Alters of the Cosmos

We are the alternate personalities of a cosmos suffering from Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). That’s the theory put forward by Bernardo Kastrup in a recent JCS paper and supported by others in Scientific American. I think there’s no denying the exciting elegance of the basic proposition, but in my view the problems are overwhelming.

DID is now the correct term for what used to be called Multiple Personality Disorder, a condition in which different persons appear to inhabit the same body, with control passing between them and allowing them to exhibit distinct personalities, different knowledge, and varied behaviour. Occasionally it has been claimed that different ‘alters’ can even change certain physical characteristics of the host body, within limits. Sceptical analysis notes that the incidence of DID has been strongly correlated with its portrayal in the media. A popular film about multiple personalities always seems to bring a boom in new diagnoses, and in fact an early ‘outbreak’ corresponded with the popularity of ‘Jekyll and Hyde’. Sceptics have suggested that DID may often, or always, be iatrogenic in part, with the patient confabulating the number and type of alter the therapist seems to expect.

Against that, the SA piece cites findings that when blind alters were in control, normal visual activity in the brain ceased. This is undoubtedly striking, though a caveat should be entered over our limited ability to spot what patterns of brain activity go along with confabulation, hypnosis, self-deception, etc. I think the research cited establishes pretty clearly that DID is ‘real’ (though not that patients correctly understand its nature), but then I believe only the hardest of sceptics ever thought DID patients were merely weird liars.

Does DID have the metaphysical significance Kastrup would give it, though? One fundamental problem, to get it up front, is this; if we, as physical human beings, are generated by DID in the cosmic consciousness, and that DID is literally the same thing as the DID observed in patients, how come it doesn’t generate a new body for each of the patient’s alters? There doesn’t seem to be a clear answer on this. I would say that the most reasonable response would be to deny that cosmic and personal DID are exactly the same phenomena and regard them as merely analogous, albeit perhaps strongly so.

Kastrup’s account does tackle a lot of problems. He approaches his thesis by considering related approaches such as panpsychism or cosmopsychism, and the objections to them, notably the combination or decombination problems, which concern how we get from millions of tiny awarenesses, or from one overarching one, to the array of human and animal ones we actually find in the world. His account seems clear and sensible to me, providing convincing brief analyses of the issues.

In Kastrup’s system we begin with a universal consciousness which consists of a sort of web of connected thoughts and feelings. Later there will be perceptions, but at the outset there’s nothing to perceive; I’m not sure what the thoughts could be about, either – pure maths, perhaps – but they arise from the inherent tendency of the cosmic consciousness to self-excite (just as a normal human mind, left without external stimulus, does not fall silent, but generates thoughts spontaneously). The connections between the thoughts may be associations, logical connections, inspirational, and so on. I’m not clear whether Kastrup envisages all these thoughts and feelings being active at the same time, or whether new ones can be generated and added in. There is a vast amount of metaphysical work to be done on this kind of aspect of the theory – enough for several generations of philosophers – and it may not be fair to expect Kastrup to have done it all, let alone get it all into this single paper.

I think the natural and parsimonious way to go from there would be solipsism. The cosmic consciousness is all there is, and these ideas about other people and external reality are just part of its random musings. The only argument against this simple position is that our experience insistently and pretty consistently tells us about a world of planets, animals, and evolution which not only forces itself on our attention, but on examination provides some rather good partial explanations of our nature and cognitive abilities. But to accept that argument is to surrender to the conventional view, which Kastrup – he identifies as an idealist – is committed to rejecting.

So instead he takes a different view. Somehow (?), islands of the overall web of cosmic consciousness may get detached. They then become dissociated consciousnesses, and can both perceive and be perceive. Since their associative links with the rest of the cosmos have been broken, I don’t quite know why they don’t lapse into solipsistic beings themselves, unable to follow the pattern of their thoughts beyond its own compass.

In fact, and this may be the strangest thing in the theory, our actual bodies, complete with metabolism and all the rest, are the appearance of these metaphysical islands: ‘living organisms are the revealed appearance of alters of universal consciousness’. Quite why the alters of universal consciousness should look like evolved animals, I don’t know. How does sex between these alters give rise to a new dissociative island in the form of a new human being; what on earth happens when someone starves to death? It seems that Kastrup really wants to have much of the conventional world back; a place where autonomous individuals with private thoughts are nevertheless able to share ideas about a world which is not just the product of their imaginations. But it’s forbiddingly difficult to get there from his starting position. For once, weirder ideas might be easier to justify.

These are, of course, radical new ideas; but curiously they seem to me to bear a strong resemblance to the old ones of the Gnostics. They (if my recollection is right) thought that the world started with the perfect mind of God, which then through some inscrutable accident shed fragmentary souls (us) which became bound in the material world, with their own true nature hidden from them. I don’t make the comparison to discredit Kastrup’s ideas; on the contrary if it were me I should be rather encouraged to have these ancient intellectual forebears.

15 thoughts on “Alters of the Cosmos

  1. How does intersubjectivity work on this sort of view? If the apple I see is really just a sort of closed perceptual loop, how do you see the same apple? Or is my hearing you claim you are seeing that apple merely another closed loop—which would indeed collapse to solipsism?

  2. Is it a matter of cosmic order identity that our planet Earth’s human consciousness is dependent on phenomena like the fundamental interactions and cosmic noumenon like observation…
    …that DID would be less dissociative at four and five dimensions in the Universe…

  3. I personally have never understood how idealism doesn’t inevitably collapse into solipsism. What evidence is there for other minds that isn’t also evidence for the outside world?

    I think the main thing the brain scans show is that DID arises from brain pathologies. It’s interesting that scans of the physical substrate of the mind are used as the basis for arguing that there are no physical substrates.

  4. Interesting highlighting of gnosticism, but in a sense all of the main classical philosophical schools, apart from Epicureanism, had the view that the universe is one unified divine mind, and (in Stoic parlance) that creatures are animated by having a portion of this divine spark/the logos, which undergoing philosophical pedagogy helps humans become aware of. For example, Epictetus continually tells his students to remember and become aware that they have this divine spark within them, and to act accordingly, and which also prompts them to study cosmology. Interestingly the phenomenon of higher states of religious experience in Hood’s M scale are when individual purport to receive insight into this creative, animating force, for example one popular account by this non-religious author https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/apr/18/barbara-ehrenreich-atheist-religious-encounter-living-with-a-wild-god

  5. Long ago Isaac Asimov wrote a novel called The Gods Themselves about sex in another dimension. I wonder if Kastrup was familiar with that story. The sentient beings were something like amoebas

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  7. In new age literature there is the metaphor of a sea of spirit, the ripples of which are individual beings – relatively autonomous/differentiated/dissociated from the sea but also deeply connected with it and with each other. It seems analogous to the concept of matter in quantum field theory where matter is modeled as a field with local energetic excitations (particles).

    Anyway, even if the cosmic consciousness is solipsistic simply because there is nothing outside of it, the individual entities within it need not be solipsistic as they can perceive things outside of them. And I would imagine that the cosmic consciousness (if we may call it “consciousness” at all) is very different from the consciousness of individual entities such as us. The individual entities are relatively loosely connected/integrated with each other, unlike within themselves, so the cosmic consciousness then seems like a loosely integrated mess, like a hazy dream.

  8. Why couldn’t consciousness itself even in the universal sense meant here be a dissociation from some more ultimate arena or gestalt?

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  11. I find it somewhat troubling that a respected journal like Scientific American would publish Bernardo Kastrup’s paper on “dissociative identity disorder” when clearly, his philosophy of Idealism is nothing more that a new age spin on an ancient religious tradition complete with Daemones and guiding spirits. The proper format for this type of work belongs in Mad Magazine, not a science journal.

  12. I know I’m responding to an older post, but I wanted to address Lee Roetcisoender’s comment above about Bernard Kastrup’s idealism.

    First of all, SA publishes all kinds of speculative science, much of which should be considered metaphysics. Most of the popular books about theoretical physics that have come out over the last few decades are largely speculative and metaphysical, and there’s nothing wrong with that so long they’re honest about it. Even the book where Stephen Hawking triumphantly (and infamously) declared philosophy to be dead was, ironically, largely a book of speculative philosophy and metaphysics. It could even be argued that String Theory, with few prospects for falsifiability in the near future, is basically just mathematical metaphysics.

    Bernardo has never portrayed his form of idealism as anything other than speculative metaphysics, and it should be said that there’s no more scientific evidence for the metaphysical worldview of materialism than there is for the metaphysical worldview of idealism. In fact, idealism fits the data just as well as materialism, albeit with at least one less unprovable assumption: that an objective, non-conscious world exists outside of conscious experience. So in that sense, idealism isn’t even slightly less scientific than materialism.

    It should also be added that idealism has a rational place for consciousness, something that materialism has a hard time claiming given the fundamentally un-quantifiable nature of experience. And that which cannot be quantified (i.e. exhaustively described by math) cannot be reduced to physics, even in principle. Idealism, on the other hand, takes consciousness as fundamental, just as materialism takes several things as fundamental, such as the laws of physics, fields, forces, etc. So, unlike materialism, idealism doesn’t have a “Hard Problem of Consciousness”.

    Unfortunately, many scientists who say disparaging things about philosophy take materialism to be the default scientific view without realizing that they are asserting a philosophical, metaphysical worldview that is not (or, at least should not be) part of science. This is really unfortunate, to say the least.

    Bottom line is that a scientist working under the assumption of idealism is not at the slightest disadvantage to one working under the assumption of materialism. The difference is that the idealist will likely realize that she has a metaphysical worldview, while the materialist will not.

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