An intro to my non-materialist view

[Bunburryist]

There are a few basic concepts with which you will simply never understand my view. It's like you're trying to explain a geometric idea to someone. If they aren't able or willing to understand the basic concepts of point, line, and plane, they simply will not understand what you're talking about. The same with my ideas. The first idea is what I call a "neutral pointer." A neutral pointer is a word or phrase used to refer to, or to point to something without attaching any conceptual baggage. Suppose, for example that there is an animal and some one person says it's a cat, and another that it is not - or perhaps that neither know what it is. They need a neutral term to refer to it, so they can call it "that animal." "That animal" is a neutral pointer. "That Animal" doesn't imply anything at all. It's just a way to refer to that animal that we're talking about. The most important neutral pointer in my thinking is "This Experience." This Experience is a neutral pointer for what the average person calls "the world." It's the colors, sensations, etc., as well as the spatial aspect of that experience. This Experience implies nothing about the nature of This Experience, what it might be made of or contain. It's just a way of saying - as we would to a ten year old - this colorful, spatial-like experience you call "the world" - whatever it is - we're going to give the neutral pointer This Experience. It's like saying, we may think this is a cat, but for right now, let's just call it This Animal. This Experience is a simple concept, but surprisingly, some people have a very hard time not going, "But it's the material world!" It's like they can't point to a cat and say "That animal," they have to say "that cat." If you can't point to something you believe is a cat and say "that animal," there's no point going any further. Okay, let's put the "This Experience" concept on a shelf over here.

Now, let's describe what I call the Materialist Sense Story. Picture this in your mind, but don't think of it as being This Experience. In the end, it might be, but for now just think of "the Material World" as an abstract "mind experiment" world. Picture in your mind that there is a world, and in that world there is a sun, a tree, and a human organism. (We are going to call this world "the Material World.") The sun, the tree, and the organism are made of atoms. (We don't know what atoms really are - because we don't know what quarks and electrons "are," but that will be important later on.) The sun, the tree, and the organism exist in an objective space that is not dependent on any kind of mind, etc. It's just there. Something (we really don't understand) but will call "photons" go from the sun to the tree. Some of the photons are reflected off of the leaves and go to the eyes of the material organism. Nerve impulses propagate along neurons to the material brain. This string of physical processes is what I call the Materialist Sense Story. (It goes for the other senses as well.) Because of the nature of the material world, there is no physical way for a material brain to "project" experiences away from that brain. The material brain, for example cannot either "project" an experience of green to the tree, neither could it "go out and feel that the tree is green" (negating the point of arguing over whether the tree is "really green" or not.) Whatever experiences happen related to that organism must happen in the brain.

So we have three concepts. We have "This Experience" (what the average person learns to call "the world"), we have the concept of an objective "material world," and happening in the Material World we have a number of processes that we are going to collectively call "the Material Sense Story." Let's put these ideas on the shelf as well. It is very important that for right now at least, we keep the This Experience and the Material World at different places in the shelf. In the end, if we find out that This Experience is the Material world, fine. But for now, we're keeping them separate. The whole point is to see whether This Experience REALLY IS the Material World. If they are, fine. If they are not, then we have some work to do to stop further confusion.

Does this make sense so far?