“What Am I — Qualia, Brahman, Neurons, or just Nothing?”
“Is the physical world merely how mental processes appear from the outside?”
Chat with SageAnalytical Idealism, defended by Bernardo Kastrup, is a rigorous version of idealism. It asserts that consciousness is the only self-evident ontological primitive, and that the physical world is its external representation.
Kastrup argues that consciousness is the only reality we directly experience. Matter is a theoretical concept we construct to explain experiences. Idealism is more parsimonious because it does not assume the existence of an unexperienced, physical substance.
Individual minds are dissociated alters of a single, universal consciousness, similar to Dissociative Identity Disorder. The boundary of the body is the boundary of our dissociation, and the physical world is the external appearance of this universal mind.
Analytical idealism avoids the combination problem of panpsychism (explaining how tiny consciousnesses combine into a human mind). It starts with a single, unified universal consciousness and explains individual minds through dissociation (de-combination).
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