If you ever think of anything would like to say, then please always feel free to message me! I always enjoy our conversations. — Bob Ross
Idealism, in the sense that there is no proof of something outside of our perception, has been refuted. — Philosophim
Don't forget to kick a rock too. — RogueAI
...but shape is intrinsic to stones and the COVID virus and countless other things. — Fooloso4
Good question: no. Solipsism is the idea that everything is in my mind, whereas analytical idealism is the idea that both our minds are in a universal mind. — Bob Ross
Now, sometimes I do hear physicalists rightly point out that an analytical idealist is not actually providing an explanation to consciousness at all but, rather, simply positing it as fundamental without a detailed account of mind — Bob Ross
to me, it isn't that impressive for one's metaphysics to align with scientific knowledge but, rather, one should be holistically determining the best metaphysical theory based off of parsimony, explanatory power, internal coherence, external coherence, reliability, intellectual seemings, etc — Bob Ross
I am certain about that. I have conducted a Yes/No poll on "Does thinking take place in the humanbrain?" and 80% answered "Yes". About the same time, I launched a discussion "You are not your body!" and had the same kind of response. I never tried again, of course to raise such issues! :smile:I suspect most people on this forum are physicalists or at least not idealists (; — Bob Ross
I see. OK. As a first response, I find "analytic idealism" very interesting and quite plausible as a theory. But I don't agree with Kastrup on a couple of important points and I also find a few "wholes", i.e. important things that are missing from his theory or theories. I had tried a lot to find answers about them but I couldn't. E.g. he talks so much about "in consciousness" and I have never found a piece of information about what he thinks/believes consciousness is. No description at all. Then, he maintains that the "self" is an illusion. But then he connects it to the "ego", i.e. the "constructed self", which of course is an illusion. But then I have never heard from him describe what the individual himself, as a unit of awareness, i.e. the "I" or "YOU", stripped from any additives, is. This is certainly not an illusion!Any thoughts you may have pertaining to this subject. — Bob Ross
No. This is a topic by itself. And a huge one! :smile:Are you referring to the hard problem of consciousness? — Bob Ross
The form this takes is not something intrinsic to the objects, but is inferred by the mind. — Wayfarer
I read Kant and I didn’t think he really did a good job of arguing for the categories. — Bob Ross
The argument is developed that it is the mind which picks out and differentiates things, attributes features to them and idenfities how they interact, and so on. — Wayfarer
The larger argument is that consciousness continuously structures experience this way ... — Wayfarer
I am unsure as to what you mean here: could you please elaborate? The hard problem of consciousness is absolutely a metaphysical problem, as it pertains solely to metaphysics and has nothing to do with science. — Bob Ross
What assumptions? — Bob Ross
Philosophy of mind is metaphysics ... — Bob Ross
... science should not be in the business of ontology ... — Bob Ross
Firstly, again, we don’t experience that the world is physical either ... — Bob Ross
... we infer it from the data — Bob Ross
The Term 'Idealism'
The term "Idealism" came into vogue roughly during the time of Kant (though it was used earlier by others, such as Leibniz) to label one of two trends that had emerged in reaction to Cartesian philosophy. Descartes had argued that there were two basic yet separate substances in the universe: Extension (the material world of things in space) and Thought (the world of mind and ideas). Subsequently opposing camps took one or the other substance as their metaphysical foundation, treating one as the primary substance while reducing the other to derivative status. Materialists argued that only matter was ultimately real, so that thought and consciousness derived from physical entities (chemistry, brain states, etc.). Idealists countered that the mind and its ideas were ultimately real, and that the physical world derived from mind (e.g., the mind of God, Berkeley's esse est percipi, or from ideal prototypes, etc.). Materialists gravitated toward mechanical, physical explanations for why and how things existed, while Idealists tended to look for purposes - moral as well as rational - to explain existence. Idealism meant "idea-ism," frequently in the sense Plato's notion of "ideas" (eidos) was understood at the time, namely ideal types that transcended the physical, sensory world and provided the form (eidos) that gave matter meaning and purpose. As materialism, buttressed by advances in materialistic science, gained wider acceptance, those inclined toward spiritual and theological aims turned increasingly toward idealism as a countermeasure. Before long there were many types of materialism and idealism.
Idealism, in its broadest sense, came to encompass everything that was not materialism, which included so many different types of positions that the term lost any hope of univocality. Most forms of theistic and theological thought were, by this definition, types of idealism, even if they accepted matter as real, since they also asserted something as more real than matter, either as the creator of matter (in monotheism) or as the reality behind matter (in pantheism). Extreme empiricists who only accepted their own experience and sensations as real were also idealists (Berkeley being a notable example). Thus the term "idealism" united monotheists, pantheists and atheists. At one extreme were various forms of metaphysical idealism which posited a mind (or minds) as the only ultimate reality. The physical world was either an unreal illusion or not as real as the mind that created it. To avoid solipsism (which is a subjectivized version of metaphysical idealism) metaphysical idealists posited an overarching mind that envisions and creates the universe. (This is the 'mind-at-large' posited by Bernardo Kastrup.)
A more limited type of idealism is epistemological idealism, which argues that since knowledge of the world only exists in the mental realm, we cannot know actual physical objects as they truly are, but only as they appear in our mental representations of them. (This is near to how I (Wayfarer) understand it.) Epistemological idealists could be ontological materialists, accepting that matter exists substantially; they could even accept that mental states derived at least in part from material processes. What they denied was that matter could be known in itself directly, without the mediation of mental representations. Though unknowable in itself, matter's existence and properties could be known through inference based on certain consistencies in the way material things are represented in perception.
Transcendental idealism contends that not only matter but also the self remains transcendental in an act of cognition. Kant and Husserl, who were both transcendental idealists, defined "transcendental" as "that which constitutes experience but is not itself given in experience." A mundane example would be the eye, which is the condition for seeing even though the eye does not see itself (a philosophical axiom of the Upanisads. This is also the reasoning behind the argument about the 'blind spot' of science). By applying vision, and drawing inferences from it, one can come to know the role eyes play in seeing, even though one never sees one's own eyes. Similarly, things in themselves and the transcendental self could be known if the proper methods were applied for uncovering the conditions that constitute experience, even though such conditions do not themselves appear in experience.
Even here, where epistemological issues are at the forefront, it is actually ontological concerns, viz. the ontological status of self and objects, that is really at stake. Western philosophy rarely escapes that ontological tilt. Those who accepted that both the self and its objects were unknowable except through reason, and that such reason(s) was their cause and purpose for existing - thus epistemologically and ontologically grounding everything in the mind and its ideas - were labeled Absolute Idealists (e.g., Schelling, Hegel, Bradley), since only such ideas are absolute while all else is relative to them. — Dan Lusthaus
Could you put the "hard problem" in question form please? The question needs to have an acceptable answer, by my lights. So, if you could formulate a question that has a potential/possible answer that you would find satisfactory, it would be super helpful. I want to make sure we're on the same page.
If there are many minds and many mental states, and they are not connected with one another, then how to explain the unarguable fact that we experience the same things in the same environments?
I don't deny that the way we perceive things is peculiar to humans because our brains and perceptual organs are constituted in the same ways, and in ways more or less similar to animals. But other animals, judging from their behavior, perceive the same things we do in the same locations that we do, which suggests that there are real structures there, which are independent of being perceived.
The hard problem is only a problem for physicalists if they presume that consciousness is not physical
The subjective "feel" of conscious experience is not available to third person observation, so it is not the business of science to explain it.
Why should we think that everything whatsoever can be explained in terms of physical models?
Subjective Idealism and solipsism aren't ideas
but a tautological understanding that the meaning of all propositions is ultimately reducible to whatever is perceived or thought in the first-person at the end of the day.
Naturalism isn't an idea
Naturalism isn't an idea, but an understanding that the meaning of inter-subjectively valid propositions, such as those concerning the properties of natural kinds, cannot be identified with particular thoughts and experiences of the first person.
So i don't consider Naturalism and solipsism or idealism to be incompatible per-se
"Being is perception" is an unavoidable tautology of non-representational idealism that is necessarily appealed to whenever an observer interprets a physical proposition in terms of his personal experiences
"perception is representation" is an unavoidable tautology of naturalism
for universalising intersubjective semantics in an abstract fashion that isn't dependent upon the perceptual judgements of any particular observer.
Taken together, "Being is Perception" and "Perception is Representation" don't necessarily imply that "Being is Representation", as is often naively assumed by materialists, if one understands these principles as referring to different and non-overlapping aspects of semantics.
So a metaphysical theory can never be wholly because of the nature of "theory".
The way our mind works is materialistic which means dualistic
and it can only explain something within space-time meanwhile the fundamental reality must be beyond space-time /or spaceless-timeless
The truth that is spoken is no longer the truth.
I launched a discussion "You are not your body!"
he talks so much about "in consciousness" and I have never found a piece of information about what he thinks/believes consciousness is.
Then, he maintains that the "self" is an illusion. But then he connects it to the "ego", i.e. the "constructed self", which of course is an illusion. But then I have never heard from him describe what the individual himself, as a unit of awareness, i.e. the "I" or "YOU", stripped from any additives, is. This is certainly not an illusion!
He argued only enough to suit the overall purpose. All he needed to do in justifying a systemic conclusion (the possibility for human empirical knowledge), is demonstrate the necessity of a certain set of antecedent conditions. It’s just a simple “if this then that” logical construct.
The question of why and how biological functions give rise to experience has everything to do with science!
Blocking such inquiry because it does not fit your metaphysical assumptions is the metaphysical, that is, conceptual problem.
…
we should not exclude the physical organism out of some metaphysical conviction
but if your metaphysics excludes scientific inquiry then it is a dead end. It is embodied minds that we must deal with, and so science is not merely a "supplement".
The question of being is a philosophical question, but that does not mean that science, which deals with actual beings, is excluded from ontological inquiry.
Right, we don't experience that the world is physical, our experience includes things that are physical.
How is the data transmitted to us if not physically?
What you described here is a purported soft problem of consciousness, which would, indeed, be expected (under physicalism) to be explained eventually (or at least possibly) by science. However, the hard problem is metaphysics proper. — Bob Ross
The hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information- processing, but there is also a subjective aspect. As Nagel (1974) has put it, there is something it’s like to be a conscious organism. This subjective aspect is experience. When we see, for example, we experience visual sensations: the felt quality of redness, the experience of dark and light, the quality of depth in a visual field. Other experiences go along with perception in different modalities: the sound of a clarinet, the smell of mothballs. Then there are bodily sensations, from pains to orgasms; mental images that are conjured up internally; the felt quality of emotion, and the experience of a stream of conscious thought. What unites all of these states is that there is something it’s like to be in them. All of them are states of experience.
It is undeniable that some organisms are subjects of experience. But the question of how it is that these systems are subjects of experience is perplexing. Why is it that when our cognitive systems engage in visual and auditory information- processing, we have visual or auditory experience: the quality of deep blue, the sensation of middle C? How can we explain why there is something it’s like to entertain a mental image, or to experience an emotion? It is widely agreed that experience arises from a physical basis, but we have no good explanation of why and how it so arises. Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all? It seems objectively unreasonable that it should, and yet it does.
How is the data transmitted to us if not physically?
Think of a vivid dream you have had ... — Bob Ross
Get involved in philosophical discussions about knowledge, truth, language, consciousness, science, politics, religion, logic and mathematics, art, history, and lots more. No ads, no clutter, and very little agreement — just fascinating conversations.