A Conscious Universe

[FallentoReason]

Yes, because just like physical monism is about reducing consciousness to a physical explanation, then so too, can you attempt to reduce the physical world to an explanation of consciousness.

The trouble here, is explaining why stuff happens in the absence of a consciousness, or even explaining how a consciousness arises in the first place for stuff to mystifyingly happen in the absence thereof.

I think both positions will have things that are fundamentally unanswerable. Like, for example, why is there matter rather than no matter? Whatever the *true* reality might be, it just seems like things were bound to exist one way or another (i.e. in a physical sense or idealistic).[/quote]

But it is one foot in front of the other, just in the other direction.

Meh, doesn't seem like it to me. I like to take things one variable at a time. Why assume that everything we know is wrong, in order to argue that one thing we have evidence for is wrong? Can't it be the only thing we have wrong? Can't we have things mostly right, or close to right, and this one thing be in error (and won't we need -something- to be right to even attempt the argument that some other thing is wrong)? If we turn everything into a variable all at once there is absolutely no solution, no way to assign confidence to our conclusion if we simply assert one. Define these variables for me. x+t=y? Now try it with x+t=6.

I see that 6 as Plato's cave. But it sounds like you'd insist on filling in "what we know" from a different starting point, one that doesn't acknowledge our inability to be connected with reality one a one-to-one basis.

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When one is having a dream, let us say of a car, that car does not exist except in one's mind. What makes the actual physical car in the 'real' world any more real than the same car in the dream world? The mind perceives all the same information whether 'real' or dream.

The "dream car" exists in your mind. The "real" car doesn't. The real car is defined by things other than your own thoughts like in your dreams. Solipsists would argue both cars are of the same nature though, perhaps. Or w/e the position is called that postulates you are the creator of your own world.