I can't help but feel like, in my overwhelmingly uniformed opinion, idealism is taking an end result and applying it backwards. Evolution tells a story of life inventing new ways to describe the world in direct response to pressures applied from the outside. Shouldn't the fact that we all don't walk off cliffs be some sort of proof that our mental representations are pretty damn accurate? I think of it like this: The brain developed over millions of years; at first just a nerve bundle barely able to describe its surroundings, but after a long while it reached such a height of processing power that some positive side-effects cropped up, like abstract thinking and immaterial ideas. That these new features are processed in the brain in the same manner as material things is just evolution being economical. How else should they be perceived, after all? And it might say something that we all intuitively separate the two worlds into their own categories (with the same damn organ, I might add). Then, Idealism comes along and says that reality is processed in the same manner as the immaterial, so it all must be immaterial. Is this not undermining the evolutionary progress of the brain?
Here's a thought I had while reading this thread. Doesn't exactly pertain, so I'm hiding it:
Here's a thought I had while reading this thread. Doesn't exactly pertain, so I'm hiding it:
