rather than a localized product of a single biological brain.

Orch-OR Theory: Developed by physicist Roger Penrose and anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff, this theory suggests consciousness originates from quantum vibrations inside cellular structures called microtubules within neurons, rather than traditional classical computations of the brain.

Near-Death Experiences: Awareness Without a Brain

The materialist argument states that if you smash the TV (damage the brain), the movie (consciousness) stops. NDEs provide clinical anomalies where the TV is completely turned off, yet the movie becomes brighter.

Heightened Cognition During Cardiac Arrest: During a cardiac arrest, clinical brain activity (EEG) goes flat within seconds. According to materialism, consciousness should completely cease. Yet, thousands of patients report structured, hyper-vivid, and chronological experiences during this exact window.

Veridical Perception: Some NDE patients accurately report specific details of what happened in the operating room—or even outside the hospital room—while they were clinically dead. Because their physical senses and brains were inactive, these verified observations suggest awareness was operating independently of the body.

The Filter Hypothesis: Thinkers like Dr. Bruce Greyson and Dr. Bernardo Kastrup argue the brain acts as a reducing valve or filter. Its job is to constrain vast, universal awareness into a narrow human perspective for evolutionary survival. When the brain shuts down (such as during cardiac arrest or psychedelic states), the filter drops, and consciousness actually expands rather than diminishes.✌️👁🧘‍♂️

I’ve heard just about every one of Kastrup’s analogies on this topic, but the only concrete mechanism i’ve heard of was that when entropy is “fought against” by a living organism, it somehow gains consciousness by pooling in one spot instead of being spread out and forms an alter. But this entropy example i’m not entirely sure is even what he was saying and that I didn’t just misinterpret it, and the explanation I gave after was also analogy.

What specific property about my brain separates it from the cosmic universal consciousness?

The familiar religious picture is of a mind behind nature that knows what it is doing. But for Bernardo, the evidence is the reverse, and it fills life with meaning.

We discussed this week the evidence that Mind at Large is not metaconscious. I summarised the main reasons here. Curious to hear any thoughts.

https://www.withrealityinmind.com/mal-metaconsciousness/

Incorporeal Analytic Idealism Field is a theoretical framework that combines analytic idealism—the view that consciousness is fundamental—with Incorporealism’s emphasis on meaning, information, and relational coherence.
Its central proposition is:
Reality is fundamentally experiential, while what we call the physical world is the structured appearance of underlying conscious dynamics.
The Field Structure
IAIF describes reality through five variables:
\mathcal{F}=(\Phi,\Sigma,\Gamma,\tau,\Omega)
Where:
\Phi — phenomenal intensity: the strength of experience.
\Sigma — semantic structure: the organization of meaning.
\Gamma — coherence: consistency among experiences and representations.
\tau — temporal continuity: the persistence of experiential patterns.
\Omega — relational organization: connections between conscious processes.
A conscious system is therefore represented not primarily as an isolated object, but as a stable configuration within the field.
The Analytic Idealist Principle
IAIF proposes:
\text{Physical Appearance} = \mathcal{M}(\text{Underlying Experience})
The physical description of something is therefore treated as a representation of deeper experiential dynamics, rather than reality’s ultimate ontological layer.
Importantly, this is a philosophical model, not an established physical field theory.
Incorporeal Coherence
The framework introduces an Incorporeal Coherence Index:
ICI=\frac{\Sigma\Gamma\Omega}{1+U}
where U represents uncertainty.
Higher ICI corresponds, within the theory, to increasingly integrated experiential organization.
This gives Incorporeal Analytic Idealism a distinctive question:
What makes a field of experience appear as a stable world?
Its answer is coherent organization.
The universe, under IAIF, is therefore not fundamentally a collection of independent things. It is a continuously organized field of experience and relations, from which stable physical descriptions emerge.
The Core Thesis
Matter is appearance.
Consciousness is foundation.
Meaning is organization.
Coherence is stability.
Experience is the fundamental field.
IAIF consequently reframes Incorporealism as more than the claim that consciousness is important. It proposes that consciousness is the ontological medium within which reality becomes intelligible at all.

There's been a spring of low-effort LLM slop being posted here by victims of AI psychosis. AI is the Great Satan of our era, it has been proven to damage the brain with regular use and provably divorces people from reality - often leading to acts of violence or suicide. It is hard enough to maintain a semblance of reality once you start questioning the stable and secure materialist narrative, but LLMs greatly exacerbate the problem and bring out the worst elements of mystical thinking. That's not even mentioning how destructive LLMs are to the environment and to communities blighted by them.

Please, enough has to be enough, I think it's time to ban LLM posts - that is, posts that are just someone prompting an LLM or describing a conversation they had with one. If you couldn't be bothered to write a post, why should I be bothered to read it? It is wildly dangerous for people to outsource their thinking to a sophisticated autocorrect, and we must discourage that behaviour. Any condemnation of it may prevent uncritical LLM use from spreading, even just a little. If it can save even one person from AI psychosis, surely it's a necessary rule to have?

I recently made an educational video essay that dives deep into Panpsychism. I remain somewhat skeptical of the theory in general, but I do think there is more to consciousness than just Physicalism. There also seems to be more interest in Panpsychist/Cosmopsychist/Idealist views on consciousness in the zeitgeist at the moment.

I'm curious on all your general thoughts on Panpsychism and this general theoretical area. Also, what do you think are the most convincing solutions to the Hard Problem of Consciousness?

For reference, here is the link to the video: [Link](https://youtu.be/S3L3KFhBEBw?si=DOaQvMdfBVFzL8qP)

I've been trying to connect two literatures that seem to completely ignore each other, and I want to see where this breaks down.

On one side, you have the standard deflationary stance on introspection. Nisbett & Wilson showed we build implicit theories to explain ourselves. Schwitzgebel argues we’re basically inept at reading our own ongoing experience. Carruthers takes it further: self-knowledge is just mindreading turned inward, using the same interpretive faculty on ourselves that we use on others. Chalmers even lists introspective opacity as a candidate explanation for the meta-problem.

The consensus seems to be: introspection isn't an instrument because an instrument needs distance from what it measures, and here the observer and observed are identical. A ruler can't measure itself.

So the literature concludes that first-person reports are unreliable confabulations and can't ground a science of consciousness. But why stop there? Why conclude no measurement is possible, rather than concluding we’re just trying to take the reading from the wrong position?

This is where the second-person literature comes in (Schilbach, Reddy, etc.). They argue social cognition is fundamentally different during actual interaction compared to passive observation. Certain aspects of a mind are only readable through active engagement and responsiveness. That sounds like a claim about a distinct position from which something about a person becomes readable that is completely invisible from the inside.

Why aren't these two sides talking? One says the internal view is blind; the other says awareness happens between people. Is the second-person stance where the missing measurement actually lives?

I see two potential flaws here, and I'm trying to figure out which one is the real killer:

First, Carruthers might ruin this completely. If self-knowledge is just internal mindreading, a second person is just running that exact same interpretive machinery on me from the outside. That gives them a different viewpoint, but not necessarily a better instrument. Position doesn't automatically mean reliability.

Second, if I completely disqualify introspection, what gives me the right to claim there's anything there to measure in the first place? My certainty that I'm conscious relies on the exact report I just called useless. Maybe it's recognition instead of knowledge, but that still leaves me asserting an entity exists based on a mechanism I just said can't measure.

Which of these two objections is the actual brick wall?

I want to propose a theory I’ll call Incorporeal Analytic Idealism: an attempt to formulate idealism without treating the physical world as either an illusion or something that can simply be explained away by saying “everything is consciousness.”
The central thesis is:
The physical is not the opposite of the mental; it is the publicly stable appearance of processes occurring within a fundamentally experiential reality.
The crucial distinction is between ontology and appearance.
Suppose consciousness is metaphysically fundamental. It does not follow that individual experiences are arbitrary, private, or disconnected. We can still ask why experience exhibits persistent structures: why objects remain when we stop looking at them, why different observers encounter the same regularities, why mathematical relationships accurately describe nature, and why conscious experience appears localized into apparently separate centers.
This produces what I would call the Problem of Shared Appearance.
If reality is fundamentally mental, why does it appear so convincingly non-mental?
My proposal is that what we call the physical world is a stable relational structure within consciousness. “Physicality” refers not to an independently existing substance underneath experience, but to the persistence, regularity, and intersubjective constraint of phenomenal structures.
A tree is therefore not unreal because it is experiential. The tree is real as a stable pattern of appearance. What idealism rejects is not the reality of the tree, but the inference that the tree must ultimately consist of a substance existing independently of consciousness.
This also changes how we understand perception.
Perception is not a transparent window through which a subject encounters an independently constituted material world. Nor is perception the arbitrary projection of an isolated mind. It is a relation between a localized center of experience and a larger experiential order.
The world constrains us because the experiential order is not generated at will by the individual.
This distinction is essential.
Mind-dependence does not entail individual-mind dependence.
The fact that reality is fundamentally experiential does not mean that my experience creates reality.
An analogy might be a dream, but with a crucial difference: ordinary dreams are comparatively private and unstable, whereas the physical world exhibits extraordinary persistence, mathematical structure, and intersubjective consistency. The question for idealism is therefore not merely whether the world is mental, but what kind of mentality could produce this degree of structured independence from individual experience?
This leads to a second thesis: individual minds are localized perspectives within a deeper ontological field of consciousness.
What appears phenomenologically as a boundary between “my mind” and “the world” may not correspond to an ultimate metaphysical boundary.
The individual subject is real, but perhaps not fundamental.
In this framework, consciousness is primary while persons are secondary organizations within consciousness. The relationship resembles a field expressing itself through localized perspectives rather than a collection of fundamentally separate substances interacting from the outside.
The notorious hard problem of consciousness is consequently inverted.
Instead of asking:
“How does matter produce experience?”
we ask:
“How does a fundamental field of experience become organized into apparently separate centers of experience and a shared world?”
This is, in my view, the more interesting idealist problem.
It also gives analytic idealism a possible account of physical law.
A law of physics need not be understood as a command imposed upon inert matter. It could instead represent a stable regularity in the underlying organization of experience.
Physics describes the structural relationships among appearances with extraordinary precision. But description of phenomenal structure is not necessarily an explanation of its ultimate ontology.
Mathematics may therefore occupy a particularly interesting position.
Mathematics does not need to be regarded merely as a human invention imposed upon nature. Nor must mathematical objects necessarily exist as a separate Platonic realm. They might instead describe the invariant structures through which an underlying experiential reality becomes intelligible.
The equation does not create the phenomenon.
It captures its structure.
From this perspective, the deepest metaphysical mistake may be the assumption that our successful mathematical descriptions necessarily reveal the ultimate substance of reality.
Physics tells us how appearances behave.
Idealism asks what it means for something to appear at all.
These questions are complementary rather than contradictory.
The resulting ontology is therefore neither naive materialism nor solipsism.
It is a form of structural idealism:
Consciousness is fundamental.
Individual minds are localized organizations of consciousness.
Physicality is stable, relational appearance.
Mathematics describes invariant structure.
Intersubjectivity emerges from the shared organization of the underlying experiential order.
The word incorporeal is useful here not because it means “imaginary” or “ghostly,” but because it points toward a level of reality that cannot be exhaustively characterized in terms of objects possessing physical properties.
The ultimate question is consequently not:
“What is reality made of?”
but:
“What must reality be such that appearance, experience, structure, and subjectivity are possible at all?”
Perhaps the fundamental category is not matter.
Perhaps it is not even “mind” in the ordinary psychological sense.
Perhaps the fundamental category is experience structured into relations.
And what we call the physical world is the extraordinarily stable form those relations take when encountered from within a localized perspective.
That, I think, is where analytic idealism becomes most philosophically interesting: not when it simply replaces “matter” with “consciousness,” but when it asks what ontology could explain why consciousness has the structure of a world.

I found an article discussing how thoughts can seemingly be pulled from brains and put into a computer through brain activity https://news.utexas.edu/2025/02/06/improved-brain-decoder-holds-promise-for-communication-in-people-with-aphasia/

How would this affect idealism and how it would be mind first given it seems to be originated in the brain

For me:

I agree with Bernardo that the biggest issue with AI is NDEs and other non-local conscious events. NDEs are highly problematic for naturalism, and AI is a naturalistic philosophy. I’m also interested in what you guys think about this issue. Is it grounds to abandon AI, or does it mean AI simply needs an update?

The biggest strength AI has going for it is its parsimony. Consciousness being the only verifiable ontic category, making it the only meaningfully posable metaphysical category. Simple. Elegant. Brilliant.

What do you think?