On naturalism and consciousness

[bennyboy]

The difference is that in an idealistic universe, mind is omnipresent (or, more accurately, all is mind), and all "things" reduce down only to concepts

Could you elaborate on this benny? When you say "all 'things' reduce only to concepts," it sounds to me like you're putting the wagon before the horse, concepts before pure experience, and in my judgment concepts tend to reduce into disjointed fragments of reality; in other words, experience is continuous while concepts are often cut out and separated and defined by their independence from all other concepts... while pure experience oftentimes isn't quite so cleanly divided. Am I reading too much into your statement... or reading it wrong altogether?

When I say things reduce to concepts, I don't mean the concepts of an observing individual's mind, but rather the fundamental building blocks of an idealistic model of the universe: mathematical relationships, etc.

Getting away from that model, and into a more personal level, I agree that experience necessarily precedes concepts: you experience, and then you categorize your experiences: internal vs. external, concrete vs. abstract, etc. In this context, the physical universe is very simply categorized as a class of experience: those experiences which are sharable with others, and about which immutable truths can be inferred. To me, this is the simplest approach: all of science still works, because it is used only in the context of that class of experience in which those physical truths are valid. You can talk meaningfully about evolution, because your experience of animals, and fossils, and lab work, etc. are coherent with those of other people. Then you go and have a spiritual experience, or one which is subtle and highly abstract, and you realize you're dealing with a different class of experience about which science has little useful to say and vice versa.

But what I've been talking about in my past couple of posts is a model of the universe, GIVEN that we accept that there's an objective framework of which each individual is a part. I think that if you're in the Matrix, and you are a good enough investigator, you'll eventually come to the conclusion that nothing exists but 1s and 0s. And I think that the physical sciences must inevitably discover that at the root of reality, time and space have no meaning, physical rules don't apply, and there's nothing there beyond the ideas we've inferred. QM squirreliness, to me, represents the first scratch in that deconstruction.

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I'm not saying the mind is incompatible with idealism. I'm saying idealism isn't internally inconsistent. Hense, it's wrong.

I sense that you believe that, but I haven't seen an argument that clearly demonstrates it.

At the simplest level, we have experiences, some of which are coherent in relation to each other, and some which are not. Physics, for example, represents a complex of experiences which are coherent in relation to each other: things always fall when we drop them, objects of different masses striking each other always behave consistently, etc. But when you say physical monism is "internally consistent," what you are really saying is "ideas about a certain class of experience are consistent with each other." You build your bridges, and fire your rockets, and the results which you experience confirm your belief in that coherence.

This coherence of ideas is perfectly compatible with an idealistic view of reality. As an added bonus, SO ARE coherent moral ideas, experiences about beauty in art, spiritual experiences, etc. Physical monism fails to be useful as soon as you leave that class of experiences from which it arose and for which it is designed.