On naturalism and consciousness

[bennyboy]

There are two methods that I'm aware of to distinguish between reality and dreamland. Reality can give a fundementally new experience. Also, reality doesn't obey your wishes.

I'm not as confident as you that my mundane thinking and experiences represent reality, or that dreams do not. I think what you mean, re the OP, is that since a new experience could not have been generated by the self, a new experience is evidence of a reality beyond or outside the self.

But this possibility is not restricted only to a physical monism. The Matrix, or the Mind of God, or an idealistic reality could also do this.

Your modern age view is imcompete. The modern age didn't come up just from a set of experiences, but also includes logical deductions. Science is the best example of this. Specifically Einstien's special relativity is almost purely based on logical arguments.

Maybe. But what else is logic, really, than the experience that one or more ideas are compatible with each other? And how is any idea arrived at, but by the experiences of the senses, fed back on each other? Is it not possible that logic makes sense because it follows the exact same algorithms by which we process experience, thereby ensuring a perfect uniformity between logic and reality as we perceive it?

My evidence for this is that as we extend our observations of the universe, it appears less and less logical to us. Why would this be so, if reality was a property of objects in the universe, rather than of the mind only? It's not unusual for us to come up against ambiguity, paradox, and impossibility in our attempts to understand our experiences. And in the case of mind, we suffer a closed loop: that all our knowledge is dependent on the nature of experience-- something that cannot be truly known but must rather be assumed.

In the end, we feel that the world is real. It feels convincing. It feels reliable, somehow immutable (under the surface at least). And isn't that really the criterion we use to establish reality-- only that the world feels real?