Contra Metaphysical Idealism

[bennyboy]

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.

I'm not denying the physical universe as a collection of ideas about ultra-consistent relationships among the things we experience. I'm denying the physical monist interpretation of what underlies it. I think that as far as we're concerned, the universe resolves down to ideas, not to locatable, existent things. Now, if you're insisting on a physical monism, you have a problem-- all your models and interpretations of physicality are ideas, and you cannot even show the elemental particles which those ideas are said to represent. And that's just for the supposedly physical stuff; now add in the philosophical problem of mind, and it's time to really start tap-dancing.

In an idealistic world view, that problem doesn't exist-- we make our ideas about the interactions between properties, and the underlying "reality" upon which those properties stand-- be it a physical universe, the Matrix, a BIJ, or the mind of God-- really doesn't matter to the work at hand.

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

Right. Discovery is an experience, and experiences can only be had where there is a mind.

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.

Like angels on the pin of a needle? You are talking about things we can neither see, nor directly interact with, nor even prove to exist except as representative concepts. At what point does scientific knowledge cross the line into metaphysical faith?

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

It's a metaphor, a descriptive device, a concept, an abstraction, an. . . IDEA. But an idea about what? About the relationships between properties of the things we experience. It's an idea which describes how things happen, not, in an absolute sense, what they are or where they come from. This is the irony of physical monism-- it is represented completeley in the realm of ideas.