My case for an Idealistic Monism

[bennyboy]

[archangle]

[Faith No More]

Are you arguing that reality itself is, in fact, mental, or are you saying that any knowledge we gain from reality must be considered mental? I can't tell.

And I think you have to define "accurate representation of an underlying, objective reality." Would that mean being able to perceive all possible information, rendering anything short of omniscience inaccurate?

[Whateverist]

And this fundamental truth closes the loop: whatever reality may underly our experiences, we as sentient beings exist in a monist idealism.

If you think you've closed the loop haven't you undermined your own position? Or can private revelation rise to the level of objective truth?

[Angrboda]

I would agree that the reality in our heads is a purely mental construct, never touching on the real. However, if you're actually arguing idealism in the classical sense, then the cause of these mental constructs is itself also mental. It's true that we have difficulty imagining how physical processes give rise to mental constructs like the thing we are, but that doesn't justify a cannot, only the observation that at present we do not have an explanation. That puzzle has a corresponding paradox in the real world. Quantum mechanics does not flow from our classical conceptions, and is thoroughly counter-intuitive in its implications. This counter-intuitiveness has given rise to dozens of interpretations of what is ontic in quantum mechanics, and what is epistemological. If world is nothing more than mind stuff, and we ourselves are mind stuff, how come we don't have an intuitive grasp of the way this world stuff works? You might postulate that the mind stuff that makes up the "shared world" is a different mind stuff than the mind stuff of our consciousness, but then you've broken the world at a cleanly articulated joint and no longer have a monism. One might suggest a similar "cannot" in that you can't derive the strangeness of quantum mechanics out of an understanding of simple mind stuff. We don't yet have such an understanding of the ontological and epistemological nature of quantum stuff either. So you have an argument for monism, supported by the inexplicability of consciousness on one hand, and an argument for dualism based on the inexplicability of quantum reality. I'd call that a draw.

[MindForgedManacle]

Let's start by looking at the main problem that a physical monism has: the problem of mind. Why does it exist? How does any amount or pattern of a physical structure like the brain result in something that goes beyond processing data and outputting behaviors, to actually experiencing what things ARE LIKE, including the self?

Why does it exist on physicalism? An accumulation via evolution given its survival-enhancing capability.
Does consciousness go beyond data processing and behavioral output? After all, there are physicalist accounts of mind and consciousness, such as put forward by Daniel Dennett, that argue that consciousness is actually an illusion.
Further, it's not that hard to argue against the existence of a 'self'. I could start with Hume's argument that even when during introspection (whatever that really is), I don't come across some singular, definite thing, but always some varying feeling or sensation.

Idealism has no such problem. If everything is mental, then the existence of ideas and experiences works fine as a brute fact.

Not sure that's true at all. On an idealist account of the mind, the idea that there are non-conscious mental processes because basically inexplicable, unlike under physicalism. After all, if all is mental and experience, then why should the creators of that mental experience have any proccesses they aren't aware of which direct their actions? While under physicalism, it's perfectly reasonable to expect unconscious processes to guide an agent's behaivors, given that we aren't consciously aware of those processes but we have discovered through science what parts of our brain are involved in regulating the proccesses.

Idealism has no way to account for this without being entirely ad hoc and just having more and more brute facts. The concept of the "unconscious" is just incompatible with idealism, because to not be conscious effectively means it does not exist. Yet I doubt you think you stop existing when you sleep.

What about science? Obviously, it represents a massive body of consistent observations and inferences that actually work, allowing us to do neat stuff like internet debates. HOWEVER, since all these inferences are made through the interface of experience, no underlying physical "reality" is actually necessary for science to work-- only an underlying reality which can produce experiences that are consistent. Whether you are looking at a real microscope or a dreamed microscope is irrelevant to the scientific process, so long as you are assured perfect consistency of observations. Science can therefore be accepted as a subset of an idealistic monism: some experiences are completely subjective and unshareable, and some are objective and shareable. The former can be called "spiritual," "personal" or just "subjective," and the latter can be called "physical" or "objective." But they need not be mutually exclusive, and we need not explain some bridge between the two, as they are not fundamentally different.

To even say there is an underlying reality involved in the success of science is to concede the very pount you're trying to dispute.

However, in a physical monism, we can't do this. We can't sensibly categorize the subjective ability to appreciate what things are LIKE as physical. You can't touch, feel, or measure what it's like for me to enjoy a chocolate bar. Yes, you could in theory monitor my entire brain state (maybe, some day, we hope and assume), but not only can you not get what it's like to be me enjoying the chocolate, you cannot even be sure that I AM enjoying it, rather than just seeming to. You cannot have access to my "what eating chocolate is like."

Same as my first response.

[bennyboy]

[archangle]

You are your brain ... period. Unless new observations come up.

What defines your brain? That is a work in progress.

How many sects of this monist and idealism are there?

[ManMachine]

[Angrboda]

Your answer to every difficulty seems to be to postulate that whatever problematic stuff you're faced with is, "just another kind of idea." Beyond the fact that this ends up as an explanation that doesn't really explain why each of these ideas is the way it is — resulting in an explanation that doesn't actually explain anything — you end up with the world being carved up in much the same way that it was carved up before you postulated that it's all "ideas," only replacing the "stuff" it's made up of being postulated to be made up of "mind" rather than made up of "reality." It seems the only benefit is to save the original internal mind stuff from needing to be explained, while creating greater mysteries which you can't resolve with appeal to anything but making everything a "brute idea," similar to making everything a "brute fact." I don't see what, besides consciousness, is rescued by this approach.