I'm A Materialist, Change My Mind

[Josephhparkk]

Firstly I want to apologize because I haven't read properly through this forum, so a post of this nature may likely be boring and old to you by now, but hopefully that only means you will have more experience in knowing how to deal with me. I want to say that I have done my best to understand Idealism before posting this, and most of the research I've done is through Bernado Kastrup's website, however I have also ordered "Why Materialism Is Baloney" so I look forward to reading that in the coming weeks as-well. I learn best through conversation, and so I've been thinking about the reasons I'm a materialist and why Idealism hasn't convinced me yet, so I'm putting those arguments forward and if I'm wrong, I will most likely change my mind altogether.

Firstly, let me make sure that I have the definitions completely right here to avoid any word games as often comes up in these debates/discussions.

Idealism: Processes within consciousness - The brain within consciousness, the material world within consciousness, biology within consciousness.
Materialism: Physical reality outside consciousness - Consciousness generated from somewhere within the material world.

I'm A Materialist, Change My Mind

Firstly, why am I not an idealist by default, given that it seems to be the most obvious ontological position? The whole philosophy seems to be predicated on that very fact that it is the most obvious ontological position anyone can take. At first, this does seem to make sense, because consciousness is the only thing we can know is not an illusion with one hundred percent certainty, so I understand that argument. But on behalf of materialism I won’t be conceding the rational high ground here just yet. While consciousness is not simple to define, it seems fair to say that it is the experience of “being?” Or as Thomas Nagel put it, a creature is conscious if there is “something that it is like to be” that particular creature. If we agree on that, then when there is no creature “to be like” do we still even have such an idea as consciousness? If so, what does it feel like? What’s it like to be mind at large? I’m assuming you have never experienced that, so to say that consciousness is actually some ineffable, metaphysical, mindy-ness that contains all of what we know as physical reality, does not seem obvious to me at all as an ontological position, it actually just seems like a very large leap. The only thing I know for sure is that I am experiencing what it’s like to be a human being, to hear, to see, to feel, to smell, to taste, but if I can’t do any of those, what exactly am I even having a subjective experience of? In what way am I conscious?

On the other hand I know that things appear to exist, we can all observe them. A bat can’t see the way I do, but we still share the same physical reality, the bat will swerve out of the way to avoid a tree whereas I will walk out of the way to avoid the same tree. I do not know what it’s like to be a bat, and a bat does not know what it’s like to be me, we are both seemingly conscious creatures, and we share the same objective reality that there are obstacles we cannot simply run or fly through. I admit this analogy begs the question, because Idealism states that the tree is just a process in consciousness, so it’s still real, but inside of consciousness. However, that is assuming Idealism, and why should I assume Idealism? Should I assume that there is an ineffable, metaphysical, mindy-ness that contains all of what we know as physical reality? I just have to trust the Empirical evidence around me. Can you explain how this immaterial, disembodied, non-located thing you’re calling a mind, ever affects my body? Ever pushes it around? Show me where it actually happens, because we know we have particles in us, we know we have atoms, we know what they do, and we know how they behave. We even know an equation that says if you put them in a certain situation, here’s what’s going to happen next. There’s no room in that equation for consciousness to say, aha well if this electron is in consciousness it moves in a different way. It’s really hard to imagine given what we know about the stuff that is in our brains, that there is anything else pushing it around. Does this stuff conserve energy? Is it predictable? Is it deterministic? Does it obey Schrödinger’s equation? Does it have a location in Space? There might be answers to all these questions, but there’s also an easier answer which is that there isn’t any such stuff. To me Idealism, is invoking new stuff that is outside of the laws of physics, and therefore it is not the most obvious ontological position. (Dislcaimer: I have quoted a lot of Sean Carroll, so this is not all that original, but nonetheless, the arguments convince me thus far)

I am looking forward to being debunked lol, thank you for reading.

[Soul_of_Shu]

To be sure, this debate has been done and done and done again in the old Metaphysical Speculations Forum that preceded and gave rise to this iteration, but there may be still some interest in going down that road yet again. My take is that if you've read Bernardo's body of work, and remain unconvinced by his most eloquent, extensive and cogent explication, then it seems unlikely that I could make a better case. Nonetheless, I trust someone else may try.

[Josephhparkk]

Well of course I still have plenty yet to read I'm sure so I may still well be convinced. The specific area in which I'm struggling with, is the step (or leap, as it currently feels) from consciousness as what I know to be true as an experience of being me, seeing, smelling, tasting etc, to consciousness at large, or consciousness as an ineffable, almost God-like, thing, that governs all of "physical reality."

Perhaps you can't make a better case than Bernado, but you can spot in some way where I'm misunderstanding, or have forgotten a key detail, and I would appreciate it being pointed out to me.

[Soul_of_Shu]

Also, as preparation for any discussion here, if you haven't already checked it out, I would suggest reading through some of the articles, especially those pertaining to physics, on the Essentia Foundation website.

[ScottRoberts]

Firstly, why am I not an idealist by default, given that it seems to be the most obvious ontological position? The whole philosophy seems to be predicated on that very fact that it is the most obvious ontological position anyone can take.

I disagree. I would say the most obvious philosophical position to take is dualism. Our experience can be divided into our thoughts and feelings on the one hand, and of things like rocks that seem to us to be totally void of anything mental. Another way of saying this is that we are "naive dualists", that is, dualists before we take up any philosophical critique.

Then, with philosophical critique, we come across the interaction problem. Only then might we become either materialists or idealists (or panpsychists or neutral monists, but for convenience let's stick with the first two).

At first, this does seem to make sense, because consciousness is the only thing we can know is not an illusion with one hundred percent certainty, so I understand that argument. But on behalf of materialism I won’t be conceding the rational high ground here just yet. While consciousness is not simple to define, it seems fair to say that it is the experience of “being?” Or as Thomas Nagel put it, a creature is conscious if there is “something that it is like to be” that particular creature. If we agree on that, then when there is no creature “to be like” do we still even have such an idea as consciousness? If so, what does it feel like? What’s it like to be mind at large? I’m assuming you have never experienced that, so to say that consciousness is actually some ineffable, metaphysical, mindy-ness that contains all of what we know as physical reality, does not seem obvious to me at all as an ontological position, it actually just seems like a very large leap.

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?

The only thing I know for sure is that I am experiencing what it’s like to be a human being, to hear, to see, to feel, to smell, to taste, but if I can’t do any of those, what exactly am I even having a subjective experience of? In what way am I conscious?

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.

On the other hand I know that things appear to exist, we can all observe them. A bat can’t see the way I do, but we still share the same physical reality, the bat will swerve out of the way to avoid a tree whereas I will walk out of the way to avoid the same tree. I do not know what it’s like to be a bat, and a bat does not know what it’s like to be me, we are both seemingly conscious creatures, and we share the same objective reality that there are obstacles we cannot simply run or fly through. I admit this analogy begs the question, because Idealism states that the tree is just a process in consciousness, so it’s still real, but inside of consciousness. However, that is assuming Idealism, and why should I assume Idealism?

Because if one chooses materialism, one is faced with the hard problem of consciousness, for which no one has the slightest hint of a possibility of an answer. If, instead, one chooses idealism there are various scenarios for why it appears to us that there is non-conscious activity (Why Materialism is Baloney gives such a scenario). It is also possible to understand why we have become naive dualists, while earlier we were naive idealists (see my Idealism vs. Common Sense essay for more on this). In other words, idealists have explanations for why we start our philosophical critique as naive dualists, while materialists have no such explanations.

Should I assume that there is an ineffable, metaphysical, mindy-ness that contains all of what we know as physical reality?

Easier to assume that than to assume that conscious activity can arise from non-conscious activity. One might add that there is a boatload of esoteric and mystical evidence, which an idealist can take seriously, while the materialist must reject it all a priori and go through all sorts of contortions to chalk it all up to being lies or delusions.

I just have to trust the Empirical evidence around me.

No empirical evidence can contradict idealism, as it is always experienced (in consciousness). It is only an additional assumption (that there is independent material reality) that contradicts idealism.

Can you explain how this immaterial, disembodied, non-located thing you’re calling a mind, ever affects my body? Ever pushes it around?

This is a dualist's problem, not an idealist's. For the idealist, it is all various thoughts (ours, and Mind-at-Large's) influencing other thoughts.

Show me where it actually happens, because we know we have particles in us, we know we have atoms, we know what they do, and we know how they behave. We even know an equation that says if you put them in a certain situation, here’s what’s going to happen next. There’s no room in that equation for consciousness to say, aha well if this electron is in consciousness it moves in a different way. It’s really hard to imagine given what we know about the stuff that is in our brains, that there is anything else pushing it around. Does this stuff conserve energy? Is it predictable? Is it deterministic? Does it obey Schrödinger’s equation? Does it have a location in Space? There might be answers to all these questions, but there’s also an easier answer which is that there isn’t any such stuff. To me Idealism, is invoking new stuff that is outside of the laws of physics, and therefore it is not the most obvious ontological position. (Dislcaimer: I have quoted a lot of Sean Carroll, so this is not all that original, but nonetheless, the arguments convince me thus far)

For the idealist, physical laws are thoughts of MAL's, which we just have to accept while we are physical beings. Physics just studies how nature behaves, not what nature's intrinsic nature is.

[Simon Adams]

To add to Scott’s replies, on your last points;

... we know we have particles in us, we know we have atoms, we know what they do, and we know how they behave. We even know an equation that says if you put them in a certain situation, here’s what’s going to happen next. There’s no room in that equation for consciousness to say, aha well if this electron is in consciousness it moves in a different way. It’s really hard to imagine given what we know about the stuff that is in our brains, that there is anything else pushing it around. Does this stuff conserve energy? Is it predictable? Is it deterministic? Does it obey Schrödinger’s equation? Does it have a location in Space?

Why not go a step further to what these particles are. If you take quantum mechanics, there are only a few feasible ways anyone has thought of to explain it. To retain the standard materialist view, it looks like you need to either accept superdeterminism, which has some extreme implications (potentially invalidating the scientific process itself), or Many Worlds, where countless trillions of new copies of the universe are created each second. If you’re quoting Sean Carroll you may think this is a reasonable explanation, but I think people in future will find it bizarre that huge numbers of very serious physicists accepted such an extreme idea just to hold their world view together, and keep the maths tidy. I could be very speculative and imagine that from an idealist perspective you could turn Many Worlds upside down, and say that the wave function is literally like part of a thought process, which starts of vague with many potential versions, but when you pay attention to it, it becomes solid, a decision.

The other main group of quantum interpretations - getting increasing attention recently - have us as deeply interwoven into the world, not in the cartesian, objective way that materialism posits. Qbism and RQM both have matter only having properties as part of an interaction. Qbism calls the subject of that interaction an agent. So what is this agent? Donald Hoffman has shown that you can describe the world mathematically purely as interactions between agents, and concludes that these agents must be conscious. So the world just becomes conscious agents.

The final group of interpretations are around Bohmian Mechanics, which have some challenges with relativity, but nonetheless describe a world more spiritual than materialist, with nature itself being like an organism.

If you then take the more useful mathematical description that physicists use to describe the quantum world - Quantum Field Theory - then what you have is a handful of fields across the whole universe, and particles are vibrations or excitations in these fields. The aim is to come up with a theory of everything where there is just one field, although no one knows if that is possible. Nonetheless, the whole universe is described as one or more fields, which ripple in different ways to produce matter. In Idealism you have a vast mental field that is represented as matter. I’m not sure it’s a big leap between these two descriptions?

So you could argue that physics supports the materialist ontology. I would argue that physics is ontology neutral, as all good science should be. But if you want to use it to support materialism, you’d better check that you have gunpowder in that blunderbuss

There might be answers to all these questions, but there’s also an easier answer which is that there isn’t any such stuff. To me Idealism, is invoking new stuff that is outside of the laws of physics, and therefore it is not the most obvious ontological position.

Which ontology involves invoking new stuff? One thing we all know about for sure is that we all experience. We could live in The Matrix and everything else (including the contents of experience) could be an illusion. With idealism you can then describe everything else in terms of the stuff that experience is made from, which then fits naturally with what the laws of physics tell us, and involves creating no new stuff. With materialism, to explain consciousness you need to invent new stuff. You can claim that it emerges from matter, but you will need to invoke some magic happening at some point.

[AshvinP]

And you may also want to consider this:

On the other hand I know that things appear to exist, we can all observe them. A bat can’t see the way I do, but we still share the same physical reality, the bat will swerve out of the way to avoid a tree whereas I will walk out of the way to avoid the same tree. I do not know what it’s like to be a bat, and a bat does not know what it’s like to be me, we are both seemingly conscious creatures, and we share the same objective reality that there are obstacles we cannot simply run or fly through.

Have you every played a VR game with other players? If so, you no doubt would have been "sharing the same" VR, where player avatars can run into the same obstacles and interact with each other in many ways similar to real life. Yet you would still know none of that 'physical' interaction is really "shared" and all of it will simply disappear once you take the headset off. So perhaps you are making an erroneous assumption about the 'real world' just as someone would be making an erroneous assumption about the VR world if they naively took their perceptions within it at 'face value'.

[Soul_of_Shu]

Another factor to keep in mind is that it is often the case, as it has been in my case, that the switch from the materialist mindset which most everyone is indoctrinated into, to seeking and embracing a viable alternative, in this case idealism, has been largely instigated by ongoing, life-long, inexplicable, indelible numinous/paranormal experiences (never mind the puzzling strangeness of QM) that simply defy any explanation under materialism. Of course, this doesn't necessarily mean that there is no such physicalist explanation, just that after many years of exploring such a possibility, I've eventually found that the more plausible, by far, explanation is more compatible with the primacy of consciousness, expressed within a scientifically compatible model based in idealism, which Bernardo, together with others who've joined him in the endeavours of the Essentia Foundation, are attempting to coherently and comprehensively explicate ~ especially with a view towards shifting the paradigm within academia, and which then in tandem with the more intuitively inspired shift at the level of ever-increasing ordinary folks dealing with extraordinary experiences, will perhaps be the catalyst that counteracts the sheer weight of the current predominant paradigm. This is not to say that absent such an experiential component a solid strictly reason-based case can't be grokked, just that without that experiential component the challenge remains mostly counter-intuitive to the well embedded materialist mindset, and hence more difficult to grok.

[Josephhparkk]

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. Now the world could look very different in reality, but why should I think it's not there at all? Shouldn't I just trust my experience? 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. (I couldn't really tell you how Siri works, but it's rational to believe Siri isn't actually in my phone)

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.

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? What sounds or language would you think in? You’ve never seen anything, so how can you conceive of what the world might look like? What would you be conscious of exactly if you had not experienced what we call physical reality? I find it extremely difficult to conceive of the idea that somebody who is brain dead is conscious. Likewise, I also find it extremely difficult to conceive of the idea of someone who has all these senses, but is not conscious. Here’s a thought experiment, say somebody completely replicates the brain, and I mean perfectly, every neuron fires off in the exact same way and in the exact same order as a real brain, but of course, none of that actually generates consciousness, so it shouldn’t pose a problem to an Idealist. You'd just assume that it’s an insanely realistic, well programmed super computer, but how do you know at that point, that it isn’t conscious? It would do and say everything a conscious person does right? Outwardly, it would sigh, It would act excited to receive gifts, and get emotional on its wedding day. You say you aren’t a philosophical zombie, but that’s exactly what a zombie would say, isn’t it? At this stage, we pretty much have to treat it as if it's a real person who was born from a mother's womb, and give it human rights, because we can’t actually verify that when it’s in pain, it’s not actually in agony. Is it possible to conceive of a completely artificial person, that isn’t conscious? I think it's extremely hard to do, and there's a high probability that the brain is responsible for consciousness.

So you could argue that physics supports the materialist ontology. I would argue that physics is ontology neutral, as all good science should be.

I'm not saying that it's an argument against idealism necessarily, I'm just saying that we understand physics as real and observable, and even if we don't fully understand it yet, I think I should trust my perception. I grant that if Idealism is correct, then physics is not an issue for it, since the laws of physics are just processes in consciousness. They only disprove Idealism if you assume Materialism, so it all comes down to exactly what Scott said, what is the most rational leap to make? I think I've made the case above why to me, the rational leap is materialism. To quote Sean Carroll again, "We know how the laws of quantum mechanics help explain how electrons move in the brain for example. As far as I can tell, just because Quantum Mechanics is confusing, and consciousness is confusing, maybe they're the same?"

Have you every played a VR game with other players? If so, you no doubt would have been "sharing the same" VR, where player avatars can run into the same obstacles and interact with each other in many ways similar to real life. Yet you would still know none of that 'physical' interaction is really "shared" and all of it will simply disappear once you take the headset off. So perhaps you are making an erroneous assumption about the 'real world' just as someone would be making an erroneous assumption about the VR world if they naively took their perceptions within it at 'face value'.

Really I just think this helps to make the case I made above, you can attach any non falsifiable story and it fits. That's a flaw, not a feature.

I just want to thank everyone engaging with me in this discussion, I'm writing from my phone as I've been busy and not much had time at my office, so apologies for any grammatical or spelling errors! I'm genuinely very appreciative of you taking the time to help me unpack this.

[Jim Cross]

I've been through plenty of these arguments in the old forum and find it is pretty much fruitless trying to persuade anybody out of what they already believe.

Personally I think the ontological question is unanswerable and of no value to settle. In the end, the answer doesn't need to change how we act in the world.