...as I’ve elaborated upon more extensively in a Scientific American essay, our sensory apparatus has evolved to present our environment to us not as it is in itself, but instead in a coded and truncated form as a ‘dashboard of dials.’ The physical world is the dials.
Once this is clarified, analytic idealism is entirely consistent with the observations of neuroscience: brain function is part of what our conscious inner life looks like when observed from across a dissociative boundary. Therefore, there must be tight correlations between patterns of brain activity and conscious inner life, for the former is simply the extrinsic appearance of the latter; a pixelated appearance.
1. How we can appear to have separate people with unique conscious experiences. — Tom Storm
2. How reality (such as it is) appears to be consistent and regular. — Tom Storm
3. How evolution tracks to idealism. — Tom Storm
4. Whether we require a universal mind for idealism to be coherent. Other models? — Tom Storm
5. Whether the Copenhagen Interpretation and the perceived flaws in a materialist metaphysics have been key in a recent revival of idealism? — Tom Storm
6. What might be the role of human beings in an idealist model? — Tom Storm
There's no connection between idealism and us having any particular role. Note, to have a role you need to have been created for a purpose. — Bartricks
Idealism is not the view that there is one mind (yours). That's solipsism.
I am an idealist and I believe in billions of minds. And so did Berkeley. Note, the basis upon which one infers the existence of other minds is going to be the same whether one is an idealist or an immaterialist (with one exception - the idealist will typically posit one extra mind as the mind who is bearing the mental states constitutive of the sensible world we're all inhabiting). — Bartricks
My words were probably unclear. I wasn't implying that idealism had a role for us but more that if we are idealists how might this have impact upon how we should live? — Tom Storm
Yes, that's what I was getting at with the question. Would I be correct in assuming that for you God is the universal mind in idealism? — Tom Storm
..as I’ve elaborated upon more extensively in a Scientific American essay, our sensory apparatus has evolved to present our environment to us not as it is in itself, but instead in a coded and truncated form as a ‘dashboard of dials.’ The physical world is the dials.
Once this is clarified, analytic idealism is entirely consistent with the observations of neuroscience
...brain function is part of what our conscious inner life looks like when observed from across a dissociative boundary. Therefore, there must be tight correlations between patterns of brain activity and conscious inner life, for the former is simply the extrinsic appearance of the latter; a pixelated appearance
For Kastrup a belief in physicalism is confusing the map for the territory. — Tom Storm
2. How reality (such as it is) appears to be consistent and regular. — Tom Storm
3. How evolution tracks to idealism. — Tom Storm
4. Whether we require a universal mind for idealism to be coherent. Other models? — Tom Storm
6. What might be the role of human beings in an idealist model? — Tom Storm
A neuroscientist - so long as they stick to doing neuroscience and do not start doing metaphysics - is investigating a small part of the sensible world. They're not committed to any view about what the sensible world is made of. So it strikes me as obvious that idealism is consistent with neuroscience - how could it not be? Those who think otherwise must mistakenly be thinking that neuroscience carries with it some commitment to materialism about what it is investigating - which is just false. — Bartricks
the basis upon which one infers the existence of other minds is going to be the same whether one is an idealist or a materialist about them — Bartricks
with one exception - the idealist will typically posit one extra mind as the mind who is bearing the mental states constitutive of the sensible world we're all inhabiting — Bartricks
No, for science investigates the behaviour of the sensible world and does not take a stand on its composition. That is, whether the sensible world is made of mental states or mind-external extended substances is a question in metaphysics that science has no bearing on. — Bartricks
Well, it is consistent with idealism that we have not been created for any purpose (for idealism is not a view about how minds come to be, but a view about what reality is made of). And it is consistent with idealism that we do have a role. (And it is consistent with materialism about you that you have a role - if your parents created you in order to stop up a hole in the wall, then that's your role). — Bartricks
There's a tension between materialism and normativity. That is, it is hard to make sense of how there could be 'shoulds' in a wholly material universe. Such shoulds - the shoulds of reason - seem to require there to be a master mind whose edicts they are. And idealism arrives at the conclusion that there is such a mind by an independent route. — Bartricks
with one exception - the idealist will typically posit one extra mind as the mind who is bearing the mental states constitutive of the sensible world we're all inhabiting
— Bartricks
But disagree with this. I don't see any reason to think that our mind is any different from all the others or that saying it is is useful, much less true. — T Clark
I don't agree with this. We have evolved as, not moral, but rule making organisms. I don't see why evolution and the evolution of mind are in any way inconsistent with materialism. — T Clark
1. An idealist might say 'entities are finite monads within / constituting The Infinite Monad and only from the perspective of finite monads do finite monads "appear separate with unique conscious experiences" (i.e. a Leibniz-Berkeley hybrid).'I'm not an idealist myself, but I'm particularly keen to enhance my grasp of how idealism accounts for such matters as:
1. How we can appear to have separate people with unique conscious experiences.
2. How reality (such as it is) appears to be consistent and regular.
3. How evolution tracks to idealism.
4. Whether we require a universal mind for idealism to be coherent. Other models?
5. Whether the Copenhagen Interpretation and the perceived flaws in a materialist metaphysics have been key in a recent revival of idealism?
6. What might be the role of human beings in an idealist model? — Tom Storm
They're not totally unique. The more unique there are, the harder to communicate. Look up the meaning of 'idiosyncratic'. It basically means not understandable to others. — Wayfarer
We are all the same species, culture, language group, etc. But glaring discrepancies appear all the time. I mean, there are still people who think Trump was great. — Wayfarer
Appealing to evolution as a support for why reason might be true is the subject of Plantinga's Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism, and also the broader Argument from Reason. Both have generated many volumes. — Wayfarer
That mind is not numerically one, but is of a kind, like space - the capacity for experience, or something of that nature. — Wayfarer
Sentient life of all kinds are the way the Universe realizes dimensions of being. Rational sentient beings are able to reflect on that. — Wayfarer
The thing with neuroscience is that the brain is taken to explain the functionality of the mind. But we don't normally have experiences of our brain. Why is it that investigation our head gives us an idea of an organ that's supposed to be responsible for us having those ideas? There's a thousand such questions about everything. How come we find fossils in the ground? Are they ideas of something that lived before we did?
How do you explain pandemics? Is Covid just an idea? People get sick and die because of an idea? What is death to an idealist? How do ideas cause you to die? — Marchesk
By 'unique' I just meant people have individual conscious experiences that don't seem connected to other's conscious experiences. — Tom Storm
Why is our car still in the carport the next morning after we sleep? Is the moon still there when we are not looking? — Tom Storm
Presumably there was a concomitance emergence of higher consciousness in humans somewhere between being a fish and being a high functioning ape? — Tom Storm
the reason [Dennett] imputes to the human creatures depicted in his book is merely a creaturely reason. Dennett's natural history does not deny reason, it animalizes reason. It portrays reason in service to natural selection, and as a product of natural selection. But if reason is a product of natural selection, then how much confidence can we have in a rational argument for natural selection? The power of reason is owed to the independence of reason, and to nothing else. — Leon Wiesletier
So by that token idealism makes no practical difference to a life lived? — Tom Storm
each individual's first person perspective is unique to oneself. — Wayfarer
By no means! Living beings are the way in which meaning enters the universe. Rational sentient beings are those able to realise that. — Wayfarer
It's not as if things come into and go out of existence when you or I are looking at them, or not. Existence of the car or the moon or anything else is constituted within our cognition of those objects. Furthermore, they are designated objects by sentient beings. — Wayfarer
They are designated objects by sentient beings. — Wayfarer
each individual's first person perspective is unique to oneself.
— Wayfarer
That's what my intended point — Tom Storm
If what we take to be the physical world is the product of mentation - can you guess/describe what evolution is doing? — Tom Storm
are cars, for instance, essentially the product of mentation — Tom Storm
We see objects based on an inherent structure in our consciousness? — Tom Storm
Let’s begin with a thought-experiment: Imagine that all life has vanished from the universe, but everything else is undisturbed. Matter is scattered about in space in the same way as it is now, there is sunlight, there are stars, planets and galaxies—but all of it is unseen. There is no human or animal eye to cast a glance at objects, hence nothing is discerned, recognized or even noticed. Objects in the unobserved universe have no shape, color or individual appearance, because shape and appearance are created by minds. Nor do they have features, because features correspond to categories of animal sensation. This is the way the early universe was before the emergence of life—and the way the present universe is outside the view of any observer.
That also accounts for the regularities we perceive, the fact that we all seem to see the same things. Hegel discussed that. 'Like Kant, Hegel believed that we do not perceive the world or anything in it directly and that all our minds have access to is ideas of the world—images, perceptions, concepts. For Kant and Hegel, the only reality we know is a virtual reality. — Wayfarer
Can you paint? I ask because if you paint you view the world as sensations rather than as objects. — Bartricks
It puzzles me why you think idealism is challenged by the existence of any sensible thing or process. — "Bartricks
So no doubt COVID, or falling off a cliff for that matter, are representations of something happening in consciousness when viewed from a particular perspective. — Tom Storm
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