What if consciousness were more fundamental than matter?

You are lying in bed in the morning, just before waking up. For a few moments, the worlds overlap. The light filtering through the window, your skin under the sheets, your curled-up body—your consciousness of things refuses to merge. You seem to be at one with nothing. You are only you. You still have in memory the last colours of your dream, or at the very least, you feel a weightlessness and a blur of consciousness. Then you shake yourself awake. Your bedroom exists just as you perceived it before falling asleep; the notifications on your phone, turned back to sound, pull you inexorably from the altered state you had surrendered to. The world exists independently of you, of course. Your brain wakes up and, with it, the materialist certainty that governs our era returns.

But what if, for a few seconds, you had glimpsed something true?

It is around this question that Bernardo Kastrup's thinking revolves—a philosopher and cognitive scientist who has, for more than a decade, been developing a metaphysical hypothesis that interrogates our understanding of reality.

His system is called analytic idealism. And contrary to what its name might suggest, it is not a flight toward romantic idealism or New Age esotericism. It is an argued metaphysical position that, according to him, proceeds with the rigour of an erudite logician and proposes a radical reformulation of what we believe we know about the nature of reality.

Who is Bernardo Kastrup?

Before diving into his system, it is worth getting to know the man. Kastrup holds a master's degree in computer engineering and philosophy, as well as a doctorate in computer engineering. He worked for nearly ten years as an engineer in the technology industry before devoting himself entirely to philosophical reflection.

This detail is not insignificant. Kastrup grew up at a time when physical materialism seemed definitive. Science appeared to have shown that consciousness was produced by the brain, that matter was the fundamental level of reality, and that explaining the universe meant reducing it to particles bouncing according to the laws of physics. But as he read further, particularly in quantum mechanics and philosophy of mind, he began to perceive cracks in this façade.

Kastrup began to propose a new philosophical edifice, not by rejecting science, but by reading it differently. His ideas now circulate in various circles: some quantum physicists find them compatible with their discoveries; philosophers of mind recognize that he has touched upon a fundamental problem ignored by materialism; and people seeking meaning find in his system a rationality that re-enchants reality without denying science.

The Horizon and the Dashboard: A Metaphor to Begin

Before directly explaining analytic idealism, Kastrup uses a simple and powerful image.

Imagine you are standing on a hill. You look toward the horizon. Everything you see up to the horizon line is earth. Naturally, you assume that beyond the horizon, there is more earth. You don't assume there is something completely different, water, fire, or a substance incommensurable with earth. Why would you? It's because you extrapolate from what you see. It is natural to think that the same thing continues beyond your field of vision.

Now, let's apply this logic to consciousness. Everything you have direct access to, everything you can truly know, is experiential states. Your sensations, your emotions, your thoughts, your perceptions, all of this is experiential and mental. That is your horizon. Beyond this personal horizon of experience, there is undoubtedly an external world. But since everything you can see up to the horizon is experiential in nature, is it not logical to conclude that, beyond the horizon, there are more experiential states?

This is the first intuition of analytic idealism. The materialist, by contrast, looks up to the horizon and sees mental states, then assumes that beyond, something completely different, non-mental matter, exists. This, according to Kastrup, is an unjustified logical leap.

To pursue the reflection, let's use another metaphor: that of an airplane's dashboard. An airplane is equipped with sensors that measure temperature, altitude, speed, and wind direction. These sensors do not provide direct access to the phenomena they measure. Instead, they transform these phenomena into indicators on a dashboard: needles, numbers, lights. The pilot observes the dashboard, not the sky directly.

In the same way, according to Kastrup, your perceptual experience constitutes a dashboard. The colours you see, the sounds you hear, the smells you smell—all of this is a representation of what truly exists beyond your personal mind. What we call the "physical" world is not the world as it exists in itself. It is the representation that your mind creates on its "perceptual screen" by measuring mental states external to you.

And this is where the idea begins to become vertiginous. What is represented on the dashboard—what truly exists "beyond the horizon"—is no less mental. It is more mental than what you perceive directly. The experiential states that constitute the external world are simply those to which you do not have immediate access through your personal perception.

Matter is Only Appearance

Here is how Kastrup reformulates this intuition: matter is not the fundamental level of reality. It is rather the appearance of mental processes. When you look at your body in a mirror, you see its shape, its colour, and its movements. But what you see is a visual representation of your body. It is not your body as it exists for itself, outside of perception. In the same way, everything science calls "matter" (atoms, molecules, quantum fields) is what mental states look like when observed from the outside and represented.

Think about it without metaphysical prejudice. Your body, what you perceive as matter, is the visible manifestation of your mental life. The cells of your brain, its connections, its neurochemical processes, all of this constitutes your inner experience when observed from "outside yourself." Kastrup cites Schopenhauer: "Your eyes are the representation of your will to see; your ears, the representation of your will to hear."

In other words, what we call "matter" could be the way an inner experience appears when viewed from the outside. Your brain may not be the cause of your consciousness, but its visible appearance, like the face of an emotion, is the outward expression of an inner state. Thus, neurons, electrical impulses, and chemical reactions would be the observable translation, from the physical world, of a mental life lived from within.

This idea does not mean that the world is "in your head." Kastrup insists strongly on this point. The world certainly exists independently of your personal mind. It is real, resistant, and independent of your desires. But this world is not material in the sense of classical materialism. It is constituted of mental states, of experiences, just as your personal consciousness is.

A Universal Consciousness, Fragmented in Us

Here, the idea becomes even bolder. If matter is the appearance of mental processes, and if the entire universe is constituted of this "matter," then the entire universe must be constituted of mental life. But how can this be? How can we be separate from each other if we are all in the same mind?

This is where the concept of dissociation comes in.

You have probably heard of Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), formerly called Multiple Personality Disorder. People with this condition exhibit alternating states of consciousness that clinicians call "alters" (as in "alter ego," another self). Each alter can have its own personality, its own memories, and its own ways of perceiving the world. They can alternate to take control of the body, sometimes without awareness of one another.

Kastrup borrows this psychiatric concept and extrapolates it upward. If dissociation can fragment a single mind into multiple alters, why would the same thing not occur at the scale of nature as a whole?

Imagine a whirlpool in a river. You can point to it and say, "There's a whirlpool!" You can trace its boundaries, determine where it begins and where it ends. But in reality, there is only the river itself, in motion. The whirlpool is not a thing; it is a phenomenon of the river. You cannot take it out of the river and carry it home.

In the same way, according to Kastrup, you are a whirlpool in the current of universal consciousness. You are a dissociative process within a primordial and boundless mind. You are real, distinct, with your own thoughts and perceptions. But you distinguish yourself only by a cognitive boundary, a dissociation, not by a fundamental ontological separation.

What separates us from one another is not a difference in substance, but a dissociative boundary within a single consciousness. Your mind cannot directly access the thoughts of another person, just as a dissociated part of the mind of a person with DID cannot access the thoughts of another part.

Clinical research suggests that the different alters of a person with DID can actually share dreams, interact with one another, and observe each other. They are not simply isolated in distinct mental universes. They exist in the same mental space, but are separated by impenetrable cognitive boundaries.

In the same way, you and I exist in the same universal mind. The world you perceive and the one I perceive are not identical; we have different perspectives on the same mental landscape. But they are not separate. We are all manifestations of what Kastrup calls a universally unified field of subjectivity.

This Does Not Mean What You Think

At this point, a natural concern emerges in most readers. If the world is "mental," does that mean it is an illusion, that everything is in "your head," that you can change it through positive thinking?

Kastrup replies firmly: no.

The fact that the world is constituted of mental states does not make it less real, less resistant, or less independent of your personal desires. Your body exists independently of your will. The laws of physics apply. You cannot fly by jumping out a window, even if you really want to. The materialist trances where "everything is just energy" or "the mind creates matter" are foreign to Kastrup's vision.

The mental states that constitute the world beyond your personal horizon are not accessible to your conscious mind. You cannot modify them through positive thinking because you do not have direct access to them. You are separated from them by your dissociative boundary. External mental states behave exactly like physical matter: they are rigorous, causally effective, and independent of your ego.

For example, the colours you see exist in your mind, on your perceptual screen. The red you perceive when looking at an apple does not truly exist in the apple itself. But what this red represents, a certain mental quality external to you to which you cannot have direct access, does indeed exist. It is simply different from the mental quality internal to you that you call "redness." It is dissociation that separates you from this external quality. As long as you live, you cannot directly access what exists beyond your personal conscious horizon.

Why Does This Idea Fascinate Now?

To understand why analytic idealism is now attracting attention, one must first understand its context. For a hundred years, physical materialism seemed irresistible. Science explained more and more things. Each discovery seemed to drive the nail further: the world is made of unconscious matter, consciousness is a product of the brain, and everything can be reduced to physical laws.

But the cracks have widened. Quantum mechanics showed that observation creates reality at the subatomic level. Neuroscience is discovering that the brain does not generate consciousness the way materialists assumed: psychedelic states show an increased wealth of experience even with reduced brain activity. The hard problem of consciousness, how subjective consciousness could emerge from inert matter, remains unsolved after decades of research.

And there is something deeper. Our era is an era of disenchantment. Materialism offered certainty and clarity, but at the price of a profoundly depressing vision: you are a bag of molecules, your most intimate thoughts and feelings are nothing but neuronal chemistry, and when you die, everything disappears forever.

It is not sentimentalism to say that this vision has dug a wound in contemporary culture. Analytic idealism proposes to restore rationality. It wants to be scientific, not sentimental, logical, not nihilistic. A vision where consciousness is the basis of everything, where your life possesses an inalienable depth, where your experience is not an epiphenomenal illusion but the most fundamental thing that exists.

Objections and Limitations

This vision faces serious criticism. Materialists argue that Kastrup builds a metaphysical palace without solid empirical evidence. How could you ever verify the existence of a dissociated universal consciousness? Isn't this pure speculation?

Kastrup responds by distinguishing falsifiability (which applies to scientific theories predicting future behaviour) from empirical adequacy (which applies to metaphysical theories). Analytic idealism, he argues, is perfectly compatible with all established science. Moreover, it explains certain phenomena that materialism finds troubling: how can dissociative states in DID manifest if consciousness is generated by the brain? How can the reduction caused by psychedelic drugs, which increases experience by decreasing brain activity, be explained? Analytic idealism accommodates these anomalies naturally.

But there is also a deeper critique. Even if analytic idealism offers a coherent vision, are we justified in simply accepting it because it is elegant and seems to explain more than materialism? Are simplicity and elegance really guarantees of truth? Perhaps we simply live in a complicated and inelegant materialist universe.

In his defence, Kastrup does not claim to have definitively demonstrated that analytic idealism is true. Rather, he proposes an alternative metaphysical framework that he believes is more parsimonious than materialism and capable of accommodating all known science while explaining the anomalies that materialism finds troubling. It is up to each of us to judge whether these advantages justify adopting this new framework.

An Invitation to See Otherwise

But let's return to that moment on the hill, to the dream dissolving upon waking. That moment when it seemed to you that all of reality was unfolding in your consciousness. You were probably right, in a certain sense. Everything you have never known unfolded in your consciousness. Everything you know right now, these words on the screen, the sensation of your clothes, your breathing, is an experience in your mind.

This intuition echoes certain ancient traditions, particularly non-dualistic Hinduism or certain mystical currents for which individual consciousness is never entirely separate from a vaster consciousness.

It resonates with Schopenhauer and with contemplative traditions that already see consciousness as the ground of reality. But Kastrup distinguishes himself through his language and approach. He speaks neither of spiritual illumination nor of escape from the material world. Rather, he attempts to reformulate these intuitions in the terms of contemporary philosophy, phenomenology, and even cognitive science. In his view, the universe is not an illusion from which we must awaken, but an immense mental life of which the physical world would be the appearance.

The external world is not an illusion. Your access to this external world is mediated by experience. What you perceive is real, but what you perceive is not the world as it exists outside of perception. It is the representation, the dashboard, the perceptual screen.

Beyond your personal horizon, in what you ordinarily call the "physical world," exists an incommensurable wealth of mental life. States of experience to which you cannot have direct access, because a cognitive boundary separates you from them. A boundary that defines you, but which is not definitive. This boundary is what enables you to perceive the world in the first person instead of simply being the world, experiencing it directly from all sides.

This reformulation of reality, of your place in it, subtly changes what it means to be conscious. You do not become a passive observer of an inert universe. You become a manifestation of universal consciousness, a way for nature to know itself from a local and fragmented perspective. Your thoughts, your feelings, your perceptions are not epiphenomena, useless byproducts. They are the vehicle through which the universe contemplates itself.

It is both humbling and grandiose. Humbling because your ego is only a small whirlpool in an infinite river. Grandiose because you are life itself, consciousness itself, never truly separate from what surrounds you.

For a long time, our culture believed that consciousness was an accident in a stupid material universe. Then we learned that matter was stranger, more nuanced, more paradoxical than we thought. And now, some thinkers are beginning to whisper a possibility we had almost forgotten: what if consciousness were not an accident? What if it were the very foundation?

The answers will not come from theories alone. They will probably emerge from contemplation, from your own engagement with the mystery of your existence. But in the meantime, Kastrup's ideas offer a framework for considering this vertiginous possibility. They invite us to suspect, at least for a few moments, that what we call materialist reality is perhaps only the appearance, and that what appears as such—consciousness, experience, the mental—could be the real.

And that is enough to make the horizon recede a bit. For us to wonder what is really out there, beyond what we can see.

Reference : Analytic Idealism in a Nutshell. A straightforward summary of the 21st century's only plausible metaphysics. Bernardo Kastrup. 2024. iff Books.