A Conscious Universe

[bennyboy]

That's where I disagree with you and thinkers such as St. Augustine who also adopted the Platonic notion that there is no distinction between "the real and the apparently real." There is.

That's a strange comment, since not long ago I was arguing that information describing a "thing" could not be used to confidently establish the existence of that thing as more than information.

If you have to act as if there is some blurred line between what experiences we should consider imaginary and those that have a definite existence known (as much as anything could be) on the basis of our physical relation to it, I won't lie, that's not attracting me to your argument.

I don't think I've done what you think I've done. In fact, I've specifically stated that except at philosophical boundary conditions (specifically with regard to QM/QFT, to cosmogony and to psychogony), mundane observations are equivalent in either physicalist or idealist monism. Is it possible that you are reading your expectations of an idealistic argument into what I'm actually saying-- or maybe that I'm just not saying things effectively?

When I say all experiences are real, I mean AS EXPERIENCES. I include among my experiences a category of those which we all share: falling rocks, droning professors, getting drunk on Friday nights. I believe you would call those "real," and that the consistency of those experiences would lead you to infer that behind the experiences lay real objects. I would, too, when thinking in the normal context of every day life. However, as soon as the mind goes to QM, all that reality starts to look pretty shaky after all.