Analytic idealism: Kastrup’s dissociation and the filter

Bernardo Kastrup’s analytic idealism is the closest contemporary metaphysics to the intuition behind this model: one field of mentation, with individual minds as dissociated alters of it. The convergences are deep — a single experiential ground, transpersonal phenomena as structural default rather than anomaly, a field that does not deliberate.

The divergences are equally instructive. Kastrup’s dissociation is close to binary — one is an alter or one is not; this model works with a continuous gradient of permeability, the membrane admitting more or less of the field. And where analytic idealism is a metaphysics, committed to consciousness as the nature of reality, the Shared Field Model is deliberately regional: it describes the structure of psychological life and remains agnostic about the ultimate question. A reader may hold Kastrup’s answer, or a materialist one, or none — the model’s derivations require only that the process of psychological life has no closed boundaries.

Where to begin: Kastrup, The Idea of the World (2019).

This note belongs to a series on theories adjacent to the Shared Field Model. The full architecture is here.