A Conscious Universe

[bennyboy]

Stop saying there's no difference between physical and mental in idealism. Nobody's saying that, unless you are. Are you?

If ontological idealism is true then what we call physical things are in fact mental things/mentally constructed. "As an ontological doctrine, idealism goes further, asserting that all entities are composed of mind or spirit."

But maybe I'm getting this thread confused with another? There many threads about idealism. I'm sorry if I am.

oic

I guess you could say that both idealism and physicalism include each other as subsets. Idealists see all existence as mind, and the experiences from which an objective physical reality is inferred as a special category of ideas (or at least I do). Physicalists see all existence as material, and mind as a special category of physical function.

So how would you go about determining whether one of these positions is true? And if this is impossible, how would you go about establishing which position, if either, should be the dafault position?

---

[. . .] it seems they both fail in the respect Nietzsche also pointed out: "To study physiology with a clear conscience, one must insist that the sense organs are not phenomena in the sense of idealistic philosophy; as such they could not be causes! Sensualism, therefore, at least as a regulative hypothesis, if not as a heuristic principle.— What? And others even say that the external world is the work of our organs? But then our body, as a part of this external world, would be the work of our organs! But then our organs themselves would be—the work of our organs! It seems to me that this is a complete reductio ad absurdum: assuming that the concept of a causa sui is something fundamentally absurd. Consequently, is the external world not the work of our organs—?"

I don't take the position Nietzsche is talking about, if I indeed understand it. It is not my position that reality is an expression of the HUMAN mind / minds, which to me would be a kind of collective solipsism (if I may abuse the roots of that word here). It is my position that everything is an expression of the interaction of underlying ideas: i.e. that everything reduces down to something expressible only as idea-- not because of human limitations in observation, but due to ambiguities intrinsic to the marriage of observed reality and any model which includes a geographic 3D space as a component.

It's funny to see Nietzsche talking this way about idealism, because I feel much the same way about physicalist thought. We "know" that reality is objectively physical, and that mind is therefore nothing more than a physical process, because. . . our experiences lead us to form ideas along these lines. I'm not sure if I'd say that way of reasoning is circular, or paradoxical.