While the idea that everything is consciousness is parsimonious, could it in its own way be as incomplete and unsatisfying as the materialistic paradigm that says we are biological robots?
I do really like the parsimony of Idealism. Bernardo, having a scientific mind, not unnaturally tends to value that highly. However, he does say he's not out to create a TOE, and is limiting himself to his central thesis. I think that's a good idea and one, by the by, more likely to engage the mind of non-fanatical materialists.
So yes, in a way it's incomplete and unsatisfying, but I don't think Bernardo has tried to make it complete and thereby able to explain everything. I read that as humility, actually.
Expanding on my comment that I find his version of Idealism rather slippery, I suppose that I (and probably others) try to complete the picture, i.e. to produce the TOE that Bernardo hasn't. So if I think about something he mentioned--whether there's some kind of direction or plan as opposed to things evolving as they go along--I don't actually get that much help from his model. But in a way it's a good thing that he doesn't try to resolve that question, and as he indicates, his central thesis doesn't preclude a variety of possibilities.
I sometimes see evidence for planning, e.g. when I look at difficult problems like the origin and evolution of life. Even at the level of a unicellular organism, the complexity and degree of organisation is simply staggering; I think that Source Consciousness must be incomprehensibly intelligent, and that anything that intelligent must be capable of planning. At the same time, there's also evidence that there's some kind of contingency involved, and it looks almost as if SC is learning as it goes along. Maybe organic evolution is the image in SC's mind of an unfolding process that It is exploring and identifying with in Its grand dream of the universe--or something like that?
I find that I sometimes struggle with deciding what the best approach to Bernardo's model might be. Should one start with considering one's individual, localised consciousness and try to think expansively towards an appreciation of SC, or is it more productive to try to go in the opposite direction? I flip-flop about this.
Since SC is the source of all manifestation, it's logical to start by considering It; but my own limited localisation of consciousness is hardly up to the job: I can only think of what it's like to be SC by projection from my localised perspective, in which much is obfuscated. So I have no choice really but to start the other way round, which is an exercise seemingly doomed to failure: since, if SC can be understood at all, it's likely that only SC can possess that understanding. And out of that, a lot of dissatisfaction arises, but that's not a fault of Bernardo's conceptual model; any model whatsoever of the universe is bound to be unsatisfying. I can only say that it's the
least unsatisfying model I've come across so far: the one with the most explanatory power and likely the most potential to accommodate my future speculations.
I liked Sciborg's quote from Jorge Luis Borges:
"...it is clear that there is no classification of the Universe not being arbitrary and full of conjectures. The reason for this is very simple: we do not know what thing the universe is...".
Wrapped up in that is the message that it's difficult to stop ourselves conjecturing: trying to come to know because we know we don't already know. We're seemingly hard wired to try to come to know. Any time we stop trying to come to know, perhaps because we've convinced ourselves we know already, then the possibility of making progress stalls: we fall into a kind of deep, dreamless sleep.
Maybe this is the meaning of separation; the meaning of hell, as a Scottish Catholic nun, sister Anselm, once told a class of of five-year-olds of which I was a member. I never forgot it, though at the time it made no sense: weren't the flames of hell much worse than merely being separated from God? The old bat must have been crazy, surely--or was she crazy like a fox?