email #54 -- my friend needs a job asap; also: analytic idealism
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Leon Kraiem
Dec 9, 2025, 11:50:55 AM12/9/25
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Hi friends,
First things first: My friend Annie needs a job, stat. She’s a very talented data analyst, who’s worked at Google, has Ivy League degrees, etc., but she got laid off through no fault of her own, as happens to even very competent people sometimes. Here’s her LinkedIn. If you know of any jobs, or people who might know of any jobs, please send them to me, and I’ll send them to her. There’s a visa-related countdown here, so time is of the essence.
--
Second things second: I mentioned in a previous email that I’ve been reading about this idea, Analytic Idealism.
As I already wrote, it’s hard to explain. But I’m going to try, because it’s on my mind a lot and there are a bunch of other ideas that I want to write about that are sort of related to it. This email was supposed to contain a bunch of them, but — as so often happens — I ran out of steam pretty early on.
So here’s what we’re going to do — we’re going to call this email Pts 1 of a multi-part series. And the only purpose of Pt. 1 is to try to explain the idea, based on — and using some phrases and examples from — Analytic Idealism in a Nutshell: A straightforward summary of the 21st century’s only plausible metaphysics, by Bernardo Kastrup. This is the only book I have read on the topic, so take everything I say with a grain or two of salt.
N.B.: This metaphysical stuff is hard, and I only have a pretty superficial knowledge of it myself, so it’s all good if this winds up reading as gibberish; in which case, 1) that’s on me, not on you, but also 2), you were warned
I would, though, welcome feedback on what was/wasn’t understandable; this isn’t a personal email, really, this is just an I-have-an-email-list-and-it’s-a-good-practice-to-write-about-things email, so we can basically treat it as an essay-type project, that people are invited to help me with, by gently nudging me this way or that.
--
Alright, so:
Analytic Idealism (as I understand it) is a metaphysical theory according to which our shared, external world is real, natural, and behaves in a way that’s predictable by science; it’s not solipsistic, in other words — it’s not simulation theory. But while this theory affirms that the world is real and external to us, it posits that the world is not ultimately made of stuff, from which consciousness happens to emerge; rather, everything in the world is ultimately made of consciousness, and ‘physicality’ is just what consciousness looks like from the outside. Anything you see, or hear, or taste, or touch — it’s real, and it’s really ‘out there.’ But what it is is an experience, just one that you aren’t having right now.
That idea is complicated, unorthodox, and counterintuitive. I think the most complicated part of it is actually the uncontroversial bit, while the big claim at the end isn’t ‘complicated’ per se, just highly unorthodox and stubbornly counterintuitive. But the whole thing is hard. I’m going to try to hash it out, and we’ll see how I do.
The complicated, uncontroversial part of the theory goes something like this: We experience the world, but we don’t experience it directly. Our eyes allow us to see things, our ears allow us to hear things, our hands allow us to hold things, etc. The reason we have eyes, and ears, and hands, is that they evolved, over gazillions of generations, as we went from amoebas to fishes to homo sapiens. The evolutionary benefit of having these senses is obvious: if I’m standing in the savannah, and there’s a lion charging toward me, and I see him, I might have time to get out of the way. The blind guy, who couldn’t see the lion, got eaten, and that was that for his genes. So far, so good, right? Uncontroversial stuff.
Here’s where it gets tricky (but still uncontroversial): Your senses are clearly ‘accurate’ in that moment — there really is a lion charging in your direction. But an accurate representation of something isn’t necessarily anything like the thing that it represents. The map in the subway is a faithful representation of New York City, and it successfully enables you to go from place to place in it. But the map is a small, flat sheet of paper, whereas the city is a huge, 3D complex made of skyscrapers and tunnels and concrete and trees. Or, another analogy: A pilot flying on an overcast day can use the doodads on his dashboard to know precisely where he is, at what altitude, at what temperature, and that allows him to fly the plane even in low visibility. But the doodads on the dashboard are little plastic things with numbers that needles point to, and the sky isn’t at all like that.
Sense-perceptions are like maps and dashboard widgets: they’re accurate representations of the things they point us to — but they aren’t those things themselves. In fact, they’re not even the same kind of thing. Sights and sounds and sensations are experiences, whereas the things we’re perceiving are physical stuff. Beer isn’t the same as what beer tastes like; the feeling of sandpaper on your skin isn’t what sandpaper is. The taste of beer and the feeling of sandpaper are experiences — they’re made of consciousness, not matter. You can’t ask, ‘What are the longitude and latitude of the resentment you have of your mother?’ or ‘What’s the weight in kilograms of the color cerulean?’ or ‘That nails-against-a-chalkboard feeling — can it fit inside this cardboard box?’ You could ask those questions any every physical object that exists; but they don’t make sense when you’re talking about experiences.
To be clear, I’m not making a statement about how those experiences come about — let’s posit, as is the orthodox position (what’s called ‘physicalism’), that they’re all the product of physical stuff, probably electrical synapses firing in a particular pattern in the brain. Still, even if the one causes the other, they aren’t the same thing. You could look at a brain till kingdom come and understand every inch of it, but you wouldn’t actually know what the experiences it’s producing are like unless you’re conscious yourself. Does that make sense?
If so, congratulations. That’s the complicated, (mostly) uncontroversial bit. Here’s the simple, but unorthodox and counterintuitive bit, which sort of flips the above on its head: According to Analytic Idealism (as I understand it), all those ‘physical’ things we perceive indirectly, through our senses — those are all experiences, too. The nails and the chalkboard are actually, in-themselves, conscious feelings just like nails-on-a-chalkboard is a conscious feeling. They’re just not experiences we’re currently having, so we perceive them ‘from the outside.’
The ‘physical’ world — the one that works in terms of volume, density, height, width, weight, color, texture— is, according to this theory, like a subway map, and those physical properties are the colors and lines that make the map legible. Like the widgets on an airplane’s dashboard, they communicate real information, about the real things they’re pointing to — but they’re very unlike those things-in-themselves, which are the equivalent of the city, or the sky.
To make this a little more concrete: When the lion is charging at me on the savannah, my sense is there’s this thing made of cells, that’s hairy and yellow and it’s got rough skin and sharp teeth, and oh by the way it’s also experiencing all this from its own perspective, but that’s sort of beside the point. What Analytic Idealism claims is: that experience the lion is having, of charging at you, is what’s charging at you. The yellow hair and rough skin and sharp teeth — those are all particular elements of that experience that, through some mechanism we don’t really understand, are getting picked up by my sense organs and presented to me as ‘physical’ objects.
This doesn’t mean there’s no real lion, that I have to get out of the way of; to the contrary, if that experience we call a lion collides with the experience I call myself, it’s bad news. The lion experience + the me experience = the getting-eaten-alive experience. That’s why millions of years of evolution have bestowed me with tools to avoid it — just like pilots have tools to avoid colliding with mountansides.
But to think the lion is, at the end of the day, really a ‘physical’ thing — to think the world is made of matter, and it’s consciousness that’s the iffy phenomenon, rather than the other way around — is to confuse the map with the subway system, or to confuse the dashboard for the sky.
Does that make sense?
--
Alright folks, that’s part 1. I’ve already written a draft of what I guess would be part 2, about what it’s been like to walk around with this idea for a couple weeks — fingers-crossed I’ll edit it and send it out before Shabbat.
Then, parts to come, next week?, maybe?:
-How the Analytic Idealist understanding of the body is basically the same thing I was taught on my 10-day Vipassana course (which could also be a fun opportunity to write about my experience of that course, which is on my mind, having just registered for a second one)
-How Vipassana’s idea of the ‘unconscious’ is like/unlike Freud’s idea of the ‘unconscious’, and how Analytic Idealism might reconcile them
-All of this and I-You/I-It (this is way better than the other two, I am aware)
--
Third things third: Now that these emails are increasingly just a Substack that’s not on Substack, I think I’m going to start a Substack. There are still the problematics of not wanting to write anything that would reflect on ToI, for better or worse, including about non-Israel-related things; but sometimes it’s an easy call that something is fine, and there’s no reason to sleep on those things. I’ll keep you all posted as I get that underway, and I think before long I’ll try to migrate these sorts of essay-emails over there.
--
Alright, no fourth things for now.
Except that I’m back in Israel, so local friends: Reach out! Let’s make plans, please. Maybe I’ll host a Shabbos dinner next week (Dec. 19)?
—
As always, I am alive, and I am well, thanks to others, not all of whom are.
I will continue to keep you posted,
Leon
First things first: My friend Annie needs a job, stat. She’s a very talented data analyst, who’s worked at Google, has Ivy League degrees, etc., but she got laid off through no fault of her own, as happens to even very competent people sometimes. Here’s her LinkedIn. If you know of any jobs, or people who might know of any jobs, please send them to me, and I’ll send them to her. There’s a visa-related countdown here, so time is of the essence.
--
Second things second: I mentioned in a previous email that I’ve been reading about this idea, Analytic Idealism.
As I already wrote, it’s hard to explain. But I’m going to try, because it’s on my mind a lot and there are a bunch of other ideas that I want to write about that are sort of related to it. This email was supposed to contain a bunch of them, but — as so often happens — I ran out of steam pretty early on.
So here’s what we’re going to do — we’re going to call this email Pts 1 of a multi-part series. And the only purpose of Pt. 1 is to try to explain the idea, based on — and using some phrases and examples from — Analytic Idealism in a Nutshell: A straightforward summary of the 21st century’s only plausible metaphysics, by Bernardo Kastrup. This is the only book I have read on the topic, so take everything I say with a grain or two of salt.
N.B.: This metaphysical stuff is hard, and I only have a pretty superficial knowledge of it myself, so it’s all good if this winds up reading as gibberish; in which case, 1) that’s on me, not on you, but also 2), you were warned
I would, though, welcome feedback on what was/wasn’t understandable; this isn’t a personal email, really, this is just an I-have-an-email-list-and-it’s-a-good-practice-to-write-about-things email, so we can basically treat it as an essay-type project, that people are invited to help me with, by gently nudging me this way or that.
--
Alright, so:
Analytic Idealism (as I understand it) is a metaphysical theory according to which our shared, external world is real, natural, and behaves in a way that’s predictable by science; it’s not solipsistic, in other words — it’s not simulation theory. But while this theory affirms that the world is real and external to us, it posits that the world is not ultimately made of stuff, from which consciousness happens to emerge; rather, everything in the world is ultimately made of consciousness, and ‘physicality’ is just what consciousness looks like from the outside. Anything you see, or hear, or taste, or touch — it’s real, and it’s really ‘out there.’ But what it is is an experience, just one that you aren’t having right now.
That idea is complicated, unorthodox, and counterintuitive. I think the most complicated part of it is actually the uncontroversial bit, while the big claim at the end isn’t ‘complicated’ per se, just highly unorthodox and stubbornly counterintuitive. But the whole thing is hard. I’m going to try to hash it out, and we’ll see how I do.
The complicated, uncontroversial part of the theory goes something like this: We experience the world, but we don’t experience it directly. Our eyes allow us to see things, our ears allow us to hear things, our hands allow us to hold things, etc. The reason we have eyes, and ears, and hands, is that they evolved, over gazillions of generations, as we went from amoebas to fishes to homo sapiens. The evolutionary benefit of having these senses is obvious: if I’m standing in the savannah, and there’s a lion charging toward me, and I see him, I might have time to get out of the way. The blind guy, who couldn’t see the lion, got eaten, and that was that for his genes. So far, so good, right? Uncontroversial stuff.
Here’s where it gets tricky (but still uncontroversial): Your senses are clearly ‘accurate’ in that moment — there really is a lion charging in your direction. But an accurate representation of something isn’t necessarily anything like the thing that it represents. The map in the subway is a faithful representation of New York City, and it successfully enables you to go from place to place in it. But the map is a small, flat sheet of paper, whereas the city is a huge, 3D complex made of skyscrapers and tunnels and concrete and trees. Or, another analogy: A pilot flying on an overcast day can use the doodads on his dashboard to know precisely where he is, at what altitude, at what temperature, and that allows him to fly the plane even in low visibility. But the doodads on the dashboard are little plastic things with numbers that needles point to, and the sky isn’t at all like that.
Sense-perceptions are like maps and dashboard widgets: they’re accurate representations of the things they point us to — but they aren’t those things themselves. In fact, they’re not even the same kind of thing. Sights and sounds and sensations are experiences, whereas the things we’re perceiving are physical stuff. Beer isn’t the same as what beer tastes like; the feeling of sandpaper on your skin isn’t what sandpaper is. The taste of beer and the feeling of sandpaper are experiences — they’re made of consciousness, not matter. You can’t ask, ‘What are the longitude and latitude of the resentment you have of your mother?’ or ‘What’s the weight in kilograms of the color cerulean?’ or ‘That nails-against-a-chalkboard feeling — can it fit inside this cardboard box?’ You could ask those questions any every physical object that exists; but they don’t make sense when you’re talking about experiences.
To be clear, I’m not making a statement about how those experiences come about — let’s posit, as is the orthodox position (what’s called ‘physicalism’), that they’re all the product of physical stuff, probably electrical synapses firing in a particular pattern in the brain. Still, even if the one causes the other, they aren’t the same thing. You could look at a brain till kingdom come and understand every inch of it, but you wouldn’t actually know what the experiences it’s producing are like unless you’re conscious yourself. Does that make sense?
If so, congratulations. That’s the complicated, (mostly) uncontroversial bit. Here’s the simple, but unorthodox and counterintuitive bit, which sort of flips the above on its head: According to Analytic Idealism (as I understand it), all those ‘physical’ things we perceive indirectly, through our senses — those are all experiences, too. The nails and the chalkboard are actually, in-themselves, conscious feelings just like nails-on-a-chalkboard is a conscious feeling. They’re just not experiences we’re currently having, so we perceive them ‘from the outside.’
The ‘physical’ world — the one that works in terms of volume, density, height, width, weight, color, texture— is, according to this theory, like a subway map, and those physical properties are the colors and lines that make the map legible. Like the widgets on an airplane’s dashboard, they communicate real information, about the real things they’re pointing to — but they’re very unlike those things-in-themselves, which are the equivalent of the city, or the sky.
To make this a little more concrete: When the lion is charging at me on the savannah, my sense is there’s this thing made of cells, that’s hairy and yellow and it’s got rough skin and sharp teeth, and oh by the way it’s also experiencing all this from its own perspective, but that’s sort of beside the point. What Analytic Idealism claims is: that experience the lion is having, of charging at you, is what’s charging at you. The yellow hair and rough skin and sharp teeth — those are all particular elements of that experience that, through some mechanism we don’t really understand, are getting picked up by my sense organs and presented to me as ‘physical’ objects.
This doesn’t mean there’s no real lion, that I have to get out of the way of; to the contrary, if that experience we call a lion collides with the experience I call myself, it’s bad news. The lion experience + the me experience = the getting-eaten-alive experience. That’s why millions of years of evolution have bestowed me with tools to avoid it — just like pilots have tools to avoid colliding with mountansides.
But to think the lion is, at the end of the day, really a ‘physical’ thing — to think the world is made of matter, and it’s consciousness that’s the iffy phenomenon, rather than the other way around — is to confuse the map with the subway system, or to confuse the dashboard for the sky.
Does that make sense?
--
Alright folks, that’s part 1. I’ve already written a draft of what I guess would be part 2, about what it’s been like to walk around with this idea for a couple weeks — fingers-crossed I’ll edit it and send it out before Shabbat.
Then, parts to come, next week?, maybe?:
-How the Analytic Idealist understanding of the body is basically the same thing I was taught on my 10-day Vipassana course (which could also be a fun opportunity to write about my experience of that course, which is on my mind, having just registered for a second one)
-How Vipassana’s idea of the ‘unconscious’ is like/unlike Freud’s idea of the ‘unconscious’, and how Analytic Idealism might reconcile them
-All of this and I-You/I-It (this is way better than the other two, I am aware)
--
Third things third: Now that these emails are increasingly just a Substack that’s not on Substack, I think I’m going to start a Substack. There are still the problematics of not wanting to write anything that would reflect on ToI, for better or worse, including about non-Israel-related things; but sometimes it’s an easy call that something is fine, and there’s no reason to sleep on those things. I’ll keep you all posted as I get that underway, and I think before long I’ll try to migrate these sorts of essay-emails over there.
--
Alright, no fourth things for now.
Except that I’m back in Israel, so local friends: Reach out! Let’s make plans, please. Maybe I’ll host a Shabbos dinner next week (Dec. 19)?
—
As always, I am alive, and I am well, thanks to others, not all of whom are.
I will continue to keep you posted,
Leon
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