Seeing red

[bennyboy]

Ah, but I can demonstrate the object of you....and I do not know, perhaps could not know, whether or not there even -is- a mind behind it....or so I've been told.

You can demonstrate the body with my name. But when you look at your hand, do you think "me" or "my hand"? I think of my body as a vehicle for the self, not the self itself.

As for idealism: it's not really an explanation for anything.  It's more simply a sensible set arrangement.  A material world view really has no sensible explanation for the mind.  However, an idealistic world view can include and subsume all of the material world view, because the material world view is experienced by us purely as ideas anyway.

It pains me to see you reassert this so often and so erroneously.  You do not think that materialism explains your mind, but this does not mean it cannot or has not offered a sensible explanation of mind.

I think brain chemistry and structure do a very good job at explaining why we have certain categories of experience. It doesn't do anything to explain why mind exists rather than not existing, nor can it even identify whether a given physical system is conscious. So any thing materialism "explains," it does so with all the assumptions in place which it is meant to be proving.

The idea of the thing is not the thing.  Simple logic, not a revelation.  OFC things may not be as they seem..but if they are not neither you nor I have any legitimate means of inference.  People often set fire to the ground when they realize the fight is unwinnable, but when the ground burns it burns beneath us both.  Your call, I guess...you can deny your experience in service of what you say is not an explanation, if you like.  I doubt it will lead you to knowledge.

Who says ideas of burning feet or exploding brains are not a part of reality? Not I, for sure. However, we never directly burn, directly touch fire, etc. We never touch a chemical reaction, or see it or hear it directly. We perceive represenations of all those events as mental experiences aka qualia. Therefore, whatever happens, it will be the qualia representing it (whatever it really is) which we care about and with which we interact.


This is the thing. It doesn't matter WHAT physical "reality" you point to, I will always be able to say that your knowledge of it is indirect, and that you cannot therefore know its source. I will always be able to say that YOUR reality isn't the universe-- it's a representation of a universe which you experience internally. Whether there's a real universe "out there" or not is unknowable, and probably not even that important, since we are interested in the experience of human agency, which is, of course, exclusively mental in nature.