What makes you think the phenomena of conscious experience is simple actually?Eugene I wrote: ↑Sat Nov 13, 2021 10:47 pm The question at the bottom line is really simple actually. We all have factual observables: the phenomena of conscious experience which are the sense perceptions, feeling, thoughts bearing ideas and meanings, imaginations, acts of will brining some of these phenomena to existence. And this is all we have as observables, and nothing more, this is undeniable fact of our direct experience. Now, the philosophical question is: is there anything in reality that by nature is fundamentally different from these consciously-observable phenomena, whatever it could be? We can make assumptions about the existence of such phenomena or noumena or fundamentals, but there is no way we can ever prove their existence, because we can never experience them directly. And there is an obvious and undeniable possibility that such phenomena or noumena simply do not exist in any ontological sense, and all there is to reality is only phenomena of conscious experience. The last statement is called "idealism", where the term "consciousness" is simply a label for the entire set of all observable conscious phenomena we can ever experience. If we are to suggest a positive answer to the ontological problem at all, of all such possible answers that philosophy has offered so far, the idealist answer is the simplest and most elegant (in other words, the most "parsimonious").
JF, what you are describing is another possible approach to the problem, which can be labelled as mysterianism or agnosticism, where we admit that our human cognitive ability is simply insufficient and inappropriate to even approach the ontological question of what the reality fundamentally is. It would be like a dog trying to understand math. I have nothing against it, and I agree that such position is the most pragmatic. We can perfectly live and survive in the world without answering the ontological question, it is irrelevant to our way of existence. But if we take such pragmatic position, ironically we arrive back to idealism. Why? Because the world we actually live in and experience is exactly the world of the conscious phenomena. We do not experience directly anything apart from conscious phenomena. All the "external" world of material objects that we think we live in is entirely our projection and fairyland fantasy, and we have no way to prove that it is real. But why do we even need such fantasy? Does it serve any pragmatic purpose? Many people think that it does, but I do not think so, IMO it's just a cognitive habit that actually creates more problems than it solves (but that's a different topic). Anyway, if we take such agnostic and pragmatic approach, we find that all that is relevant to our life is the reality we actually live in - the world of our conscious phenomena, or "consciousness" to use a simple word for it. And science is only a set of mathematical and cognitive models that simply describe and approximate the patterns of these phenomena. From a pragmatic standpoint we do not actually need to assume the existence of any other realities that are by nature different from conscious phenomena that we directly experience as observables (be it matter, shmatter, Kantian noumenon or neutral ontic fundamental or whatever). This version of idealism is not ontological (we refrain from making any statements about what the reality fundamentally is), it is simply a pragmatic worldview about the world that we actually experience and the world we actually live in - the world of the phenomena of our direct conscious experiences.
And there is plenty we deduce and know that is not observable unless you are equating knowing and observing. We don't observe the planets going around the sun, that would require us to be outside the solar system. We can make partial observations and deduce that the planets go around the sun. Even a cat observing a mouse going into a hole deduces that the mouse hasn't vanished but is instead in the wall, so it waits patiently at the hole for the mouse to reappear. If knowledge doesn't extend beyond observation, we could never generalize any experience into a prediction.