Contra Metaphysical Idealism

[bennyboy]

Can I play too?

Welcome.

I'll grant that I only experience my experiences.
The universe outside of my immediate vicinity may not exist.
However, I find it simpler to model reality as a collection independent physical things which exist whether I'm observing them or not.
Otherwise I cannot explain the consistency of their behavior.

This consistency exists in an objective reality, but not necessarily a physical monist one.

Every time I step outside, my street looks the same. What those materials 'ARE' is unavailable to me. Calling them ideas is no more helpful than calling them fields, relationships of particles or blahverts when their essential nature cannot be known.

Given a lack of access to whatever objective reality may/may not underly our experiences, then why wouldn't the most sensible choice be to take experiences as brute fact? I do not know if I'm in the Matrix, a BIJ, the Mind of God, or a physically monist reality. I do know that I have experiences. Why, then, shouldn't I categorize all my experiences as such, and think of physics simply as a description of categories of experiences which show high levels of consistency? I'm perfectly happy seeing physical monism as a model which very well represents many of my experiences-- it's when you try to turn that around and squeeze into that model psychogony and cosmogony that I no longer think the model represents my experience of things, and must be set aside.

If all is ideas thought by myself and others, how do we coordinate our experiences? Universal unconscious ideation? How does THAT work?
You'd still have the problem of determining that the universe created by the minds of others is of the same idea stuff as your own experiences. As others have pointed out, pulling everything into yourself is solipsism. No answer there. At least none that won't be laughed at.

The mechanisms of most things, even in a physical monist view of science, is unknown to us. I don't see an appeal to ignorance benefiting either position, however.

It seems trivially likely based on study of neural pathology and the effects of psychotropic drugs that personal experience is an emergent phenomenon of complicated chemical reactions. The claim that qualia are idiosyncratic and opaque to investigation is under attack.

I agree. There's no question at least in my mind that drugs affect brains, and that this altered function alters experience. I think (maybe) we will one day be able to trace the interaction of ideas in the brain.

What I do not think we will ever be able to determine is why/how some systems experience qualia, while others seem not to. Nor, for that matter, will we know if the brain itself ultimately exists on anything more than properties which themselves rest on no physical reality. (i.e. math instead of "things")

Creating a self aware neural network is simple. Point the inputs at the network and teach it that when it sees its own pattern, it has recognized itself. Once a self aware network is created, it should be highly preserved by natural selection as self preservation becomes much easier once self is recognized.

Alarm bells ring when I see things like this. There's an equivocation here between scientific/mathematical definitions of awareness, and the existence of an agent capable of experiencing qualia as I do. Since we are debating whether a physical monist world view is adequate, then a definition of mind framed purely in physical terms amounts to begging the question.

A parallel approach to Koch's postulates for identifying infectious organisms can be applied to consciousness. If an experience can be identified as a neurological pattern and transferred from individual to individual, then the experience can be considered identical to the pattern. This is currently being done with memory.
False Memory implantation in mice

Very interesting stuff, but I already agree that the content of qualia is dependent on brain activity. This is not the same as psychogony: the existence of the mind. Why is it that a brain, as it processes its information and outputs a behavior, also allows (requires?) the supervenience of the experience of qualia?

It is this hard problem of consciousness, combined with the ever-increasingly squirrely-seeming nature of physical particles as they relate to "objects," that leads me to prefer an idealistic world view.