No nuanced version of idealism, so far as I'm aware, espouses the idea that "everything is alive". There are versions of panspsychism, however, that approach idealism, as BK says.
Panpsychism does sort of say that. But regardless... idealism says everything arises from mind, and mind is the subjective aspect of reality. From Wikipedia on mind: "...it is generally agreed that mind is that which enables a being to have
subjective awareness and
intentionality towards their environment..."
The principal problem seems to be that people confuse consciousness with metaconsciousness. If one believes one's God is metaconscious, then one's notion of that God becomes Abrahamic, and dualism likely becomes the order of the day.
And the principle problem I have with Kastrup is the unnecessary invention of new vocabulary like "metaconsciousness" and "Mind at Large" or "M@L". The invention of new vocabulary means you first have to define your words in terms of already known vocabulary in order to communicate with someone else, and from a marketing perspective we know that such barriers to entry are no bueno. I prefer metaphors involving common vocab or well used symbols.
OTOH, if, as Bernardo hypothesises, M@L isn't metaconscious, but only its dissociated alters (living beings) have the potential to be so, one can see how everything might be in universal consciousness rather than being (meta)conscious.
And I don't like how he calls us "dissociated alters" which has the associations with mental illness. More bad marketing.
Idealism doesn't always emphasise the subjective.
I'm contrasting it with materialism so speaking in generalities. It is not that idealists deny such a thing as an "object" it is just that the object is dependent upon the mind which is subjective.
Bernardo himself, whilst tailoring his version more towards objective idealism (which particularly appeals to the modern analytical mind), claims to be simultaneously both a subjective and an objective idealist. There are things outside our seemingly localised metaconsciousnesses (i.e. "things-in-themselves" that objectively exist) but at the same time we can't help but experience them subjectively.
This seems to me like creating epicycles to explain planetary motion. I'm trying to reduce and simplify terms to find the simplest pattern that universally fits all others.
Unfortunately, and if it's because I'm dense, apologies, but I don't really understand your trinitarian idea of pattern. Subject and object mean something to me, but how does choice come into it? The choice between what and what? Object and subject? I don't get it.
Let me try a few different ways to illustrate the idea.
Imagine there is ONE thing. Perfect unity. No boundaries. No distinctions. How can we symbolize this or express this idea? Infinite light? Infinite blackness? Let's pick one. Doesn't matter which one. Infinite white? No, let's not be racist and let the Whities be privileged again. How about infinite darkness? Sounds good.
So in the beginning there is nothing. Infinite void. Infinite blackness. There is only ONE thing so there can be nothing else. There is not even any concept of darkness or light. Since there is nothing else to compare this infinite void we have no way of knowing whether it is infinitely large or infinitely small, infinitely bright or infinitely dark. There is no similarity and no difference because such concepts require comparison which require more than one thing.
In order to create something from nothing, something must change. Change creates a difference. The Oneness splits into two, but once it splits it cannot stop there. It starts a chain reaction of splitting into opposites. So what is the opposite of difference? Similarity. Similarity and difference come as a package deal. Pick anything and in some ways that thing is similar to and in some ways different from anything else. This is why I say everything real is a metaphor.
So we can represent this symbolically as black splits into white and black representing a change or a difference which then immediately turns into a grayscale spectrum from black to white (because both similarity and difference come as a package deal).
So now we have two legs of our three-legged stool installed, and here comes the third: choice.
Choice determines whether the differences are great enough to be considered different or whether the similarities are great enough to be considered identical. Choice is like a line drawn upon the gray scale spectrum which turns everything on the darker side black and everything on the lighter side white. It is like truncating an analog signal to a digital one and from this pattern or structure will arise.
How do you decide where to draw the line between light and dark, black and white? The choice is arbitrary unless you have a purpose. Purpose implies you have a goal. A goal implies the goal has not been fulfilled yet which implies a frustrated desire.
But without drawing a line on the spectrum, it is not established whether there is any difference or any similarity at all so there is no way to tell whether it is infinitely white or infinitely dark and thus the primal spectrum dissolves back to Oneness. In order for you to make a choice there must exist objective similarity/difference as well was subjective perception of similarity/difference which is a choice.
A second way to illustrate this geometrically: we all know that two points define a line, right? Wrong. It takes 3 points. If you only have two points you have no ratio, no comparison of spaces so you have no way to determine that the points are not infinitely close together and therefore the same point. All ratios which are comparisons of similarity/difference require three points.
The simplest way to illustrate this graphically is to draw three equidistant points. Why equidistant? This represents the smallest difference with the greatest amount of similarity and therefore it is as close as you can possibly get to the UNITY or the ONENESS without falling into that void where all distinction disappears. This is probably the origin of the triquetra and the flower of life symbols.
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Okay if that's not clear maybe the level is too granular.
Consider instead a neural network trained to recognize an image. You feed it pixels which have various values representing shades from black to white. How does it decide where the edges are? It assigns edges (which are a kind of boundary) based on what has the highest probability of being useful. Is the network perceiving objective edges or is it subjectively assigning the edges? It is doing both. The edges are both an objective gradient of values and a subjective choice about where to differentiate white from black so as to assign a useful boundary. If it chooses poorly and assigns the boundary in the wrong place it will not be as useful and may fail at its task.
Consider a human optical neural network observing subtle shadings and subtle gradients in color and light value of the swaying tall grass on the savannah trying to decide whether a lion has been observed or not. The neural network in the human is making a choice about where to assign edges and identify shapes based on what is most useful in staying alive. Those who fail are painfully eaten and this is a type of feedback which improves the functioning of the neural network making it more likely to assign boundaries upon gradients in a useful way in the future.
Consider 6 apples on a table. How many apples are there? Well I told you 6 so there must be 6. But suppose you were observing rather than listening to me: how do you know there are 6? Because there are enough similarities between the 6 objects to apply the same label to them and there are enough differences to consider them to be separate objects. Every set consists of similarity, difference, and boundary which is a matter of choice and that choice is arbitrary or random if there is no purpose and if there is a purpose, there is a goal behind it which makes it meaningful.
What if one of the apples on the table is a crab apple? What if one of them is an Adam's apple? What if one of them is an apple core? What if one of them is partially chewed? How you choose to define the set of apples depends on your purpose. Is your purpose to eat a fresh un-chewed fruit? You would draw that boundary differently than if your purpose was to count every object that could possibly have the label "apple" applied to it.
To me, the standard trinity comprises 1. Father - 2. Son - 3. Holy Spirit (to use Christian terminology).
These are just different labels for the Holy Trinity I have described.
The Spirit or Pneuma (great Tool song!) is equivalent to Choice. Father and son are the similarity/difference duo. A father is both similar to and different than his son. The father has a purpose which implies a goal which implies the goal has not been fulfilled yet which implies a frustration (which in humans manifests as sexual frustration) which drives action. Spirit is the active element. It is choice. In making a choice the boundary is set which establishes difference/similarity.
Genesis 1, the Spirit moved over the surface of the deep. Why the surface? The surface is the boundary. Why the deep? It is the void, the abyss, chaos. If there is a surface there must be the opposite: the light, the logos, structure. Like father like son: Jesus (Logos, Word, Structure) moved by the Spirit walked on the water (surface of the deep) by faith (by choice).
In idealistic terms, one might posit the trinity as being:
1. M@L (the instinctive, first-person perspective of the universe, or what it's like to be the universe).
I don't know what this means.
2. Life (the potential for awareness of awareness, "self refectivity", or "metaconsciousness" that has become so well developed in the alters we perceive as human beings).
Awareness of awareness is a feedback loop. Feedback loops are an essential element of consciousness at all scales of existence which is why I think it is so important to recognize the life review as a feedback loop which indicates the existence of a consciousness on a larger scale than one lifespan.
And that's all the time I've got now.