42 theories
Idealism: theories of consciousness
Consciousness is the fundamental reality. Mind or awareness comes first, and the physical world, including brains, is derived from consciousness, exists within it, or is an illusion.
Open Idealism on the mapAll theories A–Z
Idealism turns materialism upside down. Materialists must explain how consciousness arises from matter. Idealists hold that matter arises from consciousness, or is a form consciousness takes, so the hard problem does not come up in its usual form. Each individual mind, human or animal, is a part or expression of a wider consciousness. The view anchors several religious traditions, especially those that began in India.
Its history runs on two tracks. The Upanishads identify Brahman, ultimate reality, with Atman, the self, and Śaṅkara’s Advaita Vedānta, Kashmir Shaivism and Buddhist Yogācāra developed mind-only views in detail. In the West, George Berkeley argued that to be is to be perceived, with God as the perceiver who keeps the world in existence when no one is looking. Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel built German idealism, and F. H. Bradley’s absolute idealism carried it into Britain.
Idealism is gaining adherents today. Bernardo Kastrup’s analytic idealism treats individual minds as dissociated parts of one universal consciousness. Donald Hoffman argues that perception evolved to hide reality from us, and that the world is made of interacting conscious agents. David Chalmers distinguishes micro-idealism, grounded in the mentality of particles, macro-idealism, grounded in minds like ours, and cosmic idealism, grounded in a single cosmic mind.
Its central problem mirrors panpsychism’s. Panpsychists struggle to combine small minds into one. Idealists struggle to split one cosmic mind into many separate minds, and to explain why a world made of mind behaves with such lawful, shared regularity. Berkeley answered with God, Kastrup with dissociation, a mechanism borrowed from psychiatry.
Good places to start
- Śaṅkara's Self-Luminous Nondualism Consciousness as Self-Luminous, Nondual Brahman
- Berkeley’s Immaterialist Idealism To Be Is to Be Perceived or to Perceive
- Hegel’s Dialectical Consciousness in the Development of Spirit Consciousness as the Self-Developing Life of Spirit
- Analytic Idealism Consciousness as Ultimate Reality and Sole Ontological Primitive
- Hoffman’s Conscious Realism: The Case Against Reality ‘Consciousness is Fundamental Reality’
All 42 theories
- Advaita Vedanta Idealism (Indian Cosmic Consciousness) Consciousness as Ultimate Nondual Reality
- Śaṅkara's Self-Luminous Nondualism Consciousness as Self-Luminous, Nondual Brahman
- Sri Ramana’s Self as Pure Consciousness Consciousness as Self-Shining Pure Being
- Sri Aurobindo’s Evolving Consciousness Consciousness as Divine Reality Evolving Through Matter
- Sarkar’s Infinite Supreme Consciousness Consciousness as the Infinite Source and Goal of Creation
- Kashmir Shaivism’s Dynamic Non-Dualism Consciousness as Shiva's Self-Aware, Creative Vibration
- Bhartṛhari’s Linguistic Idealism Consciousness as the Living Word
- Buddhism’s Empty, Illusory Phenomenal Consciousness ‘Phenomenal Consciousness as Cognitive Illusion and Emptiness’
- Nāgārjuna’s Empty Consciousness: Experience Without Essence Consciousness as Empty Dependent Arising
- Yogācāra's Mind-Only: How Store Consciousness Makes Experience Cohere Without External Objects Experience as Cognition-Only, Grounded in Store Consciousness
- Dao Theory (Dao De Jing's constant dao) ‘Consciousness as the Constant/Eternal Dao’
- Kant’s Transcendental Idealism Consciousness as the Unifying Condition of Experience
- Fichte’s Self-Positing I Consciousness as the I's Self-Positing Activity
- Schelling’s Nature, Spirit, and the Identity of Mind Consciousness as Nature Awakening to Itself
- Hegel’s Dialectical Consciousness in the Development of Spirit Consciousness as the Self-Developing Life of Spirit
- Schopenhauer’s The World as Will Consciousness as the Will's Secondary Instrument
- Berkeley’s Immaterialist Idealism To Be Is to Be Perceived or to Perceive
- Bradley’s Absolute Idealism Consciousness as Felt Unity Within the Absolute
- Sprigge’s Absolute Idealism Finite Minds as Perspectives Within One Cosmic Experience
- Analytic Idealism Consciousness as Ultimate Reality and Sole Ontological Primitive
- Hoffman’s Conscious Realism: The Case Against Reality ‘Consciousness is Fundamental Reality’
- McGilchrist's Relational, Creative-Process Idealism Consciousness is the Stuff of the Cosmos
- Bentley Hart’s Monism: Consciousness, Being, God Consciousness as the Absolute Unity of Being and God
- Chopra’s Only the Whole is Conscious Consciousness as the Ultimate, Unitary Reality
- How Consciousness Becomes the Physical Universe Theory Consciousness Governs Causation and Creates Matter
- Theise’s and Kafatos’s Fundamental Awareness and Complexity Awareness as the Ground of a Complex, Non-Dual Universe
- Kak’s Universal Consciousness Consciousness as the Light Illuminating the Universe
- Goswami’s Self-Aware Universe Consciousness as the Agency that Collapses the Wave Function
- Spira’s Non-Duality Consciousness as Single, Infinite, Indivisible Reality
- Nader’s All There Is Consciousness is all there is
- Ward’s Personal Idealism: Souls as Embodied Agents Created by God Consciousness as the Embodied Subject of Agency Created by God
- Albahari's Perennial Idealism ‘Consciousness as Universal Unconditioned Ground’
- Builes’s Modal Idealism Necessary Idealism, Possible Worlds as Divine Thoughts
- Yetter-Chappell’s Non-Theistic Idealism Reality as a Godless Unity of Experience
- Arendsen’s Complex Idealism Consciousness as Unsplittable, Continuous Flow of Duration
- Richheimer’s Ground Substance of Creation Consciousness as the Ground Substance of Creation
- Meijer’s Universal Knowledge Field ‘Consciousness as Universal Knowledge Field’
- Samarawickrama’s Fundamental, Frequency-Bearing Field Consciousness as a Fundamental, Frequency-Bearing Field
- Vișan’s Self-Reference Consciousness as Self-Reference Looking Back at Itself
- Pulido-Moyano’s Consciousness Endomitosis Theory Consciousness Dividing and Recognizing Itself as Cosmos
- Forrest’s Intelligent Idealism Consciousness as Mind Under Constraint
- Shen’s Generative Principle of Physical Reality Physical Reality as Consciousness Constraining Itself