Josephhparkk wrote: ↑Tue Mar 02, 2021 2:27 pm
It is a leap, but is it any smaller a leap than that which the materialist takes, namely, how purely non-conscious activity can somehow produce conscious activity? So the question becomes: which leap is the more rational to make?
Well I would argue the leap to materialism is not that large. It's not difficult to believe that my brain is generating a copy of something that it's actually perceiving, given what we know about the way Neurons work.
Then what perceives the copy? (This is the old homunculus problem).
Now the world could look very different in reality, but why should I think it's not there at all?
It is there. It just is not made up of mindless matter. It is made up of perceptions.
Shouldn't I just trust my experience?
Sure, but you have never experienced mindlessness.
Materialism does not seem all that irrational, and of course we still have the hard problem, along with plenty of other things we don't fully understand yet.
What makes you think it can ever be understood? Here is how I would argue that in principle the hard problem has no solution: We are aware of time passing. But all the events in a spatiotemporal object like the brain are separated each from all others (by space and/or time). What is it that combines these micro-events into the macro events we actually perceive that take up time? How is that we can experience anything larger than one synapse firing? Or even the difference between it not firing and firing? It can't be some combination of micro-events "observing" the separated events, since that just regresses the problem. So one must concede that consciousness has the ability to span these separate micro-events, which no spatiotemporal object can. So a spatiotemporal object like the brain cannot produce consciousness.
I can never falsify any other theory, but it seems to me like the easier assumption to make when you compare it to the idea of mind at large, simulation theory, or the idea that maybe I'm actually just wearing a VR headset and I forgot how to logout. You can pretty much attach any story and it could be plausible, that's a flaw, not a feature. How does Idealism separate itself from any of these other non falsifiable claims? Where do we draw the line to say, "okay, now we're just making sh**t up." To be super clear, I agree that we cannot ever claim for certain what is outside of our experience, but, it feels to me like once we cross that line, we just pick our favorite story. It is rational to trust my senses.
I trust my senses. I just don't add the assumption that there is something mindless that causes me to have the sense contents I have. Making that assumption creates either the intractable hard problem or the intractable interaction problem. Not doing so does not create any intractable problem. Those stories that idealists tell are conceivable solutions to the tractable problems of idealism. The intractable problems are intractable because they have no conceivable solutions. That is why I consider the idealist leap to be smaller than the materialist leap.
Perhaps without any senses, I just think. So that would be a different way of being conscious. I fail to see why this raises a problem for idealism.
What would you think of?
Pure mathematics. Take Max Tegmark's
Our Mathematical Universe hypothesis (that all that is are mathematical objects), add a Mathematician that thinks up these objects (otherwise one is faced with the hard problem) and you have a version of idealism.