Introducing Absolute Idealism 2.0

Imagine a computer so powerful that it computes not just weather forecasts or language models, but the entire universe – galaxies, atoms, brains, and all. Now imagine that this computer is not a machine, but consciousness itself. This is not science fiction. It is a serious metaphysical hypothesis, with quite a number of philosophical and scientific arguments going for it.

Of course, the idea that reality is consciousness ‘all the way down’ is by no means new. It has an ancient and honerable pedigree in Western and Eastern philosophical and spiritual traditions and is since the 18th century known generally as “idealism”. When this fundamental consciousness is conceived as a single, all-encompassing entity, the doctrine is known specifically as “absolute idealism”. The “absolute”, that which underlies or encompasses everything else, is equated with a single self-aware mind.

In particlar, absolute idealism holds that everything exists because it is perceived or thought by an "absolute consciousness", which (consequently) in turn exists because it perceives or thinks itself. Thus it is through self-consciousness that the absolute brings itself into existence – a point that the German idealist Fichte in particular developed as the "self-positing" (Selbstsetzung) of the "absolute I" (though the basic idea can already be found in the Neo-Platonist Plotinus; see Gerson, 2011: 34). Absolute idealism is therefore standardly associated with the tradition that runs from Fichte to Schelling and Hegel, and from them to British idealists such as Green, Bradley, McTaggart, and the American idealist Royce.

So absolute idealism as such is not new. What is relatively new, however, is the link with modern computational science. In the following I will introduce a theory that I like to call – for lack of a better term – absolute idealism 2.0. As the term suggests, it concerns a digital elaboration of absolute idealism, in which the absolute consciousness – which underlies reality-as-a-whole – is specifically understood as a "cosmic computer", i.e., as the underlying "hardware" on which the "software" of our universe runs. Absolute idealism 2.0 thus combines the old absolute idealism – from Plotinus to Hegel and Royce – with the latest developments in digital physics, where the computational aspects of physical nature are investigated. In particular, I will argue that the popular hypothesis of the universe-as-a-computer, which emerged from digital physics, can only be understood consistently on the basis of absolute idealism.

For this purpose, the American idealist Josiah Royce (1855-1916) will prove particularly important. In a way, absolute idealism 2.0 begins in his highly original mathematical conception of the absolute consciousness. Under the influence of the mathematician Dedekind, Royce developed a fascinating theory about the mathematical recursion structure of "absolute self-consciousness" (see Steinhart, 2012). Although Royce himself could not yet explain this structure in computational terms (he died in 1916, twenty years before Turing invented the universal computer), we will see that a bridge can certainly be drawn between Royce's mathematical model of the absolute and modern computer science.

Return of Idealism?

But let us first ask whether absolute idealism is still viable at all. After all, the ambitious systems of German and British idealism are among the great ‘losers’ of modern philosophy. Idealism was traded for physicalist materialism, according to which reality does not primarily consist of mind or consciousness, but of material particles such as molecules, atoms, and quarks; consciousness would be merely a secondary product, emerging from matter once it has reached a critical degree of organization through Darwinian evolution, as in the human brain.

Yet the victory of materialism has never been complete. As early as the first decades of the 20th century, cracks began to appear in the materialist worldview – ironically, due to the development of physics itself. The newly developed quantum mechanics seemed to assign a constitutive role to observation (and thus to consciousness) in the "collapse of the wave function", which has given rise to various (quasi-)idealist interpretations of quantum mechanics (e.g., Bohr, Von Neumann, Wheeler, Wigner, and Stapp).

In philosophy as well – particularly in analytic philosophy – a notable return to idealist positions can be discerned (e.g., McDowell and Brandom). In the philosophy of mind, we see that materialism is increasingly being questioned and a reorientation is taking place regarding the status of consciousness in the material world. As in the surprisingly popular panpsychism, in which consciousness is seen as an inherent property of all matter, including seemingly lifeless objects.

A crucial step in this development was the elaboration of the "hard problem of consciousness", particularly by Chalmers (1996), who through a range of logical arguments showed that materialist explanations of consciousness are extremely problematic and run into aporias. Of course, there are significant correlations between brain processes and consciousness processes, but – as Chalmers and others have shown – this by no means implies that consciousness can be completely explained in terms of the brain.

Take the experience of seeing the color red. Science can tell you which wavelengths of light hit your retina, which neurons fire in your visual cortex, and which brain regions become active. But none of that explains what it is like to see red – the vivid, subjective quality that philosophers call "qualia". This gap between objective description and subjective experience is the Hard Problem. And it remains as hard as ever.

But if consciousness is not an effect of matter, what ontological status does it have? Should we then, perhaps, reverse the dependency relationship and say, with idealism: matter is an effect of / appearance in consciousness (see Hoffman, 2019)?

The Universe-as-a-Computer Hypothesis

A second physical development that – in addition to quantum mechanics – points in the direction of idealism is the rise of digital physics. In particular, the hypothesis of the universe-as-a-computer is difficult to reconcile with materialism, as we shall see. Originally developed by physicists and computer scientists such as Fredkin, Wolfram, Toffoli, Lloyd, and (albeit with reservations) Deutsch, this hypothesis has also inspired various philosophers (such as Bostrom and Chalmers) and has, of course, captured the imagination of various science fiction books and films. The Matrix (1999), in which humanity is held captive in a virtual illusory world created by malevolent robots, in particular brought public awareness to the theoretical possibility that our world is a computer simulation.

That this idea stimulates science fiction fantasy is not surprising, but its scientific appeal is also understandable. The central point is the almost complete computability of physical processes. As Deutsch (2008: 2) notes, the functional dependency relations in physical nature are "always invariably" describable as computable functions, i.e., input-output functions that can be executed by algorithms. According to Wolfram (1984: 188, 203), the laws of nature are simply algorithms, which take a state of a physical system S at time t₁ as input to produce a state of S at time t₂ as output. Thus, the total development of the universe, from the Big Bang to the present, can be understood as an all-encompassing 'supercomputation' in which the laws of nature function as algorithms (see Toffoli 1982: 165). The algorithms of individual physical processes, from the formation of galaxies to the electrochemical processes in our brains, can then be understood as subroutines in this cosmic supercomputation.

It is a dizzying thought: every rock, every raindrop, every thought you are having right now is a computational process. The laws of physics are code. The universe is running a program. Your brain is a subroutine in that program. Who wrote it? That is the question.

However, if the universe is one vast computation, then the universe might as well be described as a computer, on which the laws of nature run as software. Quantum theorist Deutsch, although critical of the universe-as-a-computer hypothesis, nevertheless points to its explanatory power: "At first sight this seems a promising strategy for explaining the connections between physics and computation: perhaps the laws of physics are formulable in terms of computer programs because they actually are computer programs" (Deutsch, 2011: 190). Various other arguments then support this conclusion.

One consideration extrapolates from the exponential growth of computing power (Moore's law) and the consequently growing possibility of generating computer simulations: at some point, computer simulations will become so realistic that they are hardly distinguishable from 'real'. In that case, physical reality might as well be understood as a virtual reality – in accordance with the principle: if it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, walks like a duck, then it probably is a duck (see Steinhart, 2014: 78).

According to some scientists, the universe-as-a-computer hypothesis is furthermore empirically confirmed by certain physical properties of the universe that point to data compression, which is a well-known technique among computer scientists and programmers to optimize the functioning of computers (see Vopson, 2023). We might then ask rhetorically: why would the universe use data compression if it were not itself a computer?

The Problem of Cosmic Hardware

However, once we assume the hypothesis of the universe-as-a-computer, we also assume the distinction between software and hardware, i.e., on the one hand the algorithms of the laws of nature and on the other hand the underlying 'machine' on which these algorithms run. But what then is that cosmic hardware? It is precisely this problem that calls for an absolute-idealist solution.

The cosmic hardware cannot itself be understood in physical terms. Physical reality is precisely that reality which is described by the laws of nature; so if the laws of nature together constitute the software, then the hardware must logically precede it. The hardware constitutes a more fundamental reality, which underlies the 'virtual reality' of the physical: "According to digital physics, our universe is a software process running on a computer. Our universe is virtual. Of course virtuality does not imply that our universe is unreal. It just implies that it is not ultimately real. Just as a wave supervenes on water, so all physical things in our universe supervene on a computer" (Steinhart, 2014: 78). Ultimately real is only the underlying computer, which must then be non-physical or – as Steinhart (ibid.) puts it – "sub-physical".

Imagine playing a video game and asking yourself about the 'real world' behind the pixels. You open the game's code, but that code runs on an operating system. You open the operating system, but that runs on transistors. Eventually you hit the physical hardware – silicon chips. But if the universe itself is a simulation, what are the silicon chips made of? Looking for the 'real world' behind the video game, you never get out of the simulation...

Suppose, however, we nevertheless assume that the cosmic hardware is also physical. Then we clearly run into a vicious regress. This underlying physical reality must itself – within the paradigm of digital physics – also be understood as a computational process, which presupposes even more fundamental hardware, and so on. For quantum theorist Deutsch, it is precisely this threatening regress that makes him doubt the universe-as-a-computer hypothesis: "There would then be an underlying physics responsible for that computer, and [...] that underlying physics could not itself also be a program running on a computer, unless you are willing to accept an infinite regress. Either way, the [universe-as-a-computer] hypothesis explains nothing" (Deutsch in Brown, 2000: 335).

Note, however, that Deutsch here tacitly assumes that the cosmic hardware must itself be physical; but it is precisely that assumption that leads to the regress. There is thus nothing wrong with the universe-as-a-computer hypothesis as such – as long as we assume the hardware to be non-physical.

Royce's Absolute Idealism

But then what is this 'sub-physical' substrate that constitutes the cosmic hardware? Given the fact that consciousness cannot be reduced to matter (as the "hard problem of consciousness" shows), we have only consciousness available as a possible candidate for the cosmic hardware.

Of course, the consciousness through which our universe is computed cannot be individual human consciousness, since our consciousness is functionally dependent on the brain (and thus on the physical universe in which those brains evolved). It must therefore be an "absolute consciousness" that ontologically precedes the physical universe, and hence space and time. The question now is: how can we understand the absolute consciousness from the tradition of absolute idealism as a 'cosmic computer'?

Here, the American idealist Josiah Royce is particularly important. Royce is unique among absolute idealists because he traded the Hegelian dialectic – hitherto dominant in German and British idealism – for modern mathematics as the central logic of absolute-idealist thought.

Royce wanted to elevate absolute idealism to a higher level and align it with modern scientific developments. He was bothered by the disdain with which Hegel and Bradley in particular spoke of mathematics. According to Royce, this had resulted in an unfortunate and completely unnecessary unscientific character in absolute idealism: "The contempt of the older idealism for the precise analysis of mathematical forms – its characteristic unwillingness to attend to the dry details of the seemingly lifeless realm of mathematically pure abstractions – is largely responsible for the imperfect and relatively vague character of the idealistic conception of the Absolute" (Royce, 1959: I, 526).

To remedy this weakness of absolute idealism, Royce – drawing mainly on the mathematician Dedekind – developed a fascinating theory about the mathematical structure of absolute self-consciousness, which since Fichte had formed the ontological foundation of most absolute-idealist systems. Royce also starts from Fichte's theory of the ontological 'self-production' of the "absolute I", which exists only because it perceives or knows itself. Thus, absolute self-consciousness brings itself into existence and thereby forms the ontological ground of reality-as-a-whole (see Sas, 2015).

Thus Royce: "If all that exists exists only as known, then the existence of knowledge must also be a known existence, which can ultimately be known only by the ultimate knower, who as such [...] must be defined in terms of absolute self-knowledge" (Royce, 1959: I, 400). This is the core of Royce's absolute idealism: reality exists only as known by an "absolute Knower" who in turn exists through "absolute self-knowledge": "What exists, is present to the insight of a single self-conscious Knower, whose life includes all that he knows [...] and whose self-consciousness is complete" (ibid.).

Royce and Dedekind's Gedankenwelt Argument

How does Royce arrive at his insight into the mathematical structure of absolute self-consciousness? As mentioned, he draws on the mathematician Dedekind, known for his definition of real numbers ("Dedekind cuts"). For Royce, however, it is especially the notorious Gedankenwelt argument that is important, with which Dedekind (1888: §66) supports his mathematical views on infinity with a strikingly mentalist model.

The argument starts from the "totality of all possible thinkable objects". Dedekind points to "my own I" as a primitive object of his thought and thus as an indubitable element of that totality. He then points to the reflexive or recursive structure of thought, whereby every thought G – first about one's own I – can itself also be the object of a subsequent thought G', and G' the object of a third thought G'', and so on. This gives us an infinite set of possible thought objects {I, G, G', G'', ...}. Since the first element, I, is not itself a thought, this set has a specific form of infinity that mathematicians still call "Dedekind-infinite", where there is a one-to-one mapping between this set and a proper subset of it, such as {G, G', G'', ...}.

Unlike his definition of real numbers and his specific conception of infinity, Dedekind's Gedankenwelt argument found little resonance among mathematicians: the concepts used – such as the I and the reflexive structure of thought – were considered far too vague for exact mathematics. Dedekind's assumption that human thought is capable of infinite self-reflection (i.e., the sequence I, G, G', G'', ...) also sounded implausible to many of his contemporaries. According to Bertrand Russell, for example, all these reflection levels have no "actual empirical existence" in the human mind: "Beyond the third or fourth level they become mythical" (Russell, 1970: 139).

The Mathematical Structure of Absolute Self-Consciousness in Royce

That Royce, as an absolute-idealist thinker, was fascinated by the Gedankenwelt argument is understandable: in effect, Dedekind provides an abstract model of what Royce calls "complete self-consciousness". The set {I, G, G', G'', ...} models a fully crystallized self-consciousness, in the sense that the I not only has consciousness of itself (G), but also a consciousness of that consciousness (G'), and a consciousness of its consciousness of that consciousness (G''), ad infinitum.

In plain language: you are conscious of yourself. But you are also conscious of being conscious of yourself. And you can be conscious of that too – and so on, without end. Now, this infinite regress may be humanly impossible, but it is not a problem for absolute consciousness; it is the very engine of its existence. The absolute is not a mind that runs out of reflective levels. It is the whole infinite stack. For Royce, this infinity is precisely what makes this self-consciousness "complete": "complete self-consciousness means consciousness of an infinite series as one whole" (Royce, 1959: II, 18).

According to Royce, absolute self-consciousness cannot be understood otherwise than as infinite in this sense. In fact, this absolute-idealist context is a much more natural 'habitat' for Dedekind's Gedankenwelt proof than his psychologism, with its focus on the human thought process. Infinite self-reflection may be problematic for human consciousness, as Russell argues, but of absolute self-consciousness – which, as self-producing, underlies all of reality – one might surely expect infinity?

What particularly interested Royce (1959: I, 494-501) here was the striking parallel between, on the one hand, the recursive structure of self-reflection and, on the other hand, the recursive successor function S(n)=n+1 which, starting with n=0, generates all natural numbers. Both are recursive in the sense that they take their output as input and thereby generate an infinite series. Thus, the series S(0)=1, S(1)=2, S(2)=3, ... is structurally equivalent to the series generated by self-reflection: G, G', G'', etc. If we adopt a structuralist view of mathematics (such that mathematical objects are identical if they are structurally equivalent), then we can say that the series G, G', G'', ... is identical to the set of natural numbers ℕ.

That is precisely what Royce says, concluding that ℕ exists as the abstract structure of the complete self-reflection of absolute self-consciousness: "The Intellect has studied itself, and as the abstract and purely formal expression of the ordered aspect of its ideally complete Self [...] the Intellect finds precisely the system of natural numbers [...]. Their formal order of first, second, and – generally speaking – of next, is an image of the life of sustained or, ultimately, complete reflection. Hence this order is the natural expression of any recursive thought process, and above all of the essential nature of the Self as totality" (Idem: I, 538).

Royce thus interprets the Gedankenwelt argument in a way that diametrically opposes Dedekind's psychologistic orientation, in which natural numbers – and, by extension, all mathematical objects and relations – are conceived as "free creations of the human mind" (Dedekind, 1888: vii-viii). For Royce, natural numbers are rather 'creations of the absolute mind', namely through the recursive structure of its complete self-consciousness. The timelessness of absolute self-consciousness (which precedes the physical universe) then guarantees the timeless 'Platonist' existence of natural numbers.

Can Absolute Self-Consciousness Be a Computer?

How can we use Royce's mathematical vision of absolute self-consciousness to formulate an idealist solution to the cosmic hardware problem in digital physics? Can we understand absolute self-consciousness in Royce's vision as a computer? With Royce's explanation of natural numbers, we have in any case taken an important step, since all computational processes can be understood in terms of computations on natural numbers (or, as digital computers do, on their binary representations).

Royce himself describes the "absolute thinking" – as it follows from the "complete self-consciousness" of the absolute – as "wandering from number to number" (Royce, 1959: I, 575), which we can interpret as a primitive conception of computation. In his explanation, however, Royce remains completely bound to the outdated work of Dedekind (see Steinhart, 2012). Royce still lacks insight into the difference between computable and non-computable functions, as well as the modern concept of an algorithm. This is not surprising given his death in 1916, while modern computer science only emerged in the 1930s with Gödel, Turing, and Church.

By thinking creatively on the basis of Royce, however, we can get quite far. To begin with, we take over Royce's idea that natural numbers are successive levels of reflection in the recursive development of absolute self-consciousness. What we can then show, in a relatively simple manner, is that the absolute is thereby also conscious of all functions on natural numbers f:ℕ→ℕ (or that it at least performs those functions). This follows in a sense from Royce's principle that the absolute has "complete self-consciousness", that it knows everything about itself that there is to know.

From this follows a specific principle that we might call inter-level self-awareness. That is: a constant self-awareness that the absolute has at all reflection levels – thereby it knows, for example, that at reflection level 4 it is the same entity as at level 9. We can then interpret this specific instance of inter-level self-awareness as a functional mapping from 4 to 9, i.e., f(4)=9. Generally speaking: the awareness of one's own identity at different reflection levels n and m amounts to a mapping from n to m, i.e., a function f such that f(n)=m. And since this, as indicated, holds for all reflection levels n and m in ℕ, it follows that the absolute performs all functions f:ℕ→ℕ.

Now, the set of all f:ℕ→ℕ includes, as a subset, all computable functions. By performing all f:ℕ→ℕ, then, the absolute thus also performs all possible computations. In that sense, absolute self-consciousness is a computer. But what does it compute? Given the essence of absolute self-consciousness, only one answer is possible: it computes itself. This is the ultimate bootstrap: the absolute is the hardware, the software, the programmer, and the program.
 

A Speculative Step: Algorithmic Information Theory and Computational Self-Recognition

But when we say that the absolute – through its consciousness of all computable functions – is also conscious of all computations, we are cheating a little bit. The concept of "computable function" does not simply coincide with the concept of "computation" in the sense of an algorithm, i.e., an effective procedure that mechanically relates an input to an output.

A computable function is merely a mapping from ℕ to ℕ for which an algorithm is in principle available. But with a computable function, the associated algorithm is not automatically included; it has to be additionally specified (and sometimes there are multiple algorithms possible for the same computable function). So how does the absolute know which functions are computable and which are not? In other words: how does the absolute obtain the algorithms that distinguish computable functions from non-computable ones?

A possible solution to this problem is suggested by the algorithmic information theory of Kolmogorov. According to this theory, a number sequence S is ordered if there is an algorithm that produces this sequence as output, where this algorithm is shorter than the sequence itself. This is in principle a definition of what order is. The shorter the algorithm compared to the number sequence, the more ordered the sequence. If for a given sequence S no algorithm shorter than S can be given, then S is completely random. In that case, S is not algorithmically "compressible", i.e., S contains no pattern that would allow the formulation of an algorithm, shorter than S itself, for generating S. According to algorithmic information theory, the information content of an algorithm lies in the order of the number sequence generated by that algorithm (see Li & Vitányi, 1997).

How can we use this to solve the above problem? We must bear in mind that every f:ℕ→ℕ forms an infinite sequence of numbers, namely f(0), f(1), f(2), etc. (To be precise, each f generates the decimal expansion of a real number, such that the set of all f:ℕ→ℕ equals the set of all real numbers; see Burrill, 1967.) So by being conscious of all f:ℕ→ℕ, the absolute is also conscious of all number sequences (and thus of all real numbers).

Now it follows from algorithmic information theory that some of these sequences are ordered because they can be generated by algorithms; these are of course precisely the algorithms that execute the computable functions. The vast majority of number sequences, however, are random; they constitute the output of non-computable functions, which are vastly in the majority. The difference between computable and non-computable functions thus amounts to the difference between ordered and unordered number sequences.

The next step is more speculative, but not unreasonable: we can say that the absolute recognizes itself in the patterns of ordered number sequences, as opposed to unordered sequences where any self-recognition is absent. This is how the absolute can distinguish between computable and non-computable functions. The crux is that some ordered number sequences contain the same information content as algorithms that simulate self-conscious and intelligent life – for example, the algorithms that describe the functioning of the human brain. In short: some ordered number sequences 'embody' the algorithmic structure of the human brain. It is plausible that the absolute recognizes itself in them, i.e., that it 'sees' its own essence of infinite self-consciousness and intelligence reflected in the algorithmic structure of the human brain, as well as in other algorithms that simulate self-conscious intelligent life.

We can derive this as a principle of self-recognition or self-reflection from Royce's more general principle that the absolute has "complete self-consciousness", such that it knows everything about itself that there is to know. One of the things it can know is that some algorithms reflect its own essence. By recognizing itself in them, absolute self-consciousness becomes even "more complete".

So what does it all mean?

In short, in the mathematical unfolding of its infinite self-consciousness, the absolute discovers specific computational structures in which it sees its own essence reflected. We can then understand the physical universe as that all-encompassing supercomputation in which the absolute optimally recognizes itself. The algorithmic structures of our brains are, after all, subroutines in the supercomputation of the universe. From the perspective of absolute idealism 2.0, then, it is no accident that the laws of nature of our universe – according to the anthropic principle in cosmology – are eminently suited for the evolution of life. For in that sense, the universe is also eminently suited as a computational mirror of absolute self-consciousness.

We are used to thinking of consciousness as something that happens inside our heads. But if absolute idealism 2.0 is correct, the opposite is true: our heads – and our brains, and our universe – happen inside an infinite, mathematically structured (self-)consciousness. The algorithms that describe our thoughts are not causes of consciousness. They are mirrors. And in those mirrors, the absolute sees itself. We are not the spectators of this cosmic self-reflection. We are its most intricate, most self-aware, most breathtaking reflection.

Literature

• Brown, Julian (2000), Minds, Machines, and the Multiverse: The Quest for the Quantum Computer. New York: Simon & Schuster.
• Burrill, Claude (1967), Foundations of Real Numbers. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company.
• Chalmers, David (1996), The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory. New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Dedekind, Richard (1888), Was sind und was sollen die Zahlen? Braunschweig: Friedr. Vieweg & Sohn.
• Deutsch, David (2008), What is Computation? (How) Does Nature Compute?, lecture for the Centre for Quantum Computation, Clarendon Laboratory, University of Oxford. Retrieved from https://homes.luddy.indiana.edu/dgerman/hector/deutsch.pdf 
• Deutsch, David (2011), The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform the World. London: Penguin Books.
• Gerson, Lloyd P. (2011), Goodness, Unity, and Creation in the Platonic Tradition, p. 29-42 in: Wippel, John F. (ed.), The Ultimate Why Question: Why Is There Anything at All Rather than Nothing Whatsoever? Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press.
• Hoffman, Donald (2019), The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
• Li, Ming & Vitányi, Paul (1997), An Introduction to Kolmogorov Complexity and Its Applications. New York: Springer.
• Royce, Josiah (1959 [1899-1901]), The World and the Individual vols. I & II. New York: Dover Publications.
• Russell, Bertrand (1970), Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy. London: George Allen and Unwin.
• Sas, Peter (2015, May 7), Self-Consciousness and Self-Grounding: Fichte and the Philosophy of Mind. Retrieved from https://critique-of-pure-interest.blogspot.com/2015/05/self-consciousness-and-possibility-of.html
• Steinhart, Eric (2012), Royce's Model of the Absolute, in: Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, 48 (3), pp. 356-384.
• Steinhart, Eric (2014), Your Digital Selves: Computational Theories of Life after Death. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
• Toffoli, Tommaso (1982), Physics and Computation, in: International Journal of Theoretical Physics #21, pp. 165-175.
• Vopson, Melvin (2023), Reality Reloaded: The Scientific Case for a Simulated Universe. Hampshire: IPI Publishing.
• Wolfram, Stephen (1984), Computer Software in Science and Mathematics, in: Scientific American, #251, September, pp. 188-203.

 

Non-Duality and the Problems of Western Idealism – Part 2: Berkeley and Kant

In my previous post I discussed Eastern non-dual spirituality and how it focuses on the Enlightenment experience of non-dual consciousness as the way to Liberation. I explained in particular how the key to non-dual consciousness lies in recognizing that one’s individual person is part of the object side of experience (together with the ‘outside’ world) and that therefore the individual person cannot be the true subject of experience – this true subject being rather non-individual consciousness free from the subject-object duality of individual and outside world. The immediate intuition of this non-dual, non-individual consciousness is what the Enlightenment experience in Eastern spirituality is all about. In this post I will turn to the topic of Western Idealism. Despite all the similarities with Eastern spirituality concerning the fundamental status of consciousness, the Enlightenment experience of the non-individual nature of non-dual consciousness is conspicuously lacking in Idealist philosophers from the West. The theoretical lesson to be learned from the Enlightenment experience is therefore also lacking in Western forms of Idealism. Although Western Idealists acknowledge the fundamental status of consciousness, they keep falling back – mostly as a matter of habit – into the familiar model of individual consciousness with its subject-object duality of individual and outside world. Hence, the question of the “external reality” outside of consciousness kept reasserting itself for Western Idealist thinkers, simply because of their unfamiliarity with anything like the Eastern Enlightenment experience of non-individual consciousness. In this post I will show how this problem emerged for the first Idealist thinkers in the West, namely Berkeley and especially Kant, who exerted the most influence on later Idealism. In a later post I will do the same for Kant’s successor in German Idealism, Fichte.  

The turn to subjective consciousness in early modern philosophy
To understand why Western Idealism never really broke free from the paradigm of individual, subjective consciousness, we have to take into account the history of Idealism in Western philosophy. We must see how it emerged from the epistemological turn to subjective consciousness in the 17th century. With this “New Way of Ideas” (as John Locke called it), philosophers started to focus on individual consciousness as the epistemological foundation of all knowledge, including knowledge about the “external world” outside the individual. This is, however, quite a complex story which we cannot fully narrate here; that would take us too far afield (for the full story, see here and here). In the following, therefore, I will give a short summary of the epistemological turn to subjective consciousness in early modern philosophy and how this gave rise to Idealism in Berkeley and Kant.

The turn to subjective consciousness – taking place with thinkers such as Descartes, Locke, Berkeley and Hume – was occasioned by two main cultural forces: (1) the generally felt desire for certain knowledge and the Cartesian solution of the self-evidence of subjective self-consciousness (“cogito ergo sum”), and (2) the rise of atomism in physical science and the subsequent realization that sensible qualities such as color, sound and smell cannot be objective properties of ‘external’ physical objects but must be merely subjective phenomena in individual consciousness.

These two developments conspired to lock the individual knower up inside the confines of his subjective consciousness, cutting him off from the outside world. Descartes’s cogito argument seemed to show that certainty can only be found within consciousness, whereas the other development – the scientific insight that sensible qualities are not objective properties – led to the idea that we never experience anything outside of our own consciousness anyway. The general picture that thus arose was of the knowing subject as ‘imprisoned’ inside his “circle of consciousness”, with physical objects impinging on it from the outside, causing subjective perceptions within the circle. As the Cartesian philosopher Antoine Arnauld summarized the situation: “We have no knowledge of what is outside us except by mediation of the ideas within us.” (Arnauld 1964 [1662]: 31)

The Way of Ideas and the problem of skepticism
Although the epistemological turn to subjective consciousness in 17th century philosophy was motivated by the desire for certain and scientific knowledge, the irony of the situation was that it produced a radical skepticism that seemed to undermine science (a skepticism that became rampant with Hume’s attack on causality). For if certainty pertains only to what is inside consciousness, how then can we know what is outside, the external reality? If all we know with certainty are the contents of consciousness, how then can we know whether these contents correspond to external objects? After all, as the problem was frequently put, we cannot step outside our consciousness in order to inspect its correspondence, or lack thereof, with the outside world. Thus, the very medium that should give us cognitive access to external reality – namely, sensory experience – became a “veil-of-perception” hiding reality. As Barry Stroud put the problem in his classic work on skepticism, summarizing the upshot of the New Way of Ideas: “We are restricted to the passing show on the veil of perception, with no possibility of extending our knowledge to the world beyond. We are confined to appearances we can never know to match or deviate from the imperceptible reality that is forever denied to us.” (Stroud 1984: 33-4)

Berkeley and Kant: Idealism as solution to skepticism
It was in response to this skeptical threat that modern Idealism emerged in Berkeley and Kant. As both of them pointed out, the skepticism invited by the epistemological turn to subjective consciousness was premised on the assumption of a reality external to consciousness; simply strike that assumption, they argued, and the threat of skepticism vanishes. If reality is ‘just’ a product of the mind, then surely its knowability can pose no problem? Berkeley and Kant, then, attempted to solve the problem of skepticism by cutting the Gordian knot: there is no “external world” outside of consciousness, the only world to be known is the phenomenal world appearing in consciousness.

Thus Berkeley saw himself as restoring common sense when he expounded this Idealist principle that “to be is to be perceived” (“esse is percipi”). In his view, the Way of Ideas had violated common sense by seeing the object of sense experience as something radically different from the sensible qualities appearing in experience: “Upon the common principles of philosophers, we are not assured of the existence of things from their being perceived. And we are taught to distinguish their real nature from that which falls under our sense. Hence arises Scepticism and Paradoxes.” (Berkeley 1969 [1713]: 3) His principle that “to be is to be perceived” allowed him to say that the object of sense experience simply is the bundle of sensible qualities experienced, and nothing beyond that. Thus he could restore the common-sense belief that when we eat a cherry, and see its redness, taste its sweetness, etc., we are perceiving the cherry itself, not just its appearance as distinct from the real thing: “I see this cherry, I feel it, I taste it […]: it is therefore real. Take away the sensations of softness, moisture, redness, tartness, and you take away the cherry.” (Berkeley 1969 [1713]: 117)

In a similar manner Kant dealt with Hume’s skeptical attack on causality. Hume had undermined the notion of causality – which is so crucial for physical science – by pointing out that we only experience the sense impressions caused by external objects, not those objects themselves. Thus, we only observe the regular connections between the sense impressions, but this gives us no certainty about the nature or even the existence of causal relations between the external objects. As Hume said: “Thus not only our reason fails us in the discovery of the ultimate connection of causes and effects, but even after experience has informed us of their constant conjunction, ‘tis impossible for us to satisfy ourselves by our reason, why we should extend that experience beyond those particular instances, which have fallen under our observation.” (Hume 2003 [1739-40]: 66)

Kant was deeply disturbed by Hume’s attack on causality. His respect for the physical science developed by Copernicus, Galileo and Newton was so great that he simply could not stomach Hume’s dismissal of causal laws. Where Hume went wrong, according to Kant, was in his assumption that causality, if it exists at all, must be a feature of external reality, in other words, that causal connections must be connections between real objects, independent of our consciousness. But, as Kant argued, such external objects are “nothing to us”. Objects become something for us, i.e. they become accessible to us as experienceable and knowable objects, only if they conform to our forms of cognition, and causality is one such form. Raw sensations do not yet give us experiences of objects. The sensations have to be ordered by our forms of sensory intuition (space and time) and our forms of conceptual understanding (the categories, prime among which is causality); only then do we experience a single, ordered, integrated reality consisting of interconnected objects. Hence Kant’s Idealism: the world to be known by us is not an “external world” outside of consciousness, but a construction within consciousness, an ordering of sensory material by means of cognitive forms such as time, space and causality.

Kant’s Transcendental Idealism
I will say a bit more about Kant’s Idealism, because it was – much more than Berkeley’s – a crucial influence on subsequent Idealistic thinking, and also because the persistence of the paradigm of individual consciousness becomes especially clear in Kant. The first thing to note here is that Kant’s Idealism extends only to the forms of empirical reality, not to the sensory material structured by these forms. This is why Kant calls his philosophy “transcendental Idealism”, the term “transcendental” being his technical term for what pertains to the a priori forms of cognition: “I call all cognition transcendental that is occupied not so much with objects but rather with our a priori concepts of objects in general.” (CPR, A12) In extension, Kant speaks of the “transcendental subject” as the subject who applies the a priori forms of cognition to the sensory material.

Ultimately, the necessity of the sensory objects to conform to our forms of cognition has to do with the fundamental role Kant accords to self-consciousness in experience and knowledge. According to Kant, a process or state in my consciousness counts as an experience or belief only if I can be aware of it as my experience or my belief, thus only if it belongs to the unity of my consciousness – a consciousness that forms a unity precisely because it is mine, i.e. because all episodes and states in it are related to me as their underlying subject. For a mental episode or state to be mine, then, I must as it were be able to prefix it with the qualifier “I think…”. By prefixing “I think…” (or “I see…”, “I hear….” etc.) to a mental content, I indicate that the content belongs to the unity of my consciousness. As Kant puts it:

“The I think must be able to accompany all my representations; for otherwise something would be represented in me that could not be thought at all, which is as much to say that the representation would either be impossible or else at least would be nothing for me… The thought that these representations […] all together belong to me means, accordingly, the same as that I unite them in a self-consciousness […].” (CPR: B132, B134)

According to Kant, the ultimate function of the forms of space and time and the categories of the understanding is to effectuate this unity of self-consciousness (a unity that Kant therefore calls “transcendental”, since it underlies the application of the a priori forms of cognition). Only by placing all my mental episodes and states within a unified spatiotemporal network of causal relations can I recognize those episodes and states as mine, as belonging to my (self-)consciousness. The resulting integrated unity of empirical reality, then, is for Kant only a reflection or projection of the transcendental unity of self-consciousness unto the unorganized manifold of raw impressions. The unity of the object, and thereby the object as such (because there is no object without unity), is really a manifestation of the unity of the subject’s self-consciousness.

The paradigm of individual consciousness in Berkeley and Kant
To repeat: Berkeley and Kant attempted to solve the problem of skepticism posed by the epistemological turn to consciousness by simply striking the assumption of a world outside of consciousness; hence their Idealism. This is, however, only one side of their story, for the jettisoned assumption of a reality outside of consciousness came right back through the back door of their systems, in the form of God for Berkeley and the thing-in-itself for Kant. Here we begin to see how Western Idealism never really broke free from the paradigm of individual consciousness and how this paradigm kept dictating the theoretical problems that Idealist thinkers were supposed to solve.

Even if Berkeley and Kant argued that “objective reality” – reality as the object of sensory experience and rational knowledge – exists only as a phenomenon within consciousness, they still felt they had to posit a cause for that phenomenon outside of consciousness: God for Berkeley, the thing-in-itself for Kant. Why? Well, so they reasoned, sensory objects do exist only within our consciousness, but we nevertheless have no awareness of having produced them; their appearance within consciousness is independent of our will, in contrast to those mental states that we can freely create ourselves (such as thoughts and fantasies). Thus, although sensory objects exist only within consciousness, they must nevertheless have a cause outside of our consciousness.

In this vein, Berkeley admits that humans have perceptions “whereof they themselves [are] not the authors, as not being excited from within, nor depending on the operations of their will” – perceptions, then, that have an external cause. But since, according to Berkely, all being is being perceived, the being of that cause must be relative to a perceiving consciousness outside of us, another mind that installs those involuntary perceptions within our minds – and for Berkely this can only be the mind of God, “the supreme spirit which excites those ideas in our minds” (Berkeley 1995 [1710]: 44-45). 

Kant reasoned much in the same way, though he ended up by invoking an unknowable “thing-in-itself” rather than God as the cause of the sensory material appearing in consciousness. Kant agreed with Berkeley that although Idealism avoids skepticism by placing “objective reality” within consciousness, it still needs to explain the external origin of the sensory material out of which “objective reality” is created. As said, according to Kant, the sensory material becomes an experienceable and knowable object for us only when it is ordered by our a priori forms of cognition (space, time, causality). With respect to those forms, then, we are active, “spontaneous” as Kant put it, meaning that we freely impose the forms on the sensory material. But with respect to the sensory material itself, we are passive, “receptive”, meaning that the sensory material arises in consciousness because we are “affected” from the outside. Here Kant agreed with Berkeley that human beings experience sensations “whereof they themselves [are] not the authors, as not being excited from within, nor depending on the operations of their will” (Berkeley 1995 [1710]: 44). Hence the well-known dichotomies drawn by Kant between spontaneity and receptivity, a priori and a posteriori, cognitieve form and sensory material, etc. It is to account for the alleged passive, receptive side to our consciousness that Kant felt necessitated to invoke something outside of consciousness, the thing-in-itself, as the cause of the sensory material appearing within consciousness. It was only in line with his Idealism when he then declared this thing-in-itself to be completely unknowable to us, given that the only reality we can know – according to Kant – is the phenomenal reality constructed in consciousness.

Kant on “inner” and “outer sense”
As I said above, it is here that we start to see how Western Idealism never really broke free from the standpoint of individual consciousness, thereby creating insoluble problems for itself. The point is that the sensory passivity of consciousness holds only for individual consciousness, i.e. for the individual subject who stands over against his object, the external world. Thus, the sensory passivity of consciousness still presupposes the subject-object duality. But hasn’t this duality been overcome once consciousness is recognized as the condition for the appearance of both subject and object, in the sense of the individual and his world? And doesn’t it then follow that this consciousness, that precedes the appearance of subject-object duality, is itself free from subject-object duality and is thus “non-dual”, as Eastern spirituality says? But if this is so, if consciousness is prior to the subject-object duality, why then attribute receptivity to consciousness when the very idea of receptivity clearly presupposes this duality? The lingering attachment of Western Idealists to the idea that there is a receptive side to consciousness is a clear category mistake, a confusion of the transcendental consciousness with the individual consciousness (which is better called the “individual mind”) which is just one of the appearances within transcendental consciousness.

It seems to me that this category mistake emerges clearly in Kant when he introduces the distinction between “inner” and “outer sense” into his Transcendental Idealism. This distinction is really Kant’s acknowledgment that the subject-object duality is merely an appearance within transcendental consciousness. For Kant, “inner sense” designates the psychological self-experience of the individual person, the sensing of individual mental states such as thoughts and feelings. It is through inner sense that the individual mind (“Gemüth”) “intuits itself or its inner state” (CPR, A23/B37). Correlatively, “outer sense” is for Kant the sense through which the individual mind senses the outside world; with the outer sense “we represent to ourselves objects as outside us” (CPR, A22/B37). Now, the crucial move on Kant’s part here is his recognition that transcendental consciousness is prior to both inner and outer sense: not only the objects appearing in the outer sense but also the objects appearing in the inner sense are just phenomena constructed by consciousness. Thus, Kant stresses emphatically that the psychological self-experience of inner sense is certainly not to be confused with the transcendental self-consciousness underlying all experience, the unity of the “I think” that unifies all what appears in consciousness (CPR, B153).

Kant’s category mistake: the receptivity of the transcendental subject
It follows that the transcendental subject, the I that holds together all phenomena in the unity of its self-consciousness, is not the individual self whose mind is experienced through inner sense and whose sensory affection by an external world is experienced through outer sense. But if this is so, why then does Kant attribute this sensory affection – this “receptivity” – to the transcendental subject? Clearly, Kant commits a category mistake here. The only evidence we have for the existence of receptivity comes from the phenomenal realm, from the dichotomy of inner and outer sense, thus from the experience of the individual person as limited and affected by his external world. So by attributing receptivity to the transcendental subject, Kant is confusing the phenomenal and the transcendental: he is attributing a phenomenal property (receptivity) to the transcendental precondition of all phenomenality, the transcendental subject.

In his own terminology, Kant is guilty here of an “amphiboly”, which is his term for the mistake he detected in his empiricist and rationalist predecessors, namely the confusion of the a priori and a posteriori. According to Kant, rationalist philosophers tended to mistake a posteriori givens with a priori products of the mind; here Kant targeted above all Leibniz with his extreme claim that all concepts are “innate”. Conversely, empiricist philosophers tended to make the opposite mistake of seeing the a priori as a sensory given; here Kant targeted philosophers like Locke who saw all concepts, including a priori concepts such as causality, as deriving wholly from sensory experience.

For Kant, seeing the truth in epistemology hinged on avoiding such “amphibolies”, thus on distinguishing clearly between a priori and a posteriori and on assigning each its proper role in cognition. In this way, Kant aimed to steer a middle course between empiricism and rationalism by recognizing both the spontaneous and the receptive side of consciousness. But isn’t it clear now that Kant’s own middle course is itself predicated on an amphiboly, and indeed a rationalist amphiboly, such that an a posteriori given (the receptivity of cognition) is mistaken for an a priori insight in the nature of transcendental consciousness? This is what Kant’s account of the distinction between inner and outer sense makes clear, namely that the duality of subject and external object – and thus the sensory affection of the former by the latter – is a phenomenon appearing in transcendental consciousness and therefore not a property of this consciousness which pre-conditions all phenomenality.

In this sense, Kant’s recognition of the phenomenal nature of the inner sense / outer sense duality should have clearly shown to him the non-dual nature of transcendental consciousness itself. That is, it should have made it perfectly clear to him that the transcendental subject, whose self-consciousness unifies all phenomena, is a non-dual subject, i.e. a subject without an external object (“one without a second” in the language of the Upanishads). The fact that Kant didn’t see this, that he continued to attribute – amphibologically – the phenomenal property of receptivity to the pre-phenomenal transcendental subject, testifies to the strong hold that the paradigm of individual consciousness exerted on Idealist philosophers in the West.                      
 
References
-Arnauld, A. (1964 [1662]), The Art of Thinking. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill.
-Berkeley, G. (1995 [1710]), A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing.
-Berkeley, G. (1969 [1713]), Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous. Chicago: Open Court.
-Hume, D. (2003 [1739-40]), A Treatise of Human Nature. Mineola: Dover Publications.
-Kant, I (1998 [1781-87]), Critique of Pure Reason. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
-Stroud, B. (1984), The Significance of Philosophical Scepticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.