Materialism vs Idealism

Matter is a mental phenomenon, a mental process independent from our own individual mental processes. Matter isn't its own fundamental independent substance. Matter, and the spacetime structure around it, is part of our perception.

It's like a computer screen : what you see on the screen is not the real thing. The pixels of the icons and shortcuts on your screen are what you call matter. Matter is a representation.

originally posted by: gosseyn
a reply to: cooperton

Personally, i don't think this universal mind has metacognition, i think it just is fundamental awareness. It doesn't premeditate, it doesn't plan ahead. It doesn't think about its own thoughts like we do. I don't see it as an anthropomorphic entity. I am more in line with Bernardo Kastrup's idealism, which is a form of analityc idealism, or rational idealism.

The laws that persist all things are intelligent. It has a machine-like aspect in this sense. This intelligence must be aware also... it is mostly beyond our comprehension, just like a shadow would struggle to understand that it's existence is dependent upon light. The laws themselves are invisible but we see their effect, and it is the same with consciousness

originally posted by: gosseyn
Matter is a mental phenomenon, a mental process independent from our own individual mental processes. Matter isn't its own fundamental independent substance. Matter, and the spacetime structure around it, is part of our perception.

Yes this is pretty much the Copenhagen Interpretatoon of quantum physics. People who are stubbornly materialistic or nihilistic will ignore this... that's fine. Although if they truly are nihilistic and suppose nothing has meaning, it's contradictory for them to make any claims on any objectivity whatsoever.

It's like a computer screen : what you see on the screen is not the real thing. The pixels of the icons and shortcuts on your screen are what you call matter. Matter is a representation.

Well said. It's a very convenient interface. I liked your analogy about the painter in the OP

Thank you for the response.

a reply to: cooperton

Nihilism insists that there is no meaning to life. This claim goes hand-in-hand with the notion that there is no higher power. This therefore claims that we do not come from anything intelligent, and instead come from randomness.

That's the center of this. All debate here flows through belief vs. non-belief.

The abstraction inclined will see consciousness preceding matter and the empirically driven will see the inverse.

So it's an intelligent design debate and another  presuppositional apologetics argument.

So I'll use the argument I use there.

If [intelligent design] created the multiiverse what created the intelligence; and if that intelligence can always exist in some form why can't we just say that for the multiverse, and remove one logical step from the equation?

The OP mentioned "many worlds". That comes from string throry/M theory. It came from math and exists as compactified superposition to explain away the enigma of the weakness of gravity.

The universe is now affixed to a membrane rippling in a cosmic bulk. The matter of the universe is now explained by this cosmic membrane collision and the intelligent creation is pushed back a step.

In fact, any idea anyone comes up with can have a god added back in preceding it. The chicken and egg with never be resolved.

I feel this is in that family of debates.

 I hold to an arcmchair vacuum theory which still requires some (a)causality In the form of a random fluctuation in a scaler field. Or even the necessity of physical constants (like the speed of light) existing in the "preuniverse". There still needed to be laws before there was matter.  Even my best answer can still have someone come along and say, "That initial vacuum field fluctuation is the quantification of God's omnipotence. That there were laws before the universe still shows an intelligent order."

It's fun if you don't get emotional about It, but ultimately futile to argue. 

This is why I suppose consciousness preceded matter... because matter behaves according to laws that allow living organisms to exist. Not to mention quantum physics, which is by far the leading theory regarding particles, insists that consciousness and the faculty of observation/measurement is fundamental to the physical world itself.

But how does observation exist and what does that really say?

It is a confirmation for noncompatibility in my eyes. If observation determines so much then the logical argument holds there is NO absolute future. There is trajectory but nothing is set in stone.

I roll the dice I can put up odds for the liklihood of 7 coming up but never absolutely predict the outcome.

In analogy to wave collapse experiments (which is what I think you are getting at) the wave pattern on the unobserved paper is the same thing as the odds of a certain number coming up on an upcoming dice roll. The observed version of that experiment is like doing several dice rolls at once and plotting it after the fact.

 It's the same argument as "we can't know what the dice will do until we roll them". 

It speaks to nothing until you can prove your active observation can make you win at the craps table (change causality beyond just collapsing waves to points). If one can prove the mind can direct wave collapse in accordance with will I will have no argument left because it shows consciousness preceding the material.

a reply to: cooperton

The painter metaphor is Bernardo Kastrup's. He talks very well about idealism, in a very articulate manner. He has a scientific background as well as a philosophy background, and that's what I like about him. There are a lot of videos where he is interviewed, and also debates where he is confronted to people who defend materialism.

Here is a good one, it's almost 5 hours :

originally posted by: gosseyn
Matter is a mental phenomenon, a mental process independent from our own individual mental processes. Matter isn't its own fundamental independent substance. Matter, and the spacetime structure around it, is part of our perception.

It's like a computer screen : what you see on the screen is not the real thing. The pixels of the icons and shortcuts on your screen are what you call matter. Matter is a representation.

No. The language we use to describe matter may be compared to the pixels on the computer screen comprising a JPEG image. The literal atoms comprising the computer itself are what we call matter.

And yes, matter is a fundamental independent substance. Matter exists regardless of whether we have the awareness to observe it or the language to talk about it.

There is an objective world out there but it is made of perception, and what you perceive is not the thing in itself. That's why matter is so elusive. The burden of proof is on materialists to prove that electrons and photons are independent of perception. Good luck with that.

originally posted by: gosseyn
There is an objective world out there but it is made of perception, and what you perceive is not the thing in itself. That's why matter is so elusive. The burden of proof is on materialists to prove that electrons and photons are independent of perception. Good luck with that.

Matter is not elusive, language is. The whole crux of ontology is language being used to quantify matter and what "is" outside of simple physical measurement, not matter itself. Observation, identification, quantification, communication. Ontology is dependent on all these steps in the "awareness" process. Matter is not.

When you're not observing it, matter is just an idea, because matter is just the appearance of a mental process behind it. If matter was that fundamental thing, its constituents wouldn't blink in and out of existence. If matter wasn't so elusive, it would be rather easy to show how it gives rise to consciousness. The reality is that matter doesn't do anything by itself, it's just an appearance, an image made of pixels on the screen of our perception.

I think things have various levels of reality. When I think of a red apple and visualize it in my mind, does it generate energy? Does it create patterns in reality that weren't there before? Is a thought energetic?

Sometimes I ponder whether our thoughts (along with those of all other thinking beings that might have existed in the past or might in the future) are making the universe expand by adding more energy to it out of virtuality.

originally posted by: gosseyn
When you're not observing it, matter is just an idea, because matter is just the appearance of a mental process behind it. If matter was that fundamental thing, its constituents wouldn't blink in and out of existence. If matter wasn't so elusive, it would be rather easy to show how it gives rise to consciousness. The reality is that matter doesn't do anything by itself, it's just an appearance, an image made of pixels on the screen of our perception.

I'm not directly observing the beer I'm going to buy later today. Does that mean the beer doesn't exist in the store?

it exists but not in the form of atoms and electrons, but in the form of an unknown type of data that your perception will turn into atoms and electrons. This unknown form of data we can only represent with equations.

originally posted by: gosseyn
it exists but not in the form of atoms and electrons, but in the form of an unknown type of data that your perception will turn into atoms and electrons. This unknown form of data we can only represent with equations.

The beer, right? It was made by yeast, yeast is alive. Alive I guess means it has consciousness, so why does it need a human to make the beer real if another consciousness has processed it before?

Also where is the line of 'equations' becoming matter? Mass? So if that's what consciousness does: giving stuff mass to make it matter, why do we need the universal mind at all If it can't even do that?
Plus there is already something that does that: the Higgs Field.

It feels more and more like you didn't think this through.

Idealism is as old as philosophy itself, whether we talk about ancient Greek philosophers or more recently what is called German idealism with Schopenhauer or Kant. So if you think it is not thought through, you can go read these philosophers and produce objections to what they say.

Do you want to prove that yeast in a can of beer has metabolism and is alive ? Be my guest.

But your objections prove that you don't get what I have been saying : matter is the appearance of mental processes, it's what it looks like to us, and as such what we call matter is a category of our perception.

a reply to: gosseyn

Because that's not what you've been saying.

Idealism states that everything is part of the mental experience, that only experience exists. It states that the universe is one universal consciousness, or mind, and that the world around us is the mental process of this universal mind

That's what you've been saying. And it's really far from where we're at now

matter is the appearance of mental processes, it's what it looks like to us, and as such what we call matter is a category of our perception.

From mental process of an universal mind to a category of our perception is a gigantic leap.
Sooooo no, I don't think anyone would have gotten that's what you meant.

What are we talking about now? How colours work? The way of light from the retina to the brain?

Plus: I don't know what Kant you read, because as I understood it he was talking about how we can know things about our reality and for that we need a mental representation from the object of our inquiry.
By far nothing of any universal mind if I remember that right?

originally posted by: Degradation33

The abstraction inclined will see consciousness preceding matter and the empirically driven will see the inverse.

I think consciousness preceding matter is more logical. There is no empirical evidence that consciousness can emerge from matter. There is the recordings in quantum physics which show that the probabilistic wave collapses to the discrete material quantum form due to measurement. This is what the Schroedinger equation calculates, the probability of a where a particle will be when it is measured/observed. So here we have quite literally matter coming to be from a probability wave due to a conscious observer. This is why you get the quantum physicists saying stuff like this:

 I hold to an arcmchair vacuum theory which still requires some (a)causality In the form of a random fluctuation in a scaler field. Or even the necessity of physical constants (like the speed of light) existing in the "preuniverse". There still needed to be laws before there was matter.  Even my best answer can still have someone come along and say, "That initial vacuum field fluctuation is the quantification of God's omnipotence. That there were laws before the universe still shows an intelligent order."

It's fun if you don't get emotional about It, but ultimately futile to argue. 

I agree not to get emotional, but it is not futile to surmise that intelligent laws were implemented by Something intelligent. It is Occam's razor in this case. Random chaos does not generate laws. logic is a necessity in biological, cosmological, and physiological laws. From here I don't know what else to say because if that doesn't show someone the necessity of intelligence in manifesting intelligent things, then they need to study more to see for themselves the immense complexity and machine-like nature at every level of reality from the pico to the giga scale

It speaks to nothing until you can prove your active observation can make you win at the craps table (change causality beyond just collapsing waves to points). If one can prove the mind can direct wave collapse in accordance with will I will have no argument left because it shows consciousness preceding the material.

I don't think it is mere observation, except in the instance of particles where they're essentially like "oh wait, you can't see us in this state", and then bam the light behaves like a particle instead of a wave. That shows the fundamental nature and necessity of consciousness in the physical world. What shows a change of causality best is the placebo effect (or the nocebo effect). Merely believing in a treatment has a remarkable benefit to the patient... anywhere from 15-70% effective according to the multitude of studies that have examined the effect. This is profound empirical data that shows that belief or hope is in fact a causal effector.

a reply to: cooperton

There is no empirical evidence that consciousness can emerge from matter.

Yes there is ca 8 billion times in human shape and plenty billions more in various animal form plus whatever you want to count as consciousness several googol more in smaller forms.
Yet not a single empirical evidence of a consciousness without a body.

With quantum mechanics what it say is that no object can ever have precise values of position and velocity simultaneously.
No wave function collapses, I just take a snapshot of it. No consciousness is needed because reality is no vakuum. Particle-waves hit other stuff, or interact with the fields of other stuff constantly, which in a nutshell leaves a trace of their path.
Grossly simplified what quantum decoherence means.

originally posted by: Peeple

Yes there is ca 8 billion times in human shape and plenty billions more in various animal form plus whatever you want to count as consciousness several googol more in smaller forms.
Yet not a single empirical evidence of a consciousness without a body.

It's as if you said "we have never seen an object under the sun without a shadow, therefore shadow must be the fundamental thing in the universe, and even though we have no idea how shadow gives rise to everything else, we must be right"

You postulate there is matter on one side and consciousness or mind on the other side, the burden of proof in on you to prove there exists something called matter that sits outside of our perception, and you have to demonstrate how matter interacts with consciousness and vice versa.

Read that slowly and try to understand all the implications : something that sits outside of perception. Good luck.

a reply to: gosseyn

No, I don't have to, because I said earlier:

...I don't think it's an either/or situation, humans are a matter & consciousness system ...

page 1

...and there's a whole scientific field figuring out how it works: neurology
What do you have? ...not even a working definition...

originally posted by: Peeple

Yes there is ca 8 billion times in human shape and plenty billions more in various animal form plus whatever you want to count as consciousness several googol more in smaller forms.

Like you said earlier, consciousness and matter are inseparable. The greater of the two is consciousness though. Matter doesn't study consciousness, consciousness studies matter. Matter is the seamless reactive shadow to the light of consciousness.

Grossly simplified what quantum decoherence means.

It's the most straight-forward conclusion. You can do mental gymnastic and come up with more erroneously complex solutions

originally posted by: Peeple
a reply to: gosseyn

No, I don't have to, because I said earlier:

...I don't think it's an either/or situation, humans are a matter & consciousness system ...

page 1

...and there's a whole scientific field figuring out how it works: neurology
What do you have? ...not even a working definition...

If you believe matter exists as a fundamental substance independent from perception, you have to prove it. Don't you understand the implications of what you say ?