Contra Metaphysical Idealism

[bennyboy]

...That's what I said. And I didn't merely mean "pushing" in the sense of actual pushing, but interacting with and affecting me, even though on idealism one has no good reason to expect that one's experience of the world should in fact include the world affecting us even in ways we aren't consciously aware of (after all, under idealism only that which is a mental substance exists).

Why not? In a reality composed entirely of ideas, concepts, and experiences, why wouldn't they?

Physicality of the gaps?

No, it means by the "self" we mean a mental image of ourself that is entirely built up from our physical experience. So if you take that away I no longer have any idea what you're even talking about.

Why qualify "experience" with "physical"? It sounds like you're trying to piggyback one philosophical context onto another one.


Let me clarify-- I'm not trying to replace physicalist objectivity and the concistency of our shared physical knowledge with a pseudo-solipsistic idealism. I'm saying that physicalism may be seen as a child node of idealism, but not vice versa: i.e. that it's possible to resolve all we can experience, including physics, down to concepts, but not vice versa. All the things we know about the universe, including brain function and its relationship to thought, can be ideas. However, the idea that consciousness, which is intrinsically subjective, is a child node to a physical monism, which is intrinsically objective, is absurd.

Ironicially, it is largely science which leads me to idealism. Science serves very much to undermine our normal view of what things ARE. For example, the idea that a table is 99.999999% empty space, and that even that .00000001% which is "stuff" is slippery, ambiguous, possibly-random stuff that can only be represented statistically, makes much more sense in a universe of ideas. This is because ideas can be both abstract and concrete, both well-defined and ill-defined. Physical "stuff" isn't supposed to be all those things, at least not in a definition where an objective reality is supposed to really have meaning.

Let me put it this way: where can something be both a wave and a particle? Where can a cat be both alive and dead at the same time until Schrodinger opens its box? I'd contend a mental reality would accomodate that kind of paradox and ambiguity much better than a physical one.