Contra Metaphysical Idealism

[Chas]

If everything is thought, what was the universe before there were homo sapiens? Or before there were any sapient beings?

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You are still treating ideas as objects of physical entities. In an idealistic reality, reality itself is purely composed of ideas and concepts. Asking what thougth up all those ideas is like asking where the Big Bang came from-- it's an unapproachable question. I've already said in another thread that idealism doesn't solve all the mysteries and paradoxes of cosmogony. The main advantage is that it makes the problem of consciousness go away. Since ideas are seen as flexible, and the physical universe as inflexible (possibly deterministic), then the physical universe can possibly be seen as a subset of all experience/ideas, whereas it makes much less sense to say that the mind, which is obviously subjective, is a subset of the physical universe, which is defined as objective.

There is absolutely no justification of this. We discover things unthought of repeatedly.

Are you sure? Even in a physicalist model of the brain and mind, by the time something is experienced, it has been broken down and mentally reassembled completely. Name one thing you've ever discovered on a physical level but not on a mental level. It can't be done-- the moment of discovery is a mental experience.

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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'.

Fine. What does an electron look like? Where, exactly, is it located in space? How about a photon? When a photon is behaving like a wave, or like a particle, what are its dimensions in space?

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None of that was in the least responsive to what I wrote.

You are the one denying physical reality, not I. Ideas are not distinct, physical objects, they are patterns in brains. No brains, no ideas - but there is still the physical universe.

Everything ever discovered was something new to our knowledge, therefore new thoughts.

I don't believe an electron or a photon looks like anything at all; certainly nothing in our experience. They are too small to be seen by our senses.

Photons only behave sort of like what we conceive of as waves and particles - it's a freakin' metaphor, a descriptive device