First-Principles Assessment: Physicalism and Idealism at First Principles

Abstract: Physicalism and analytic idealism are compared at the level of first principles — not theory maturity, not evidential closure, not institutional success — using five symmetric criteria that both frameworks accept: epistemic direction, brute-fact placement, handling of the hard problem, parsimony of ontological categories, and self-referential coherence. A key distinction structures the comparison: category-crossing transitions (generating a new ontological kind from primitives that exclude it) carry greater epistemic cost than intra-category costs (explaining the specific structure of an already-accepted primitive), because the former have no known direction of approach while the latter admit of progressive elaboration. The three strongest physicalist responses — the phenomenal concept strategy, a posteriori identity, and Russellian monism — are engaged on their own terms. The assessment: analytic idealism currently commits fewer unjustified epistemic inversions at the foundational level while remaining empirically adequate. The verdict is explicitly conditional — the essay specifies what developments would change the result — and names idealism's genuine vulnerabilities (the granularity problem, the absence of mid-level bridge theories) alongside physicalism's structural costs. The aim is adjudication, not advocacy: the criteria are shared, the standards are symmetric, and the finding is revisable. Keywords: first-principles analysis · epistemic direction · hard problem of consciousness · parsimony · analytic idealism · physicalism · epistemic inversion · brute facts

Part of the Return to Consciousness research program — 30 philosophical essays exploring consciousness-first metaphysics.

Full project: https://returntoconsciousness.org/