My thoughts on the Hard problem of consciousness

[bennyboy]

I'm sorry to say, you're losing me with all this   So your view is a kind of materialistic/idealistic hybrid? Okay, 'immaterial formative principles'... 'physical rules' etc... those are 'ideas' to an idealist? How is that different from a materialist accepting physical laws of the universe, like gravity etc? I thought idealism simply referred to the qualia... the opposite of realism. I'm really sorry but it's just not making the slightest bit of sense to me, not even enough to know what sort of questions to ask to clarify it What would a neuron be? an idea? an immaterial formative principle (in the sense that it is the ultimate functional building block of the brain, just as a gate is in an electronic circuit)?

As I said, I don't claim to be an idealist. If I had to choose among material monism, dualism, and ideal monism, I'd probably go with the latter. But I think reality is much more slippery and ambiguous than that-- I'd have to make up a new term, like "paradoxist" or something, to describe my view, but I usually just throw up my hands and identify as agnostic-- not only in the religious sense, but in pretty much every sense. In truth, I believe very much in reality-in-context-- that reality not only SEEMS different but IS different depending on context.

As for idealism being different than materialism-- I've said before that idealism subsumes, rather than replaces, physicalism. In other words, all that we believe or know about physical reality can be viewed simply as a collection of ideas; some things that are NOT readily explained by materialism, like the existence of qualia-experiencing mental agents, also work fine as ideas. So do things like QM particles-- you cannot represent them unambiguously in a 3D spacetime framework, but you can encapsulate them with equations and descriptive terms-- more ideas. Trying to fit modern science into a world view based on our everyday experience of life simply doesn't work.

Well, I hope to understand it better at some point, but you had me at 'layered' From that perspective, there is an appeal because that's what evolution is really... layers and layers of slow but sure development. Is there any particular idealist that inspires you or is this all you?  

The truth is I probably horribly abuse the term "idealism," but I don't really claim to be an idealist, so I'm okay with that. I generally try to think of and express original ideas until someone says, "Oh. . . you're talking about boobledyboo-ism" or whatever.