Return to Consciousness: A Comparative Case for Consciousness-First Metaphysics

Abstract: This is the foundational synthesis of the Return to Consciousness project. The one thing every investigation of nature presupposes — conscious experience — has for over a century been treated as a byproduct of the things it was used to study. This essay argues that consciousness-first metaphysics — specifically Bernardo Kastrup's analytic idealism — handles the resulting explanatory difficulties more coherently than physicalism. Physicalism must explain how experience arises from non-experiential primitives; neuroscience has mapped correlates, but correlates are not the problem — no one has explained why there is experience at all. Idealism must explain why consciousness dissociates into finite minds and why into these specific patterns — genuine debts, named here as debts. Regularity — why reality exhibits mathematically precise, lawlike structure — is equally unexplained under both frameworks; the intuition that it is "natural for matter" but "surprising for mind" is circular — it presupposes physicalism to argue for physicalism. The standard throughout is comparative plausibility under explanatory pressure, not certainty. Keywords: analytic idealism · physicalism · hard problem of consciousness · consciousness-first metaphysics · comparative ontology · explanatory burden · dissociation Part of the Return to Consciousness research program — 26 philosophical essays exploring consciousness-first metaphysics. Full project: https://brunoton.github.io/return-to-consciousness/