The position and its structure

Yetter-Chappell’s nontheistic idealism begins with a diagnostic observation about Berkeley. God plays two central roles in Berkeley’s metaphysics. He accounts for the persistence of reality when not perceived by finite minds, and he underwrites the regularities we find in nature (Berkeley Reference Berkeley and Robinson2009). Many of God’s attributes are inessential to these roles, but what is essential is God’s sensory phenomenology. His experiences, like those of the greenness of the tree, its shape, and the roughness of its bark, are essential in accounting for natural regularities we experience. God’s beliefs, desires, intentions, will, and agency are inessential in accounting for such regularities. Strip away the inessential and what remains is a phenomenal unity, or God-minus. This God-minus constitutes the physical world.

Yetter-Chappell’s book develops her nontheistic idealism with considerably more detail than her earlier papers (Yetter-Chappell Reference Yetter-Chappell, Goldschmidt and Pearce2018). Physical reality is a vast phenomenal tapestry, or a unity of consciousness binding together sensory experiences of every point from every possible perspective. These experiences are indexed to perspectives and bundled by property binding into threads, which are woven by unity-of-consciousness and spatial relations into the structure of physical objects and their spatial relationships. The laws of nature govern the unfolding of this phenomenal tapestry, and any account of laws available to the nontheistic materialist is equally available to the nontheistic idealist, since physical laws are neutral as to the metaphysical nature of what they govern.

The account of perception pairing with this metaphysics is what Yetter-Chappell calls Naive Idealism (Yetter-Chappell Reference Yetter-Chappell2025, ch. 4). In veridical perception, threads of the phenomenal tapestry literally become part of the finite perceiver’s mind. The perceived aspects of the tree are unified with the finite mind’s experiential contents by the unity-of-consciousness relation, making them simultaneously aspects of physical reality and aspects of the perceiver’s experience. This gives a direct account of perceptual contact with reality and explains a neglected epistemic virtue: that the truthmaker for my perceptual judgement is literally a constituent of my experience, in a way unavailable to materialism.

The tapestry is structured by three kinds of relations inherited from the phenomenology of ordinary experience. Unity-of-consciousness relations bind all the experiences of the tapestry into a single structured whole, just as they bind the experiences of a finite mind into a single overarching experience. Property binding relations bind together the specific phenomenal properties of a single object, making each object a unified bundle rather than a collection of co-present properties. Phenomenal spatial and temporal relations provide the spatial and temporal structure of physical reality. These relations are the same relations required to make sense of the unity of individual conscious experience, extended to structure a larger unity.

An important feature of her book is its explicit engagement with the question of whether the tapestry requires a subject. Yetter-Chappell identifies three potential positions (Yetter-Chappell Reference Yetter-Chappell2025, 15–18). On the Robust Mind view, the experiences constituting the tapestry are had by a cosmic mind that is an ontological addition to the experiences themselves, akin to Berkeley’s God stripped of theological attributes. On the Thin Mind view, following Strawson (Reference Strawson2003), experiences are essentially experienced, and so there is an experiencer, but this experiencer is not an ontological addition beyond the experiences themselves. On the No Mind view, experiences can be free-floating, requiring no experiencer. Yetter-Chappell declares herself partial to the Thin Mind view but states that all three are compatible with the rest of her account.

Yetter-Chappell recognizes the pressure towards a subject while attempting to defuse it without conceding full subjectivity. Whether the Thin Mind succeeds is the topic of the next section. The structure of Yetter-Chappell’s position thus generates two pressure points that the next two sections examine in turn. Each concerns a feature of the tapestry that the nontheistic framework is committed to explaining but that, on examination, requires a globally unifying subject to explain adequately. Her engagement with Hurley’s (Reference Hurley and Peacocke1994) objectivity requirement is of particular consequence, since she accepts that unity of consciousness requires something beyond mere phenomenal content, but argues that Dainton’s (Reference Dainton2000) introspectively accessible co-consciousness relation provides the required objectivity without being extra-mental. I will return to this later.Footnote ¹

In Section 6.4.3, Yetter-Chappell directly compares nontheistic and theistic idealism. Her conclusion is ‘…. that all the benefits of the nontheistic idealism developed in this book can be captured equally well by theistic idealists. There is nothing essential to capturing these virtues that came from the absence of a Divine creator’ (Yetter-Chappell Reference Yetter-Chappell2025, 192). She allows that a theist could take the phenomenal tapestry to have traditional divine attributes, producing God-minus-plus equals God. Her objections are that theism forecloses free speculation about the tapestry’s structure, and moving to God-minus gives philosophical licence to fill in the details she has spent a book filling in. Whether these methodological considerations constitute a principled philosophical objection to theism’s truth is something I take up later in the paper.

The thin mind dilemma

Yetter-Chappell’s preferred position on the question of what bears the tapestry’s experiences is the Thin Mind view. On this view, experiences are essentially experienced, so the tapestry requires an experiencer; but the experiencer is not an ontological addition beyond the experiences themselves. Following Strawson (Reference Strawson2003), Yetter-Chappell holds that subject and experience are not separable existents, as there is no robust mind hovering above or behind the bundle of experiences, only the bundle itself properly understood as essentially experienced. The Thin Mind is what you have when you acknowledge that experiences require an experiencer without adding anything to the ontology beyond the experiences and the unity relations that structure them.

The view is attractive because it threads a needle by avoiding the No Mind view, on which free-floating experiencer-less phenomenology seems to strip the unity relations of the feature that makes them experiential rather than merely formal, while also avoiding the Robust Mind view, which would introduce a cosmic subject as an ontological primitive. The Thin Mind view acknowledges the essential connection between experience and experiencer while claiming that this connection adds nothing to the tapestry’s ontology.

It is important to note that Yetter-Chappell does not assign the Thin Mind the role of grounding the unity of the tapestry. The Thin Mind answers the question of who has the experiences, not the question of what produces their unity, which is the work of the unity-of-consciousness relation. The argument of this section is that the Thin Mind view fails on its own terms, not that it fails to ground unity. The claim that an experiencer of all possible sensory perspectives adds nothing to the ontology beyond the experiences themselves cannot be sustained at that scale. Either the Thin Mind is a subject of considerable ontological weight, or it is not genuinely an experiencer in the relevant sense. That dilemma runs independently of the unity-grounding role, and that is the issue this section presses. The difficulty is that acknowledging the essential connection while denying the ontological addition is only coherent on specific conditions, and those conditions are harder to satisfy at the scale of the tapestry than they are for finite minds.

Consider what the Thin Mind must be. It is an experiencer of all possible sensory experiences simultaneously, unified into a single overarching experience. Every perspective from which anything could be perceived, every indexed phenomenological thread in the tapestry, is a content of the Thin Mind’s experience. The unity-of-consciousness relation is invoked to bind these into a single whole, and they are all presented as contents of this single experiencer’s act. Property binding relates specific threads into objects because those objects are presented together in this unified experiential act. Its experience is unbounded by any particular spatial location, temporal moment, or type of perceptual apparatus. The claim that such an entity adds nothing to the ontology beyond the experiences themselves requires argument Yetter-Chappell does not provide.

The reply available to her is that the Thin Mind is simply what you get when you properly understand experiences as essentially experienced. At most, the Thin Mind is a grammatical or logical inevitability rather than a genuine entity. Strawson’s (Reference Strawson2003) point is that there is no real ontological distinction between the subject and the experiences; they are conceptually distinguishable but not separable. So the Thin Mind is the tapestry itself, understood as essentially experiential.

This reply faces a problem, though. If the Thin Mind is simply the tapestry understood as essentially experiential, it cannot be what grounds the unity of the tapestry. The unity of the tapestry is what the unity-of-consciousness relation produces when it binds all the experiential threads together into a single overarching experience. But if the Thin Mind just is the unified tapestry, then invoking the Thin Mind as the experiencer of the tapestry adds no explanatory purchase on what produces that unity.

If the Thin Mind is invoked as the experiencer of the unified tapestry, it becomes difficult to distinguish it from a globally unifying subject of non-trivial ontological weight. An experiencer for whom all possible phenomenal perspectives are simultaneously present contents is not a featureless grammatical convenience. That experiencer is a subject with a determinate experiential scope, and that scope is what makes it globally unifying. Whatever grounds the unity of a finite mind’s experiences at a moment, whether causal, physical, or otherwise, no analogous grounding is available for the Thin Mind of the tapestry. Its unity cannot be grounded in anything physical, since it is what constitutes the physical. Its unity cannot be brute, since Yetter-Chappell herself describes the brute-correlation answer as deeply unsatisfying when she considers the explanatory disunity challenge (Yetter-Chappell Reference Yetter-Chappell, Goldschmidt and Pearce2018, 79; Reference Yetter-Chappell2025, 47–48). And its unity cannot be explained by the laws of nature, since the laws govern the temporal evolution of the tapestry, not the synchronic co-consciousness of its simultaneous experiential contents.

The only available ground for the Thin Mind’s unified experiential act is that there is a subject for whom all these experiences are unified, and that subject’s unity is a primitive feature of the subject rather than something to be further explained. A subject of this kind is what I call a globally unifying subject. The Thin Mind dilemma establishes that Yetter-Chappell’s own preferred subject-option either collapses into a globally unifying subject or is not a genuine experiencer of the required scope.Footnote ²

A further consequence concerns the account of Naive Idealist perception. Yetter-Chappell holds that in veridical perception, threads of the tapestry are unified with the finite mind by the unity-of-consciousness relation. She also holds that this relation is non-transitive. A thread can be co-conscious with both the tapestry and a finite mind without the finite mind being thereby unified with the entire tapestry. The non-transitivity is important for the account of perception. But it requires that the Thin Mind’s experiential act is genuinely distinct from the finite mind’s experiential act. If that act is genuinely distinct, the Thin Mind is a subject distinct from finite minds, and the claim that it is no ontological addition beyond the experiences themselves becomes difficult to sustain. Two distinct experiential acts unified over the same thread are two subjects, however thin each may be.

When the tapestry’s unity relations are pressed for their grounds, the Thin Mind either gains the substantiality of a globally unifying subject or loses the explanatory role that made it necessary to posit it. Yetter-Chappell’s preferred answer to the subject question is unstable, and points towards a globally unifying subject of non-trivial ontological weight. In the next section, I develop the second pressure argument, which targets the synchronic pattern of the unity relations.

The pattern problem: synchronic structure and its ground

This section identifies a further explanatory difficulty arising from Yetter-Chappell’s deployment of unity relations. Even if we grant that co-consciousness can hold without a subject, a further question arises that Yetter-Chappell has not addressed: what grounds the specific pattern of co-consciousness relations in the tapestry?

Why are these phenomenal items co-conscious with these other phenomenal items, producing a coherent physical world rather than some other possible pattern of co-consciousness, or none at all? The tapestry has structure; it is not an undifferentiated fusion of all possible phenomenal contents. The greenness of the leaf is co-conscious with and property-bound to the leaf’s shape but not to the roughness of bark on a tree three miles away, even though both are threads in the tapestry. The spatial relations among threads correspond to genuine spatial structure rather than random phenomenal adjacency. The temporal relations evolve coherently so that the leaf’s greenness threads unfold together with the threads constituting the wind moving through the same leaves. This is an extraordinarily specific pattern of co-consciousness that manages to weave together a physical world governed by the laws of nature.

Yetter-Chappell’s answer is that the laws of nature explain this pattern. The laws govern the unfolding of the phenomenal tapestry, and any account of laws available to the nontheistic materialist is equally available to her. This answer handles the temporal question, why the threads evolve coherently over time, with some plausibility, since laws of temporal evolution could in principle explain why the tapestry at time t + 1 has the structure it has given the structure it has at t. It does not handle the synchronic question of why the tapestry has the structure it has at any given moment in the first place.

The phenomenal threads constituting a leaf at a moment are co-conscious with one another and property-bound into a single object. The phenomenal threads constituting a different leaf ten metres away are co-conscious with one another and property-bound into a distinct object. The two objects are spatially related within the tapestry’s unified experiential space. What grounds this pattern of co-consciousness and property binding at a moment? The laws of temporal evolution tell us how the pattern changes over time, but they do not tell us what makes any particular synchronic pattern the right one. The synchronic structure of the tapestry requires its own explanation. Laws of nature may explain how the tapestry evolves over time, but they do not by themselves explain which threads are co-conscious with which, which properties are bound together, or how the spatial relations among threads are configured at any given moment.

Three candidate grounds are available in principle. The synchronic structure could be grounded in a unified experiential act, in which the co-present contents are co-present because they are all given together to a single experiencer. It could be treated as a brute primitive with no further explanation. Or it could be derived from the laws of nature, on the assumption that the laws specify how the tapestry evolves and also fully determine its structure at every moment.

The second candidate is the brute-fact answer Yetter-Chappell elsewhere describes as deeply unsatisfying. She writes that it would be ‘a much more serious worry’ if the coherence of the tapestry’s threads had to be accepted as brute, and that ‘surely this is not just a brute miracle’ (Yetter-Chappell Reference Yetter-Chappell, Goldschmidt and Pearce2018, 79; Reference Yetter-Chappell2025, 47–48). The third candidate requires that the laws of nature fully determine the synchronic structure of the tapestry at every moment. But standard accounts of laws, whether Humean regularity theories, Armstrong–Tooley–Dretske necessitation relations (Dretske Reference Dretske1977; Tooley Reference Tooley1977; Armstrong Reference Armstrong1983), or Maudlin’s (Reference Maudlin2007) primitive laws of temporal evolution, specify how states of a system at one time constrain states at later times. They do not specify what makes a particular configuration of co-consciousness relations a coherent experiential unity at a time. That is a question about synchronic phenomenal structure, and the laws of nature are not in the business of answering it.

Yetter-Chappell’s tapestry analogy is helpful here. She writes that picking up one thread of a physical tapestry lifts the adjoining threads because the threads are bound together by the weaving, and that no separate force is needed to move each thread individually (Yetter-Chappell Reference Yetter-Chappell, Goldschmidt and Pearce2018, 78; Reference Yetter-Chappell2025, 49–50). In a physical tapestry, the unity is produced by a weaver whose intentional act configures the threads into a structured whole. The structure of adjacency, the pattern of over-and-under relations, the specific configuration that makes this tapestry a picture of this scene rather than a random weave, all trace back to an intentional act that imposed the pattern. Yetter-Chappell’s phenomenal tapestry has the structure without the weaver. The pattern of co-consciousness relations is just there, with no account of what produced it or why it is this pattern rather than any other.

Hurley’s (Reference Hurley and Peacocke1994, 60–62) objectivity requirement re-enters here with additional force. If genuine phenomenal unity requires a relational fact beyond the contents, then the pattern of co-consciousness relations across the tapestry, namely that certain threads are genuinely unified together and certain properties genuinely bound together, is itself a fact beyond the contents that must have some ground. Yetter-Chappell’s response to Hurley focuses on showing that the co-consciousness relation is not extra-mental. But the question of what grounds the specific pattern of that relation’s instantiation is not the same question. Even if co-consciousness is an intrinsically experiential relation, there must be something in virtue of which it holds between these threads rather than those.

A unified experiential act in which the co-present contents are co-present because they are all given together to a single experiencer handles this question more naturally than the available nontheistic alternatives. A globally unifying subject who experiences all possible phenomenal perspectives in a single unified act explains why the co-consciousness has the specific pattern it has. The threads that are co-conscious are the ones that are co-present in that experiential act, and their spatial and property-binding relations reflect the structure of the act’s intentional content. Whether this globally unifying subject is the God of theistic idealism is a question I take up in the next section. The claim of this section is that the synchronic pattern problem provides independent reason to posit such a subject.Footnote ³

The comparative explanatory virtue here is parsimony about unexplained primitives. Between two theories that account for the same structural data, the one that treats fewer features as brute gives a more theoretically satisfying account. The theistic account treats the synchronic pattern as grounded in the intentional structure of a globally unifying experiential act. The nontheistic account treats it as either brute or derived from laws not suited to generating synchronic phenomenal structure. On this criterion, Yetter-Chappell’s own methodology of comparing complete worldviews as packages gives a comparative advantage to theism. The synchronic pattern of co-consciousness in the tapestry has no adequate nontheistic ground. The laws of nature do not generate synchronic phenomenal structure. The brute-fact answer is one Yetter-Chappell herself rejects, and the unified experiential act of a globally unifying subject is the most natural resolution. With both pressure arguments in place, I examine whether any nontheistic realization of the required globally unifying subject can resolve the pressures before turning to the comparative case for theistic idealism.

From global subject pressure to theistic resolution

The previous two sections have established pressure towards a globally unifying subject, but this is not yet an argument for theistic idealism. One may ask: Why theism rather than a primitive phenomenal field, a neutral monist global experiencer, a cosmopsychist field consciousness of the kind Goff (Reference Goff2017) defends, or some other globally unifying but non-divine subject? This section engages those alternatives in turn before applying Yetter-Chappell’s own comparative methodology.

Cosmopsychism is the view that the universe is a single fundamental conscious entity whose phenomenal properties are more basic than those of any of its parts, which are grounded by the whole rather than the whole being constituted by them. Philip Goff’s (Reference Goff2017) constitutive cosmopsychism develops this by specifying that the cosmic consciousness grounds the phenomenal properties of its parts via a combination relation. This view admits a globally unifying subject and in that respect addresses the pressure from the previous two sections. But Goff’s cosmopsychism faces a specific difficulty when applied to the synchronic pattern problem from the previous section. For the cosmic consciousness to constitute a world with the specific co-consciousness structure that Yetter-Chappell’s tapestry requires, its phenomenal properties must already be structured in a way that mirrors that world. But then the question of what structures the cosmic consciousness’s own phenomenal properties in this specific configuration rather than any other arises at the cosmic level itself. The explanatory regress is relocated upward rather than resolved. Goff requires additional combination laws governing how the cosmic phenomenal properties decompose into the structured experiential world we inhabit, and these laws face the same grounding question as the synchronic pattern they are introduced to explain (Coleman Reference Coleman2014).

Goff’s more recent proposal that the universe fine-tunes and designs itself (Goff Reference Goff2019) relocates but does not dissolve this difficulty. A self-designing universe whose self-organization produces the specific synchronic co-consciousness pattern still requires an account of what grounds that pattern at any given moment, and the synchronic question from the previous section applies at each such moment. On Yetter-Chappell’s own account, the unity relations binding the tapestry are the same relations we understand from ordinary finite experience, extended in scope. A theistic idealism that grounds the tapestry in the unified experiential act of a divine perceiver requires no additional combination principle. The unity is explained by the same resources that explain finite experiential unity, since the divine perceiver’s intentional act is of the same kind as a finite experiential act, differing in scope rather than in kind.

Primitive phenomenal field views, associated with panpsychist field consciousness proposals (Seager Reference Seager1995), and neutral monist views (Russell Reference Russell1921; Stubenberg Reference Stubenberg and Zalta2016) require separate treatment, since they face different forms of the synchronic pattern problem. Primitive phenomenal field views posit a single undifferentiated field of phenomenal presence that is globally unified but intrinsically structureless. An intrinsically structureless field is consistent with any possible pattern of property binding and perspectival indexing, not the particular pattern that constitutes a physical world with determinate objects, spatial relations, and coherent temporal evolution. The field’s global presence does not select among these possible patterns. Structure must come from somewhere else, whether from laws governing the field’s differentiation or from some further relation imposed on the field’s elements. Both options reintroduce the grounding question. What determines the specific form that differentiation or imposition takes? The brute-fact answer is relocated from the pattern itself to the law or relation that produces it.

Neutral monism faces a related but distinct problem. On the Russellian version (Russell Reference Russell1921; Stubenberg Reference Stubenberg and Zalta2016), the fundamental level is composed of neutral elements that are individually neither experiential nor physical; mentality and physicality are both structural features of how these elements are organized. This view does not naturally provide a globally unifying subject. For neutral monism to address the global subject pressure, it must hold that the neutral level is itself a single unified entity with the co-consciousness structure the tapestry requires. But a single unified neutral entity with experiential structure just is a form of cosmopsychism, and faces the combination problem already pressed against Goff’s view. If the neutral entity is genuinely non-experiential, it provides no subject in the sense the constitutive subject-involvement argument demands. Co-consciousness requires experiential togetherness, and a non-experiential neutral base cannot supply it. Neutral monism either collapses into cosmopsychism or fails to address the subject-involvement pressure.

Impersonal cosmic subject views, which posit a globally unifying subject stripped of intentional states, beliefs, and agency, have received recent development in Albahari’s (Reference Albahari2022) perennial idealism, which argues for a cosmic subject grounded in a stream of experience prior to the individuation of finite minds. These views face a more specific objection than the Thin Mind problem. Even granting such a subject its unity, an impersonal subject has no directedness towards a world. Intentional states are essentially world-directed in the sense that their content is determined by what they are about, not by their intrinsic character (Searle Reference Searle1983). What determines the specific synchronic pattern of co-consciousness in the tapestry is this intentional content; the threads that are co-present are co-present because they are all given together as a world in a single intentional act directed at that world. An impersonal subject whose experiential act has no intentional structure directed at a world cannot explain why the co-consciousness pattern takes the form of a world rather than any other possible global co-consciousness configuration. Stripping intentionality from the global subject strips away the only resource that can explain the synchronic pattern.

The intermediate alternatives share a difficulty insofar as each removes a feature, such as combination-grounding, intrinsic structure, or intentionality, that the synchronic pattern problem requires the subject to have. Theistic idealism on Yetter-Chappell’s own model retains all three. A divine perceiver whose unified sensory experience constitutes the phenomenal tapestry grounds the tapestry’s synchronic structure in the intentional content of the divine experiential act, grounds the unity of that act in the primitive unity of a subject understood by analogy with finite subjects, and requires no additional combination principle because the unity relations are the same relations that structure ordinary experience. While theism is not the only possible globally unifying subject view, the specific pressures the previous sections identify are most naturally resolved by a subject with these features, and the available alternatives each leave at least one of the two pressures unresolved.

Section 6.4.3 of her book contains an admission briefly discussed previously that now takes on additional significance. Having argued at length that nontheistic idealism captures Fundamental Intelligibility, Edenic Reality, and Open Window in ways unavailable to materialism, she turns to theistic idealism and writes: ‘I take it that all the benefits of the nontheistic idealism developed in this book can be captured equally well by theistic idealists. There is nothing essential to capturing these virtues that came from the absence of a Divine creator’ (Yetter-Chappell Reference Yetter-Chappell2025, 192). While she allows that a theist could ‘plus’ God-minus back to God, her methodological objection to theistic idealism is that theism forecloses speculation about the tapestry’s structure, and moving to God-minus gives licence to fill in the details she develops throughout the book.

The methodological objection rests on an assumption that the theistic account of the tapestry’s structure would be less philosophically specifiable than the nontheistic account. She has specified the structure of a unified all-perspective experiential act, its unity relations, its indexing scheme, its property-binding structure, its spatial and temporal relations. All of this specification is of what a divine experiential act of the required scope must be like.

Applying her comparative methodology consistently requires comparing nontheistic and theistic idealism on the same terms she uses to compare idealism and materialism. She argues that a theory should be preferred when it renders reality intelligible rather than opaque, when it explains the structure of the world rather than positing it as brute, and when it offers a coherent account of direct perceptual contact with reality. On each of these criteria, theism has a comparative advantage over the nontheistic account.

On intelligibility, Yetter-Chappell argues that idealism is more intelligible than materialism because the phenomenal character of reality is something we grasp directly, while material substance is not intelligible to us. This is right, but the synchronic pattern of co-consciousness relations in the nontheistic tapestry is not intelligible either, for the reasons given in the previous section. The theistic account renders that pattern intelligible by grounding it in the intentional structure of a divine experiential act. The divine mind is, as Yetter-Chappell acknowledges when she deploys it as a heuristic throughout the book, intelligible by analogy with our own minds.

On explanation versus brute positing, a theory should explain the features of the world rather than treating them as unexplained primitives. The synchronic pattern of co-consciousness in the nontheistic tapestry is either a brute primitive or derived from laws not suited to generate synchronic phenomenal structure. Since the theistic account explains it, the advantage goes to theism by Yetter-Chappell’s own criterion.

On perceptual contact, idealism uniquely explains how we can have direct perceptual contact with reality by making reality the kind of thing that can be a literal constituent of a finite mind. This advantage is preserved under theism, since theistic idealism retains the same account of perception. The divine perceiver does not compete with finite perceivers for the experiential threads; the unity-of-consciousness relation is non-transitive, and a thread can be simultaneously unified with the tapestry and with a finite mind.

There is one consideration that genuinely favours nontheistic idealism, namely parsimony. God-minus has no beliefs, desires, will, or omnibenevolence. God-minus-plus has all of these. The theistic account is more ontologically laden, and Yetter-Chappell is right that this is a cost. Parsimony is only a virtue when the leaner theory accounts for the same data. The nontheistic account leaves the Thin Mind dilemma unresolved and the synchronic pattern of unity relations without explanation. Theism offers the most unified resolution of both pressures by positing a subject whose unified experiential act is the tapestry. The added ideological content of theism is doing explanatory work the nontheistic account cannot do without it.

Yetter-Chappell writes at the end of Section 6.4.3: ‘On the other hand … why plus when you could minus?’ (Yetter-Chappell Reference Yetter-Chappell2025, 193). The question assumes that God-minus is stably available, but the arguments have so far shown how it is not. The unity relations constituting the tapestry require a globally unifying subject to instantiate them, and among the available realizations of that subject, theistic idealism offers a more unified resolution than cosmopsychist alternatives, primitive phenomenal field views, neutral monist accounts, and impersonal cosmic subject views. The question should run the other way: Why minus, when the minus cannot stand and the available alternatives to plussing each leave one of the three pressures unresolved?

The constructive implication

The argument of the preceding sections is negative in form, since it shows that Yetter-Chappell’s nontheistic idealism generates global subject pressure she has not resolved, and that among the available realizations of the globally unifying subject this pressure requires, theistic idealism is comparatively superior. The constructive implication that follows is that a theistic idealist who takes seriously the details Yetter-Chappell has developed now holds a more coherent position than either Berkeley’s original theistic idealism or Yetter-Chappell’s nontheistic alternative.

Berkeley’s theistic idealism placed the structure of reality inside God’s mind and left it at that (Berkeley Reference Berkeley and Robinson2009). The philosophical work of specifying what that structure consists in, how a unified all-perspective experiential act could be organized, what unity relations bind its contents, how perspectives from radically different perceptual systems could be integrated into a single coherent experience, and how finite minds could overlap with the divine experiential contents in perception was not done.

In developing the structure of God-minus in detail, Yetter-Chappell has provided what Berkeley’s position needed, namely a precise account of the unity relations structuring a unified all-perspective experiential act, an account of perspective-indexing that dissolves the apparent contradiction between the leaf’s being simultaneously green to one perceiver and red to another, a treatment of the relationship between the tapestry’s structure and the laws of nature, and an account of how finite minds can be partially constituted by the tapestry’s experiential contents in veridical perception. Each of these contributions survives the transition from God-minus to God-minus-plus. A theistic idealist who accepts Yetter-Chappell’s structural account and adds to it a subject whose unified experiential act instantiates the unity relations inherits all the philosophical precision of the nontheistic account while resolving the problems the nontheistic account cannot resolve.

The resulting position differs from Berkeley’s in several respects that Yetter-Chappell herself identifies. It takes the divine experiencer to have sensory phenomenology structurally similar to our own rather than a purely intellectual grasp of the world. It treats the unity relations structuring the divine experience as the same relations that structure finite experience, extended to a larger domain. It accounts for perception as phenomenal overlap between the divine experiential contents and finite minds, grounded in externalist bridging laws rather than Berkeley’s account of God imprinting ideas on finite perceivers (Berkeley Reference Berkeley and Robinson2009; Principles 29–33). These are departures from Berkeley that strengthen the theistic position.

The argument of this paper does not show that idealism entails theism in the strict sense. It remains possible in principle that a nontheistic account of the unity relations’ grounds could be developed that avoids the problems we have pressed. What the argument shows is that the specific nontheistic account Yetter-Chappell offers does not succeed, and that the natural resolution of the problems it faces is a globally unifying subject of the kind theistic idealism provides. The pressure arises from the internal requirements of the unity relations, not from external theological commitments. A philosopher who finds idealism attractive for the reasons Yetter-Chappell gives – the intelligibility of reality, the directness of perceptual contact, the world being as it appears – and who follows the argument wherever it leads, has reasons to take theistic idealism seriously.