Seeing red

[bennyboy]

But to be honest I can't understand how you can 'subsume' materialism either, given that where theories of psychology and neuroscience are concerned, they directly affect the content and nature of your experience - you can rely on them to make predictions about your experience, but they rely on materialistic assumptions.

They rely on objective assumptions more than material ones-- that is, that there is something outside your own mind, and that you are interacting with it. However, let's say we're in the Matrix or the Mind of God. Given that our experiences are consistent, and that there are some experiences which are so consistent across time that we consider them to represent "objects," would this now be a material universe, or wouldn't it?

I'd argue that however compelling our experiences are, without knowing where they come from or why, Matrix denizens or Mind of God denizens would infer from experiential consistency that there was a "material" reality, though really there is not guaranteed to be anything of the sort. So while their beliefs represent a pragmatic organization of their experiences, they are STILL ideas, as is everything they experience.

I know you say later that they don't have anything to say about the actual existence of subjective experience - why or how it exists - but nonetheless they still do have a lot to say about what you experience given that you can experience. It seems to me that if you accept the findings of materialistic theories of psychology and neuroscience - to whatever extent you do - then you have to be relying on materialism to some extent, and therefore to deny materialism seems like circular logic.

Not really. The brain, a microscope, an fMRI machine. . . they are all so far as any of us knows, just highly consistent experiences. Whatever is "out there" or not, it's not really disputed by anyone, even the staunchest materialist, that the universe at the point of experience is a mental representation. So while you might feel that you're using things to establish rules about the physical universe, when you forget that the use of things is ALWAYS an experience, you are missing out on the real circle-- using mind to establish a system by which to validate its own source. This is a nasty circle indeed, not really that different than that of the Bible and God mutually establishing each other's veracity.

[quote]


Unless you're saying that everything that materialism sees as a thing is in fact an idea? But if that is the case, why would those ideas exhibit exactly the same relationships and coherency as the materialistic universe? Why would they be as if it was a materialistic universe? eg that certain ideas are only found in certain places in 'idea space'... like you'd have to look in a brain idea before you could see a neuron idea etc?


--edit--
Your next paragraph was pretty thick for me. I want to reserve some time to fully read and understand it later.