A Conscious Universe

[bennyboy]

I don't understand this. Do you think that in an idealism, paint doesn't exist, or it doesn't dry? If so, then you are arguing past me, not with me. I've seen paint, and observed that it dries. What does this have to do with a physical monism?

Neither. You're claiming physical terms and explanations can be translated into idealist terms and explanations. This claim is not justified. On the QM level, you only have wavefunctions not redness, dryness or any other qualia.

I'm doing no such thing. There's no translation needed. We experience information about shapes, colors, etc., and we form ideas from our experience. Those experiences which we seem to share we call objective. At no point in any of this have we needed to assert that there is a magical universe full of stuff-that-is-not-stuff like photons or their wave functions. That we have done so is probably much the same as our reason for counting in 10s-- we are limited. We experience in terms of objects with dimensions: table surfaces and such. But now we know that a surface is a symbolic representation of a statistical cloud of. . . wait for it. . . information.

You know, we're so limited that we used to think that things occupying space actually occupied space. Now, we know that things like a desk occupy not more than 0.000000001% (forgive me if I've miscounted the actual number of zeros-- I only have so many fingers, you know), and that non-zero fraction may itself be the wishful clinging of a material world view where stuff is still stuff.