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April 6, 2014 at 9:39 am (This post was last modified: April 6, 2014 at 9:42 am by Chas.)
(April 4, 2014 at 9:44 pm)bennyboy Wrote:
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.
If everything is thought, what was the universe before there were homo sapiens? Or before there were any sapient beings?
The argument in the OP fails with the first premise.
"2) For every X, if X exists, then X is thought of. [premise 1]"
There is absolutely no justification of this. We discover things unthought of repeatedly.
And note that Schroedinger came up with his cat as an example of the absurdity of that interpretation. He believed it was always either dead or alive, not in some overlapped state.
And things are not "both wave and particle"; that is a completely erroneous understanding of 'wave/particle duality'. The duality is that some things exhibit behaviors that are like our concepts of waves or particles. Those things so described are what they are - they are neither waves nor particles, they are never 'being both'.
Skepticism is not a position; it is an approach to claims.
Science is not a subject, but a method.