My case for an Idealistic Monism

[ManMachine]

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(Derived from the recent post on God as the only explanation of consciousness, but not arguing for theism/desim)

First, a definition:

In philosophy, idealism is the group of philosophies which assert that reality, or reality as we can know it, is fundamentally mental, mentally constructed, or otherwise immaterial.

Let's start by looking at the main problem that a physical monism has: the problem of mind. Why does it exist? How does any amount or pattern of a physical structure like the brain result in something that goes beyond processing data and outputting behaviors, to actually experiencing what things ARE LIKE, including the self? Idealism has no such problem. If everything is mental, then the existence of ideas and experiences works fine as a brute fact.

What about science? Obviously, it represents a massive body of consistent observations and inferences that actually work, allowing us to do neat stuff like internet debates. HOWEVER, since all these inferences are made through the interface of experience, no underlying physical "reality" is actually necessary for science to work-- only an underlying reality which can produce experiences that are consistent. Whether you are looking at a real microscope or a dreamed microscope is irrelevant to the scientific process, so long as you are assured perfect consistency of observations. Science can therefore be accepted as a subset of an idealistic monism: some experiences are completely subjective and unshareable, and some are objective and shareable. The former can be called "spiritual," "personal" or just "subjective," and the latter can be called "physical" or "objective." But they need not be mutually exclusive, and we need not explain some bridge between the two, as they are not fundamentally different.

However, in a physical monism, we can't do this. We can't sensibly categorize the subjective ability to appreciate what things are LIKE as physical. You can't touch, feel, or measure what it's like for me to enjoy a chocolate bar. Yes, you could in theory monitor my entire brain state (maybe, some day, we hope and assume), but not only can you not get what it's like to be me enjoying the chocolate, you cannot even be sure that I AM enjoying it, rather than just seeming to. You cannot have access to my "what eating chocolate is like."

How about the relationship between brain and experience? This is a tricky one. Given a shotgun and the instruction to use it on himself "to show that the brain is just an idea," an idealist is proven to be a closet physicalist (or at least a dualist). Or is he? I don't think so-- we are all familiar with the idea that a shotgun to the brain will alter or cease mental activity, and most of us fear this effect. Our experiences in reading, in watching movies, and in hearing wars, build up ideas that cause us to experience negative emotions. An idealistic reality doesn't mean there are no consequences for actions. If a person takes LSD, he/she will still get high. The LSD will still affect the person's brain, and their thinking. The only difference is that the LSD, the brain, and all the QM particles of which they are composed, have no existence independent of the mental fabric of reality.

If you don't believe me, then consider modern physics. What is the "stuff" of which the universe is made? 99.9999999999999% space just to get down to a particle. So that table, that brain, that neuron, are really empty space. What is with all the solidity and bright colors that we experience then? The answer is that we interface with the IDEAS of table, of brown, of flatness, of hardness, of smoothness. Therefore, what we are experiencing CANNOT, even when filtered throught the idea of a physical monism, be an accurate representation of an underlying, objective reality. And this fundamental truth closes the loop: whatever reality may underly our experiences, we as sentient beings exist in a monist idealism.

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I think you have put the proverbial cart before the horse.

Idealism fails in its anthropocentricity, it attempts to approximate the disinterested pursuit of a determinate fixed truth, that what we perceive is constructed by the mind. But this is to ignore that mind itself is a product of what it is attempting to construct.

To break this recursion we need to recognise that mind is determined by problems rather than solving them, that reason is shaped by the irrational, formed by particular relationships among irrational factors. Our minds are not born of the rules and laws we attribute to the physical and metaphysical universe, but are carved out of the delirium and drift that lies beneath.

Scientific discipline compounds this issue by citing observation as a tool to generate quantitative theories based on fixed points of reference. What scientific endeavour discreetly papers over is that every observed event is distinct and unique, that ultimately everything is 'subjective and unshareable' and by gathering events that display a lack of difference and presenting them as generalised theories it gives us a false sense of objectivity, an objectivity that can never be established, again because it is fundamentally recursive in nature.

I cannot and never will be able to share your experience of a chocolate bar but I can carve an approximation of your experience out of the lack of difference with my own experiences.

Indeed, if we examine modern physics we can dispense with any notion that there is anything but nothing, there is no objective reality, just random patterns in the void.

There are no properties of mind that exist independently of this chaos, just our very human need to seek order that will ultimately delude us into believing we can understand the universe by applying thought to the chaos from which it emerges.

MM