Idealism
Arendsen’s Complex Idealism
Consciousness as Unsplittable, Continuous Flow of Duration
Albert R.J. (Richard) Arendsen holds that reality is a continuous mental and informational flow of duration, and that consciousness is an ‘unsplittable unity’ that no computation can model. The measured physical universe is a secondary, frozen snapshot of this flow, and Arendsen offers a mathematical model of the interface where the flow becomes discrete physical events. ‘Complex’ refers to a dual-aspect structure that joins ‘real’ and ‘imaginary’ domains, as in complex numbers.
Albert R.J. (Richard) Arendsen
What consciousness is
Consciousness is a primary, continuous mental mobility, an indivisible qualitative flow of duration that is the fabric of reality.
Mind and body
Physical structures are stable, frozen boundaries precipitated out of the mental flow when it is measured and counted. The brain slices the continuous flow into discrete communicative signals; it does not compute consciousness.
Mechanism
Actuation by phase rotation. GUT models the interface with 2x2 matrix rotations (continuous phase shifts) and Kronecker products (recursive scaling), projected onto a quaternionic 4D phase space built from h, c, ν, and e, where an actuation impulse splits the flow into stable recursive movements.
Core claims
- Most models of mind ‘spatialize’ time by treating brain and universe as machines processing static successive states, following a mistake Bergson identified.
- Consciousness is not a computational output, so no algorithm can model it, though its communication with the physical can be modeled.
- The laws of quantum mechanics and electromagnetism arise as secondary footprints of the primary flow under Arendsen's phase-space formalism.
- Against Kastrup's Analytic Idealism, flow is real and static space and discrete objects are the abstraction.
Criticisms
Arendsen calls consciousness non-computational yet models its interface with linear algebra, and he describes the brain both as not generating consciousness and as a ‘generator or regularizer’, which needs clarification. The mathematical framework is set out in papers posted on ResearchGate, and its link to established physics is asserted, not tested.
Implications
- AI consciousness: Unlikely
- Consciousness is not a computational output, so no AI system could produce it by computing.
- Survival beyond death: Yes
- Arendsen holds that the observer is an expression of continuous duration, so physical mortality is a frozen abstraction of measurement and the perceiving being is never denied eternity.
- Virtual immortality: No
- Since consciousness cannot be modeled computationally, a digital simulation of a person would not carry their consciousness.
Related theories
- Bergson's Multiplicity, Duration, Perception, Memory (Foundation)
- Kastrup's Analytic Idealism (Contrast)
- Whitehead's Process Theory (Compatible)
- Computational Theories (Critique)
Sources
- The Generative Universal Transformers of Complex Idealism: Metaphysical Model, Albert R.J. Arendsen (2026)
- The Grand Phase Architecture of the New SI Units: Structural Placeholders and Active Rotations in Complex Idealism, Albert R.J. Arendsen (2026)
- The Actuation Impulse of Complex Idealism: How the Measured Universe Splits into Recursive Timeless Movements, Albert R.J. Arendsen (2026)
- The Quaternionic Split: How 4D Rational Rotations Apportion the Indivisible Continuum of Complex Idealism, Albert R.J. Arendsen (2026)
- The Sensory Complex Features Model of Complex Idealism in a Flash, Albert R.J. Arendsen (2025)
- Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, Henri Bergson (1889)