(January 29, 2015 at 9:19 pm)Pickup_shonuff Wrote: The mistake in your position, however, is to conflate subjective experiences with what is actually taken to be understood as objective. Any particular subjective experience can truly lead to a mistaken interpretation in how one perceives the context of the events in reality, and by objective we emphatically mean external objects that really exist independently of us and our sense intuitions, even if only known and understood through sense.Why do you see an idealistic reality as incapable of supporting an objective reality which is shared by many minds? I think almost everyone here, even those on the same "side," are working with very different views of what idealism is.
To me, an idealistic universe can support everything we call physical. Size, shape, energy, conservation, photons, gravity, Mom, apple pie: they are all perfectly comfortable in an idealistic space.
The only difference is that in an idealism, as you start peeling off the layers, you will end up with a reality that loses all the qualities we call "physical," and require more and more abstract descriptions (or more and more refined math) to express. In other words, I think modern science is revealing the abstract and idealistic nature of the universe.
Okay, there is one more difference: mind. There is nothing about a so-called physical universe which is poorly represented as an idea. I know this, because ALL our experiences, and our linguistic expression of them, are naturally represented as ideas. However, I do not think that mind is well described or explained in physical monist terms at all, except by equivocation: "Scientists say mind is brain function. Okay, I found some brain function. Yay, I have located mind."
