Contra Metaphysical Idealism

[bennyboy]

Your ideas actually explain nothing and you have no evidence, no mechanism.

Sure they do. They explain why mind exists at all in a world supposed by many to be physically monist.

Ideas do not exist independently of minds.

That's right by definition, I'd say.

Why aren't we talking to trees? to rocks? You claim they are made of ideas, too.

You think the mind is a function of matter, and yet they cannot talk. The reason is that the matter is not formed in such a way as to allow trees to think and talk. The same goes for trees in idealism.

Just because we have not yet explained consciousness doesn't mean that you can simply declare that it is not explainable in physical terms.

Well, do we have any reason to think science can study consciousness? Can you see which physical systems are/aren't conscious? Can you make a system that you know for sure is conscious, and is not just a philosophical zombie?

Consciousness (I mean, the actual experience of qualia, not the awakened state of the brain)is so unlike anything studied that there's no evidence science is capable of dealing with it at all.

Evidence is just another word for "experiences that support my ideas." There's no such thing as non-mental evidence.

You fail to respond to the fact of independent verification.

Given that all human minds are supervenient on the same underlying system (whatever it is), then independent verification of the nature of that underlying system is impossible.

You have to take this kind of verification in context. If you want to verify ideas about gravity, you can get 100 people to pick up and drop rocks all day. This is perfectly acceptable, because the context is implied: "In our common experience of things we touch and manipulate, rocks always fall down when dropped." But if you want them to verify your idea the the rock exists independently of mind, they can't, because nobody ever verified anything who wasn't also in possession of a functioning mind. Nobody has access to the context of whatever reality underlies experiences.