Open letter to Bernardo Kastrup

Bernardo, I remain an avid admirer of your work—especially your stirring defense of free will—but on consciousness I stand firmly in the illusionist camp. To me, consciousness is not a place or a time, nor a luminous theater tucked behind the eyes; it is the upshot of dynamic, ever-shifting processes: neural populations competing for bandwidth, updating predictive models of the body and world, tagging salient states with quick-and-dirty labels, and weaving those tags into a narrative we can report to ourselves and to one another. The vivid “inner light” we speak of is nothing more than the brain reading its own compressed labels for pain, red, self and so forth—handy shortcuts that evolution hit upon because they guide adaptive behavior and social coordination at minimal metabolic cost.

Meditation lends empirical weight to this view: as the cognitive overlay quiets, people often report a thinning or outright disappearance of the felt boundary between subject and object, just what one would expect if the glow were optional and not ontological. For that reason the zombie thought experiment strikes me as incoherent; a physical duplicate would necessarily possess every causal power I do, including the power to complain about stubbing a toe, and thus the notion of an experience-less twin is as self-contradictory as a round square.

Your analytic idealism, elegant though it is, seems to multiply entities without delivering new predictive torque: once we have a complete algorithmic story that reproduces every observable regularity—right down to people saying “red feels warm”—there is simply nothing left for a hard problem to explain. In my eyes you overestimate the reality of your own qualia, while I may well underestimate them; that is the ground on which our friendly dispute rests. I hope to to someday discuss this face to face, for your ideas continue to sharpen my thinking, and for that I owe you sincere gratitude.

Until then, I shall keep arguing that when the self-modeling bug is debugged and the algorithm laid bare, the mystery of consciousness evaporates, and the universe remains wondrously, but wholly, physical.