Proof Mind is Fundamental and Matter Doesn't Exist

[Captain Scarlet]

Assuming you convince yourself that everything is mind, what comes of it?  Will you not go on being motivated for exactly the same reasons you are now?

I don't really need to convince myself.  Everything that I experience, including the apparent physical world, is mind.  The default position is that I don't need to add anything else, i.e. specify the nature of the source of experience which is not really demonstrable anyway.

But basically, yes.  The only difference between a physical world and an idealistic one, in terms of living my life, is that one seems a better fit and the other not so much.  It has little to do with the nature of experience which one I believe.

Mind is the faculty of consciouness  ->  
Conciousness is the is the state of being aware of an external objects and oneself (but it is not the state only of self-awareness, otherwise you would be conscious only of your own consciousness) -> 
Awareness is gained through sense perception of the enviornment -> 
The senses are self authenticating given any attempt to inavlidate them requires their validity -> 
Thus as senses detect objective external reality, external objective reality is real.  Existence, exists.

Everything I experience is of an objective physical world and its causality (including self-awareness, ideas, etc).  The default position is that I do not need to add anything else, ie a world of make-believe where there is only mind, and a mind or minds controlling reality

[FreeTony]

Step 2 is a fallacy, the same that is used by God/Ghost/Bigfoot/UFO believers all the time. Saying something cannot be shown to be imposible doesn't demonstrate that it is possible.

E.g. I claim that inside a box that you cannot examine lives a leprechaun.

You not being able to prove it doesn't exist does not constitute evidence that it could exist.

[ignoramus]

Rob, you know how we fuck around with our VR sims and most recently the sim "John" is running?
It's a nice distraction, isn't it. To think that a real person in a high tech future somewhere has created a sim and we're it!

Is this guy saying the same thing but instead of a real person using real technology creating and running the sim, we have GOD running it!

How the fuck to you nest one impossibility inside another. As if the odds weren't ridiculous enough for the existence of "God" or a "sim", now we've arguing for both!
I got a better one: There's a troll sleeping under the bridge who's dreaming of a god who is in turn creating worlds in his mind!
Nested 3 deep! Fuck me! I'm going to bed...

[Captain Scarlet]

Because Idealism would be a manifestation of the state of the greater mind as outlined by AKD.  So no matter what happens, it has no bearing on the real mind as all we are experiencing is just a manifestation of that mind (if I understand it correct).  Therefore whether in this "reality" you live to be a world leader or a serial rapist, is meaningless to the "real mind".

These things don't have objective meaning in a physicalist view, either.  Idealism doesn't mean Sky Daddy, it means that the fundamental nature of reality is an expression of universal concepts, rather than concepts being an approximation of some other reality.

I think current physics supports this view, by the way.  Try and define, in physical terms, what a photon is, for example.  You'll end up with something definable ONLY in conceptual terms, and which cannot be modeled or represented in 3 dimensions or 4 in any meaningful way.  Sounds like an idea to me.

This appears to be the rather lazy and armchair line of reasoning employed by Deepak Chopra.  The essence of it is that Idealism is sppoky, mysterious and hard to understand, Quantum Theory (QT) is spooky, mysterious and hard to understand.  Therefore QT supports Idealism.  You have to work a lot harder to connect Idealism and QT.  From my rather limited understanding of QT it does nothing at all to validate Idealism, whatever strange and spooky physics exists, it is part of our natural world be it 4, 10 or 11 dimensions, be it packets of energy, strings and branes or solid particles.

[robvalue]

Rob, you know how we fuck around with our VR sims and most recently the sim "John" is running?
It's a nice distraction, isn't it. To think that a real person in a high tech future somewhere has created a sim and we're it!

Is this guy saying the same thing but instead of a real person using real technology creating and running the sim, we have GOD running it!

How the fuck to you nest one impossibility inside another. As if the odds weren't ridiculous enough for the existence of "God" or a "sim", now we've arguing for both!
I got a better one: There's a troll sleeping under the bridge who's dreaming of a god who is in turn creating worlds in his mind!
Nested 3 deep! Fuck me! I'm going to bed...

Yeah, I was wondering when we should break this to him

If this reality is indeed an "unreal" manifestation of another process, then presumably the thing where that process is going on is real, and made of "matter"? Whatever that means. We can't even be sure about our own reality, so coming to conclusions about the guy who is imagining all of this is ridiculously out of our scope.

[Rational AKD]

Step 2 is a fallacy, the same that is used by God/Ghost/Bigfoot/UFO believers all the time. Saying something cannot be shown to be imposible doesn't demonstrate that it is possible.

E.g. I claim that inside a box that you cannot examine lives a leprechaun.

You not being able to prove it doesn't exist does not constitute evidence that it could exist.

i'm not saying it 'can't be shown' to be impossible. i'm saying it is epistemically impossible to to disprove solipsism. that means, for all we know and all we could know solipsism is possible or could be true. and given that is the case, I think it is reasonable to conclude it is actually possible since the only alternative is nihilism which is self defeating. the substantiation of premise 2 is that the prospect of solipsism being possible is the only reasonable conclusion given our epistemic knowledge; which is that for all we know and could know solipsism could be true. I think the wording of the premise made it clear it's not reasonable to conclude solipsism is impossible and you can't reasonably be agnostic on this issue because that would mean you don't think the only current and possible knowledge we have is sufficient to establish what's true of reality which is nihilism.

[Rational AKD]

How the fuck to you nest one impossibility inside another. As if the odds weren't ridiculous enough for the existence of "God" or a "sim", now we've arguing for both!

really i'm just arguing for the sim here. an argument for God could be drawn from the conclusion we are in a sim, but I haven't presented such an argument yet.

[Brian37]

I hate philosophy. Our consciousness is simply our brain in motion, our individuality is a result of input, upbringing, genetics, and brain health conditions that vary.

[The Grand Nudger]

"If everything we think we know is false, then some other thing might be true"

You realize that you don't -actually- have to appeal to solipsism in order to make the statement "everything is mind", right?  You can make that statement from the position of reductive physicalism just as easily.  You can argue for "the sim" from that position as well, and much, much more competently, I'd wager. Particularly in that there's no need to beg from the ledge of possibilities accepted for sake of argument. You can simply provide demonstrations and schematics. "Sims" - as you know them, as you experience them -are- physical things. Little pieces of machinery-in-state.

Or, you know...you could go with "hey guys.....what if".........your call.

(your conclusions don't follow..and some of the statements are "wtf" level wrong, btw. Prove for me, right now, that substance dualism is false.....as you so casually claimed had already been proven.)

[Rational AKD]

We'll start with Santa Claus, since that's the most amusing can of worms you decided to pop open. No, you cannot disprove the existence of Santa Claus or his workshop. No, going to the North Pole will not help. I used to be one of Santa's elves, you see, and I have first-hand knowledge of the security features in his shop. For one thing, it's surrounded by a magnetic field that fucks with people's compasses and other navigational equipment, causing them to constantly circle the North Pole any time they try to get there; the shop is also surrounded by several "false poles," which are designed to prevent human suspicions about why they can't find the North Pole. Humans have never been to the "real" North Pole, only these false ones.

those 'security' features are ad hoc. it's not a valid refutation of the criticism against it. but again, even if you're right you can only at best conclude Santa is possible...

The only other point from this that's even remotely worth addressing is that stupid question-begging thing you keep bringing up, and all I have to say to that is this: it should be obvious to everyone reading this that you have attempted to deliberately construct your argument so that any time someone brings up evidence from the physical Universe, you can cry "question begging!" and move on.

it has nothing to do with the argument. philosophers of epistemology acknowledge you cannot use experience to explain why you experience because that's question begging. you want to challenge it? try something better than 'nuh-uh.'

What's really more likely: that you (whoever the hell you are) have somehow figured out some unassailable Truth about the basic underpinnings of reality, or that you have constructed a childishly evasive argument that allows you to cop out by name-dropping a fallacy?

are you seriously challenging the argument by appealing to some arbitrary probability you have in your head of the chances I have an argument that proves something about a controversial topic? why don't you just say 'you're wrong because I say so...' it might make you look a little more intelligent...

Besides, even your false fallacy is fallacious in the reasoning by which you arrive at it.

so why is my fallacy accusation false? oh right... because you say so... got it!

The question is whether we can use information from our experience to explain why we experience things, and the answer is that as long as the Universe behaves according to consistent rules, yes we can.

so you're saying because material explanations are consistent they are therefore accurate? look up those two words and tell me the difference.

Regardless of whether reality is physical or conceptual, it still behaves according to apparent rules that allow us to glean information about how it works and what goes on in it.

that justifies functional realism but not objective realism. sure it's reasonable to believe that physical laws are pragmatic to understanding the world we experience. but that doesn't mean they can establish the objectivity of the world beyond what we experience. even I accept functional realism.

As long as the alleged Dreamer doesn't change any of the rules, we can learn things about the reality it's dreaming up by studying that reality, including how and why our bodies and minds behave the way they do.

in some sense, yes. you can find how mind behaves by studying the world, though also through epistemology. but you can't explain the fundamental nature of mind by studying the world. that has to be reasoned.

That doesn't answer questions of metaphysical meaning, but then again neither does your whole argument.

which is exactly why the 'evidence' you bring fourth isn't valid evidence against the argument... because it has metaphysical physical implications while your evidence doesn't.

This is also another instance where you've deliberately chosen shitty wording to meet your ends.

there you go again with your ad hominem... look, if you're not going to say my definitions are invalid then quite frankly I don't care what you think about them. I care about reasons, not your preference of sentence appearance.

You've chosen the word "experience" because of its subjectivity.

actually, I used experience in an objective manner. your thoughts of your experience is subjective, but the contents of what you experience is objective. for example, it's subjective for John to say he tasted good food. but it's objective to say he ate food. if the contents of experience don't have added thoughts or opinions, they are objective.

 more appropriate way to word this question might be, "Is it possible to use evidence from reality to learn about how our brains generate our minds?"

that's a loaded question... it already presumes brains generates minds, which is not agreed upon here.

By throwing the word "experience" around and asking if it's possible to prove experience from experience, you try to make it sound like your opponent is always begging the question any time evidence comes up.

irony... your question was certainly more presumptuous than mine. the wording of my question did presume materialism or idealism, yet the wording of your question clearly presumed materialism.

There is no reason to believe the things you propose unless you can somehow show them with evidence.

if evidence is whatever you arbitrarily claim is so, then can you blame me for not having it?

one last question to try and add to the conversation. if something for all we know and all we could know is possible or could be true, is that reasonable evidence that it is in fact possible or in fact could be true?