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Curiosity Drive @[email protected] · 2026-01-24 · 04:11 UTC
North Island down the middle
Not only did we find ourselves back in NZ, but back in a van—albeit for a short tour in North Island this time.
Coordinates
Auckland
Smaller than our live-aboard 2022–24 home Curiosity, the family’s rejuvenated camper is an ex-rental KEA Nomad M700. A common sight on NZ roads, the 7m Sprinter conversion’s rear bed/ barn door combo offers up those archetypal morning views (📷1). From pitch at Ardmore Airfield we made our way to Pine Harbour, enjoying views to the volcanic Rangitoto Island (📷2). We continued along the Pōhutukawa Coast, via Ōmana and a very busy Maraetai, to Umupuia. When B grew up here the latter was known as Duders Beach; the family homestead is still nestled into the base of Whakakaiwhara Peninsula, now occupied by Duder Regional Park (📷3). On to Clevedon, location of B’s old primary school and scout den at Camp Sladdin. Behind the camp is Clevedon Scenic Reserve | Te Nīkau Pā; we combined the Tōtara and Puriri tracks for a 3km/ 1h loop via a lookout from which we could see central Auckland, the mouth of the Wairoa River and Hauraki Gulf (📷4), and the Hunua Ranges. The Puriri section is dubbed “Stairway to Heaven” after its almost 1,000 wooden steps.
The KEA Nomad M700: the family’s “new” used wheels
KEA Nomad M700
Key features:
- Mercedes-Benz Sprinter 314 CDI [3.5-ton weight class, 143 PS/ 105 kW power output, 2.1 L/ 2,143 cm3 OM651 4-cylinder common-rail direct-injection diesel]
- LWB [4,325 mm], built on the VS30 [3rd Gen] platform, model series BR907/ body variant W907 [panel/ crew van chassis]
- Rear wheel drive; 7-gear automatic transmission
- Dimensions: L 6,967 mm; W 2,345 mm; H 2,365 mm
- 3 belted seats; cab-only air con, cruise control
- XTRONS PX5 Android 8.0 head unit with Bluetooth and reversing camera display
- Tare 2,275 kg = unladen mass; GVM 3,490 kg = tare + payload (1,215 kg)
- Beds 1.91 x 1.78m rear + 1.75 x 0.66 m front
- Webasto Air Top 2000 STC diesel heater
- Sink; 3-burner gas hob; 2-burner slide-out BBQ; gas-fired Suburban water heater
- 130 L, 12 V compressor fridge
- 100 Ah deep cycle AGM house battery + solar panel & PWM solar charger
- Underslung tanks: 85 L fresh water; 104 L grey water
- Thetford C402 bench-type chemical toilet and shower/ handbasin
- Evoke DVB-T TV and Majestic radio/ CD player
🤔 Curiosity

Now for a brief insight into road trip sustenance (professional etiquette and dirty looks from S prohibit B from using the word “nutrition”). Two cups of fresh filter coffee for breakfast (📷1). What do you mean, you need solids? The ubiquitous Kiwi favourite, a savoury pie for lunch; this one is steak and cheese (📷2). Afternoon tea at the beach in the form of a Tip Top Jelly Tip ice cream (📷3)—although when B was a lad there was less tip but actual jelly! For dinner, fish and chips seemed like the perfect way to end a day on the road (📷4). Add in a Longest Drink in Town milkshake, because fish like to swim. The inevitable post-prandial slide from anticipation into regret is readily ameliorated with an alcoholic beverage of your choice.
Waikato
We called at Robert Findlay Wildlife Reserve at Pūkorokoro | Miranda in the Firth of Thames, where intertidal mudflats attract Artic migrants in summer e.g. kuaka | bar-tailed godwit, seen here airborne together with NZ migrant tōrea | South Island pied oystercatcher (📷1). Another NZ migrant, this taranui | Caspian tern had a catch in its beak (📷2); we also saw year round residents e.g. tūturiwhatu | northern NZ dotterel and poaka | pied stilt. We drove on to Thames hoping for a bottle of colour-changing Awildian gin, but The Tasting Room were on summer break. Located on the gravel road over the Coromandel Range linking Tapu to Coroglen, Rapaura Watergardens were created in the early 1960s by a German family; they offer a 2km trail through manicured pond-side planting and regenerating native bush with cascades (📷3). A short drive east on the same road is a 175m DOC track to a ~1,200 year old “Square Kauri”, although the squarish trunk of this forest giant is hard to appreciate in a 2D photo (📷4). The tree’s viewing platform also looks out to Maumaupaki | Camels Back at 822m.
It’s nice revisiting a place and not having to do/ re-do the “main thing” that the masses have come for; we eschewed Cathedral Cove at Hahei. The Coromandel settlement’s long beach is a fine specimen, deservedly popular on a summer’s day (📷1). We followed the beach to its end at Wigmore Stream. The lookout at Hereheretaura Pā on Te Pare Point Historic Reserve, set upon high cliffs at the southern end of the beach, is only 20min from the end of Pa Rd (or wade the stream from the beach). The track itself affords elevated views over the length of Hahei Beach (📷2). From the lookout/ pā terraces on the point there are commanding views northeast beyond Mahurangi | Goat Island to the Mercury Islands (📷3), and southeast to the Alderman Islands (📷4). You can also see up the coast to the vicinity of Cathedral Cove, marked by associated water taxi, kayak and other seagoing traffic (📷5).
We’d never been to Te Aroha (in Māori “the love”). The township arose with the opening of goldfields in 1880, but when those failed it relied for a time on hot springs as a spa town. Visitors can still buy access to mineral pools; Mōkena Geyser was on an extended summer break. Like many NZ small towns, Te Aroha has seen better days, but a heritage trail explores noteworthy architectural remnants (📷1). In 27° we decided not to climb the Te Aroha peak looming over the town, highest in the Kaimai Range at 953m; we instead followed the inland flank of the range southeast. Wairere Falls near Gordon are North Island’s highest falls (153m tall) and had been on our point-of-interest list in 2022–24, but the track had closed due to rockfall risk. Sad to learn it was still closed, we wondered if the falls could be see from the road: indeed they can (📷2). The track is barricaded before reaching the viewing platforms, and thus delivers only a glimpse from closer by (📷3). However, on the return you can rest in the “International Seat of Peace”, installed by a local farmer to overlook “Paddock 66” and admire the farmscape beyond, including Te Tapui at 492m—around 22km distant to the west of Matamata (📷4). There’s also a swimming hole beneath the bridge, about 10min up the track.
Time for a short (adapted) story?
Once upon a time a boy and girl sought out the Waihou River—but it was too cold for a swim (and discouraged). Te Waihou Walkway (near Putāruru) from Whites Road car park is 4km one way on a well-made path, lined with the burgundy flowers of Himalayan honeysuckle, offering multiple views of the clear waters in which watercress and other aquatic plants sway (📷1). The 11° waters of the Te Puna | Blue Spring spend 50–100 years underground on their journey from the Mamaku Plateau, during which time aquifers filter out light-absorbing particles to imbue the pure water with its blue-green hue (📷2); it’s the source of 70% of NZ’s bottled water.
Grateful for having arrived at 0830h in the now overwhelmed car park, the pair moved on, taking the scenic route through the Waikite Valley to arrive at Waikite Hot Pools—but the water was too hot (and entry fee greater than five nights in an NZMCA Park). Fed by Te Manaroa Spring discharging ~40–50 L per second of almost boiling water (📷3), it needs cooling before bathing use.
Onward the couple went, until they came to Kerosene Creek (Hakereteke Stream) near Maunga Kākaramea. Here they sighed, as the water was just right. The access road was in poor condition, yet the reward… rarely do you lower yourself into a stream in nature slowly because it’s a tad too warm (📷4)!
Here’s a brief recording made in one of the hot pools within the creek:
Manawatū
Departing from pitch in a grey and damp Taupō we made use of a laundrette and observed the latest in gumboot fashion in Taihape before deviating east from SH1 onto the Manawatū Scenic Route—a winding drive through rugged farming country (📷1). We stopped to overlook the Ruahine Dress Circle, a papa formation on the Mangawharariki Stream, so named because it reminded early settlers of an opera house fixture (📷2). The small reserve here features a swimming hole at the base of a horse-tail waterfall (📷3). Just upstream layers of papa (“earth” in Māori, referring to soft blue-grey mudstone) have eroded differentially: undermining has resulted in a partially suspended section of faux stream bed (📷4).
We’re fond of Rangiwahia in northern Manawatū: this small farming community has a great park-over property (POP) with excellent amenities and local info. Rangiwahia Hut Track in the Ruahine Forest Park was on our list but missed last visit, due to bad weather. It begins at Renfrew Road end (drive through a couple of stock gates) and climbs 4.2km/ 2h to Rangiwahia Hut, offering clear views to Mount Ruapehu—almost 80km distant—even from the lower end (📷1). About 1.5km in, the hillside is predominantly endemic Pseudowintera colorata | mountain horopito | NZ pepper tree, a “pioneer plant” recognisable by red/ purple staining of leaf edges caused by anthocyanin pigments; polygodial is the chemical responsible for its peppery taste and behind Māori medicinal uses (antibacterial, antifungal and anti-inflammatory). Libocedrus bidwillii | pāhautea | mountain cedar, with reddish “flaky pastry” bark, is a threatened endemic tree readily observed here (📷2); as a resinous hardwood, its grey trunks (known as “snags” or “mountain ghosts”) remain standing for some time after death—also well seen on the track. We encountered several other endemics trackside, including the broad-leaved Cordyline indivisa | mountain cabbage tree (📷3); Celmisia spectabilis | cotton daisy (📷4); and Euphrasia cuneata | North Island eyebright (📷5).
Situated above the tree line and set at the edge of a tussock landscape, the present DOC hut at 1327m elevation on the Whanahuia Range (an outlying ridge of the greywacke Ruahine Range) replaces a shepherd’s hut linked to a ski slope established here in the 1930s. Out and back, including lunch at the hut, took us 4.5h:
Rangiwahia Hut
Also on Renfrew Road, Rangiwahia, is the Ian McKean Pinetum, a 14ha family farm planted with one of the Southern Hemisphere’s largest collections of conifers—300 species and 90 pines—including the rarest, largest, tallest and oldest varieties. You could visit purely for views to the cone of Mount Ruapehu if tree cones aren’t your thing.
Conifers and pinesView to Ruapehu
Mangahuia Wetlands on Main South Road, Rangiwahia, are the result of Bourke’s Dam, established 1997. Parking is roadside but due to an adverse camber we walked back 500m. Clearly a project with potential, it had a somewhat neglected feel. Black swan were present and we were aggressively stalked by free-range chickens, one of whom was especially large with a high percentage of velociraptor DNA!
WetlandsChookoraptor stalkersaurus
Limestone Creek Reserve Glow Worm Caves are east of Āpiti; roadside parking/ turning wasn’t ideal for a 7m van. This trail on private property wasn’t maintained and lacked waypoints; it involves several creek crossings. B slipped descending a muddy bank and ended up lying in the creek. Both phone and camera were submerged and the latter was taken out of action. We bailed after further trail finding woes and can’t recommend visiting.
Entry to all three sites is free.
Wellington
Back in the Eye of the Fish, the capital at the Edge of the World (if you know, you know). Hard to believe it’s 20 years since we came to live/ work in Wellington on sabbatical. Of course, it’s not quite as we remember. One can never truly “go back” to a place, for even if it had stood still, you’re no longer the same visitor. The iconic Chocolate Fish Cafe has gone and Leuven Belgian Beer Cafe is soon to close—the leases for both being terminated. An “absolutely positively” attitude isn’t enough to keep businesses afloat in the economic downturn locals tell us the city is experiencing (more so than the country as a whole). Te Papa kept us dry during a wet welcome (📷1). When the rain stopped we had a last beer at Leuven (📷2), then on to Wellington Seamarket (Cuba St) for the best crumbed tarakihi, followed by Kaffee Eis for tasty feijoa and black liquorice ice cream (📷3). An evening stroll along Oriental Parade helped it all settle (📷4).
Migration to New Zealand
An exhibit in Te Papa focussed on New Zealand’s migration history. The main movement of people from Asia into the Pacific took place around 3,500 to 3,000 years ago. This was followed by further colonisation of smaller and more remote islands. A small wave of people from the vicinity of the Society Islands in the eastern Pacific voyaged further south than ever before, and legend tells of Kuramārōtini, wife of Polynesian explorer Kupe, sighting land and exclaiming:
He ao, he ao, he ao tea, he ao tea roa! | A cloud, a cloud, a white cloud, a long white cloud!
Archeological, anthropological and genetic evidence suggests this southern colonisation voyage took place around the late 13th century—c.1250–1300 CE. These first migrants were the forebears of the Māori.
The next big wave of migration comprised “boatfuls of hopefuls” who arrived during the 1840–60s: some 40,000 people, who were mostly British. Their hopes centred on being able to buy land, and organisations like The New Zealand Company provided for their passage to incentivise purchase of land at considerable profit (having themselves acquired it cheaply from Māori). By 1858 there were almost as many Europeans in New Zealand as there were Māori.
European numbers swelled via “chain migration”, whereby family and friends from the same areas followed in subsequent sailings (as per the Highland Scots “Waipū Migration”). Passage was typically uncomfortable, with most accommodated in “steerage class” (dark bunk rooms, left to their own devices) rather than “intermediate class” (small cabin, some luxuries) or “cabin class” (best cabins, with attendants). Thus, many New Zealanders can trace their descent via these 19th C. “chain migrants” from England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. Imagine, off the back of a rough trip, arriving on far-flung and foreign shores. In 1853 Henry Sewell, a migrant from England, recorded his observations:
Everything very strange. I can hardly tell what my first impressions were. I think the main idea was of newness and unfinishedness—every thing appearing as if done yesterday in a great hurry
🤔 Curiosity

We’ve probably visited Zealandia, a predator-free ecosanctuary in Wellington’s Karori suburb, every time we’ve come to Welly. But never have we seen so many tuatara out of their burrows at once (📷1). This endemic reptile (Sphenodon punctatus) is the only surviving species from an order that thrived 200,000,000 years ago; we had the luck to meet one outside of the enclosure and get eye-to-eye with this living relic (📷2). Kākā | Nestor meridionalis is a large endangered parrot readily seen in the skies and around feeders here (📷3). Tūī | Prosthemadera novaeseelandiae may not rival kākā for size despite being one of the largest Australasian honeyeaters (📷4), but they sure do give NZ’s only other endemic honeyeater, the korimako | bellbird | Anthornis melanura—also seen and heard here (📷5)—stiff competition as bush song meister.
Water birds are present at Zealandia too, as there are a couple of reservoirs within the sanctuary. Examples are the kāruhiruhi | pied shag | Phalacrocorax varius, a.k.a. Australian pied cormorant (📷1) and papango | NZ scaup | Aythya novaeseelandiae, a species of diving duck (📷2). On the forest paths, do look up! The endemic North Island robin | Petroica longipes (📷3) diverged from its South Island cousin before the Pleistocene, according to DNA analyses. Just as we’d given up on getting a good look at a North Island saddleback | Philesturnus rufusater, having heard the distinctive cackle of several, one obliged with a brief appearance (📷4).
Wait, bird photos? How? Despite the creek dunking the Canon EOS R7 took and visible water residue inside the lens, it seems to be (mostly) working again!
Wairarapa
The long weekend (due to Wellington Anniversary Day) got off to a windy and wet start; our empathy went to the tent campers beside us at Kaitoke Regional Park (📷1). Crossing the Remutaka Range into the Wairarapa, we wandered bustling Greytown and a relatively subdued Martinborough (📷2) before making for the freedom camp at Lake Domain, on the northern shore of Wairarapa Moana Wetland. After a quiet night (deliberately parking nose into the wind) we called in for treats at Carterton’s deservedly popular Clareville Bakery (📷3), to enjoy later with coffee after a walk/ sandblasting on Riversdale Beach (📷4). At the beach’s northern end we encountered terns, oystercatchers, dotterels, pied stilts and fur seals; the Castlepoint headland loomed on the hazy horizon.
A damp ending
In February 2023 we were working our way north from the Wairarapa into the eastern Manawatū when Cyclone Gabrielle came barrelling down the East Coast. We bailed on visiting Mangatiti Falls, instead bolting through the gap between the Tararua & Ruahine ranges to relative safety deep in the Whanganui. Three years later, Mangatiti Falls on the Aohanga River can still be accessed with permission via private farmland on Coast Road, Pongaroa. It’s a 1h winding drive in from SH2 just south of Mangatainoka, although sealed and in good condition. Phone farm owners Debbie and Marty in advance to arrange your visit; you’ll sign a waiver at the farmhouse, as this is a working stock farm (📷1). Indeed, we were mobbed by curious cattle and chose to yield ground (given a prior head-butting incident with a young bull), so viewed the falls from a distance (📷2&3). It is possible, however, to scramble down into their basin. There’s a freedom camp not 1km from the farm (Four Mile Bush Reserve).
We had planned to continue our return north via Hawke Bay, East Cape and the Bay of Plenty. With SH2 between Gisborne and Whakatāne already closed due to slips (campers were airlifted out) and red rain warnings for East Cape with its vulnerable coastal road, we took the same escape route as three years prior. With the Ruahine Range now on our starboard flank, we stopped for lunch at Stormy Point Lookout—overlooking one of the best-preserved sequences of river terraces in the world:
View from Stormy Point Lookout in the Manawatū
Our change of plan was prudent, as weather-related disasters unfolded along our intended route. Thus, we wrapped up our North Island tour early. Although we were fine, heavy rains caused problems that for some people go well beyond damage to the road network. It wouldn’t have felt right to tour into areas recently/ still affected by the storms, and we’d had our own (comparatively minor) issues with water. First, a leaking roof caused by a negligent reversing camera installation, and then an internal water leak. These things do happen in vans, but the fun had gone out of our tour, and we needed workshop time.
More adventures will follow: we’ll soon be trying out a 4WD camper in Australia. Meantime, our thoughts go out to those dealing with damage to their homes—or worse.
#2026 #auckland #camperVan #coromandel #hiking #manawatu #motorhome #nature #newZealand #nomad #northland #roadTrip #rv #travel #vanLife #waikato #wairarapa #wellington
#wellington #wairarapa #waikato #vanlife #travel #rv
Gardiner Bryant @[email protected] · 2026-03-16 · 12:24 UTC

The Digital Plague: When World of Warcraft Accidentally Simulated a Pandemic In 2005, a bug in World of Warcraft turned Azeroth into a virtual pandemic, and gave scientists a rare glimpse into human behavior durin... #Retrospectives #Gaming #BryantReview gardinerbryant.com/the-digital-...

The Digital Plague: When World...

#retrospectives #gaming #bryantreview
Jason Elrod :cupofcoffee: :donor: @[email protected] · 2022-12-02 · 03:32 UTC

Etiquette matters so here is my #introduction post:

I’m Jason and I spend most of my time around northern Nevada near Lake Tahoe in a small town that could easily be mistaken for something out of a #Hallmark movie (which is probably because it was actually used in a Hallmark movie).

I am a long time IT leader with #InfoSec being my primary focus for the last 20+ years. I work as a #CISO in #healthcare and build, mature, and lead teams to address the entire #InformationSecurity spectrum (and then some). I believe that the job of a #leader is to build other leaders and I 100% know that any successful program is built first through its people. My guiding principles are to always be learning, optimizing, taking ownership, and focusing on results.

When I am not fighting on the frontlines of the cyberwar, I spend time as an #advisor and #mentor to businesses and individuals as well as being a regular #speaker on the topics of #cybersecurity, technical #risk, and organizational #leadership. If you have a #podcast or are looking for someone to join a panel or speak at your event or organization, then let me know. Maybe we can arrange something.

Finally, a few hashtags to get a glimpse into the rest of my world: #running #skiing #motorcycle #kayaking #martialarts #guitar #hiking #writing #reading #naps #biohacking #family #personalimprovement #languages #notcooking

-J

#introduction #hallmark #infosec #ciso #healthcare #informationsecurity
Mastodon Migration @[email protected] · 2023-02-05 · 20:20 UTC

#MastodonGuides Feb 5, 2023
The amazing hachyderm admin Kris Nóva @nova just presented an fantastic talk at #fosdem about managing growth over the last few months. Here is her excellent blog post on the subject:
Kris Nóva: Leaving the Basement >>> https://community.hachyderm.io/blog/2022/12/03/leaving-the-basement/
Even if you are not technical, this is an astonishing glimpse into the work going on behind the scenes to make Mastodon a reality. Thank you Kris!
#twittermigration #mastoadmin
More Guides >>> https://medium.com/@mastodonmigration/sharing-advice-and-assisting-with-the-great-mastodon-migration-53c1a286b805#1ad8

#mastoadmin #twittermigration #fosdem #mastodonguides
Mark Prince @[email protected] · 2009-09-02 · 11:58 UTC
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A First Look atKvdW Speester

Back in 2001, a fellow by the name of Kees van der Westen had already made a big name for himself as an artist with metalwork and someone who loved espresso and the technology behind it. He’d designed one-off machines for some of the top echelon of the espresso world for almost two decades by that point, including machines showcased at La Marzocco, used at Espresso Vivace, and dreamed of by a yet to be started up roastery in Portland known as Stumptown. He was well into the run of building his fabled Mistral lineup of machines, using La Marzocco parts; mainly from Lineas.
van der Westen had spare machine parts in ample supply because he was the distributor and service agent for La Marzocco in Holland at the time. Lineas were La Marzocco’s sole machine during that period, but van der Westen also had a collection of old GS/2 machines – single and double groups – at a time when La Marzocco had long ceased production of the machine. As he puts it himself on his website,
“Through the years we acquired some of the old type paddle-groups from the GS machines. As we could not bring ourselves to dump these we eventually decided to use these in a fun-project: building a small series of one-group machines, especially designed to use these groups for their proper purpose. This machine was called Speedster.”
The Speedster of that era was about as old school inside as you could get. It featured the original GS’s same-size boilers used for both brewing and steaming. It was almost entirely mechanical, with no temperature stability or state of the art electronics. It did however feature three key things – the iconic and revolutionary La Marzocco paddle group; the aforementioned dual boiler setup; and the complete uniqueness of van der Westen’s design skills.

Original Speedster
One of the six original Speedsters built in 2001; features La Marzocco boilers, paddle group.
Only six were built. I first saw the Speedster back in 2002 when I was at La Marzocco’s Seattle office for a meeting about developing the machine that would eventually become the GS/3. Kent Bakke was one of the purchasers of those Speedsters and had it proudly on display in his showroom at La Marzocco. I still remember my first glimpse of the machine, and this was after I’d been wow’ed by another van der Westen artwork piece Bakke owned and had on display: the Zizi lever group machine. As impressive (and big) as the Zizi was, the Speedster almost seemed on a different plane. Where the Zizi was huge and a lever and a complete work of art (definitely forsaking a certain amount of usability for the art), the Speedster encompassed art, design, style, and usability. It was small. It had dual boilers. It had a GS/2 paddle group. It was completely unique. I’d never seen a machine like it before.I even got a chance to pull shots on it, and immediately felt this was a singular moment in my coffee and espresso career (and to put that into perspective, I was at a meeting for the development of the GS/3!). Everything “clicked” – the machine felt comfortable. It steamed exceptionally well. The paddle group put you, as a barista, in direct connection with the machine. It was tight, light, solid, beautiful, industrial, exceptional all at the same time. From that very moment onward, I had it in my mind that, if I ever won a million dollars, I’d make an offer on this machine so I could own my own – and the offer wouldn’t be cheap. After all, van der Westen built only six of these and by 2002, was already saying that was that – there were six and there would be no more.I finally met van der Westen in 2004 at a trade show and we immediately hit it off. He’s a dynamic, energetic fellow (who ironically enough does not like to be photographed); and there’s a clear passion for espresso, espresso technology and art within the man. My first questions to him were “so when are you going to build the Speedster again?” and I got a surprise answer: “find me the guts to a well working GS/2 and I’d be happy to build one!”. I’m not sure if he was joking or not, but I do know two things – I did in fact search for a reasonably priced GS/2 I could salvage and send to van der Westen (hint: I never found one), and secondly, he never did build another paddle group Speedster as far as I know.Over the years, I stayed in contact with van der Westen, and the subject of the Speedster would always come up – are you building them again? Send me a GS/2 and I will. How about a lever Speedster? Oh, you’re a crazy man, Prince.Then in early 2008, during an email conversation with him, van der Westen dropped a bomb: he decided he needed a one group machine to complement and supplement his current line up of state-of-the-art and exceptionally beautiful Mirages and (licensed to La Marzocco) Mistrals, and that one group machine would be a next generation Speedster.It was right at that moment I started socking away $200 a month into a special savings account. And some 18 months later, I became the proud owner of a next-generation Speedster espresso machine from Kees van der Westen.
AboutThe Machine

There’s not much I could write about the technological innards of the Speedster that van der Westen hasn’t already fully detailed himself on his website – but I’ll give it a go, at least from a third party perspective. It’s also important to note that the machine has already seen upgrades and will continue to do so.
The Speedster ships quite complete. In the crate you’ll find:
- all necessary tubing, pressure tubes, connections, etc.
- water softener machine.
- the pump.
- single spout and double spout portafilter (or a chopped portafilter if you ordered one), teflon lined (chopped PFs are not teflon lined).
- Kees van der Westen custom tamper, height adjustable. Heavy, beautiful, mirror polish finish.
- custom Speedster espresso cups – two. These are ltd edition though.
- a cleaning brush (a clone of the Pallo design) in aluminum.
- spare gaskets, filter baskets, blind filter.
- aluminum tamping stand.
- Speedster t-shirt (again ltd item, once gone, no more).
- Speedster instruction manual including setup instructions.
- cleaner.
The shipping crate is 82kg.
Inside is the machine, accessories, pump, water softener.
First glimpse of the Speedster during unpacking.
Very limited edition cups that come with the machine.
A custom-height tamper included with machine.
Little things like the brush, cups, t-shirt, and bigger things like the way-cool tamper make a big difference to the overall package. Seems complete. About the only thing missing is the grinder. By comparison a La Marzocco GS/3 comes with a plastic tamper, bottle of cleaner, two PFs and little else. And no grinder either.
The Speedster Espresso Machine is about as state of the art inside as you can get in today’s espresso world, and is quite different from the 2001 era Speedster, at least inside. The machine is built around a dual boiler, dual PID (proportional–integral–derivative) controller setup to deliver brewing water, heating water and steam.
The boilers feature the latest go-to technology in espresso: the 3.5 litre steam boiler is fitted with a heat exchanger to provide pre-heated water for the smaller 2.3 litre brew boiler. This technology was initially developed for the GS/3 to help with power consumption but it was also found to increase temperature stability, especially shot-to-shot-to-shot performance in all machines, Along with the Speedster, some of the most technologically advanced machines in the world feature this design, including the La Marzocco FB80 and GB/5 series, and the Synesso machines.
Both boilers are controlled via solid state relays, a much more reliable and efficient way to control the heating elements over the old mechanical relays. They are also virtually silent, and much less prone to break down (or wearing down) compared to the older style of relays most machines have.
Taking a peek inside the Speedster takes all of two minutes: four side bolts and three hex bolts in the back and both the side panels and top panel slide off easily. If you’ve seen earlier interior photos of the Speedster (2008 version), things have changed a bit. There are no less than four electronic Parker solenoid valves controlling everything from steam boiler refill to water mix, to injecting the preinfusion chamber unique to the Speedster (and Mirage line from van der Westen). Initially, the Speedster had the steam boiler PID on the right side of the machine, accessible through a maze of copper tubing, but that has since moved to the more clean left side. Also gone from the initial 2008 version is the internal adjustable mix valve the Speedster offered for hot water dispensing; instead there’s a very unique dual mode hot water option available via a front panel rocker switch.
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SpeedsterDesign

There is so much to the design of this machine that is unique and ground breaking.
Let me focus on that one bit for a second. The Speedster’s two ginormous dial handles up front were traditionally for steam (the left side) and hot water (the right side). But on the 2009 edition of the Speedster, the right side dial handle is for show and aesthetics only because accessing hot water on this machine is accomplished via a rocker switch on the right front panel.
Why a rocker switch? van der Westen heard feedback from many professional baristas regarding hot water from a machine. Some wanted a mix valve, pulling both water from a steam boiler (above boiling, usually 275F) and line water (72F) so the resulting water pulled into a cup could be below boiling or usually around 200F. Others wanted steam boiler only water (275F but “flashes” to 212F as it comes out of the tap) for the heat.
van der Westen devised a system in 2009 that provided both, via microswitches, solenoids and computer control and the result was the rocker switch activation for hot water. Flip the switch upward and the hot water tap feeds steam boiler-only water. Flip it down, and you get mixed water – steam boiler and line water – for approximately 200F water at the tap head. Quite ingenious.
Here’s a few more visual features.

An elongated "acorn" tip, this is easily one of the best tips we've ever used in the CoffeeGeek Lab.
The tip has four small holes; the other included tip (the "Mistral Tip") is the same design with bigger holes.
The Speedster uses top-of-the-line Fuji PID controllers for both boilers; the one up front is for the brew boiler, but the K1/K2 are indicators for both PIDs (K1 is front boiler PID). Programming the temperatures is as easy as pressing P for a second and adjusting up or down. Offset can be programmed in (as it is here).
The maze of tubing you see is primarily the heat exchanger tubing, running outside the boilers to cool down HX water before it gets to the brew boiler.
This is the drip tray mount (there's one on each leg up front). It can be slid up or down to give an extra inch in tray height.
This is the up / down rocker switch for delivering two temperatures of hot water.
The screwless dispersion screen; note the centre doesn't have the hole-perforations - that is to further disperse water (which can drain in the middle from the dispersion block)
Flipped up for photographing, the hot water tap's wide articulation of motion and well engineered flow dispersion is top of the line.
I focused on the hot water delivery to prove a point about this machine and about the person who builds it: Kees van der Westen is a details man. Pretty much every aspect of this machine, from the aesthetics, to the usability, to the technology inside shows a supreme attention to detail by an artist and engineer who “gets” modern day espresso.
This isn’t a machine designed by someone who’s building for 10,000 units sold in Spain, or 25,000 units sold in China, where niceties such as temperature stability, steaming ability or manual controls are not valued much. This is machine designed by someone who gets what the modern day professional barista demands from a state of the art espresso brewer. It shows in every single aspect of the machine’s design and function.

SpeedsterPreinfusion System

This is where the Speedster really starts to stand out. When it was first announced that the machine was going to be built again in limited numbers, the prototype machines that van der Westen showed at the Copenhagen World Barista Championships in 2008 were missing something obvious – it was no longer a paddle group machine. Instead, brewing was done via a three-position shift lever on the right side of the front panel.

Preinfusion Piston
Piston is fully engaged (sticking out of the machine) showing full preinfusion.

Here is another example of van der Westen’s brilliance in engineering design – two areas actually. He fully understands the allure and hands-on control that La Marzocco’s 20+ year technology known as the paddle group offered to a professional barista for crafting a shot of espresso. So do Synesso and Slayer – their machines feature paddles for hands on control of preinfusion. van der Westen also believes that the lever group design (for spring piston lever espresso machines) offers the best form of preinfusion and coffee saturation today, which is why his Mirage machine line up includes the Idrocompresso variant.
van der Westen found a way to marry three key desired methodologies in espresso machines – dual boilers, manual preinfusion, piston lever enabled preinfusion – into one machine controlled by solid state relays and PIDs – and this is what makes the Speedster entirely unique. The Mirage lineup are heat exchanger machines (single boilers with heat exchangers for the groupheads); the Speedster is a dual boiler machine that still encompasses all the best from two other machine technologies.
How it works is a bit difficult to explain but we’ll try here. When water for brewing first comes into the machine it actually goes through a heat exchanger in the steam boiler. It gets heated up quite a bit – hotter than what is adequate for brewing in fact – but the machine’s design takes that into account. The brewing water exits the steam boiler heat exchanger and goes through over 50cms (almost 2 feet) of copper tubing that snakes around the back-right side of the machine. The tubing eventually makes it into the brew boiler, where the water is now just slightly below usual boiler water temperature settings.
The brew boiler’s PID is constantly turning on and off the heating element to manage the temperature to 0.1F / 0.1C ranges. At this point the water is approximately 3-4F hotter than your customised brewing temperature (if you’ve programmed the front PID to have a pre-programmed offset).
When you move the shift lever away from its off position, a microswitch is disengaged and one of the machine’s two brewing water solenoids is re-engaged (the one right behind the groupcap) to keep the pressure-release path closed, and the other brewing water solenoid on the right front of the machine is disengaged, allowing water flow from the line pressure (3bar usually) to start flowing into a preinfusion chamber which sits just behind the right front panel.
While this small chamber (not unlike the size and shape of a lever piston’s water chamber) starts filling up with water, the water also flows at normal atmospheric pressure to the grouphead where your coffee is sitting. For approximately 5 to 6 seconds, if you don’t engage the machine’s pump, the coffee is saturated with water being pushed by nothing more than gravity. You also get a visual indication of this via the preinfusion chamber’s most notable design feature – there is a spring-loaded piston that starts to jut out from the front panel of the Speedster as the chamber fills up. As it fully extends, pressure in the grouphead ramps up from normal pressure to 3bar (about 60psi). It will hold steady at this point as long as you don’t move the brewing shift lever to its third position – the pump position.
Shifting the machine into ‘second gear’ means ratcheting the shift lever down to the lowest position and slotting it left into the locked position. At this point, a second microswitch is engaged and the pump starts, delivering 9bar through both the preinfusion chamber and solenoid to start the true espresso brewing process.
Shifting off the second gear lock position does one thing, and one thing only – it disengages the pump. If you don’t put the shift lever back up into the neutral or starting position, the machine keeps the group cap solenoid engaged (ie back pressure is not released) and the preinfusion chamber solenoid disengaged (ie, open flow to grouphead from boiler water); what this means is you can do a preinfusion, brewing via pump, and a post brew using line pressure, if you want. Whether this is a boon or not for espresso brewing quality is not for deciding here – instead, I mention it to show the possibilities a hands-on barista has for fully manipulating water flow and pressure during the entire shot process.
Putting the shift lever back into the neutral position does two things – it closes the brew boiler / preinfusion chamber solenoid, and opens up the back pressure solenoid to instantly relieve the pressure in the brewing group.
On last thing about this preinfusion system. There’s actually two ways it works. If you ratchet the brewing shift lever into the first position (first gear we call it here), you as the barista control the preinfusion and the preinfusion is quite slow since it is entirely based on line water pressure (60psi, 3bar), and not pump pressure (135psi, 9bar). But you can use the van der Westen-designed “programmed” preinfusion by simply ratcheting the shift lever directly into position two (second gear) and letting the preinfusion chamber fill up via pump pressure. It is a faster preinfusion, but a neutral pressure preinfusion none-the-less.
Let’s have a visual look at some of these features.

One of the things that makes the Speedster so special - it's shift lever brewing activation system.
The shift lever arm is perforated, and can ratchet into the first position, right onto that metal bracket sticking out midway - ratcheting below that moves it into pump position.
A lot of people ask what this is. You show them by brewing a shot.
The interior of the shift lever system. Here, at the neutral or off position, it is depressing the top metal microswitch (with a roller-wheel ending for smooth control)
Here, in "1st Gear", the arm is not pressing any microswitch - at this stage, the pressure relief solenoid is closed, but the line water solenoid is open, preinfusing the bed of coffee.
Here, in the "2nd gear" position, the second microswitch is pressed, which engages the machine's pump. It also does other things, like tell the machine's brains to not auto-fill the steam boiler at this time (to make sure 100% of the attention and power of the machine goes to shot brewing)
Here, before starting a shot, the preinfusion piston is flush with the rest of the mounting.
As the preinfusion commences, the chamber behind this piston is filling up, and the piston itself starts to extend out.
Preinfusion continues; if the machine is in 1st gear, it is fairly slow as line pressure slowly builds up. If it were in 2nd gear, this would come out approximately 40% faster.
At this stage (about 6-7 seconds in on line preinfusion, or 3-4 seconds in on pump preinfusion), the chamber is almost full. Water on the bed of coffee is still below 3bar pressure.
Once the piston stops moving, the puck is then saturated with a full 3bar of pressure (or will ramp up to 9bar if you're direct into second gear).
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SpeedsterOther Highlights

The Speedster features three 900 watt heating elements – two in the steam boiler (left and right) and one in the brewing boiler. It runs on 220V, 20amp service, and requires special electrical hookup in N. America in a home environment – you cannot plug this machine into a standard 110V 15amp (or 20amp) plug.
The Speedster also requires plumbing in. You could run it off a water bottle setup with a Flo-jet handling the preinfusion, but to get the full benefits of the multi-preinfusion systems, running a cold water line from a T-valve off your kitchen’s sink is a requirement, not an option.
Little niceties about the machine include the use of POM plastic for the dispersion block inside the grouphead – something I don’t think any other espresso machine uses (at least that I know of). POM is extremely durable, temperature neutral, and very resistant to any kind of oils contamination from the coffee. The dispersion screens are a screwless design (similar to E61 machines) and the grouphead itself is a fully saturated design – the grouphead is in effect part of the brewing boiler – its volume of water is part of the brewing boiler’s overall volume.
There are so many more technological things to talk about with regards to the Speedster but the last we’ll discuss is something that is both elegantly simple and painfully obvious but you have to wonder why something like this is rarely done by other machine builders. The Speedster has a very simple and accessible boiler draining system. If you take the left panel off the machine, you can see two beefy pipes extending out from the two boilers at the bottom of each. These pipes come to the right border of the machine’s frame and have caps on the front and shiny red levers on top. When the machine is cooled down all you need to do to completely drain the boilers is remove the caps, attach hoses to the pipes and open the valves. No bendy-twisty actions to get to a bottom-capped boiler drain. No flipping the machine this way and that to access them. Simple. Elegant. Efficient.

You'll find the dual-ball design of this gear lever for activating brewing to be very comfortable once you use the machine for a few shots.
The Speedster next to a La Marzocco GS3
The switch is huge, and easy to access. I never turn this thing off though.
The drains on the right side of the machine. Clear. Big. Accessible. And very bright candy-red turning dials.
These water drains are a perfect example of what this machine is all about – a complete, state of the art espresso machine designed by a company that pays attention to the smallest most minute details.

SpeedsterAesthetics

It was evident the moment this machine was taken out of its crate – the Speedster is something special, and part of that special-ness comes from the absolute attention to details this machine has been given by the manufacturer.
From the business side of the machine (the operational front), you feel like you’re operating a 1950s roadster, or perhaps even a racer-airplane and facing the dash or control panel. The portafilter evokes feelings of a joystick in a retro plane. The shifter on the right side is super slick and tends to catch most new users by surprise.

Speedster First Day
The Speedster (before offset was programmed in) from the user angle.

From the side, the roadster and retro-aeronautic feelings continue, but as you get around to the back of the machine, it feels like a 1950s flying wing or slight-steam-punk alien bug ship. All very cool.
The side panels. What really can I say, except to say photos don’t even do them justice. In person, they are a major wow factor. The high gloss polish on the aluminum panels is broken up by the carved out powder-coated yellow stripes and red lettering. Just stunning. Polish is inside as well as out.The plating on the machine, known commercially as “perlage” or engine tuned plating is first rate, and blemish free.
I own a a fair bit of hand built products. I had a locally hand built mountain bike for some time. I have a variety of hand built coffee and espresso machine products. I feel I can safely say this: There is no product I’ve seen that is hand built, one a time that has the level of fit and finish the Speedster has. Heck, even where there are metal and plastic washers (like on the drip tray frame bar mounts), the plastic washers are lined up perfectly with the metal washers – I know because when I went to go adjust the height of the drip tray and re-tightened the bolts, I put the plastic washers slightly out of alignment (easy to do).
There is not a single dirty /scorched weld on this machine. There are no gaps. Every single seam, angle, joinery, weld, curve and physical part on the outside of the machine is flawless. I noticed it right away in the drip tray’s design and build: given the angular, “floating on air” nature of the drip tray and drip tray cover, I half expected to see weld scorch marks in hidden areas or where metal has been joined with metal, but there are none. All the bends are precise. All the welds are flawless and polish-finished. All the pieces align perfectly.
You can see it from every angle on the machine – for as much attention that has been given to the internal construction of the Speedster, at least as much (if not more) has been given to the fit and finish. In preparation for this first look I scoured the machine front to back, side to side and top to bottom to find one flaw, no matter how small, in the build quality.
I found none.
Compare this to the GS/3. We have a paddle group model in the CoffeeGeek Lab and it is an amazing machine technologically, but the aesthetics are very meh, and the fit and finish is questionable at times. You can see weld scorch marks on the upper cup tray of the GS/3 for example. You can wiggle around the cup tray and drip tray because the fit isn’t terribly precise. The side panels on my original GS/3 paddle group had misaligned mounting bolts making it quite difficult to remove the left side panel.
The Speedster has none of these issues. It is in a completely different league when it comes to aesthetics, quality of build and fit and finish. I cannot say it enough: I have never seen an espresso machine with such a complete attention to every minute detail as I have with the Speedster. It sets a completely new standard.

SpeedsterUsability

Usually aesthetics and usability in an industrial product are mutually exclusive – or at the very least, a case of 60% one way, 40% the other way. Usually something has to give. On the Speedster, there’s very little give in the usability department when compared to the aesthetics. Let’s get the usability quirks out of the way first.
The drip tray is a gorgeous piece of the artwork puzzle on the Speedster. From the user viewpoint, it hangs in mid air with seemingly no supports. It cuts a wide arrow shape out from the body towards one of the Four “M”s (that’d be you), and is wide and spacious. But the top tray, the perforated part, is only held in place by gravity, a small “lip”overhanging the back end of the tray, and by virtue of the sides sitting on the angled basin of the tray. In short, it kind of slides around, mainly when you’re cleaning the tray. It is not an issue when brewing shots. This is an entirely minor thing and to show you how good this machine is, probably my biggest gripe.
The gauges are also a bit hard to read from the user’s standpoint. They are on the front panels of the machine but seem angled downward somewhat and you have to drop lower to fully read them.
The rocker switch for the multi-choice hot water gives the appearance of being flimsy (it actually isn’t – its more of a perception) and very minutely out of place on the machine. Most other elements are beefy (the steam and hot water handle dials, the shift lever), so the long narrow rocker switch seems different.
The grouphead and portafilter position is quite low – at the factory-setting, the drip tray is in its uppermost position (it is height adjustable by about an inch) and the spouts on the double portafilter barely clear an illy espresso cup by 3cm; cappuccino cups clear it by maybe 1cm. For my use this is perfect – I rarely brew into anything larger than a latte wide-bowl cup, but for some it may be an inconvenience – you won’t be fitting your 16oz mug under a spouted portafilter.
Probably the last thing to mention in the negative column isn’t really a negative at all – it is the result of something very positive about the machine. The steam boiler’s intake is fed by a 0.6mm gicleur valve to slow down the boiler refill and keep the temperatures rock steady solid in the steam boiler. This is by design. It makes the machine even more temperature stable than even the best from Synesso and La Marzocco (at least those without a 0.6mm gicleur on the steam boiler). The downside is when you first fill the machine it takes quite a bit longer than other similar sized boilers and when you access steam boiler hot water, the refill via the pump runs a bit longer. A very minor thing and an excellent tradeoff for amazing temperature ability.

The drip tray with portafilter in place.
From the user perspective it appears the drip tray floats in air without any visible support. Also note the angled back plate - it's a "poor man's" mirror, showing an exposed portafilter pour without needing to bend underneath.
The fit and finish is very visible here - special bends, polishing rough edges, intricate cuts. Nothing is missed on the build of this machine.
bends, polishing rough edges, intricate cuts. Nothing is missed on the build of this machine.There's a weld in there!In the drip tray basin, there are welds, but you'd be hard pressed to find some of them. They are polished, finished off, and no scorch marks.
Here, the top trip tray sits on the drip tray basin. You're dealing with angles, bent metal, slopes and such, but it all fits perfectly.
The machine's batching details, including serial number. Kees' has a super sweet logo
The dials are very retro, black, white lettering, fire engine red dials. the machine plating is first rate. Note no gaps at all between the front plate and side aluminum panels - though they are not attached at all to each other.
This is the pump pressure dial. It shows status of preinfusion and pump pressure.
Onto the positives in usability. Well, just about everything! The grouphead’s gasket accessibility is literally the best I’ve ever worked with. Accessing the PID for the brew boiler is a breeze – it is right up front, dead centre on the machines lower front panel. Use the shift lever for a week and it feels like the most natural way to control brewing espresso that has ever existed. The machine is quiet, rattle free, and extremely solid on the counter.
The hot water wand articulates into the middle of the machine – a very good design which at first may seem to go against the machine’s aesthetic look. But trust me, you want the hot water over the drip tray, not over the side of the tray. Articulation is quite extensive too – you can rotate it on a near 180-360 degree plane on both vertical and horizontal axis (and other axis too, I guess). What I’m trying to say is you can point the water wand almost anywhere on the right side of the drip tray. It is hot touch, but has a rubber grabber on it that is nice and big but not ugly (nothing on this machine is ugly).
Using the three position shift lever for brewing is something that at first seems weird, but quickly becomes natural for brewing espresso and as you fine tune your preinfusion and brewing technique, you’ll wonder why this kind of brewing system isn’t on every machine. It actually works quite similar to the way a paddle group operates – move to one position and the line valves to the grouphead open up. Move to another position and you engage the pump. After one week, the Speedster’s brewing control seemed incredibly natural.
Viewing a shot as it develops is extremely easy on this machine – there are no blocked ‘sight lines’. Because of the nature of the exposed grouphead and groupcap, the portafilter spouts sit out in the open, not obscured in any way by other parts of the machine. People sitting to the side of the machine can see a shot develop just as well as the operator or people standing in front.
Let me focus on one particular aspect of usability – steaming. This machine is of course a manual steamer, meaning you control the steam through a variable control dial handle, and there are no gizmos or froth aiders to help impede things. The steam boiler is rated to handle 3.0+ bar of pressure (most commercial machines top out at 1.8 or 2.2bar) meaning that it is a complete steam monster in terms of power – it comes factory preset to run at around 2.3bar, and you can easily modify the steam boiler’s PID up or down by removing the left side panel and accessing it.
The machine ships with two steaming tips – the stock one (the “Speedster tip”) is a bit of a limiter in that the four holes are small and restrict the full steaming pressure somewhat, making it easy to steam 12oz pitchers. The other included tip (the “Mirage tip”) has four bigger holes and will fully utilize the steam boiler’s ample steam production.
I definitely do not need the bigger-hole tip. With the slightly restricted tip, I was steaming and frothing in 24oz pitchers (starting with about 12oz of milk) in under 15 seconds. Doing 5oz of milk in a 12oz pitcher takes less than 10 seconds (I haven’t timed it yet, but it is closer to 7 seconds than 10). What amazed me was that, even for all that power (the GS/3 takes twice as long), I was creating beautiful microfoam and had great control over the steaming from the very first pitcher. Part of it is the valve system the Speedster uses – there’s actually quite a bit of control over the amount of steam you use via the dial. Where most steam knob dials go from nothing to full power with very little turn, you have a radius of at least 2 hours (ie from noon to 2pm on a clock face) adjustment possible on the Speedster to fine tune how much steam you’re releasing down the pipe. I have not found another machine with more fine tuning control over the volume of steam.
The machine is also extremely serviceable. As mentioned previously, 4 side bolts (twist off by hand) and three hex bolts at the back of the machine are all that are needed to remove before you can take off the side panels and top plate. I’ve done it in under 1 minute. Almost everything is accessible at this point, save for the water line connections. For me this is a huge usability gain.

Ordering aSpeedster

If you want a Speedster you can order it direct from Kees van der Westen, or order one through a local distributor.
Two things to factor in. This machine costs 4,975 Euros (approximately $7,800 Canadian dollars, or $7,200 US dollars as of this writing), and you will have to pay shipping ($350 sea, $620 air), duties and taxes (9% duty in Canada plus your local PST and GST), bringing the cost close to $10,000 Canadian dollars, or around $9,000 US once it is set up in your home, office, cafe or roastery.
EDIT 2024: Things sure have changed. This machine now costs between $12,900 and $15,000USD in the United States. It is close to $20,000 in Canada.
The second thing to factor in is a waiting list – a long one. You may have to wait up to six months to get a Speedster. van der Westen only builds a few each month and the waiting list last time I checked was over 4 months long.
Some distributors may charge a premium over van der Westen’s 4,975 Euro price + shipping + taxes, some may not, but it is best to go through a distributor because they usually include installation as part of the price, and local servicing and warranty is included.
If you order direct, they will take your name and put you into the queue. You may have to put a deposit down at that time. Once the machine is being built, they will ask for the full amount paid via wire transfer. The machines are shipped COD for delivery costs, so expect to pay the full delivery charge when it arrives. Machines are well crated (82kg incl. crate) and will ship to your nearest Intl’ airport, or if coming by sea, to a major shipping destination (again usually an airport).
There are plenty of variants you can order when getting the Speedster. They include, but are not limited to the following:
- Black powder-coated side plates (black where you see red and yellow on our model)(
- Chopped portafilter instead of spouted model
- Wide cup rail instead of narrow one
- Mirror finish body work instead of perlage style
- All black body panels, powder coated finish matching the legs
In addition, van der Westen debuted a lever version (yes!!!) at the Cologne World of Coffee Expo during the Summer of 2009. It is a prototype, but may go into production for 2010.
EDIT 2024: The Lever Speedster was never realised. But they did make an Idromatic version. See it here.
Here’s what a shot looks like with the Speedster, including preinfusion time.

This video shows a HD rendition of an espresso shot on a Speedster espresso machine, using a factory-modified chopped portafilter.
This particular shot was done using manual preinfusion, which does tend to muck up the shot timing overall – with pump pressure, it was around 22 seconds, but I’d call it about 30 seconds total including the preinfusion time. One thing I’d love to see on the Speedster in the future is one or two speedometer style gauges that show shot times for both full shot (including manual or pump driven preinfusion) and pump “on” time.
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ConclusionKvdW Speedster

I don’t know if I’ll ever post a full detailed review on the Speedster or not – hence this super long “first look”. It’s quite an exclusive machine and a major expense – possibly the biggest expense someone would make for their home outside of actually buying the home or buying a car.
At the start of this First Look I hinted this may be the best espresso machine in the world. Of course that is a subjective opinion and not rooted in any fact, but here are some real world things about the machine: The Speedster has been installed and operating for five weeks now and has been viewed, used and experienced by at least 30 people, including many professional baristas, restaurant owners, sommeliers, bartenders and cafe owners.
One thing all had in common – to a one they all felt it was the most beautiful and intriguing espresso machine they’d ever seen. At times I had them observe and use both the Speedster and GS/3 Paddle Group and while the more technologically savvy baristas recognized the GS/3’s ground breaking design and electronics, the Speedster was the constant first pick.
Usability is first rate. It’s obviously a hands on machine allowing a certain amount of latitude in how shots are brewed, but where you want automated control (in temperatures and pressures and stability), the machine has very few equals.
What could be better? At this point, only the addition of a few niceties might improve the machine, but they’d be minor things. I’d like to see a shot timer incorporated into the machine – perhaps, keeping with the retro feel, an analog stopwatch / speedometer kind of dial that engages as soon as the pump does, perhaps even two such devices – one on the left for overall shot time, and one on the right showing just the pump activation time. It would keep with the automobile / racing plane theme of the front and sides of the machine.
Other than that, the machine is just about perfect. For us at least, it is the best espresso machine in the world. Nothing else, save for perhaps other Kees van der Westen machines, come close.
The Speedster Espresso Machine CoffeeGeek buys coffee from Social Coffee at a reduced subscription rate to use exclusively in our product reviews, first looks and guides. We require a high quality, consistent coffees to fairly test coffee and espresso equipment month to month, and Social provides that. Highly recommended. coffeegeek advertisers make this website possible.
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#firstLook #keesVanDerWesten #kvdw #speedster
#firstlook #keesvanderwesten #kvdw #speedster
amazee.io @[email protected] · 2026-01-08 · 18:53 UTC

What does a globally distributed team sound like? 🎶🌐🎶
Our "office" spans continents, but we stay connected through more than just Slack threads and pet photos. Over the last few years, we’ve woven together a sonic tapestry.
From deep-work lo-fi to uplifting anthems, our 2️⃣0️⃣2️⃣4️⃣ playlist is a glimpse into the rhythms that keep our remote team in sync.
🎧 https://www.amazee.io/blog/post/sounds-like-team-spirit-playlist-2024
🚨 Stay tuned for the 2026 drop → Coming soon! 🎤
#LifeAtAmazeeIO #AmazeeIOPlaylist

#lifeatamazeeio #amazeeioplaylist
David Boles @[email protected] · 2026-05-05 · 11:46 UTC

The Dissociated Universe: Bernardo Kastrup’s Analytic Idealism and the Mind That Contains the World

This essay completes a sequence. The first article considered Iain McGilchrist’s panpsychist proposal that matter is a phase of consciousness, the way ice and vapor are phases of water. Its companion examined Daniel Dennett’s illusionism, which argued that consciousness as we ordinarily conceive it is a user illusion the brain stages for itself. The third position, the one we take up here, inverts the relation again. Bernardo Kastrup’s analytic idealism holds that matter is an appearance within mind rather than the substance from which mind emerges or the surface on which it plays. The three views together cover most of the contemporary terrain on the consciousness question, and once we have all three on the table we can ask what each gets right, what each fails to deliver, and what the overall topography tells us about the limits of philosophical argument when applied to the deepest question we know how to ask.
Kastrup is an unusual figure in contemporary philosophy of mind. Born in Rio de Janeiro in 1974 and now based in the Netherlands, he holds two doctorates: one in computer engineering from Eindhoven University of Technology, completed in 2001, and a second in philosophy from Radboud University Nijmegen, completed in 2019, with a dissertation titled “Analytic Idealism: A Consciousness-Only Ontology.” He spent years at CERN working on the trigger system for the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider, founded the parallel processor company Silicon Hive (acquired by Intel in 2011), and currently runs an AI hardware company called Euclyd while serving as Executive Director of the Essentia Foundation, the Dutch nonprofit dedicated to advancing post-materialist research. His scientific credentials matter for the discussion that follows, since one common line of dismissal against idealism is that it represents a flight from science. Kastrup spent two decades inside science before publishing a single book on metaphysics, and the work he produces shows that experience on every page.
Begin with the position itself, stated as carefully as possible. Analytic idealism holds that reality is mental at its base. There is one substrate of existence, and that substrate is consciousness, what Kastrup calls mind-at-large or the universal field of subjectivity. The physical world we perceive is the extrinsic appearance of mental processes, in the way that the surface activity of a brain (neurons firing, blood flowing, electrical signals traveling) is the extrinsic appearance of someone’s inner experience. When you observe another person’s brain in an MRI scanner, you see the outside of their thoughts. When you look at the universe, you see the outside of mind-at-large.
The question this position must answer is the obvious one. If everything is mind, why does it look like a world of separate things, including separate persons with separate inner lives? Kastrup’s answer is the most striking move in his system. He argues that individual minds are dissociated alters of universal consciousness, comparable to the alternate personalities that appear in cases of Dissociative Identity Disorder, the condition formerly known as multiple personality disorder. In DID, one biological organism hosts multiple distinct centers of awareness that often have no access to one another’s memories, preferences, or self-conception. Each alter experiences itself as a separate person. Each alter is a real conscious subject. There is one underlying organism producing all of them. Kastrup proposes that we (and all other living creatures) are alters of mind-at-large, dissociated centers of awareness within the single field of universal subjectivity, each of us mistakenly experiencing ourselves as a separate person when we are something the universe is temporarily doing.
The physical world, on this view, is a representation. Specifically, it is what the dissociation looks like from the inside of an alter. Just as the dashboard of an airplane represents external states (altitude, fuel, airspeed) without itself being those states, our perceived world represents the activity of mind-at-large without itself being that activity. The dashboard analogy, which Kastrup uses repeatedly, makes the claim concrete. We do not perceive reality directly. We perceive a user interface that represents reality, and the interface is constructed by our cognitive apparatus, which is itself a dissociative boundary within a larger mental field.
Several consequences follow that distinguish analytic idealism from neighboring positions. Death, on this account, is the end of dissociation rather than the end of consciousness. When the alter dissolves, what was alter rejoins what was always already mind-at-large. Psychedelics are interpreted as substances that weaken the dissociative boundary, which is why they often produce ego dissolution and what Kastrup considers genuine glimpses of pre-dissociated awareness. Near-death experiences are read as moments when the dissociation thins and richer experience floods through. Most strikingly, artificial intelligence on Kastrup’s view cannot be conscious in the relevant sense, because computers are what he calls heaps, aggregates of components that do not constitute a true dissociative process. Only metabolism, life, the actual process of biological self-maintenance, produces the kind of dissociation that yields a conscious alter. Silicon will not do, no matter how complex the architecture.
Where his case works, it works for these reasons.
The argument is effective because idealism dissolves the hard problem rather than postponing it. If consciousness is the base substrate and matter is its appearance, there is no question of how non-conscious stuff produces conscious experience, since there is no non-conscious stuff. The question David Chalmers identified in 1995, the question that materialism cannot answer and that illusionism tries to argue out of existence, simply does not arise on idealist premises. This is no small advantage. A theory that does not face the hardest problem in philosophy of mind has gained considerable ground over theories that do.
It is also effective because the DID analogy is rooted in actual psychiatric and neurological evidence. DID is a controversial diagnosis, but its empirical reality is harder to dispute than its theoretical interpretation. There exist documented cases of patients whose alters present with measurably different physiological responses, different visual capabilities (one alter cortically blind while another sees normally, as documented by Strasburger and Waldvogel in their 2015 PsyCh Journal case report on patient B.T., who showed completely absent visual evoked potentials in her blind alters and normal VEPs in her sighted ones, with switches occurring within seconds), and different allergic reactions, all in the same body. Whatever DID is, it shows that the relationship between one biological substrate and multiple centers of awareness is genuinely possible. Kastrup uses this as proof of concept rather than as proof of his metaphysics, but the proof of concept matters: a critic cannot dismiss the dissociation move as impossible in principle, because we have evidence that something analogous happens at the human scale.
A further strength: the position takes empirical findings about brain function seriously in a way his critics often do not credit. Studies by Robin Carhart-Harris and colleagues at Imperial College London, beginning with the 2012 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences paper on psilocybin and brain activity, found that psychedelic experience correlates with decreased activity in certain brain regions, particularly the default mode network. Materialist orthodoxy predicts that richer experience should require more brain activity. The data show the opposite in significant cases. Kastrup uses this as evidence for what philosophers call the brain-as-filter hypothesis: the brain constrains and channels consciousness rather than producing it, with reduced activity allowing wider awareness through. Aldous Huxley made a version of this argument in 1954 in The Doors of Perception, drawing on Henri Bergson’s earlier work, and the recent neuroscientific findings have given the older idea a second life. Whether or not one accepts the idealist conclusion, the empirical pattern is real and demands explanation.
The position earns additional power because it accommodates findings in foundational physics that materialism handles awkwardly. The relational interpretation of quantum mechanics, developed by Carlo Rovelli starting in 1996, holds that the properties of a physical system exist only relative to other systems, with no observer-independent reality. Kastrup, in a 2018 Foundations of Physics paper coauthored with Edward F. Kelly and others, argued that this interpretation aligns naturally with idealism, since a universe in which physical properties exist only as relations is a universe whose deepest substrate may be mental rather than material. The argument does not prove idealism, though it does show that idealism coordinates with serious physics in ways that flat-footed materialism does not.
Last, the position is internally coherent in a way panpsychism struggles to achieve. McGilchrist must explain how micro-experiences combine into the unified field of human awareness, and the combination problem identified by William Seager in 1995 has no settled solution. Kastrup argues that idealism faces only the inverse problem, what philosophers call decombination, which asks how universal consciousness divides into apparent multiplicity. Kastrup’s answer is dissociation, and dissociation is something we have empirical reason to believe occurs in nature. The combination problem requires us to imagine micro-experiences merging into macro-experiences, a process for which we have no empirical model whatsoever. Decombination, by contrast, has a real-world analog in psychiatric phenomena that can be studied. The asymmetry between the two problems is one of Kastrup’s strongest arguments for preferring idealism over panpsychism.
Weaknesses follow, however, and any honest reader should press them.
The argument is not effective because the DID analogy, suggestive as it sounds, is doing more work than analogies can legitimately bear. Even if dissociation occurs in human minds, extrapolating from human dissociation to cosmic dissociation is a major leap that the analogy cannot underwrite by itself. Kastrup acknowledges this and frames the move as inference to the best explanation, but inference to the best explanation requires that the explanation actually be best, which is the question in dispute. A critic can reasonably reply that we have no idea whether mind-at-large, even if it exists, would dissociate the way human minds do, since the conditions producing human dissociation (trauma, neurological development, psychological defense) have no obvious analog at cosmic scale.
It is also not effective because DID itself remains contested as a clinical diagnosis. The condition was popularized by cases like Sybil and The Three Faces of Eve, both of which have been challenged in subsequent decades on grounds of iatrogenic creation, where the diagnosis was effectively constructed by therapist suggestion rather than discovered in the patient. The 1973 Sybil case, the foundational case for the modern diagnosis, was substantially reexamined by Debbie Nathan in her 2011 investigation Sybil Exposed, which presented evidence that the alters were largely produced by the therapeutic process rather than preexisting it. Building a metaphysics on a clinical category whose status is genuinely uncertain creates exposure that Kastrup tends to underplay. The cases of differential physiological response across alters are real and significant, but the broader diagnostic category of DID may not be quite the natural kind his argument requires.
A further weakness: the decombination problem may be no easier than the combination problem, only different. Kastrup claims it is easier because we have human dissociation as an example. The reply is that dissociation in human minds occurs within a single biological organism with a single nervous system, where the unity is given and the division is what needs explanation. Dissociation at cosmic scale would require the unity to fracture across what looks like an entire universe of separate beings, which is a different operation by orders of magnitude. Saying “the universe dissociates the way a human mind dissociates” makes the words available without making the operation clear. Whether this is genuine progress over panpsychism depends on whether the analogy translates, and that translation has not been demonstrated.
The position fails because it cannot account well for the resistance the world offers to the will. If everything is mind, why does the chair refuse to move when I will it to? Why do facts about the world repeatedly disconfirm my expectations? Kastrup answers that the rest of mind-at-large is not under my control, since I am only an alter, and what I experience as physical resistance is the appearance of mental activity outside my dissociative boundary. This response is not incoherent, but it does shift the burden onto explaining why the appearance is so consistent across different observers, why it has the lawful structure physics describes, and why it tracks counterfactuals so reliably. A mind-at-large that produces a perfectly consistent appearance of a physical world is doing something hard to distinguish from actually being a physical world, and the explanatory virtue of idealism shrinks the more its appearance matches what materialism predicts.
His treatment of artificial intelligence is also vulnerable to challenge. The claim that silicon cannot host consciousness because it is a heap rather than a metabolic process is a strong commitment that does work Kastrup may not be able to cash. The distinction between heap and life is doing the heavy lifting, and the distinction is itself empirical: he is claiming, on metaphysical grounds, that we know which natural systems can support dissociation and which cannot, but the criterion (metabolism) is itself something that arose through unguided physical processes. Why metabolism in particular should mark the threshold of dissociative capacity, when we cannot specify what about metabolism makes it special, leaves the position exposed to the objection that the threshold is being drawn for convenience rather than on principle. If materialism cannot explain why neurons matter and silicon does not, idealism inherits the same difficulty in different vocabulary.
Last, idealism shares with all consciousness-fundamental positions the difficulty of empirical falsifiability. Kastrup makes empirical predictions about psychedelics, about NDEs, about quantum measurement, but the core claim that reality is mental rather than physical is hard to test in any decisive way, since both views can typically accommodate the same data with different interpretations. While this does not prove idealism wrong, it does mean that any preference for idealism over materialism rests on theoretical virtues like coherence and explanatory parsimony rather than on a knockdown empirical case, and theoretical virtues alone rarely settle metaphysical disputes that have run for two and a half thousand years.
Now bring the three positions together. Each of the views we have considered confronts the hard problem differently, and each pays a different price for its solution.
Dennett’s illusionism tries to make the hard problem disappear by denying that phenomenal consciousness exists in the way introspection suggests. The cost is high. Illusion presupposes a perceiver, and the position has never quite recovered from this objection. What survives Dennett’s project is a sharpened understanding of how introspection misrepresents underlying neural activity, which is significant cognitive science but does not amount to the metaphysical achievement he claimed.
McGilchrist’s panpsychism tries to dissolve the hard problem by making consciousness elementary at every level of organization, with matter as one of its phases. The cost is the combination problem, which has occupied serious philosophers since William James raised the worry in 1890 and which has not been answered to general satisfaction. What survives the panpsychist program is the recognition that emergent materialism may be smuggling in a miracle when it claims that consciousness arises from non-conscious matter at some unspecified threshold of complexity.
Kastrup’s analytic idealism tries to dissolve the hard problem by making consciousness the only thing there is, with matter as its appearance under conditions of dissociation. The cost is the decombination problem, the dependence on a contested clinical analogy, and the difficulty of explaining the apparent independence of physical regularity from subjective will. What survives the idealist position is a coherent and rigorous alternative to materialism that takes the empirical findings about psychedelics, NDEs, and foundational physics more seriously than its competitors typically do.
The honest verdict is that none of the three positions has solved the consciousness problem, and that each has identified real difficulties in the others. If those previous moves are correct, then the hard problem is real (against Dennett), the materialist emergence story is unconvincing (against the orthodoxy), and consciousness must be either elementary at every level (McGilchrist) or the only level (Kastrup). The choice between the latter two depends on whether one finds the combination problem or the decombination problem more tractable, and reasonable readers will divide on that question along lines that have less to do with evidence than with which kind of mystery each finds easier to live with.
What the trilogy together suggests is something philosophy is reluctant to admit. The consciousness problem may not be solvable by argument alone. We are conscious beings trying to construct a theory of consciousness from inside consciousness, and there is no obvious way to step outside the medium in which the theorizing takes place. McGilchrist and Dennett and Kastrup have each produced careful work that engages the problem from a different angle, and each has been pressed by serious critics in ways that expose real weaknesses in his position. None of the three has won the argument. None has even come close to winning the argument. What they have done, taken together, is mapped the terrain in enough detail that we can now see why winning the argument may not be possible with the tools currently available.
This map is itself an honest accounting of the limits of the inquiry, which philosophy at its best produces and which the consciousness debate increasingly demonstrates. The next generation of work in this area will need to go beyond the choice among materialism, panpsychism, illusionism, and idealism, and find some way of asking the question that the current frame cannot accommodate. Whether that requires a new conceptual vocabulary, a new empirical paradigm, or simply more patience with the irreducibility of the problem remains to be seen.
For the BolesBlogs reader who has followed the sequence to this point, the takeaway is this. Consciousness is real. The hard problem is real. Materialism cannot explain consciousness. Panpsychism faces the combination problem. Illusionism collapses on its own premises. Idealism trades one set of difficulties for another. We have not been told the truth about what we are by any of the available frameworks, and the search continues. The task of the serious reader is to hold the question open, refuse to settle prematurely on any of the offered solutions, and continue reading what the philosophers and the scientists and the contemplatives produce as they work toward whatever lies beyond the current map.
Kastrup wrote in a 2019 Scientific American opinion piece that mind is the only carpet under which we can no longer sweep the inconvenience of consciousness. The line is sharp and works whether or not we accept his particular formulation of what mind requires us to believe. Consciousness is the inconvenience that materialism cannot explain. Whether it is the only inconvenience, or whether it is the substrate from which all other inconveniences follow, is the question we have been asking for three articles now, and the question we will keep asking long after this sequence concludes.
We assume our own inwardness because we have nothing else to assume from. Whether that inwardness reaches outward into a world of separate things, downward into the smallest particles, inward into a single field that contains everything, or only inward into the lighted corner where we happen to find ourselves, is the question philosophy has not yet answered and may never answer. The honest scholar lives with this. An honest writer says it out loud. And the honest reader, having followed three serious philosophers through three serious wagers, walks away from the sequence with sharper questions and fewer false certainties than when he or she began.
That is what philosophy at its best can do for us. None of the three thinkers we have considered solved the problem. All three of them taught us how the problem must be approached if we are to make progress on it, and all three of them deserve continued reading, continued argument, and continued respect for the seriousness with which they pursued the deepest question we have.
#death #disassociated #huxley #idealism #kastrup #mind #physics #rovelli #tech #universe #weakness #world

#death #disassociated #huxley #idealism #kastrup #mind
David Boles @[email protected] · 2026-05-05 · 11:46 UTC

The Dissociated Universe: Bernardo Kastrup’s Analytic Idealism and the Mind That Contains the World

This essay completes a sequence. The first article considered Iain McGilchrist’s panpsychist proposal that matter is a phase of consciousness, the way ice and vapor are phases of water. Its companion examined Daniel Dennett’s illusionism, which argued that consciousness as we ordinarily conceive it is a user illusion the brain stages for itself. The third position, the one we take up here, inverts the relation again. Bernardo Kastrup’s analytic idealism holds that matter is an appearance within mind rather than the substance from which mind emerges or the surface on which it plays. The three views together cover most of the contemporary terrain on the consciousness question, and once we have all three on the table we can ask what each gets right, what each fails to deliver, and what the overall topography tells us about the limits of philosophical argument when applied to the deepest question we know how to ask.
Kastrup is an unusual figure in contemporary philosophy of mind. Born in Rio de Janeiro in 1974 and now based in the Netherlands, he holds two doctorates: one in computer engineering from Eindhoven University of Technology, completed in 2001, and a second in philosophy from Radboud University Nijmegen, completed in 2019, with a dissertation titled “Analytic Idealism: A Consciousness-Only Ontology.” He spent years at CERN working on the trigger system for the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider, founded the parallel processor company Silicon Hive (acquired by Intel in 2011), and currently runs an AI hardware company called Euclyd while serving as Executive Director of the Essentia Foundation, the Dutch nonprofit dedicated to advancing post-materialist research. His scientific credentials matter for the discussion that follows, since one common line of dismissal against idealism is that it represents a flight from science. Kastrup spent two decades inside science before publishing a single book on metaphysics, and the work he produces shows that experience on every page.
Begin with the position itself, stated as carefully as possible. Analytic idealism holds that reality is mental at its base. There is one substrate of existence, and that substrate is consciousness, what Kastrup calls mind-at-large or the universal field of subjectivity. The physical world we perceive is the extrinsic appearance of mental processes, in the way that the surface activity of a brain (neurons firing, blood flowing, electrical signals traveling) is the extrinsic appearance of someone’s inner experience. When you observe another person’s brain in an MRI scanner, you see the outside of their thoughts. When you look at the universe, you see the outside of mind-at-large.
The question this position must answer is the obvious one. If everything is mind, why does it look like a world of separate things, including separate persons with separate inner lives? Kastrup’s answer is the most striking move in his system. He argues that individual minds are dissociated alters of universal consciousness, comparable to the alternate personalities that appear in cases of Dissociative Identity Disorder, the condition formerly known as multiple personality disorder. In DID, one biological organism hosts multiple distinct centers of awareness that often have no access to one another’s memories, preferences, or self-conception. Each alter experiences itself as a separate person. Each alter is a real conscious subject. There is one underlying organism producing all of them. Kastrup proposes that we (and all other living creatures) are alters of mind-at-large, dissociated centers of awareness within the single field of universal subjectivity, each of us mistakenly experiencing ourselves as a separate person when we are something the universe is temporarily doing.
The physical world, on this view, is a representation. Specifically, it is what the dissociation looks like from the inside of an alter. Just as the dashboard of an airplane represents external states (altitude, fuel, airspeed) without itself being those states, our perceived world represents the activity of mind-at-large without itself being that activity. The dashboard analogy, which Kastrup uses repeatedly, makes the claim concrete. We do not perceive reality directly. We perceive a user interface that represents reality, and the interface is constructed by our cognitive apparatus, which is itself a dissociative boundary within a larger mental field.
Several consequences follow that distinguish analytic idealism from neighboring positions. Death, on this account, is the end of dissociation rather than the end of consciousness. When the alter dissolves, what was alter rejoins what was always already mind-at-large. Psychedelics are interpreted as substances that weaken the dissociative boundary, which is why they often produce ego dissolution and what Kastrup considers genuine glimpses of pre-dissociated awareness. Near-death experiences are read as moments when the dissociation thins and richer experience floods through. Most strikingly, artificial intelligence on Kastrup’s view cannot be conscious in the relevant sense, because computers are what he calls heaps, aggregates of components that do not constitute a true dissociative process. Only metabolism, life, the actual process of biological self-maintenance, produces the kind of dissociation that yields a conscious alter. Silicon will not do, no matter how complex the architecture.
Where his case works, it works for these reasons.
The argument is effective because idealism dissolves the hard problem rather than postponing it. If consciousness is the base substrate and matter is its appearance, there is no question of how non-conscious stuff produces conscious experience, since there is no non-conscious stuff. The question David Chalmers identified in 1995, the question that materialism cannot answer and that illusionism tries to argue out of existence, simply does not arise on idealist premises. This is no small advantage. A theory that does not face the hardest problem in philosophy of mind has gained considerable ground over theories that do.
It is also effective because the DID analogy is rooted in actual psychiatric and neurological evidence. DID is a controversial diagnosis, but its empirical reality is harder to dispute than its theoretical interpretation. There exist documented cases of patients whose alters present with measurably different physiological responses, different visual capabilities (one alter cortically blind while another sees normally, as documented by Strasburger and Waldvogel in their 2015 PsyCh Journal case report on patient B.T., who showed completely absent visual evoked potentials in her blind alters and normal VEPs in her sighted ones, with switches occurring within seconds), and different allergic reactions, all in the same body. Whatever DID is, it shows that the relationship between one biological substrate and multiple centers of awareness is genuinely possible. Kastrup uses this as proof of concept rather than as proof of his metaphysics, but the proof of concept matters: a critic cannot dismiss the dissociation move as impossible in principle, because we have evidence that something analogous happens at the human scale.
A further strength: the position takes empirical findings about brain function seriously in a way his critics often do not credit. Studies by Robin Carhart-Harris and colleagues at Imperial College London, beginning with the 2012 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences paper on psilocybin and brain activity, found that psychedelic experience correlates with decreased activity in certain brain regions, particularly the default mode network. Materialist orthodoxy predicts that richer experience should require more brain activity. The data show the opposite in significant cases. Kastrup uses this as evidence for what philosophers call the brain-as-filter hypothesis: the brain constrains and channels consciousness rather than producing it, with reduced activity allowing wider awareness through. Aldous Huxley made a version of this argument in 1954 in The Doors of Perception, drawing on Henri Bergson’s earlier work, and the recent neuroscientific findings have given the older idea a second life. Whether or not one accepts the idealist conclusion, the empirical pattern is real and demands explanation.
The position earns additional power because it accommodates findings in foundational physics that materialism handles awkwardly. The relational interpretation of quantum mechanics, developed by Carlo Rovelli starting in 1996, holds that the properties of a physical system exist only relative to other systems, with no observer-independent reality. Kastrup, in a 2018 Foundations of Physics paper coauthored with Edward F. Kelly and others, argued that this interpretation aligns naturally with idealism, since a universe in which physical properties exist only as relations is a universe whose deepest substrate may be mental rather than material. The argument does not prove idealism, though it does show that idealism coordinates with serious physics in ways that flat-footed materialism does not.
Last, the position is internally coherent in a way panpsychism struggles to achieve. McGilchrist must explain how micro-experiences combine into the unified field of human awareness, and the combination problem identified by William Seager in 1995 has no settled solution. Kastrup argues that idealism faces only the inverse problem, what philosophers call decombination, which asks how universal consciousness divides into apparent multiplicity. Kastrup’s answer is dissociation, and dissociation is something we have empirical reason to believe occurs in nature. The combination problem requires us to imagine micro-experiences merging into macro-experiences, a process for which we have no empirical model whatsoever. Decombination, by contrast, has a real-world analog in psychiatric phenomena that can be studied. The asymmetry between the two problems is one of Kastrup’s strongest arguments for preferring idealism over panpsychism.
Weaknesses follow, however, and any honest reader should press them.
The argument is not effective because the DID analogy, suggestive as it sounds, is doing more work than analogies can legitimately bear. Even if dissociation occurs in human minds, extrapolating from human dissociation to cosmic dissociation is a major leap that the analogy cannot underwrite by itself. Kastrup acknowledges this and frames the move as inference to the best explanation, but inference to the best explanation requires that the explanation actually be best, which is the question in dispute. A critic can reasonably reply that we have no idea whether mind-at-large, even if it exists, would dissociate the way human minds do, since the conditions producing human dissociation (trauma, neurological development, psychological defense) have no obvious analog at cosmic scale.
It is also not effective because DID itself remains contested as a clinical diagnosis. The condition was popularized by cases like Sybil and The Three Faces of Eve, both of which have been challenged in subsequent decades on grounds of iatrogenic creation, where the diagnosis was effectively constructed by therapist suggestion rather than discovered in the patient. The 1973 Sybil case, the foundational case for the modern diagnosis, was substantially reexamined by Debbie Nathan in her 2011 investigation Sybil Exposed, which presented evidence that the alters were largely produced by the therapeutic process rather than preexisting it. Building a metaphysics on a clinical category whose status is genuinely uncertain creates exposure that Kastrup tends to underplay. The cases of differential physiological response across alters are real and significant, but the broader diagnostic category of DID may not be quite the natural kind his argument requires.
A further weakness: the decombination problem may be no easier than the combination problem, only different. Kastrup claims it is easier because we have human dissociation as an example. The reply is that dissociation in human minds occurs within a single biological organism with a single nervous system, where the unity is given and the division is what needs explanation. Dissociation at cosmic scale would require the unity to fracture across what looks like an entire universe of separate beings, which is a different operation by orders of magnitude. Saying “the universe dissociates the way a human mind dissociates” makes the words available without making the operation clear. Whether this is genuine progress over panpsychism depends on whether the analogy translates, and that translation has not been demonstrated.
The position fails because it cannot account well for the resistance the world offers to the will. If everything is mind, why does the chair refuse to move when I will it to? Why do facts about the world repeatedly disconfirm my expectations? Kastrup answers that the rest of mind-at-large is not under my control, since I am only an alter, and what I experience as physical resistance is the appearance of mental activity outside my dissociative boundary. This response is not incoherent, but it does shift the burden onto explaining why the appearance is so consistent across different observers, why it has the lawful structure physics describes, and why it tracks counterfactuals so reliably. A mind-at-large that produces a perfectly consistent appearance of a physical world is doing something hard to distinguish from actually being a physical world, and the explanatory virtue of idealism shrinks the more its appearance matches what materialism predicts.
His treatment of artificial intelligence is also vulnerable to challenge. The claim that silicon cannot host consciousness because it is a heap rather than a metabolic process is a strong commitment that does work Kastrup may not be able to cash. The distinction between heap and life is doing the heavy lifting, and the distinction is itself empirical: he is claiming, on metaphysical grounds, that we know which natural systems can support dissociation and which cannot, but the criterion (metabolism) is itself something that arose through unguided physical processes. Why metabolism in particular should mark the threshold of dissociative capacity, when we cannot specify what about metabolism makes it special, leaves the position exposed to the objection that the threshold is being drawn for convenience rather than on principle. If materialism cannot explain why neurons matter and silicon does not, idealism inherits the same difficulty in different vocabulary.
Last, idealism shares with all consciousness-fundamental positions the difficulty of empirical falsifiability. Kastrup makes empirical predictions about psychedelics, about NDEs, about quantum measurement, but the core claim that reality is mental rather than physical is hard to test in any decisive way, since both views can typically accommodate the same data with different interpretations. While this does not prove idealism wrong, it does mean that any preference for idealism over materialism rests on theoretical virtues like coherence and explanatory parsimony rather than on a knockdown empirical case, and theoretical virtues alone rarely settle metaphysical disputes that have run for two and a half thousand years.
Now bring the three positions together. Each of the views we have considered confronts the hard problem differently, and each pays a different price for its solution.
Dennett’s illusionism tries to make the hard problem disappear by denying that phenomenal consciousness exists in the way introspection suggests. The cost is high. Illusion presupposes a perceiver, and the position has never quite recovered from this objection. What survives Dennett’s project is a sharpened understanding of how introspection misrepresents underlying neural activity, which is significant cognitive science but does not amount to the metaphysical achievement he claimed.
McGilchrist’s panpsychism tries to dissolve the hard problem by making consciousness elementary at every level of organization, with matter as one of its phases. The cost is the combination problem, which has occupied serious philosophers since William James raised the worry in 1890 and which has not been answered to general satisfaction. What survives the panpsychist program is the recognition that emergent materialism may be smuggling in a miracle when it claims that consciousness arises from non-conscious matter at some unspecified threshold of complexity.
Kastrup’s analytic idealism tries to dissolve the hard problem by making consciousness the only thing there is, with matter as its appearance under conditions of dissociation. The cost is the decombination problem, the dependence on a contested clinical analogy, and the difficulty of explaining the apparent independence of physical regularity from subjective will. What survives the idealist position is a coherent and rigorous alternative to materialism that takes the empirical findings about psychedelics, NDEs, and foundational physics more seriously than its competitors typically do.
The honest verdict is that none of the three positions has solved the consciousness problem, and that each has identified real difficulties in the others. If those previous moves are correct, then the hard problem is real (against Dennett), the materialist emergence story is unconvincing (against the orthodoxy), and consciousness must be either elementary at every level (McGilchrist) or the only level (Kastrup). The choice between the latter two depends on whether one finds the combination problem or the decombination problem more tractable, and reasonable readers will divide on that question along lines that have less to do with evidence than with which kind of mystery each finds easier to live with.
What the trilogy together suggests is something philosophy is reluctant to admit. The consciousness problem may not be solvable by argument alone. We are conscious beings trying to construct a theory of consciousness from inside consciousness, and there is no obvious way to step outside the medium in which the theorizing takes place. McGilchrist and Dennett and Kastrup have each produced careful work that engages the problem from a different angle, and each has been pressed by serious critics in ways that expose real weaknesses in his position. None of the three has won the argument. None has even come close to winning the argument. What they have done, taken together, is mapped the terrain in enough detail that we can now see why winning the argument may not be possible with the tools currently available.
This map is itself an honest accounting of the limits of the inquiry, which philosophy at its best produces and which the consciousness debate increasingly demonstrates. The next generation of work in this area will need to go beyond the choice among materialism, panpsychism, illusionism, and idealism, and find some way of asking the question that the current frame cannot accommodate. Whether that requires a new conceptual vocabulary, a new empirical paradigm, or simply more patience with the irreducibility of the problem remains to be seen.
For the BolesBlogs reader who has followed the sequence to this point, the takeaway is this. Consciousness is real. The hard problem is real. Materialism cannot explain consciousness. Panpsychism faces the combination problem. Illusionism collapses on its own premises. Idealism trades one set of difficulties for another. We have not been told the truth about what we are by any of the available frameworks, and the search continues. The task of the serious reader is to hold the question open, refuse to settle prematurely on any of the offered solutions, and continue reading what the philosophers and the scientists and the contemplatives produce as they work toward whatever lies beyond the current map.
Kastrup wrote in a 2019 Scientific American opinion piece that mind is the only carpet under which we can no longer sweep the inconvenience of consciousness. The line is sharp and works whether or not we accept his particular formulation of what mind requires us to believe. Consciousness is the inconvenience that materialism cannot explain. Whether it is the only inconvenience, or whether it is the substrate from which all other inconveniences follow, is the question we have been asking for three articles now, and the question we will keep asking long after this sequence concludes.
We assume our own inwardness because we have nothing else to assume from. Whether that inwardness reaches outward into a world of separate things, downward into the smallest particles, inward into a single field that contains everything, or only inward into the lighted corner where we happen to find ourselves, is the question philosophy has not yet answered and may never answer. The honest scholar lives with this. An honest writer says it out loud. And the honest reader, having followed three serious philosophers through three serious wagers, walks away from the sequence with sharper questions and fewer false certainties than when he or she began.
That is what philosophy at its best can do for us. None of the three thinkers we have considered solved the problem. All three of them taught us how the problem must be approached if we are to make progress on it, and all three of them deserve continued reading, continued argument, and continued respect for the seriousness with which they pursued the deepest question we have.
#death #disassociated #huxley #idealism #kastrup #mind #physics #rovelli #tech #universe #weakness #world

#death #disassociated #huxley #idealism #kastrup #mind
David Boles @[email protected] · 2026-05-05 · 11:46 UTC

The Dissociated Universe: Bernardo Kastrup’s Analytic Idealism and the Mind That Contains the World

This essay completes a sequence. The first article considered Iain McGilchrist’s panpsychist proposal that matter is a phase of consciousness, the way ice and vapor are phases of water. Its companion examined Daniel Dennett’s illusionism, which argued that consciousness as we ordinarily conceive it is a user illusion the brain stages for itself. The third position, the one we take up here, inverts the relation again. Bernardo Kastrup’s analytic idealism holds that matter is an appearance within mind rather than the substance from which mind emerges or the surface on which it plays. The three views together cover most of the contemporary terrain on the consciousness question, and once we have all three on the table we can ask what each gets right, what each fails to deliver, and what the overall topography tells us about the limits of philosophical argument when applied to the deepest question we know how to ask.
Kastrup is an unusual figure in contemporary philosophy of mind. Born in Rio de Janeiro in 1974 and now based in the Netherlands, he holds two doctorates: one in computer engineering from Eindhoven University of Technology, completed in 2001, and a second in philosophy from Radboud University Nijmegen, completed in 2019, with a dissertation titled “Analytic Idealism: A Consciousness-Only Ontology.” He spent years at CERN working on the trigger system for the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider, founded the parallel processor company Silicon Hive (acquired by Intel in 2011), and currently runs an AI hardware company called Euclyd while serving as Executive Director of the Essentia Foundation, the Dutch nonprofit dedicated to advancing post-materialist research. His scientific credentials matter for the discussion that follows, since one common line of dismissal against idealism is that it represents a flight from science. Kastrup spent two decades inside science before publishing a single book on metaphysics, and the work he produces shows that experience on every page.
Begin with the position itself, stated as carefully as possible. Analytic idealism holds that reality is mental at its base. There is one substrate of existence, and that substrate is consciousness, what Kastrup calls mind-at-large or the universal field of subjectivity. The physical world we perceive is the extrinsic appearance of mental processes, in the way that the surface activity of a brain (neurons firing, blood flowing, electrical signals traveling) is the extrinsic appearance of someone’s inner experience. When you observe another person’s brain in an MRI scanner, you see the outside of their thoughts. When you look at the universe, you see the outside of mind-at-large.
The question this position must answer is the obvious one. If everything is mind, why does it look like a world of separate things, including separate persons with separate inner lives? Kastrup’s answer is the most striking move in his system. He argues that individual minds are dissociated alters of universal consciousness, comparable to the alternate personalities that appear in cases of Dissociative Identity Disorder, the condition formerly known as multiple personality disorder. In DID, one biological organism hosts multiple distinct centers of awareness that often have no access to one another’s memories, preferences, or self-conception. Each alter experiences itself as a separate person. Each alter is a real conscious subject. There is one underlying organism producing all of them. Kastrup proposes that we (and all other living creatures) are alters of mind-at-large, dissociated centers of awareness within the single field of universal subjectivity, each of us mistakenly experiencing ourselves as a separate person when we are something the universe is temporarily doing.
The physical world, on this view, is a representation. Specifically, it is what the dissociation looks like from the inside of an alter. Just as the dashboard of an airplane represents external states (altitude, fuel, airspeed) without itself being those states, our perceived world represents the activity of mind-at-large without itself being that activity. The dashboard analogy, which Kastrup uses repeatedly, makes the claim concrete. We do not perceive reality directly. We perceive a user interface that represents reality, and the interface is constructed by our cognitive apparatus, which is itself a dissociative boundary within a larger mental field.
Several consequences follow that distinguish analytic idealism from neighboring positions. Death, on this account, is the end of dissociation rather than the end of consciousness. When the alter dissolves, what was alter rejoins what was always already mind-at-large. Psychedelics are interpreted as substances that weaken the dissociative boundary, which is why they often produce ego dissolution and what Kastrup considers genuine glimpses of pre-dissociated awareness. Near-death experiences are read as moments when the dissociation thins and richer experience floods through. Most strikingly, artificial intelligence on Kastrup’s view cannot be conscious in the relevant sense, because computers are what he calls heaps, aggregates of components that do not constitute a true dissociative process. Only metabolism, life, the actual process of biological self-maintenance, produces the kind of dissociation that yields a conscious alter. Silicon will not do, no matter how complex the architecture.
Where his case works, it works for these reasons.
The argument is effective because idealism dissolves the hard problem rather than postponing it. If consciousness is the base substrate and matter is its appearance, there is no question of how non-conscious stuff produces conscious experience, since there is no non-conscious stuff. The question David Chalmers identified in 1995, the question that materialism cannot answer and that illusionism tries to argue out of existence, simply does not arise on idealist premises. This is no small advantage. A theory that does not face the hardest problem in philosophy of mind has gained considerable ground over theories that do.
It is also effective because the DID analogy is rooted in actual psychiatric and neurological evidence. DID is a controversial diagnosis, but its empirical reality is harder to dispute than its theoretical interpretation. There exist documented cases of patients whose alters present with measurably different physiological responses, different visual capabilities (one alter cortically blind while another sees normally, as documented by Strasburger and Waldvogel in their 2015 PsyCh Journal case report on patient B.T., who showed completely absent visual evoked potentials in her blind alters and normal VEPs in her sighted ones, with switches occurring within seconds), and different allergic reactions, all in the same body. Whatever DID is, it shows that the relationship between one biological substrate and multiple centers of awareness is genuinely possible. Kastrup uses this as proof of concept rather than as proof of his metaphysics, but the proof of concept matters: a critic cannot dismiss the dissociation move as impossible in principle, because we have evidence that something analogous happens at the human scale.
A further strength: the position takes empirical findings about brain function seriously in a way his critics often do not credit. Studies by Robin Carhart-Harris and colleagues at Imperial College London, beginning with the 2012 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences paper on psilocybin and brain activity, found that psychedelic experience correlates with decreased activity in certain brain regions, particularly the default mode network. Materialist orthodoxy predicts that richer experience should require more brain activity. The data show the opposite in significant cases. Kastrup uses this as evidence for what philosophers call the brain-as-filter hypothesis: the brain constrains and channels consciousness rather than producing it, with reduced activity allowing wider awareness through. Aldous Huxley made a version of this argument in 1954 in The Doors of Perception, drawing on Henri Bergson’s earlier work, and the recent neuroscientific findings have given the older idea a second life. Whether or not one accepts the idealist conclusion, the empirical pattern is real and demands explanation.
The position earns additional power because it accommodates findings in foundational physics that materialism handles awkwardly. The relational interpretation of quantum mechanics, developed by Carlo Rovelli starting in 1996, holds that the properties of a physical system exist only relative to other systems, with no observer-independent reality. Kastrup, in a 2018 Foundations of Physics paper coauthored with Edward F. Kelly and others, argued that this interpretation aligns naturally with idealism, since a universe in which physical properties exist only as relations is a universe whose deepest substrate may be mental rather than material. The argument does not prove idealism, though it does show that idealism coordinates with serious physics in ways that flat-footed materialism does not.
Last, the position is internally coherent in a way panpsychism struggles to achieve. McGilchrist must explain how micro-experiences combine into the unified field of human awareness, and the combination problem identified by William Seager in 1995 has no settled solution. Kastrup argues that idealism faces only the inverse problem, what philosophers call decombination, which asks how universal consciousness divides into apparent multiplicity. Kastrup’s answer is dissociation, and dissociation is something we have empirical reason to believe occurs in nature. The combination problem requires us to imagine micro-experiences merging into macro-experiences, a process for which we have no empirical model whatsoever. Decombination, by contrast, has a real-world analog in psychiatric phenomena that can be studied. The asymmetry between the two problems is one of Kastrup’s strongest arguments for preferring idealism over panpsychism.
Weaknesses follow, however, and any honest reader should press them.
The argument is not effective because the DID analogy, suggestive as it sounds, is doing more work than analogies can legitimately bear. Even if dissociation occurs in human minds, extrapolating from human dissociation to cosmic dissociation is a major leap that the analogy cannot underwrite by itself. Kastrup acknowledges this and frames the move as inference to the best explanation, but inference to the best explanation requires that the explanation actually be best, which is the question in dispute. A critic can reasonably reply that we have no idea whether mind-at-large, even if it exists, would dissociate the way human minds do, since the conditions producing human dissociation (trauma, neurological development, psychological defense) have no obvious analog at cosmic scale.
It is also not effective because DID itself remains contested as a clinical diagnosis. The condition was popularized by cases like Sybil and The Three Faces of Eve, both of which have been challenged in subsequent decades on grounds of iatrogenic creation, where the diagnosis was effectively constructed by therapist suggestion rather than discovered in the patient. The 1973 Sybil case, the foundational case for the modern diagnosis, was substantially reexamined by Debbie Nathan in her 2011 investigation Sybil Exposed, which presented evidence that the alters were largely produced by the therapeutic process rather than preexisting it. Building a metaphysics on a clinical category whose status is genuinely uncertain creates exposure that Kastrup tends to underplay. The cases of differential physiological response across alters are real and significant, but the broader diagnostic category of DID may not be quite the natural kind his argument requires.
A further weakness: the decombination problem may be no easier than the combination problem, only different. Kastrup claims it is easier because we have human dissociation as an example. The reply is that dissociation in human minds occurs within a single biological organism with a single nervous system, where the unity is given and the division is what needs explanation. Dissociation at cosmic scale would require the unity to fracture across what looks like an entire universe of separate beings, which is a different operation by orders of magnitude. Saying “the universe dissociates the way a human mind dissociates” makes the words available without making the operation clear. Whether this is genuine progress over panpsychism depends on whether the analogy translates, and that translation has not been demonstrated.
The position fails because it cannot account well for the resistance the world offers to the will. If everything is mind, why does the chair refuse to move when I will it to? Why do facts about the world repeatedly disconfirm my expectations? Kastrup answers that the rest of mind-at-large is not under my control, since I am only an alter, and what I experience as physical resistance is the appearance of mental activity outside my dissociative boundary. This response is not incoherent, but it does shift the burden onto explaining why the appearance is so consistent across different observers, why it has the lawful structure physics describes, and why it tracks counterfactuals so reliably. A mind-at-large that produces a perfectly consistent appearance of a physical world is doing something hard to distinguish from actually being a physical world, and the explanatory virtue of idealism shrinks the more its appearance matches what materialism predicts.
His treatment of artificial intelligence is also vulnerable to challenge. The claim that silicon cannot host consciousness because it is a heap rather than a metabolic process is a strong commitment that does work Kastrup may not be able to cash. The distinction between heap and life is doing the heavy lifting, and the distinction is itself empirical: he is claiming, on metaphysical grounds, that we know which natural systems can support dissociation and which cannot, but the criterion (metabolism) is itself something that arose through unguided physical processes. Why metabolism in particular should mark the threshold of dissociative capacity, when we cannot specify what about metabolism makes it special, leaves the position exposed to the objection that the threshold is being drawn for convenience rather than on principle. If materialism cannot explain why neurons matter and silicon does not, idealism inherits the same difficulty in different vocabulary.
Last, idealism shares with all consciousness-fundamental positions the difficulty of empirical falsifiability. Kastrup makes empirical predictions about psychedelics, about NDEs, about quantum measurement, but the core claim that reality is mental rather than physical is hard to test in any decisive way, since both views can typically accommodate the same data with different interpretations. While this does not prove idealism wrong, it does mean that any preference for idealism over materialism rests on theoretical virtues like coherence and explanatory parsimony rather than on a knockdown empirical case, and theoretical virtues alone rarely settle metaphysical disputes that have run for two and a half thousand years.
Now bring the three positions together. Each of the views we have considered confronts the hard problem differently, and each pays a different price for its solution.
Dennett’s illusionism tries to make the hard problem disappear by denying that phenomenal consciousness exists in the way introspection suggests. The cost is high. Illusion presupposes a perceiver, and the position has never quite recovered from this objection. What survives Dennett’s project is a sharpened understanding of how introspection misrepresents underlying neural activity, which is significant cognitive science but does not amount to the metaphysical achievement he claimed.
McGilchrist’s panpsychism tries to dissolve the hard problem by making consciousness elementary at every level of organization, with matter as one of its phases. The cost is the combination problem, which has occupied serious philosophers since William James raised the worry in 1890 and which has not been answered to general satisfaction. What survives the panpsychist program is the recognition that emergent materialism may be smuggling in a miracle when it claims that consciousness arises from non-conscious matter at some unspecified threshold of complexity.
Kastrup’s analytic idealism tries to dissolve the hard problem by making consciousness the only thing there is, with matter as its appearance under conditions of dissociation. The cost is the decombination problem, the dependence on a contested clinical analogy, and the difficulty of explaining the apparent independence of physical regularity from subjective will. What survives the idealist position is a coherent and rigorous alternative to materialism that takes the empirical findings about psychedelics, NDEs, and foundational physics more seriously than its competitors typically do.
The honest verdict is that none of the three positions has solved the consciousness problem, and that each has identified real difficulties in the others. If those previous moves are correct, then the hard problem is real (against Dennett), the materialist emergence story is unconvincing (against the orthodoxy), and consciousness must be either elementary at every level (McGilchrist) or the only level (Kastrup). The choice between the latter two depends on whether one finds the combination problem or the decombination problem more tractable, and reasonable readers will divide on that question along lines that have less to do with evidence than with which kind of mystery each finds easier to live with.
What the trilogy together suggests is something philosophy is reluctant to admit. The consciousness problem may not be solvable by argument alone. We are conscious beings trying to construct a theory of consciousness from inside consciousness, and there is no obvious way to step outside the medium in which the theorizing takes place. McGilchrist and Dennett and Kastrup have each produced careful work that engages the problem from a different angle, and each has been pressed by serious critics in ways that expose real weaknesses in his position. None of the three has won the argument. None has even come close to winning the argument. What they have done, taken together, is mapped the terrain in enough detail that we can now see why winning the argument may not be possible with the tools currently available.
This map is itself an honest accounting of the limits of the inquiry, which philosophy at its best produces and which the consciousness debate increasingly demonstrates. The next generation of work in this area will need to go beyond the choice among materialism, panpsychism, illusionism, and idealism, and find some way of asking the question that the current frame cannot accommodate. Whether that requires a new conceptual vocabulary, a new empirical paradigm, or simply more patience with the irreducibility of the problem remains to be seen.
For the BolesBlogs reader who has followed the sequence to this point, the takeaway is this. Consciousness is real. The hard problem is real. Materialism cannot explain consciousness. Panpsychism faces the combination problem. Illusionism collapses on its own premises. Idealism trades one set of difficulties for another. We have not been told the truth about what we are by any of the available frameworks, and the search continues. The task of the serious reader is to hold the question open, refuse to settle prematurely on any of the offered solutions, and continue reading what the philosophers and the scientists and the contemplatives produce as they work toward whatever lies beyond the current map.
Kastrup wrote in a 2019 Scientific American opinion piece that mind is the only carpet under which we can no longer sweep the inconvenience of consciousness. The line is sharp and works whether or not we accept his particular formulation of what mind requires us to believe. Consciousness is the inconvenience that materialism cannot explain. Whether it is the only inconvenience, or whether it is the substrate from which all other inconveniences follow, is the question we have been asking for three articles now, and the question we will keep asking long after this sequence concludes.
We assume our own inwardness because we have nothing else to assume from. Whether that inwardness reaches outward into a world of separate things, downward into the smallest particles, inward into a single field that contains everything, or only inward into the lighted corner where we happen to find ourselves, is the question philosophy has not yet answered and may never answer. The honest scholar lives with this. An honest writer says it out loud. And the honest reader, having followed three serious philosophers through three serious wagers, walks away from the sequence with sharper questions and fewer false certainties than when he or she began.
That is what philosophy at its best can do for us. None of the three thinkers we have considered solved the problem. All three of them taught us how the problem must be approached if we are to make progress on it, and all three of them deserve continued reading, continued argument, and continued respect for the seriousness with which they pursued the deepest question we have.
#death #disassociated #huxley #idealism #kastrup #mind #physics #rovelli #tech #universe #weakness #world

#world #weakness #universe #tech #rovelli #physics
David Boles @[email protected] · 2026-05-05 · 11:46 UTC

The Dissociated Universe: Bernardo Kastrup’s Analytic Idealism and the Mind That Contains the World

This essay completes a sequence. The first article considered Iain McGilchrist’s panpsychist proposal that matter is a phase of consciousness, the way ice and vapor are phases of water. Its companion examined Daniel Dennett’s illusionism, which argued that consciousness as we ordinarily conceive it is a user illusion the brain stages for itself. The third position, the one we take up here, inverts the relation again. Bernardo Kastrup’s analytic idealism holds that matter is an appearance within mind rather than the substance from which mind emerges or the surface on which it plays. The three views together cover most of the contemporary terrain on the consciousness question, and once we have all three on the table we can ask what each gets right, what each fails to deliver, and what the overall topography tells us about the limits of philosophical argument when applied to the deepest question we know how to ask.
Kastrup is an unusual figure in contemporary philosophy of mind. Born in Rio de Janeiro in 1974 and now based in the Netherlands, he holds two doctorates: one in computer engineering from Eindhoven University of Technology, completed in 2001, and a second in philosophy from Radboud University Nijmegen, completed in 2019, with a dissertation titled “Analytic Idealism: A Consciousness-Only Ontology.” He spent years at CERN working on the trigger system for the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider, founded the parallel processor company Silicon Hive (acquired by Intel in 2011), and currently runs an AI hardware company called Euclyd while serving as Executive Director of the Essentia Foundation, the Dutch nonprofit dedicated to advancing post-materialist research. His scientific credentials matter for the discussion that follows, since one common line of dismissal against idealism is that it represents a flight from science. Kastrup spent two decades inside science before publishing a single book on metaphysics, and the work he produces shows that experience on every page.
Begin with the position itself, stated as carefully as possible. Analytic idealism holds that reality is mental at its base. There is one substrate of existence, and that substrate is consciousness, what Kastrup calls mind-at-large or the universal field of subjectivity. The physical world we perceive is the extrinsic appearance of mental processes, in the way that the surface activity of a brain (neurons firing, blood flowing, electrical signals traveling) is the extrinsic appearance of someone’s inner experience. When you observe another person’s brain in an MRI scanner, you see the outside of their thoughts. When you look at the universe, you see the outside of mind-at-large.
The question this position must answer is the obvious one. If everything is mind, why does it look like a world of separate things, including separate persons with separate inner lives? Kastrup’s answer is the most striking move in his system. He argues that individual minds are dissociated alters of universal consciousness, comparable to the alternate personalities that appear in cases of Dissociative Identity Disorder, the condition formerly known as multiple personality disorder. In DID, one biological organism hosts multiple distinct centers of awareness that often have no access to one another’s memories, preferences, or self-conception. Each alter experiences itself as a separate person. Each alter is a real conscious subject. There is one underlying organism producing all of them. Kastrup proposes that we (and all other living creatures) are alters of mind-at-large, dissociated centers of awareness within the single field of universal subjectivity, each of us mistakenly experiencing ourselves as a separate person when we are something the universe is temporarily doing.
The physical world, on this view, is a representation. Specifically, it is what the dissociation looks like from the inside of an alter. Just as the dashboard of an airplane represents external states (altitude, fuel, airspeed) without itself being those states, our perceived world represents the activity of mind-at-large without itself being that activity. The dashboard analogy, which Kastrup uses repeatedly, makes the claim concrete. We do not perceive reality directly. We perceive a user interface that represents reality, and the interface is constructed by our cognitive apparatus, which is itself a dissociative boundary within a larger mental field.
Several consequences follow that distinguish analytic idealism from neighboring positions. Death, on this account, is the end of dissociation rather than the end of consciousness. When the alter dissolves, what was alter rejoins what was always already mind-at-large. Psychedelics are interpreted as substances that weaken the dissociative boundary, which is why they often produce ego dissolution and what Kastrup considers genuine glimpses of pre-dissociated awareness. Near-death experiences are read as moments when the dissociation thins and richer experience floods through. Most strikingly, artificial intelligence on Kastrup’s view cannot be conscious in the relevant sense, because computers are what he calls heaps, aggregates of components that do not constitute a true dissociative process. Only metabolism, life, the actual process of biological self-maintenance, produces the kind of dissociation that yields a conscious alter. Silicon will not do, no matter how complex the architecture.
Where his case works, it works for these reasons.
The argument is effective because idealism dissolves the hard problem rather than postponing it. If consciousness is the base substrate and matter is its appearance, there is no question of how non-conscious stuff produces conscious experience, since there is no non-conscious stuff. The question David Chalmers identified in 1995, the question that materialism cannot answer and that illusionism tries to argue out of existence, simply does not arise on idealist premises. This is no small advantage. A theory that does not face the hardest problem in philosophy of mind has gained considerable ground over theories that do.
It is also effective because the DID analogy is rooted in actual psychiatric and neurological evidence. DID is a controversial diagnosis, but its empirical reality is harder to dispute than its theoretical interpretation. There exist documented cases of patients whose alters present with measurably different physiological responses, different visual capabilities (one alter cortically blind while another sees normally, as documented by Strasburger and Waldvogel in their 2015 PsyCh Journal case report on patient B.T., who showed completely absent visual evoked potentials in her blind alters and normal VEPs in her sighted ones, with switches occurring within seconds), and different allergic reactions, all in the same body. Whatever DID is, it shows that the relationship between one biological substrate and multiple centers of awareness is genuinely possible. Kastrup uses this as proof of concept rather than as proof of his metaphysics, but the proof of concept matters: a critic cannot dismiss the dissociation move as impossible in principle, because we have evidence that something analogous happens at the human scale.
A further strength: the position takes empirical findings about brain function seriously in a way his critics often do not credit. Studies by Robin Carhart-Harris and colleagues at Imperial College London, beginning with the 2012 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences paper on psilocybin and brain activity, found that psychedelic experience correlates with decreased activity in certain brain regions, particularly the default mode network. Materialist orthodoxy predicts that richer experience should require more brain activity. The data show the opposite in significant cases. Kastrup uses this as evidence for what philosophers call the brain-as-filter hypothesis: the brain constrains and channels consciousness rather than producing it, with reduced activity allowing wider awareness through. Aldous Huxley made a version of this argument in 1954 in The Doors of Perception, drawing on Henri Bergson’s earlier work, and the recent neuroscientific findings have given the older idea a second life. Whether or not one accepts the idealist conclusion, the empirical pattern is real and demands explanation.
The position earns additional power because it accommodates findings in foundational physics that materialism handles awkwardly. The relational interpretation of quantum mechanics, developed by Carlo Rovelli starting in 1996, holds that the properties of a physical system exist only relative to other systems, with no observer-independent reality. Kastrup, in a 2018 Foundations of Physics paper coauthored with Edward F. Kelly and others, argued that this interpretation aligns naturally with idealism, since a universe in which physical properties exist only as relations is a universe whose deepest substrate may be mental rather than material. The argument does not prove idealism, though it does show that idealism coordinates with serious physics in ways that flat-footed materialism does not.
Last, the position is internally coherent in a way panpsychism struggles to achieve. McGilchrist must explain how micro-experiences combine into the unified field of human awareness, and the combination problem identified by William Seager in 1995 has no settled solution. Kastrup argues that idealism faces only the inverse problem, what philosophers call decombination, which asks how universal consciousness divides into apparent multiplicity. Kastrup’s answer is dissociation, and dissociation is something we have empirical reason to believe occurs in nature. The combination problem requires us to imagine micro-experiences merging into macro-experiences, a process for which we have no empirical model whatsoever. Decombination, by contrast, has a real-world analog in psychiatric phenomena that can be studied. The asymmetry between the two problems is one of Kastrup’s strongest arguments for preferring idealism over panpsychism.
Weaknesses follow, however, and any honest reader should press them.
The argument is not effective because the DID analogy, suggestive as it sounds, is doing more work than analogies can legitimately bear. Even if dissociation occurs in human minds, extrapolating from human dissociation to cosmic dissociation is a major leap that the analogy cannot underwrite by itself. Kastrup acknowledges this and frames the move as inference to the best explanation, but inference to the best explanation requires that the explanation actually be best, which is the question in dispute. A critic can reasonably reply that we have no idea whether mind-at-large, even if it exists, would dissociate the way human minds do, since the conditions producing human dissociation (trauma, neurological development, psychological defense) have no obvious analog at cosmic scale.
It is also not effective because DID itself remains contested as a clinical diagnosis. The condition was popularized by cases like Sybil and The Three Faces of Eve, both of which have been challenged in subsequent decades on grounds of iatrogenic creation, where the diagnosis was effectively constructed by therapist suggestion rather than discovered in the patient. The 1973 Sybil case, the foundational case for the modern diagnosis, was substantially reexamined by Debbie Nathan in her 2011 investigation Sybil Exposed, which presented evidence that the alters were largely produced by the therapeutic process rather than preexisting it. Building a metaphysics on a clinical category whose status is genuinely uncertain creates exposure that Kastrup tends to underplay. The cases of differential physiological response across alters are real and significant, but the broader diagnostic category of DID may not be quite the natural kind his argument requires.
A further weakness: the decombination problem may be no easier than the combination problem, only different. Kastrup claims it is easier because we have human dissociation as an example. The reply is that dissociation in human minds occurs within a single biological organism with a single nervous system, where the unity is given and the division is what needs explanation. Dissociation at cosmic scale would require the unity to fracture across what looks like an entire universe of separate beings, which is a different operation by orders of magnitude. Saying “the universe dissociates the way a human mind dissociates” makes the words available without making the operation clear. Whether this is genuine progress over panpsychism depends on whether the analogy translates, and that translation has not been demonstrated.
The position fails because it cannot account well for the resistance the world offers to the will. If everything is mind, why does the chair refuse to move when I will it to? Why do facts about the world repeatedly disconfirm my expectations? Kastrup answers that the rest of mind-at-large is not under my control, since I am only an alter, and what I experience as physical resistance is the appearance of mental activity outside my dissociative boundary. This response is not incoherent, but it does shift the burden onto explaining why the appearance is so consistent across different observers, why it has the lawful structure physics describes, and why it tracks counterfactuals so reliably. A mind-at-large that produces a perfectly consistent appearance of a physical world is doing something hard to distinguish from actually being a physical world, and the explanatory virtue of idealism shrinks the more its appearance matches what materialism predicts.
His treatment of artificial intelligence is also vulnerable to challenge. The claim that silicon cannot host consciousness because it is a heap rather than a metabolic process is a strong commitment that does work Kastrup may not be able to cash. The distinction between heap and life is doing the heavy lifting, and the distinction is itself empirical: he is claiming, on metaphysical grounds, that we know which natural systems can support dissociation and which cannot, but the criterion (metabolism) is itself something that arose through unguided physical processes. Why metabolism in particular should mark the threshold of dissociative capacity, when we cannot specify what about metabolism makes it special, leaves the position exposed to the objection that the threshold is being drawn for convenience rather than on principle. If materialism cannot explain why neurons matter and silicon does not, idealism inherits the same difficulty in different vocabulary.
Last, idealism shares with all consciousness-fundamental positions the difficulty of empirical falsifiability. Kastrup makes empirical predictions about psychedelics, about NDEs, about quantum measurement, but the core claim that reality is mental rather than physical is hard to test in any decisive way, since both views can typically accommodate the same data with different interpretations. While this does not prove idealism wrong, it does mean that any preference for idealism over materialism rests on theoretical virtues like coherence and explanatory parsimony rather than on a knockdown empirical case, and theoretical virtues alone rarely settle metaphysical disputes that have run for two and a half thousand years.
Now bring the three positions together. Each of the views we have considered confronts the hard problem differently, and each pays a different price for its solution.
Dennett’s illusionism tries to make the hard problem disappear by denying that phenomenal consciousness exists in the way introspection suggests. The cost is high. Illusion presupposes a perceiver, and the position has never quite recovered from this objection. What survives Dennett’s project is a sharpened understanding of how introspection misrepresents underlying neural activity, which is significant cognitive science but does not amount to the metaphysical achievement he claimed.
McGilchrist’s panpsychism tries to dissolve the hard problem by making consciousness elementary at every level of organization, with matter as one of its phases. The cost is the combination problem, which has occupied serious philosophers since William James raised the worry in 1890 and which has not been answered to general satisfaction. What survives the panpsychist program is the recognition that emergent materialism may be smuggling in a miracle when it claims that consciousness arises from non-conscious matter at some unspecified threshold of complexity.
Kastrup’s analytic idealism tries to dissolve the hard problem by making consciousness the only thing there is, with matter as its appearance under conditions of dissociation. The cost is the decombination problem, the dependence on a contested clinical analogy, and the difficulty of explaining the apparent independence of physical regularity from subjective will. What survives the idealist position is a coherent and rigorous alternative to materialism that takes the empirical findings about psychedelics, NDEs, and foundational physics more seriously than its competitors typically do.
The honest verdict is that none of the three positions has solved the consciousness problem, and that each has identified real difficulties in the others. If those previous moves are correct, then the hard problem is real (against Dennett), the materialist emergence story is unconvincing (against the orthodoxy), and consciousness must be either elementary at every level (McGilchrist) or the only level (Kastrup). The choice between the latter two depends on whether one finds the combination problem or the decombination problem more tractable, and reasonable readers will divide on that question along lines that have less to do with evidence than with which kind of mystery each finds easier to live with.
What the trilogy together suggests is something philosophy is reluctant to admit. The consciousness problem may not be solvable by argument alone. We are conscious beings trying to construct a theory of consciousness from inside consciousness, and there is no obvious way to step outside the medium in which the theorizing takes place. McGilchrist and Dennett and Kastrup have each produced careful work that engages the problem from a different angle, and each has been pressed by serious critics in ways that expose real weaknesses in his position. None of the three has won the argument. None has even come close to winning the argument. What they have done, taken together, is mapped the terrain in enough detail that we can now see why winning the argument may not be possible with the tools currently available.
This map is itself an honest accounting of the limits of the inquiry, which philosophy at its best produces and which the consciousness debate increasingly demonstrates. The next generation of work in this area will need to go beyond the choice among materialism, panpsychism, illusionism, and idealism, and find some way of asking the question that the current frame cannot accommodate. Whether that requires a new conceptual vocabulary, a new empirical paradigm, or simply more patience with the irreducibility of the problem remains to be seen.
For the BolesBlogs reader who has followed the sequence to this point, the takeaway is this. Consciousness is real. The hard problem is real. Materialism cannot explain consciousness. Panpsychism faces the combination problem. Illusionism collapses on its own premises. Idealism trades one set of difficulties for another. We have not been told the truth about what we are by any of the available frameworks, and the search continues. The task of the serious reader is to hold the question open, refuse to settle prematurely on any of the offered solutions, and continue reading what the philosophers and the scientists and the contemplatives produce as they work toward whatever lies beyond the current map.
Kastrup wrote in a 2019 Scientific American opinion piece that mind is the only carpet under which we can no longer sweep the inconvenience of consciousness. The line is sharp and works whether or not we accept his particular formulation of what mind requires us to believe. Consciousness is the inconvenience that materialism cannot explain. Whether it is the only inconvenience, or whether it is the substrate from which all other inconveniences follow, is the question we have been asking for three articles now, and the question we will keep asking long after this sequence concludes.
We assume our own inwardness because we have nothing else to assume from. Whether that inwardness reaches outward into a world of separate things, downward into the smallest particles, inward into a single field that contains everything, or only inward into the lighted corner where we happen to find ourselves, is the question philosophy has not yet answered and may never answer. The honest scholar lives with this. An honest writer says it out loud. And the honest reader, having followed three serious philosophers through three serious wagers, walks away from the sequence with sharper questions and fewer false certainties than when he or she began.
That is what philosophy at its best can do for us. None of the three thinkers we have considered solved the problem. All three of them taught us how the problem must be approached if we are to make progress on it, and all three of them deserve continued reading, continued argument, and continued respect for the seriousness with which they pursued the deepest question we have.
Part three of three. For the full sequence and reading guide, see The Consciousness Trilogy: Reading Three Wagers on the Question We Cannot Settle.
#death #disassociated #huxley #idealism #kastrup #mind #physics #rovelli #tech #universe #weakness #world

#death #disassociated #huxley #idealism #kastrup #mind
Andreas Wagner @[email protected] · 2025-11-05 · 10:00 UTC

I'm at the AI and Law conference in Tübingen and have just heard a MARVELOUS keynote lecture by Sylvie Delacroix on preserving productive uncertainty in designing AI systems. It reminded me of (among other things) an idea brough up by @andreaskuczera at #DHd2025 : How about allowing (or incentivizing) usage of AI systems in research only in scenarios where you are not sitting alone in front of the system, but use it exclusively in group settings from the outset?
A glimpse of what Delacroix discussed can be gleaned from: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11023-025-09736-x
Here is the conference webpage: https://ailawinstitute.de/conference-for-ai-and-law/
I guess I may post some more thoughts today and tomorrow with the hashtag #AIandLaw

#dhd2025 #aiandlaw
Andreas Wagner @[email protected] · 2025-11-05 · 10:00 UTC

I'm at the AI and Law conference in Tübingen and have just heard a MARVELOUS keynote lecture by Sylvie Delacroix on preserving productive uncertainty in designing AI systems. It reminded me of (among other things) an idea brough up by @andreaskuczera at #DHd2025 : How about allowing (or incentivizing) usage of AI systems in research only in scenarios where you are not sitting alone in front of the system, but use it exclusively in group settings from the outset?
A glimpse of what Delacroix discussed can be gleaned from: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11023-025-09736-x
Here is the conference webpage: https://ailawinstitute.de/conference-for-ai-and-law/
I guess I may post some more thoughts today and tomorrow with the hashtag #AIandLaw

#dhd2025 #aiandlaw
Andreas Wagner @[email protected] · 2025-11-05 · 10:00 UTC

I'm at the AI and Law conference in Tübingen and have just heard a MARVELOUS keynote lecture by Sylvie Delacroix on preserving productive uncertainty in designing AI systems. It reminded me of (among other things) an idea brough up by @andreaskuczera at #DHd2025 : How about allowing (or incentivizing) usage of AI systems in research only in scenarios where you are not sitting alone in front of the system, but use it exclusively in group settings from the outset?
A glimpse of what Delacroix discussed can be gleaned from: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11023-025-09736-x
Here is the conference webpage: https://ailawinstitute.de/conference-for-ai-and-law/
I guess I may post some more thoughts today and tomorrow with the hashtag #AIandLaw

#aiandlaw #dhd2025
Andreas Wagner @[email protected] · 2025-11-05 · 10:00 UTC

I'm at the AI and Law conference in Tübingen and have just heard a MARVELOUS keynote lecture by Sylvie Delacroix on preserving productive uncertainty in designing AI systems. It reminded me of (among other things) an idea brough up by @andreaskuczera at #DHd2025 : How about allowing (or incentivizing) usage of AI systems in research only in scenarios where you are not sitting alone in front of the system, but use it exclusively in group settings from the outset?
A glimpse of what Delacroix discussed can be gleaned from: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11023-025-09736-x
Here is the conference webpage: https://ailawinstitute.de/conference-for-ai-and-law/
I guess I may post some more thoughts today and tomorrow with the hashtag #AIandLaw

#dhd2025 #aiandlaw
United States News Beep @[email protected] · 2025-10-11 · 06:40 UTC

Nina Dobrev shines in Paris getaway trip as fans celebrate her being single
Nina Dobrev is giving fans a glimpse into her recent vacation. In an Instagram post, the 36-year-old “Vampire Diaries”…
#NewsBeep #News #US #USA #UnitedStates #UnitedStatesOfAmerica #Celebrities #celebritycouples #Entertainment #FRANCE #instagram #NinaDobrev #PARIS #ShaunWhite #sophiabush #TheVampireDiaries
https://www.newsbeep.com/us/216157/

#newsbeep #news #us #usa #unitedstates #unitedstatesofamerica
United States News Beep @[email protected] · 2025-10-11 · 06:40 UTC

Nina Dobrev shines in Paris getaway trip as fans celebrate her being single
Nina Dobrev is giving fans a glimpse into her recent vacation. In an Instagram post, the 36-year-old “Vampire Diaries”…
#NewsBeep #News #US #USA #UnitedStates #UnitedStatesOfAmerica #Celebrities #celebritycouples #Entertainment #FRANCE #instagram #NinaDobrev #PARIS #ShaunWhite #sophiabush #TheVampireDiaries
https://www.newsbeep.com/us/216157/

#thevampirediaries #sophiabush #shaunwhite #paris #ninadobrev #instagram
IndieAuthors.Social News @[email protected] · 2026-04-28 · 15:35 UTC

Future Flash
Every writer needs a little inspiration once in a while. For today’s prompt, write about an instant camera that shows glimpses of the future.
The post Future Flash appeared first on Writer's Digest.
https://www.writersdigest.com/future-flash
#BeInspired #CreativeWritingPrompts #PhotoPrompts #WritingPrompts #creativewritingprompt

#beinspired #creativewritingprompts #photoprompts #writingprompts #creativewritingprompt
IndieAuthors.Social News @[email protected] · 2026-04-28 · 15:35 UTC

Future Flash
Every writer needs a little inspiration once in a while. For today’s prompt, write about an instant camera that shows glimpses of the future.
The post Future Flash appeared first on Writer's Digest.
https://www.writersdigest.com/future-flash
#BeInspired #CreativeWritingPrompts #PhotoPrompts #WritingPrompts #creativewritingprompt

#beinspired #creativewritingprompts #photoprompts #writingprompts #creativewritingprompt
IndieAuthors.Social News @[email protected] · 2026-04-28 · 15:35 UTC

Future Flash
Every writer needs a little inspiration once in a while. For today’s prompt, write about an instant camera that shows glimpses of the future.
The post Future Flash appeared first on Writer's Digest.
https://www.writersdigest.com/future-flash
#BeInspired #CreativeWritingPrompts #PhotoPrompts #WritingPrompts #creativewritingprompt

#beinspired #creativewritingprompts #photoprompts #writingprompts #creativewritingprompt
United States News Beep @[email protected] · 2026-02-27 · 01:00 UTC

Tennis Icon Serena Williams Shows Slim New Look in Latest Post
Serena Williams had followers swooning over her latest post as the tennis icon shared a glimpse of her…
#NewsBeep #News #US #USA #UnitedStates #UnitedStatesOfAmerica #Tennis #AdiraRiverOhanian #AlexisOhanian #AlexisOlympiaOhanianJr. #Instagrampost #SerenaWilliams #Sports #weightloss
https://www.newsbeep.com/us/492579/

#newsbeep #news #us #usa #unitedstates #unitedstatesofamerica
Originalbarbas @[email protected] · 2025-09-19 · 12:05 UTC

2/n So, after a week too full of work, I have some time now to continue writing about my upcoming Holy Grail War campaign. I don't think I will disclose much about the plot and setting yet, but I will offer some broad strokes about the foundations of it.

1. It is going to be set after the 5th Holy Grail War and the Dismantling War. The year is going to be either 2018 or 2026, as it is going to be set in the US during... ahem... the Trump dictatorship administration. Yes, this is an important part of the plot.

2. It is going to be set up at Grand Island, Nebraska. I am not from the US, I mainly chose it because it the name of the place sounded cool and I needed an "isolated" place to set up the Holy Grail Wars.

3. Indeed, there are going to be multiple Holy Grail Wars happening simultaneously. The players think they are going to participate in one, and don't know about the other two. As there may be up to 9 players (some other friends wanted to play too), there will be... 23 Heroic Spirits, give or take.

4. I am going to use a system based on OSR philosophy (mainly Into the Odd, as it is the one I am most familiar with), the previous campaign we played and some PbtA elements (mixed with some FitD elements such as clocks and factions and so on).

Today I am going to run an alpha test where I will introduce some of the players to the setting, show them what kind of Heroic Spirits they can summon (inspire them in a way), give them a glimpse on the lore of the actual campaign and test the system. In-game it will actually be a test run by one of the organisers of the Holy Grail War, a Nazi-vampire magus who will kidnap people from the streets, use Nazi medicine/vampire magic to have them summon Heroic Spirits and have them navigate an underground daedalus (she will have summoned actual Daedalus to build it) with ghouls and other vampires to test how the Heroic Spirit summoning went. That is why, even if the system is not working well and there are things missing, it can be explained in-game too, hahaha. Also, none of these PCs are expected to survive due to reasons.

Tomorrow I will probably write another post about how the system actually works and the day after an post-mortem of the test. We will see.

#TTRPG #FateNE #TypeMoon #FateStayNight #Nasuverse

#ttrpg #fatene #typemoon #fatestaynight #nasuverse
Originalbarbas @[email protected] · 2025-09-19 · 12:05 UTC

2/n So, after a week too full of work, I have some time now to continue writing about my upcoming Holy Grail War campaign. I don't think I will disclose much about the plot and setting yet, but I will offer some broad strokes about the foundations of it.

1. It is going to be set after the 5th Holy Grail War and the Dismantling War. The year is going to be either 2018 or 2026, as it is going to be set in the US during... ahem... the Trump dictatorship administration. Yes, this is an important part of the plot.

2. It is going to be set up at Grand Island, Nebraska. I am not from the US, I mainly chose it because it the name of the place sounded cool and I needed an "isolated" place to set up the Holy Grail Wars.

3. Indeed, there are going to be multiple Holy Grail Wars happening simultaneously. The players think they are going to participate in one, and don't know about the other two. As there may be up to 9 players (some other friends wanted to play too), there will be... 23 Heroic Spirits, give or take.

4. I am going to use a system based on OSR philosophy (mainly Into the Odd, as it is the one I am most familiar with), the previous campaign we played and some PbtA elements (mixed with some FitD elements such as clocks and factions and so on).

Today I am going to run an alpha test where I will introduce some of the players to the setting, show them what kind of Heroic Spirits they can summon (inspire them in a way), give them a glimpse on the lore of the actual campaign and test the system. In-game it will actually be a test run by one of the organisers of the Holy Grail War, a Nazi-vampire magus who will kidnap people from the streets, use Nazi medicine/vampire magic to have them summon Heroic Spirits and have them navigate an underground daedalus (she will have summoned actual Daedalus to build it) with ghouls and other vampires to test how the Heroic Spirit summoning went. That is why, even if the system is not working well and there are things missing, it can be explained in-game too, hahaha. Also, none of these PCs are expected to survive due to reasons.

Tomorrow I will probably write another post about how the system actually works and the day after an post-mortem of the test. We will see.

#TTRPG #FateNE #TypeMoon #FateStayNight #Nasuverse

#ttrpg #fatene #typemoon #fatestaynight #nasuverse
Originalbarbas @[email protected] · 2025-09-19 · 12:05 UTC

2/n So, after a week too full of work, I have some time now to continue writing about my upcoming Holy Grail War campaign. I don't think I will disclose much about the plot and setting yet, but I will offer some broad strokes about the foundations of it.

1. It is going to be set after the 5th Holy Grail War and the Dismantling War. The year is going to be either 2018 or 2026, as it is going to be set in the US during... ahem... the Trump dictatorship administration. Yes, this is an important part of the plot.

2. It is going to be set up at Grand Island, Nebraska. I am not from the US, I mainly chose it because it the name of the place sounded cool and I needed an "isolated" place to set up the Holy Grail Wars.

3. Indeed, there are going to be multiple Holy Grail Wars happening simultaneously. The players think they are going to participate in one, and don't know about the other two. As there may be up to 9 players (some other friends wanted to play too), there will be... 23 Heroic Spirits, give or take.

4. I am going to use a system based on OSR philosophy (mainly Into the Odd, as it is the one I am most familiar with), the previous campaign we played and some PbtA elements (mixed with some FitD elements such as clocks and factions and so on).

Today I am going to run an alpha test where I will introduce some of the players to the setting, show them what kind of Heroic Spirits they can summon (inspire them in a way), give them a glimpse on the lore of the actual campaign and test the system. In-game it will actually be a test run by one of the organisers of the Holy Grail War, a Nazi-vampire magus who will kidnap people from the streets, use Nazi medicine/vampire magic to have them summon Heroic Spirits and have them navigate an underground daedalus (she will have summoned actual Daedalus to build it) with ghouls and other vampires to test how the Heroic Spirit summoning went. That is why, even if the system is not working well and there are things missing, it can be explained in-game too, hahaha. Also, none of these PCs are expected to survive due to reasons.

Tomorrow I will probably write another post about how the system actually works and the day after an post-mortem of the test. We will see.

#TTRPG #FateNE #TypeMoon #FateStayNight #Nasuverse

#nasuverse #fatestaynight #typemoon #fatene #ttrpg
Originalbarbas @[email protected] · 2025-09-19 · 12:05 UTC

2/n So, after a week too full of work, I have some time now to continue writing about my upcoming Holy Grail War campaign. I don't think I will disclose much about the plot and setting yet, but I will offer some broad strokes about the foundations of it.

1. It is going to be set after the 5th Holy Grail War and the Dismantling War. The year is going to be either 2018 or 2026, as it is going to be set in the US during... ahem... the Trump dictatorship administration. Yes, this is an important part of the plot.

2. It is going to be set up at Grand Island, Nebraska. I am not from the US, I mainly chose it because it the name of the place sounded cool and I needed an "isolated" place to set up the Holy Grail Wars.

3. Indeed, there are going to be multiple Holy Grail Wars happening simultaneously. The players think they are going to participate in one, and don't know about the other two. As there may be up to 9 players (some other friends wanted to play too), there will be... 23 Heroic Spirits, give or take.

4. I am going to use a system based on OSR philosophy (mainly Into the Odd, as it is the one I am most familiar with), the previous campaign we played and some PbtA elements (mixed with some FitD elements such as clocks and factions and so on).

Today I am going to run an alpha test where I will introduce some of the players to the setting, show them what kind of Heroic Spirits they can summon (inspire them in a way), give them a glimpse on the lore of the actual campaign and test the system. In-game it will actually be a test run by one of the organisers of the Holy Grail War, a Nazi-vampire magus who will kidnap people from the streets, use Nazi medicine/vampire magic to have them summon Heroic Spirits and have them navigate an underground daedalus (she will have summoned actual Daedalus to build it) with ghouls and other vampires to test how the Heroic Spirit summoning went. That is why, even if the system is not working well and there are things missing, it can be explained in-game too, hahaha. Also, none of these PCs are expected to survive due to reasons.

Tomorrow I will probably write another post about how the system actually works and the day after an post-mortem of the test. We will see.

#TTRPG #FateNE #TypeMoon #FateStayNight #Nasuverse

#ttrpg #fatene #typemoon #fatestaynight #nasuverse
Painted Pixels @[email protected] · 2024-11-09 · 20:22 UTC

I’ve talked in a previous post about my love for the show GameCenter CX, a Japanese show where comedian Shinya Arino is tasked with beating a retro game by a certain time limit. The show is an hour long, and the main challenge is broken up by a couple of shorter segments throughout. The recurring one is TamaGe, where Arino visits an arcade, or at least a business that has arcade games attached to it like a candy store. One of the other segments changes from season to season. While there hasn’t been a seasonal segment that I’ve actively disliked, there are certainly some that stand out as particularly entertaining to me. So today I’d like to talk about five of my favorite seasonal segments from GameCenter CX!
1. The People in My Head
Okay, so right off the bat we’re starting with a bit of a cheat. Because this one wasn’t actually featured as one of the segments in the show itself. Rather, this was a special series of video clips they put on the official website. The segment was so popular though, that they ended up putting it on one of the DVD releases.

So in The People in My Head, various staff members are tasked with drawing famous characters from video games, but they’ve got to do it from memory. There are some very talented people working on GameCenter CX, and cameraman Abe always has some amazing art to show. But it’s the less talented of the bunch that make the segment truly worth watching, as Arino does not hold back in making fun of them. He awards a ‘best of’ for each collection of drawings, and each time it’s usually the worst of weirdest one that he says is his favorite of the day.
There’s almost too many that are hilarious for me to say which drawing is my favorite, but I think the one of staff member Urakawa making Ryu throwing a fireball that Arino says looks like he’s inviting people to his shop, saying “Irashaimasen!” Ryu looks so happy!
2. Ring Ring Tactics
This was a very early segment, going back to season 3 (they’re on season 28 as of my writing this)! This segment saw Arino playing through the notoriously difficult (and maybe tedious?) Ganso Saiyuki: Super Monkey Daibouken, a famous kusge, or crap game, from the Faimcom era. This is an extremely obtuse and early RPG that gives you no indication where you need to go or what you need to do next.
Luckily, the ‘Ring ring’ part of the title is all about Arino calling fans to get help! Before the season aired, fans could write in and leave their phone number and say something like how far they’ve made it. When he gets stuck, Arino calls a random number. Some people were adults who had figured out the game in their youth and were able to give helpful tips on what Arino should do next. Other times it might be someone that clearly didn’t think they’d be called, as they didn’t really know what he should do! And then other times a mother answers saying that the kid that sent in the postcard isn’t home!
I think I like this segment because while it would be a tedious slog to use as an actual full episode, broken up the way it is, and with him able to call in help from people (that may or may not actually be able to help) makes it really fun. Plus while I like seeing Arino play retro games from my youth, I also really like seeing him play games that I might have missed or in this case that never came to the West in the first place!
3. Until the Udon Boils
In this segment Arino visits an Udon shop being manned by staff writer Kibe. Kibe is a huge fan of udon, and maybe my own fondness for it is why this one ranks so high for me! In each segment, Kibe will be boiling a different type of udon, which he talks about briefly. Then, to pass the time while the udon is being prepared, Arino is presented with some type of retro gaming oddity. One time it was Nintendo themed puzzles, and another it was retro gaming collectible cards. A short while later the udon is ready, and Arino eats some, talking about what makes it unique.
The Famicom related items Arino will pour over while waiting for his udon.
No too many of this season has been translated yet, so I actually haven’t seen too many of Until the Udon Boils yet, but Kibe is always entertaining when he’s on the show, and he truly has a passion for udon that I love seeing. Between Arino’s retro game items he looks through and Kibe’s udon of the day, this one always makes me want to sit on the floor playing NES with a steaming hot bowl of udon nearby!
They talk about the unique features of each udon they try.
4. Shocking Videos: MAX
This one is a favorite of mine because of the hilarious editing and over the top seriousness on display. In a parody of a weirdo hoarding snuff films, Arino goes to the apartment of Inoue, one of the show’s ADs. ADs are assistant directors, and help Arino out if he’s having a particularly hard time with a game. (They also scout out games by playing through them completely and deciding if it would be a good fit for the show.)
Arino arrives at Inoue’s apartment, and Inoue shares shocking videos of violence caught on tape…such as footage of the player from Paperboy getting hit by a car, or the main character in Balloon Fight getting zapped by electricity. Like I said, part of the charm of this one is how dramatically it’s edited, such as warning viewers of the violence and giving a countdown to when it happens. And Inoue plays it straight too, acting as if he’s about to show something that shouldn’t be shown to people. It’s a really fun idea and it’s made me try to think of other events in retro games that would be pretty horrible if they were real. Which is probably most of them, I suppose?
5. Famicom Sniper
This one is preeetty silly, but once again, it’s the great editing that makes the segment so enjoyable. This segment starts off with a very Golgo-13 feeling intro, showing Arino wielding a Nintendo Super Scope several stories up in a building looking out a window to the streets below. Somewhere on the street nearby, a shady exchange will happen between to members of the staff, with one stealthily handing the other a Famicom game that Arino has previously played on the show. With only a brief glimpse, Arino has to figure out what the game was.
It’s a pretty simple premise, but I found the staffers trying to act shady on the streets pretty funny, and Arino usually has something insulting to say about them as they make their attempts. It’s also fun to play along, and sometimes I could guess what the game was.
So there you have it, five great segments in addition to Arino’s usual challenges from GameCenter CX. I had planned on being cheeky and adding a 6th segment, but after looking through the list I think I could easily talk about five more segments that I love just as much, so I’m sure I’ll return to this at some point in the near future. For those GameCenter CX fans out there, what’s your favorite segment? Leave a comment and let me know! Thanks for reading!
https://paintedpixelsblog.wordpress.com/2024/11/09/my-top-5-game-center-cx-segments/
#gameCenterCx #gamecenterCx #Japan #nintendo #retroGameMaster #retroGames #shinyaArino

#gamecentercx #japan #nintendo #retrogamemaster #retrogames #shinyaarino
DaxAeterna ✨ (witchandry) @[email protected] · 2024-01-01 · 22:09 UTC
#selfpromo
Happy 2024! I got two posts that are available for free to followers on my Ream page today!
1. A cool glossary of terms you will find in my upcoming novel, Smoke and Steel. I've crafted a sweet desert nation in Smoke and Steel inhabited by cat-people and this post gives you a glimpse of their culture and way of life.
2. A psych-horror short story called "An Unreliable Narrator of My Own Life". I know, psych-horror is not my usual, but I enjoyed writing this and if you know anything about my personal life, I think you will know why!
Just sign up for Ream and hit the follow button on my page and you will get access to these and a few other tidbits! If you want to nyooom through my whole back list in a month, use the code DREAMER for a free month at the Sorcery Seeker or Enchantment Enthusiast levels, which will get you access to pretty much everything digital right now.
If you want to know more about what I have planned for January on Ream, here's my calendar!
Happy New Year! Can't wait to share even more words and worlds with everyone <3
#IndieAuthor #LGBTQAuthor
#selfpromo #indieauthor #lgbtqauthor
The Omen Media @[email protected] · 2025-01-03 · 13:35 UTC

Step into Meghan's world with 'With Love, Meghan' - cooking, gardening, and joy! Watch the trailer now on Netflix. Premieres Jan 15!
Check out the trailer right here: https://www.theomenmedia.com/post/meghan-markle-s-with-love-meghan-a-glimpse-into-the-duchess-s-new-netflix-lifestyle-series
#MeghanMarkle #Netflix #WithLoveMeghan #LifestyleSeries #DuchessOfSussex #CookingShow #MindyKaling #RoyChoi #AliceWaters

#meghanmarkle #netflix #withlovemeghan #lifestyleseries #duchessofsussex #cookingshow
Inside the Red Head's Head @[email protected] · 2024-06-03 · 12:02 UTC

Daily writing prompt List three books that have had an impact on you. Why? View all responses
This question is pandering to the religious folks, right? 95% of the responses are going to be the bible. I know it. You know it. We all know it. Insert my frustrated sigh here.
Three books… I don’t know if I can narrow it down to three. They’ve all had an effect on me to some extent or another, even the crappy books.
Okay, the first one we’ll go with came from my school days. Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank. I was born in the 1970’s and came of age in the 1980’s. The cold war had a big influence on who I was. I don’t think all of my friends were obsessed with imminent nuclear annihilation, but I sure as hell was. We lived close enough to a major city and, more frighteningly, a couple of air force bases and one army base that the chances of me and my family surviving a nuclear conflict was pretty much zero. When you’re 13 years old and have a vivid imagination and a bit of a dark side… well… that leads to quite a bit of near panicked fear. Alas, Babylon was written in 1959 and it tells the story of a town in Florida trying to survive the aftermath of world war iii. I was both terrified and fascinated by it. I forget what grade we were in when we had to read it for English class but I loved the book and didn’t sleep for weeks after I read it. I knew that the situation described in the book were not accurate by 1980’s nuclear capabilities (the bombs described in the book were wimpy by comparison) and it ignored the whole nuclear winter thing. Still, it made me want to read more post-nuclear fiction in some weird attempt to prepare myself for the inevitable.
On to book number two. This one also goes back to my school days. 8th grade, if I remember correctly, but it could be earlier than that. Hot Rod by Henry Gregor Felsen. This one hit me hard because there is an extremely graphic and violent twist in it. It was bloody and gory and I couldn’t believe we were asked to read it in school. At that point in my young, innocent, sheltered life I was not allowed to watch R rated movies. This type of violence was not something I was used to. The book was written in 1950 and was about teenagers driving souped up cars way too fast. You can probably guess what the graphic, violent twist entailed. This book clued me into the idea that a novel didn’t have to be PG rated. There was more to life than that, and books could give me a glimpse.
The third book I am going to go with is Weaveworld by Clive Barker. In my last year in high school I was exposed to the horror genre through a movie written and directed by Clive Barker called Hellraiser. It scared the every loving shit out of me. I was terrified, I was grossed out, and I was instantly obsessed with the genre. When I found out that Clive Barker was better known for writing short stories and novels I checked him out. I can’t remember if Weaveworld was the first of his books that I read. It might have been The Damnation Game, or one of the Books of Blood collection. I’m going with Weaveworld because it was the best of them all, by far. My new horror movie fandom morphed into a horror fiction fandom almost instantly. I tore through everything Barker had written up to that point. Weaveworld is amazing. It’s not really scary, though there’s some gore to be found. It’s actually more of a fantasy novel, I think. Really… it’s just a Barker novel. It’s a little of everything thrown into one super imaginative setting that no one else could have ever come up with. It’s very hard to explain. There’s one other item of note here. When I ran out of Barker books to read I needed to find someone else to hold me over until more books were released. That’s when I started dipping my toes into Stephen King. Yeah… we’re still drowning in that particular literary pool today. Talk about a master, right?
Okay, there’s three books. I could have mentioned 1000 others, and none of them are about a guy who is his own father.
https://robertjames1971.blog/2024/06/03/books/
#bookReview #bookReviews #books #cliveBarker #dailyprompt #dailyprompt1958 #horror

#dailyprompt #dailyprompt1958 #bookreview #bookreviews #books #clivebarker
Andy Tseng @[email protected] · 2026-01-16 · 05:26 UTC

Interesting chat between Sally and Sebastian on the latest #CuriosityUnbounded. Loved the glimpse into the research happening at @[email protected] and @[email protected]. #Science #Biology #Microbiology #ResearchSky #Podcast #MIT #WhiteheadInstitute

RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:376brirdwae4fayb4sd3bzdy/post/3mchvk4c4wc2m

#curiosityunbounded #science #biology #microbiology #researchsky #podcast
Andy Tseng @[email protected] · 2026-01-16 · 05:26 UTC

Interesting chat between Sally and Sebastian on the latest #CuriosityUnbounded. Loved the glimpse into the research happening at @[email protected] and @[email protected]. #Science #Biology #Microbiology #ResearchSky #Podcast #MIT #WhiteheadInstitute

RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:376brirdwae4fayb4sd3bzdy/post/3mchvk4c4wc2m

#curiosityunbounded #science #biology #microbiology #researchsky #podcast