Editing Hard problem of consciousness (section)

====Idealism and cosmopsychism====
{{Main|Idealism}}
A traditional solution to the hard problem is [[idealism]], according to which consciousness is fundamental and not simply an emergent property of matter. It is claimed that this avoids the hard problem entirely.<ref>{{Cite journal|url=https://philpapers.org/rec/KASTUI|title=The Universe in Consciousness|journal=Journal of Consciousness Studies|year=2018|volume=25|issue=5–6|pages=125–155|last1=Kastrup|first1=Bernardo}}</ref> [[Objective idealism]] and [[cosmopsychism]] consider mind or consciousness to be the fundamental substance of the universe. Proponents claim that this approach is immune to both the hard problem of consciousness and the [[combination problem]] that affects panpsychism.<ref name="shani-keppler-2018">{{cite journal|last1=Shani|first1=Itay|last2=Keppler|first2=Joachim|title=Beyond combination: how cosmic consciousness grounds ordinary experience|journal=Journal of the American Philosophical Association|date=2018|volume=4|issue=3|pages=390–410|doi=10.1017/apa.2018.30|s2cid=125246376|doi-access=free}}</ref><ref name="shani-2015">{{cite journal|last1=Shani|first1=Itay|title=Cosmopsychism: A holistic approach to the metaphysics of experience|journal=Philosophical Papers|date=2015|volume=44|issue=3|pages=389–437|doi=10.1080/05568641.2015.1106709|s2cid=146624784}}</ref><ref name="albahari-2019">{{cite journal|last1=Albahari|first1=Miri|title=Perennial Idealism: A Mystical Solution to the Mind–Body Problem|journal=Philosophers' Imprint|date=2019|volume=19|issue=44|pages=1–37|s2cid=211538796}}</ref>

From an idealist perspective, matter is a representation or image of mental processes. Supporters suggest that this avoids the problems associated with the materialist view of mind as an emergent property of a physical brain.<ref name="kastrup-2018">{{cite journal|last1=Kastrup|first1=Bernardo|title=Conflating abstraction with empirical observation: The false mind-matter dichotomy|journal=Constructivist Foundations|date=2018|volume=13|issue=3}}</ref> Critics argue that this then leads to a decombination problem: how is it possible to split a single, universal conscious experience into multiple, distinct conscious experiences? In response, Bernardo Kastrup claims that nature hints at a mechanism for this in the condition [[dissociative identity disorder]] (previously known as Multiple Personality Disorder).<ref>{{Cite thesis|url=https://philarchive.org/rec/KASAIA-3|title=Analytic Idealism: A consciousness-only ontology|year=2019|publisher=Radboud University Nijmegen|type=PhD Thesis|last1=Kastrup|first1=Bernardo}}</ref> Kastrup proposes dissociation as an example from nature showing that multiple minds with their own individual subjective experience could develop within a single universal mind.

Cognitive psychologist [[Donald D. Hoffman]] uses a mathematical model based around conscious agents, within a fundamentally conscious universe, to support [[Panpsychism#Conscious realism|conscious realism]] as a description of nature—one that falls within the objective idealism approaches to the hard problem: "The objective world, i.e., the world whose existence does not depend on the perceptions of a particular conscious agent, consists entirely of conscious agents."<ref name="hoffman-2008">{{cite journal|last1=Hoffman|first1=Donald D.|title=Conscious Realism and the Mind–Body Problem|journal=Mind and Matter|date=2008|volume=6|issue=1|pages=87–121|s2cid=3175512}}</ref>

David Chalmers calls this form of idealism one of "the handful of promising approaches to the mind–body problem."<ref name="chalmers-idealism">{{cite encyclopedia|last=Chalmers|first=David J.|author-link=David Chalmers|editor-last=Seager|editor-first=William|editor-link=William Seager (philosopher)|encyclopedia=The Routledge Handbook of Panpsychism|title=Idealism and the Mind–Body Problem|publisher=Routledge|isbn=978-1138817135| url=http://consc.net/papers/idealism.pdf|access-date=2 December 2019|date=2020|quote=Overall, I think cosmic idealism is the most promising version of idealism, and is about as promising as any version of panpsychism. It should be on the list of the handful of promising approaches to the mind–body problem.}}</ref>