My case for an Idealistic Monism

[ManMachine]

I think most of what you're saying is right. An idealistic universe still doesn't explain why there is mind rather than an absence of it. There are still mysteries about how interfaces work-- how individual subjective minds interface through a mental universe, for example. So as a Theory of Everything, idealism doesn't put us much further ahead. My point about idealism is that all the physical "stuff" can be looked at as an idea quite readily-- we dream about stuff all the time, and can experience touching it, feeling it, or seeing it. looking at mind and ideas as members of a physical universe, however, makes much less sense. I can't see your "what it's like to eat chocolate," or touch it, or measure it in any meaningful way.

With regard to idealistic and physicalistic processes of inference, I think the direction is important. When I experience a knock on the head, I start inferring ideas about hammers or rocks-- that when a hammer hits my head, it will hurt, or that a rock when held up and let go will always fall to the ground. Whatever the actual reality of hammers and rocks (or of myself) is, I can still make those inferences based on direct experience. Whether it's a dream hammer, a Matrix hammer, a BIJ hammer, a physical monist hammer, a Mind of God hammer-- none of it matters, because my reality is determined by experiences and the ideas I infer from them, and is not really dependent on source attributions.

Looking at things through a physical monist view, however, is messier. I have to accept that the "real" world which my experiences seem to indicate really is what I think it is. An idealistic monism, with all the problems and mysteries it still carries, therefore requires at least one less assumption-- and that assumption is a real doozy.

Consider that mind, thought and idea are not abstractions of experience but are formed and framed by differential relationships. This 'framing' does not rely on any internal identity, unlike Plato's forms or Kant's pure reason they do not transcend possible experience; instead they are the conditions of actual experience.

Deleuze calls this transcendental empiricism, in contrast to Kantian transcendental idealism.

On monism, Deleuze inverts Spinoza, who maintained that everything that exists is a modification of the one substance. For Deleuze, there is no one substance, only an always-differentiating process, an origami cosmos, always folding, unfolding, refolding. Deleuze summarizes this ontology in the paradoxical formula "pluralism = monism." (Giles Deleuze, The Fold).


MM