The idea that reality is fundamentally thought, consciousness, or an idea, as opposed to physical matter, atoms, or particles, is becoming more main stream. The many problems with scientific materialism are finally coming home to roost. But this does not mean reality just is how it appears to be in our own private consciousness of it, writes Bernardo Kastrup.

When we look around ourselves, we perceive a world of qualities: colours, melodies, textures, scents, and flavours. With the automatism of a reflex, we then take it for granted that these qualities are the world; that is, that the world out there, as it is in itself, is made of the colours, melodies, scents, and flavours that appear on the screen of our perception.

Yet, our mainstream metaphysics—physicalism—denies that: according to physicalism, all those qualities exist solely inside our skull, in that they are somehow—nobody has ever coherently and explicitly specified how—conjured up into existence by our brain activity. The world, as it is outside the screen of perception, has no intrinsic qualities. Instead, it is supposed to be a realm of pure quantitative abstraction, which one cannot even visualise, for any visualisation already entails qualities. In other words, the world out there has mass, charge, spin, and linear momentum, but not colour, texture, scent or flavour.