Bernardo Kastrup

Similarly, neuroses and psychoses – such as some obsessions, phobias, and schizophrenic visions – all seem to arise from a part of mind that we do not at all identify with; a part of mind that feels entirely alien, external to the ego

Imagine mind as the screen of a movie theater. Images on the screen represent the entire set of your subjective experiences. Materialism states that those images have an external source and are captured by ‘cameras’ – our sense organs – used to record the movie you are watching. Under idealism, on the other hand, only the movie theater exists: all images you see are generated in the theatre itself, like a computer animation rendered in real-time, and have no external source (we will discuss the role of our sense organs under idealism in ). We can empirically identify certain patterns and regularities in the unfolding of these images. The so-called ‘laws of physics’ are simply a model of these observed patterns and regularities according to which the ‘pixels’ of the images seem to change. In other words, the ‘laws’ reflect the observed regularities of the behavior of the ‘pixels’ in the ‘computer-generated’ images, as opposed to representing rules governing how events in an abstract external world unfold.

The sequence of abstract images in the figure clearly does not represent anything in an outside world. They are not ‘copies’ of anything, but realities in their own right. The advantage of using such abstract images is that they help by-pass all of your cultural programming, since you won’t be able to find any recognizable pattern in them that your mind already assumes to represent an external object