First-Principles Assessment: Physicalism and Idealism at First Principles

Abstract: Comparison between physicalism and analytic idealism typically operates under standards that favor physicalism — predictive track records, institutional maturity, the appearance of neutrality — that rule the question out before it can be asked. This essay conducts the comparison under five symmetric first-principles criteria that both frameworks accept: epistemic direction, brute-fact placement, hard-problem handling, parsimony of ontological categories, and self-referential coherence. A single distinction does most of the work: category-crossing transitions (generating a new ontological kind from primitives that exclude it) carry greater epistemic cost than intra-category costs (explaining the structure of an already-accepted primitive), because the former have no known way forward while the latter can be progressively articulated. The strongest physicalist responses (phenomenal concept strategy, a posteriori identity) are engaged on their own terms; Russellian monism is parsed as a family of variants, leaving the verdict against non-experiential physicalism unaffected. Under symmetric standards, analytic idealism currently commits fewer unjustified epistemic inversions: it dissolves the hard problem by placing its brute fact differently, carries only an intra-category debt (the granularity problem) rather than a category-crossing transition, and avoids ranking what is known indirectly above what is known directly. The granularity debt is real but bounded — its structural side is substantially developed, and its specific side reaches the framework's principled stopping point. The verdict is conditional and revisable; the essay specifies what would change it. The aim is adjudication, not advocacy. 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/