Hi Gerald

Fascinating and thoughtful as always. I may come back and respond more, but two clarifications for now.

I just saw an interview with Bernardo Kastrup where he quite clearly defines his "Mind At Large" idealist concept as basically involving ONLY phenomenal consciousness - and he explicitly said this is essentially the same phenomenal consciousness that is found in mammals, reptiles and - yes - insects.

This is pretty much the same way he defined it back when I was co-moderator of one of his forums, about 8 years ago. So without going into more detail, I think we can be quite confident that kastrup's ocean of consciousness is profoundly different from the God of Abraham, the Brahman of Vedanta, the Buddha Nature of the Mahayana Buddhists, and, well, just about any genuine contemplative (I'll leave it to y'all to assess who or what is a genuine contemplative)

regarding panpsychism and dualism - there are different varieties of panpsychism. Bernardo is actually pretty good on this one.

There's "constitutive" panpsychism, which pretty much accepts matter as (mis)understood by most scientists (yes, I'm willing to have a long detailed conversation on that misunderstanding if anyone is shocked by that statement). So it ends up being kind of a primitive dualism.

But there is 'Top down" panpsychism which is almost indistinguishable from neutral monism - that is, which sees mind and matter as co-existing throughout the universe, and both as manifestations or reflections of some greater reality.

Good work, keep it up.,