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The Dissociated Universe: Bernardo Kastrup’s Analytic Idealism and the Mind That Contains the World

This essay completes a sequence. The first article considered Iain McGilchrist’s panpsychist proposal that matter is a phase of consciousness, the way ice and vapor are phases of water. Its companion examined Daniel Dennett’s illusionism, which argued that consciousness as we ordinarily conceive it is a user illusion the brain stages for itself. The third position, the one we take up here, inverts the relation again. Bernardo Kastrup’s analytic idealism holds that matter is an appearance within mind rather than the substance from which mind emerges or the surface on which it plays. The three views together cover most of the contemporary terrain on the consciousness question, and once we have all three on the table we can ask what each gets right, what each fails to deliver, and what the overall topography tells us about the limits of philosophical argument when applied to the deepest question we know how to ask.

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The Application of Imagination: Where Thought Becomes Matter

Imagination without application remains a private theater, brilliant perhaps, but ultimately sterile. The history of human achievement suggests that genius resides not in the capacity to imagine alone, but in the peculiar ability to transform mental constructs into material reality. This transformation requires something more demanding than pure creativity: it requires the discipline to translate vision into form, the patience to iterate through failure, and the courage to impose one’s internal architecture onto an indifferent world.

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Raising Cynical Children in an Idealized World

Ideally, we want to raise caring and tender children who rightfully grow into wise and smart adults.  Unfortunately, the way into adulthood is, and always had been, fraught with predators and disappointment and liars.  We prefer to pretend these evil elements are not among us — and within us — and the ability for adults to repress inherent danger in the spinning world is what particularly places children in a purposeful peril.

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A Warning about Google Drive Local File Permissions and Web Publishing

Google Drive is one of the loves of my online life.  I store all my local files in my Google Drive Folder and that Google Drive Folder gets synced between here and the — out there — remote Google Drive.  I do all my writing and publishing via Google Drive.  I can find pretty much anything I want just by typing in a few keywords in Google Drive and I’m instantly presented with what I need.  Life is good that way!

However, I just discovered a permissions problem when it comes to using a local instance of Google Drive and a remote, third-party, website publisher, and I’ll share with you now what I learned, and how I fixed it.

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Writing for Yourself: You are the Center of the Panopticon

Too many writers write for other people.  They write for lovers or lost hope or for an unknown, future, audience they hope will like them — when they should really only be writing for themselves.  Every writer is the core of their confounding world.  We are the center of our Panopticonic lives.

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Manhattan Skyline Art Mocks World Trade Center Jumpers

We know memory is convenient.  We prefer to remember the happy and the good while repressing the horrible and the cruel. We also know there is one guarantee in this life you can always count on:  There Will Always Be Bad Art.  The current “Jumpers Sculptures” pocking the heart of New York City is but the latest example of cruelty in convenience masquerading as inspired artwork.

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Is Internet Access a Human Right?

We live in a New Age.  Technology not only runs our lives, it rules our being and ruins our sense of comprehensive societal cohesion.  Has access to the internet become a fundamental human right?  If so, should we have to pay for that right of access?

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Facebook is Running Out of Space

I am fascinated by how we know, learn and propagate information into the icy aging of our future.  This week I had a flood of email in my Facebook Inbox — from only my friends in Germany — suggesting the social networking service was running out of server space. 

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Fifty Articles Written in Seven Days

From January 10-16, 2009, the incredible Gordon Davidescu and I published 50 new articles — you’re reading number fifty right now —  in the Boles Blogs Network!  That is an incredible and unbelievable new publication record that didn’t happen by chance or circumstance.  Gordon wrote 13 network blog articles and one Go Inside Magazine article and I wrote the rest.

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Urbanization in the Year 2100

We know half the world is urban — but what will our world look like in the year 2100?  We will be compressed even further up and away from each other in skyscrapers?  Or will we begin to winnow out and find room to stretch the horizon?

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