Phase and the Fractured Self: Bernardo Kastrup and the Mathematics of Mind
When I first began writing The Dream of Matter, I was naturally curious about collective thinking around the nature of reality and consciousness. I googled a list of the “top 50 living philosophers” to see who was shaping the modern discourse. I assumed, perhaps naively, that many of them would be wrestling with the same questions that had seized me for years—questions about the structure of consciousness, the origin of experience, and the architecture of existence itself.
What I found instead was a field almost entirely captured by scientific materialism, with a few flirtations toward panpsychism. Almost no one was questioning the foundational assumption that the universe is made of “stuff.” It was as if the ontological debate had ended with the Enlightenment, and everyone had quietly pivoted to epistemology, logic, or morality.
At one point, I brought up my fascination with Pythagorean thinking to a friend—how much explanatory power it seemed to have, and how it had matured over centuries. Why wasn’t anyone talking about it? He responded with surprising intensity: the greatest minds, he insisted, hadconsidered it, found it unworkable, and moved on. I was struck by his passion for the point. Though in hindsight, his existentialist leanings probably colored the conversation more than I realized. After all, if there is such a thing as a ground truth—something beneath opinion, beneath narrative—then some of us are bound to be wrong. And if that’s the case, we may be far more responsible for the consequences of our metaphysics than we’d like to admit.
In any case, doesn’t everything else ultimately rest on the ontological foundations we accept? If we’re wrong about what reality is, aren’t we potentially building all our moral and epistemological frameworks on the wrong substrate? And what, really, is the positive evidence that materialism is the final word?
I kept searching.
Then I found Bernardo Kastrup.
Kastrup didn’t just question materialism. He dismantled it. With surgical clarity, he reveals how incoherent the prevailing view of consciousness is—how it smuggles in assumptions, mistakes metaphor for mechanism, and retreats from explanation in favor of statistical utility. I ate it up. His books aren’t just critiques. They’re invitations. They give voice to what so many have felt but didn’t quite know how to say: that mind is not in matter—matter is in mind.
But as I continued reading—especially Analytic Idealism in a Nutshell and Why Materialism Is Baloney—I felt a familiar itch. Kastrup opens the door, but doesn’t always walk all the way through it. His philosophy is metaphysically bold, but I think we can push it further. He tells us what reality is but hesitates to describe its formal nature—how it’s built, how it evolves, how its internal logic works.
If reality is mind-like, can we explore its structure—not just its mood?
Ontological Mathematics as a Framework for Structure
This is where Ontological Mathematics steps in. It’s a rationalist idealist framework—nearly 2,500 years in development—that attempts to supply the architectural scaffolding that Analytic Idealism points toward. Where Kastrup argues what the universe is made of—mind—Ontological Mathematics offers insight into how that mind is structured.
Before you go Googling the term, a word of caution: the material associated with Ontological Mathematics is uneven in its public presentation. Some of it has been picked up by fringe personalities or rebranded to serve self-promotional agendas, which often does more harm than good. In other cases, it has remained inside its own intellectual bubble, with most discussion happening among students of the original texts.
This means it hasn’t yet broken into the philosophical mainstream. But it should be taken seriously. The core library—spanning over 200 books, primarily by the pseudonymous Mike Hockney and Dr. Thomas Stark—offers tens of millions of words of highly developed metaphysical reasoning, logic, and mathematical metaphysics. These works remain largely ignored, but they contain the kind of rigorous ontological depth that systems like Analytic Idealism could benefit from integrating.
That said, the learning curve is steep. Ontological Mathematics demands a radically different mode of thought—one that prioritizes pure reason over empirical approximation, and abstract mathematical logic over sensory intuition. It’s not light reading. But that’s part of what makes it powerful: it doesn’t aim to entertain—it aims to explain. And in doing so, it asks us to grow into a new level of intellectual engagement.
The Physics of Thought: Interference and Identity
In Ontological Mathematics, every monad—every mind—is a frequency structure, made up of infinite sinusoidal waves. Not metaphorically, but ontologically. The basic unit of reality isn’t a particle or a field, but a wave. Each wave is defined by three parameters:
Frequency: the archetypal nature of the signal
Amplitude: how strongly the signal expresses itself
Phase: the wave’s relative position, which determines how it interacts with others
Phase is what gives the pattern its structure. It determines how waves interfere—how signals amplify or cancel each other.
When waves are in phase, they reinforce each other—constructive interference. This might show up experientially as clarity, flow, or internal resonance. When waves are out of phase, they cancel—destructive interference. That might look like psychological conflict, inner fragmentation, or paralysis.
Most of the time, our minds are running on a mix of both. Some parts support each other. Others conflict. And some are so out of sync they don’t even register—they’re ignored, exiled, or repressed. The self isn’t a fixed entity. It’s a shifting field of phase interactions.
This is where individuation comes in—not as a mystical or poetic idea, but as a real mathematical process. Growth means reducing internal phase conflict. It means bringing more of the self into coherence.
And this same logic scales.
Just as a person becomes more integrated by tuning their own signals, a society becomes more coherent when its minds align—not identically, but structurally. Ontological Mathematics calls this the General Will, referencing Rousseau’s Social Contract. Not a forced consensus, but a shared vector—a resonance that emerges when thought itself becomes structured.
Plurality and the Hive Field
This model also offers a crucial reframing of what “oneness” means. Kastrup often describes the universe as a single mind that dissociates into alters. But Ontological Mathematics suggests something different: not one mind splintering, but countless minds—monads—that were always distinct, yet functionally unified.
Think of it as a phase-locked field of individuated minds. At maximal coherence, they behave as one. But when phase relationships begin to drift, the field fragments—not ontologically, but functionally. The “One Mind” is not a metaphysical given, but an emergent harmony of many.
Schopenhauer gave us will. Hegel gave us reason. Kastrup inherits Schopenhauer’s view—a universe of blind striving and experiential fragmentation. But Ont Math reframes this. What appears as chaos may only look that way from within a dissonant system. The conflict is real—but not fundamental. It’s interference. Misalignment. Signals falling out of tune.
This also recontextualizes trauma—not as a metaphysical wound in the divine psyche, but as signal disruption in a field of autonomous minds. The problem isn’t that unity broke apart—it’s that coherence was lost. And it can be restored.
From Dissociation to Differentiation
In this light, dissociation isn’t the fragmentation of a singular self—it’s the natural condition of a field of selves that haven’t yet achieved harmonic resonance.
Kastrup’s idea of cosmic dissociation likens the universe to a single psyche expressing multiple personalities. It’s compelling, but incomplete. It frames the alter as secondary. Ontological Mathematics says otherwise: each alter is primary. Each monad is its own eternal self, expressing a portion of the infinite waveform of mind.
DID, then, isn’t a window into the cosmos fracturing—it’s a magnified view of what happens when signal structures become dissonant, whether in one psyche or a collective field. What we call “personality” may be a transient phase pattern—a momentary rhythm of interference among internal subsystems.
Dissociation is everywhere. In the individual. In the collective. In culture, identity, and cognition. But it’s not a flaw. It’s a condition that points toward its own resolution.
A Purpose Beyond Process
Kastrup often avoids teleology. He sees the universe as an unfolding of experience—not necessarily toward any end. But if reality is structured, if it has logical form, then it’s fair to ask: what is that structure doing?
Ontological Mathematics says coherence is the attractor. Not because it’s morally superior, but because it’s mathematically inevitable. Rational structures seek phase alignment. Monads optimize themselves. Minds seek harmony. Not because they’re told to—but because that’s what self-solving equations do.
Seen this way, individuation isn’t a process of escaping difference—it’s the work of refining signal relationships. Identity doesn’t dissolve—it harmonizes. The Absolute isn’t a deity or a mystical void. It’s the Omega Point: the final state of maximal coherence across a differentiated field.
Brain, Mind, and the Collective Field
This framework doesn’t stay in the clouds. It reaches down into neurology, psychology, and embodied experience.
The brain, in this view, isn’t the source of mind. It’s a projection field—an emergent structure shaped by the internal logic of the soul. Neuroscience can observe its syntax—its rhythms, its networks—but not its semantics: the meaning those rhythms encode. That meaning is known only from the inside.
Still, traces remain. EEG research shows that mental health may be a matter of phase relationships. Dissociation, depression, ADHD—these may not be dysfunctions of tissue, but signal conflicts. Many disorders are, quite literally, minds out of tune with themselves.
And because the brain is plastic—because it learns—it can also retune. Neurotherapy is already exploring this. Ont Math simply gives it a deeper theoretical scaffold.
If the soul expresses itself through signal logic, then the EEG may provide a map of the self’s internal clarity—or its fragmentation. We might be seeing, in those lines and squiggles, the visible edge of a deeper metaphysical pattern.
Coherence as a Destination
Coherence, then, isn’t just a metaphor. It’s a state. A condition. A destination.
Kastrup helped bring idealism back to the philosophical table. He reminded us that consciousness is primary, and that mind—not matter—is the substrate. But if experience is the ground, then structure is the path. Analytic Idealism cracked open the vault. Ontological Mathematics begins to diagram the architecture.
And that brings us back to the brain—and to the soul.
If mind is real, its logic should be legible. If the soul is not a metaphor but a mathematically describable field, then coherence is not just something we feel—it’s something we can foster. Maybe we’re not just meaning-making machines. Maybe we’re tuning forks—each trying to find the right resonance in the field.
And maybe what we call enlightenment isn’t the end of differentiation—but the moment the signal clicks into place.