• Wayfarer
    22.7k
    The aim of this essay is to make the case for a type of philosophical idealism, which posits mind as foundational to the nature of existence. Idealism is usually distinguished from physicalism — the view that the physical is fundamental — and the related philosophical naturalism, the view that only natural laws and forces, as depicted in the natural sciences, account for the universe. Physicalism and naturalism are the assumed consensus of modern culture, very much the product of the European Enlightenment with its emphasis on pragmatic science and instrumental reason. Accordingly this essay will go against the grain of the mainstream consensus and even against what many will presume to be common sense. However I hope to present an argument that shows that common sense and this formulation of philosophical idealism are not necessarily in conflict.

    Adopting a predominantly perspectival approach, I will concentrate less on arguments about the nature of the constituents of objective reality, and focus instead on understanding the mental processes that shape our judgment of what they comprise. In so doing I will draw on phenomenology as well as perspectives from non-dualist philosophy — an approach that will hopefully be become clear in the subsequent sections.

    All in the Mind?

    In philosophy it is customary to address objections after making your case, but I will mention two of the most frequent objections to idealism at the outset. First is the criticism that ‘idealism says that the world is all in the mind’ — the implication being that, were there no mind to be aware of an object, then it would cease to exist. Even very eminent philosophers have (mis)understood idealism in this way: that things pass into and and out of existence depending on whether they’re being perceived or not. G.E. Moore, for example, once said that idealism must entail that, when the passengers are all seated on the train, the wheels would go out of existence for their not being perceived.

    The second objection is against the notion that the mind, or ‘mind-stuff’, is literally a type of constituent out of which things are made, in the same way that statues are constituted by marble, or yachts of wood. The form of idealism I am advocating doesn’t posit that there is any ‘mind-stuff’ existing as a constituent in that sense. The constitution of material objects is a matter for scientific disciplines (although I’m well aware that the ultimate nature of these constituents remains an open question in theoretical physics).

    At this stage I will only note these objections, as to counter them now would be premature, but I hope it will become clear in what follows that these objections are misplaced.

    A Thought Experiment

    Let’s start with a simple thought-experiment, to help bring the issues into focus.

    Picture a tranquil mountain meadow. Butterflies flit back and forth amongst the buttercups and daisies, and off in the distance, a snow-capped mountain peak provides a picturesque backdrop. The melodious clunk of the cow-bells, the chirping of crickets, and the calling of birds provide the soundtrack to the vista, with not a human to be seen.

    Now picture the same scene — but from no point of view. Imagine that you are perceiving such a scence from every possible point within it, and also around it. Then also subtract from all these perspectives, any sense of temporal continuity — any sense of memory of the moment just past, and expectation of the one about to come. Having done that, describe the same scene.

    “Impossible!” you object. “How can I imagine any such thing?! It is really nothing at all, it is an impossibility, a jumble of stimuli, if anything — this is what you are asking me to imagine! It is completely unintelligible.”


    But that is my point. By this means I am making clear the sense in which perspective is essential for any judgement about what exists — even if what we’re discussing is understood to exist in the absence of an observer, be that an alpine meadow, or the Universe prior to the evolution of h. sapiens. The mind brings an order to any such imaginary scene, even while you attempt to describe it or picture it as it appears to exist independently of the observer.

    These are the grounds on which I am appealing to the insights of philosophical idealism. But I am not arguing that it means that ‘the world is all in the mind’. It’s rather that, whatever judgements are made about the world, the mind provides the framework within which such judgements are meaningful. So though we know that prior to the evolution of life there must have been a Universe with no intelligent beings in it, or that there are empty rooms with no inhabitants, or objects unseen by any eye — the existence of all such supposedly unseen realities still relies on an implicit perspective. What their existence might be outside of any perspective is meaningless and unintelligible, as a matter of both fact and principle.

    Hence there is no need for me to deny that the Universe is real independently of your mind or mine, or of any specific, individual mind. Put another way, it is empirically true that the Universe exists independently of any particular mind. But what we know of its existence is inextricably bound by and to the mind we have, and so, in that sense, reality is not straightforwardly objective. It is not solely constituted by objects and their relations. Reality has an inextricably mental aspect, which itself is never revealed in empirical analysis. Whatever experience we have or knowledge we possess, it always occurs to a subject — a subject which only ever appears as us, as subject, not to us, as object.

    A corollary of this is that ‘existence’ is a compound or complex idea. To think about the existence of a particular thing in polar terms — that it either exists or does not exist — is a simplistic view of what existence entails. This is why the criticism of idealism that ‘particular things must go in and out of existence depending on whether they’re perceived’ is mistaken. It is based on a fallacious idea of what it means for something to exist. The idea that things ‘go out of existence’ when not perceived, is simply their ‘imagined non-existence’. In reality, the supposed ‘unperceived object’ neither exists nor does not exist. Nothing whatever can be said about it.

    So How Does Mind ‘Create Reality’?

    So this is the sense that I’m arguing for the fundamental role that the mind plays in creating reality.

    Let me address an obvious objection. ‘Surely “the world” is what is there all along, what is there anyway, regardless of whether you perceive it or not! Science has shown that h. sapiens only evolved in the last hundred thousand years or so, and we know Planet Earth is billions of years older than that! So how can you say that the mind ‘‘creates the world”’?

    As already stated, I am not disputing the scientific account, but attempting to reveal an underlying assumption that gives rise to a distorted view of what this means. What I’m calling attention to is the tendency to take for granted the reality of the world as it appears to us, without taking into account the role the mind plays in its constitution. This oversight imbues the phenomenal world — the world as it appears to us — with a kind of inherent reality that it doesn’t possess. This in turn leads to the over-valuation of objectivity as the sole criterion for truth.

    By ‘creating reality’, I’m referring to the way the brain receives, organises and integrates cognitive data, along with memory and expectation, so as to generate the unified world–picture within which we situate and orient ourselves. And although the unified nature of our experience of this ‘world-picture’ seems simple and even self-evident, neuroscience has yet to understand or explain how the disparate elements of experience , memory, expectation and judgement, all come together to form a unified whole — even though this is plainly what we experience.

    By investing the objective domain with a mind-independent status, as if it exists independently of any mind, we absolutize it. We designate it as truly existent, irrespective of and outside any knowledge of it. This gives rise to a kind of cognitive disorientation which underlies many current philosophical conundrums. And that is the subject of the remainder of this essay.
  • Angelo Cannata
    354
    It seems to me that you would like to build a non-dualist philosophy, but actually, at the end, you are still dualist.

    You wrote

    what we know of its existence is inextricably bound by and to the mind we have, and so, in that sense, reality is not straightforwardly objective. It is not solely constituted by objects and their relations. Reality has an inextricably mental aspect, which itself is never revealed in empirical analysis. Whatever experience we have or knowledge we possess, it always occurs to a subjectWayfarer

    Thinking that whatever we say about reality is conditioned by our perspective doesn’t make you a postmodern. You are still assuming very well that reality exists independently of our mind, even if it is impossible to us to think about it without interfering in this thought with our mind.

    Your exposition contains an ambiguous language, but actually there are clear signs that you are far from exposing to radical criticism the very ideas of existence, reality, being.

    Pinter has the same ambiguity in the passage you quoted:
    nothing can be said about its objects except that they exist”.
    The additional note “except that they exist” destroys the whole argumentation, so that the whole reasoning is nothing at the end, it is still just an old metaphysical philosophy that tries to be a bit more clever, but actually is just hidden behind a mask that pretends to take into account the existence of perspectives.

    If you truly want to take perspectives into account, you should consider that the whole idea of reality imagined by perspectives is itself a perspective. Talking about perspectives is itself a perspective. As a consequence, the very concept of “perspective” has to be considered completely unreliable; this, obviously, doesn’t make metaphysics valid again, because metaphysics has already been demolished by considering perspectives.
    As a consequence, once we demolished metaphysics by considering perspectives, and then we demolished perspectives by considering that they must apply to themselves, we need to find different routes for philosophy, to see how to proceed after that. Surely we should avoid all those masked ways of bringing metaphysics back to life (like this one I commented on, for example: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/840414).
  • Tom Storm
    9.1k
    Nicely done. A lucid articulation and a useful, accessible summary. I read your full piece.

    What I’m calling attention to is the tendency to take for granted the reality of the world as it appears to us, without taking into account the role the mind plays in its constitution. This oversight imbues the phenomenal world — the world as it appears to us — with a kind of inherent reality that it doesn’t possessWayfarer

    This is the key for me. You said something similar here some months back and it helped me to understand your perspective on idealism - a much more straight forward and, dare I say it, naturalistic account. I can certainly see an argument for the world arising or co-arising as a dynamic interplay of subject and object.
  • Tom Storm
    9.1k
    If you truly want to take perspectives into account, you should consider that the whole idea of reality imagined by perspectives is itself a perspective. Talking about perspectives is itself a perspective.Angelo Cannata

    I can see your point here but then we would also probably need to say that your perspective that it's a perspective is itself a perspective... and I fear we can keep doing this until we become a spinning top of infinite recursion.
  • Angelo Cannata
    354
    your perspective that it's a perspective is itself a perspectiveTom Storm

    I completely agree, that’s why I said that, after our work, we need to keep in mind that the very concept of perspective is completely unreliable, because, after all, it remains a hidden way of saying that there is an objective reality, from which perspective tries to be different.
    We cannot free ourselves from perspectives, because we cannot free ourselves from our brain, we cannot think without using our brain, and I know that this is already a perspective.
    I even think that Socrate’s knowing that he didn’t know nothing is already knowing too much, it is actually a claim of knowing really a lot.
    After that, I think we are driven to aknowledge that language forces us to make statements that, as such, are far from being correct, aware of perspectives, humble. But attention to language shouldn’t make us go to analytical philosophy. I think that analytical philosophy is another masked metaphysical philosophy, because it takes language as a hard point, a hard basis to inquire into our reasoning.
    Once we realize that we are prisoners of our brains (the experiment of brain in a vat is not a mental experiment, it is just our condition: the brain is the vat of itself, from which it cannot escape), I think the best we can do is to go to our humanity, psichology, emotions, literature, myths. Not in an obscurantist mentality, but exactly after being enriched by the research we have made about metaphysics, perspectives, criticism and self-criticism.
    After all, the fear of the infinite recursion you mentioned is a consequence of carrying on by applying a mental methodology based on wanting to understand, to control, to master what is happening in our reasoning. Now we know that we cannot get any ultimate mastering, so I think it is better to stop trying to build new metaphysics and, rather, go to humanity, humbleness, weakness.
  • Wayfarer
    22.7k
    the very concept of “perspective” has to be considered completely unreliableAngelo Cannata

    I don’t know if perspective is a concept at all; it’s more that perspective provides a necessary ground for any concept. Certainly in non-dualism there is awareness of states of ‘contentless consciousness’ (nirvikalpa samadhi) but not having realized such states then yes, I am still a dualist. It’s the human condition, I’m afraid. And as such I have to use reasoned argument to point to that which is beyond it. That is all philosophy is good for, as far as I’m concerned.

    There’s an understanding in non-dualism, that any form of teaching is like the stick used to get a fire going. When it’s going, the stick is thrown in with it. I think that’s what you’re driving at and thank you for it :pray:

    Thanks. I would hope my view is compatible with what is starting to manifest as ‘extended’ or ‘transcendent’ naturalism - a style of naturalism that acknowledges the irreducibility of the first-person perspective. In that sense naturalism itself is evolving.
  • Tom Storm
    9.1k
    we need to keep in mind that the very concept of perspective is completely unreliable, because, after all, it remains a hidden way of saying that there is an objective reality, from which perspective tries to be different.Angelo Cannata

    Interesting. Are you saying that you can't have perspectives without an objective reality from which perspectives are derived? I've never given it much thought, but I am unsure if this is necessarily the case. I will need to think it over. Can I get back to you in 20 years? Perhaps the word perspective is inadequate and just the best we can do to try and convey a set of relationships.

    I even think that Socrate’s knowing that he didn’t know nothing is already knowing too much, it is actually a claim of knowing really a lot.Angelo Cannata

    Yes, the comments sometimes sounds like false modesty.

    I think the best we can do is to go to our humanity, psichology, emotions, literature, myths. Not in an obscurantist mentality, but exactly after being enriched by the research we have made about metaphysics, perspectives, criticism and self-criticism.Angelo Cannata

    Perhaps. My answer to this has often been that these sorts of questions are probably unsolvable by me and in the end will do nothing to help other people, so best I just get on with my day job...

    I think @Wayfarer's idea of extended naturalism does offer potential insights into how we co-create the reality we experience and how it might benefit us to realise the tentative nature of many of our positions.
  • 0 thru 9
    1.5k

    Thanks very much for the effort of creating this essay and for sharing it here with us. :smile: :flower:
    (and for making it accessible without a Medium.com membership… but I really must join soon).

    Question / invitation for expanding on the essay:

    If I’m understanding the gist, your essay centers on idealism / physicalism and the
    noumenal / phenomenal (beyond the mind / perspectival).

    (As if that’s not already enough to juggle and discuss lol… )
    Building upon what you have written, how would you compare (or integrate?) the Buddhist doctrine of the Two Truths? (whichever version of the doctrine you may prefer)
    (Two Truths Wikipedia article and SEP entry)

    Thanks again!
  • unenlightened
    9.2k
    I don’t know if perspective is a concept at all; it’s more that perspective provides a necessary ground for any concept. Certainly in non-dualism there is awareness of states of ‘contentless consciousness’ (nirvikalpa samadhi) but not having realized such states then yes, I am still a dualist. It’s the human condition, I’m afraid. And as such I have to use reasoned argument to point to that which is beyond it. That is all philosophy is good for, as far as I’m concerned.Wayfarer

    I watched the "is reality real?" vid in your notes, and the arguments there were all towards indirect realism, which posits a Kantian objective reality to which we do not have access except via 'constructive' senses. What I was hoping for, but the above comment seems to deny me, is an inversion of that, such that the constructed sensed world is the real, of which the 'objective world is a mere abstraction:— that just because we are participants in the unfolding of the world, we have direct access to it, and the objective world is an impoverished world that 'works' but does not 'care'.
  • 180 Proof
    15.4k
    ... a style of naturalism that acknowledges the irreducibility of the first-person perspective.Wayfarer
    As a philosophical naturalist I'm unaware of any "style of naturalism" wherein "first-person perspective" is reducible to ... just as e.g. living organisms are not reducible to their constituent phenomenal subsystems (e.g. biochemistry, biophysics, wavefunction, etc) because organisms are emergent complex phenomena. 'Ontological reductionism" is a mere caricature of methodological reductionism and thereby a rhetorical objection to scientism.. Also, though naturalism is presupposed by natural science, naturalism itself is not natural science. This so-called "extended or transcendental naturalism", Wayfarer, sounds like another quasi-Kantian solution is search of a problem – tilting at windmills. :sparkle:

    :chin: Maybe I should read the OP ...
  • RogueAI
    2.9k
    Put another way, it is empirically true that the Universe exists independently of any particular mind.Wayfarer

    If anything exists in a universe with no minds, then non-mental stuff exists in that universe.
  • NOS4A2
    9.3k
    We continually have to view our own nose. This isn't because "the brain receives, organises and integrates cognitive data, along with memory and expectation, so as to generate the unified world–picture within which we situate and orient ourselves", but because the nose is too close to the eyes. It appears to us, as object, constituted by its relations.

    Still, even though it is a constant presence in our perspective, we barely notice our noses and rarely talk about them, especially when describing to others what we see. Van Gogh’s nose never shows up in his Café de nuit, for example. Why? Far from generating a unified world-picture, the mind tends to ignore the reality. Perspective is inextricably bound to the body, an object, constituted not only by its relations, but by its being, something any account of mind is forever lacking.
  • Manuel
    4.2k
    Good summary. I don't see anything that should be too controversial in that, heck if you just stated I think there is a world absent us, that could've avoided lots of unnecessary clearing up on your part, as far as I can see, maybe you feel differently about it.

    What I think we are really ignorant about, is many aspects of the world absent us, which are not covered by physics, which is, although fundamental, far from exhaustive.

    Kant's comments of "things in themselves" covers one aspect of it, but there are several. All in all, a high quality post. :up:
  • Wayfarer
    22.7k
    What I was hoping for, but the above comment seems to deny me, is an inversion of that, such that the constructed sensed world is the real, of which the 'objective world is a mere abstraction:— that just because we are participants in the unfolding of the world, we have direct access to it, and the objective world is an impoverished world that 'works' but does not 'care'.unenlightened

    Excellent point, I'll take that on board.

    Building upon what you have written, how would you compare (or integrate?) the Buddhist doctrine of the Two Truths? (whichever version of the doctrine you may prefer)0 thru 9

    Thanks for positive feedback! I've always found the 'two truths' doctrine compelling, since I first encountered it in T R V Murti The Central Philosophy of Buddhism. One of the footnotes to the Medium essay can be found in the Wikipedia link you provided:

    By and large, Kaccayana, this world is supported by a polarity, that of existence and non-existence. But when one sees the origination of the world as it actually is with right discernment, “non-existence” with reference to the world does not occur to one. When one sees the cessation of the world as it actually is with right discernment, “existence” with reference to the world does not occur to one.’ — The Buddha, Kaccāyanagotta Sutta

    That is what I'm drawing on for much of the essay, as you've correctly intuited.

    :pray:
  • Wayfarer
    22.7k
    re Medium - I signed up almost 3 years ago but I’ve only published three articles on it, including this one. I like the publishing features and the look and feel of the output. But on the other hand, there’s an absolute torrent of content pouring out of it every day. The quality is mixed - a lot of it pretty ordinary, but there are some good writers (one philosophical favourite is https://medium.com/@castalianstream). It’s very hard to get anything noticed, especially if you have my kind of esoteric philosophical interests. I’ll also add, I made use of ChatGPT Premium in writing, it was very useful for providing critique, suggestions, and structure. I intend to finish a few more pieces but I’m not expecting much traffic from them ;)
  • Metaphysician Undercover
    13.2k
    But that is my point. By this means I am making clear the sense in which perspective is essential for any judgement about what exists — even if what we’re discussing is understood to exist in the absence of an observer, be that an alpine meadow, or the Universe prior to the evolution of h. sapiens. The mind brings an order to any such imaginary scene, even while you attempt to describe it or picture it as it appears to exist independently of the observer.Wayfarer

    What I find to be the crucial aspect of understanding the essential nature of "perspective", is to consider the temporal perspective of the human experience of being at the present, now. Suggestions as to how long "now" is from the human perspective, range from a couple hundred milliseconds to a couple of seconds, depending on the purpose of the estimate. In any case, if this perspective was radically different, like a few picoseconds on one extreme, or a few billion years to the other extreme, then the way that we perceive the universe would be completely different.

    So the issue is not simply a matter of how mental processes shape the "reality" which we know, but how the very basic living processes of the living being shape this "reality" . The living processes are organized so as to perceive the universe from what is probably best described as a "mid-way" temporal perspective. We do not perceive extremely fast occurrences, nor do we perceive extremely slow processes, we rely on logic to figure these out. The reliability of our models of the very fast aspects of reality, and the very slow aspects of reality, are dependent on the soundness of our logic.

    The "reality" which we know and respect is produced from empirical observation, sense information, and this is the reality of the mid-way temporal perspective. The senses provide us with the reality of the mid-way temporal perspective. But even things within this mid-way reality are affected by the aspects of reality which are outside of it, in the extremes, so these influences are invisible to us and therefore do not enter into our representation of reality. This makes our reality, the one produced from our mid-way temporal perspective, not very accurate as a true representation, because we cannot account for these influences.
  • wonderer1
    2.2k
    But even things within this mid-way reality are affected by the aspects of reality which are outside of it, in the extremes, so these influences are invisible to us and therefore do not enter into our representation of reality. This makes our reality, the one produced from our mid-way temporal perspective, not very accurate as a true representation, because we cannot account for these influences.Metaphysician Undercover

    We can somewhat account for such influences, and to a relatively high degree of accuracy in specific cases. Without our ability to choreograph ballets of bits, on a timescale much smaller than we can consciously perceive, we wouldn't be communicating on TPF.
  • creativesoul
    12k
    that is my point. By this means I am making clear the sense in which perspective is essential for any judgement about what exists — even if what we’re discussing is understood to exist in the absence of an observer, be that an alpine meadow, or the Universe prior to the evolution of h. sapiens. The mind brings an order to any such imaginary scene, even while you attempt to describe it or picture it as it appears to exist independently of the observer.Wayfarer

    Sure... judgment about what exists always comes via perspective. It does not follow from that that everything that ever existed does as well.

    Some parts of reality... sure.

    What preceded us... never. Impossible.
  • creativesoul
    12k
    the mind tends to ignore the reality.NOS4A2

    Much of it anyway...
  • Wayfarer
    22.7k
    What I find to be the crucial aspect of understanding the essential nature of "perspective", is to consider the temporal perspective of the human experience of being at the present, nowMetaphysician Undercover

    One of the thought-experiments I sometimes consider is imagine having the perspective of a mountain (were a mountain to have senses). As the lifespan of a mountain is hundreds of millions of years, you wouldn't even notice humans and animals, as their appearances and dissappearances would be so ephemeral so as to be beneath your threshold of awareness. Rivers, you'd notice, because they'd stay around long enough to actually carve into you. But people and animals would be ephemera. At the other end of the scale, from the perspective of micro-organisms, humans and animals would be like solar systems or entire worlds.
  • creativesoul
    12k
    One of the thought-experiments I sometimes consider it, imagine having the perspective of a mountain (were a mountain to have senses). As the lifespan of a mountain is hundreds of millions of years, you wouldn't even notice humans and animals, as their appearances and dissappearances would be so ephemeral so as to be beneath your threshold of awareness. Rivers, you'd notice, because they'd stay around long enough to actually carve into you. But people and animals would be ephemera.Wayfarer

    Anthropomorphism.
  • Metaphysician Undercover
    13.2k
    We can somewhat account for such influences, and to a relatively high degree of accuracy in specific cases. Without our ability to choreograph ballets of bits, on a timescale much smaller than we can consciously perceive, we wouldn't be communicating on TPF.wonderer1

    Oh yes I agree, we can "account" for some such influences, that's how we know they are somewhat real. But look at the way in which that is currently done, through statistics and probabilities, not through understanding. So our representation of reality does not show this level of causation at all, only the probable effects of it, derived through statistical analysis. This is very similar to the way that classical theologians understood God. We know that God exists through an analysis of His effects on the "reality" which we know, as created through our sense organs and minds. But all we know is His effects, and we do not know God Himself as the cause of these effects.

    One of the thought-experiments I sometimes consider is imagine having the perspective of a mountain (were a mountain to have senses). As the lifespan of a mountain is hundreds of millions of years, you wouldn't even notice humans and animals, as their appearances and dissappearances would be so ephemeral so as to be beneath your threshold of awareness. Rivers, you'd notice, because they'd stay around long enough to actually carve into you. But people and animals would be ephemera. At the other end of the scale, from the perspective of micro-organisms, humans and animals would be like solar systems or entire worlds.Wayfarer

    That's a good example. I like to make a comparison between an atom with its orbiting electrons, and the solar system with its orbiting planets. Our temporal experience of the present is such that the electrons appear to orbit the nucleus so fast, that their locations just appear as a cloud of probabilities. In other words we do not have the required "present" to properly locate them. However, we are capable of locating the planets relative to the sun, using empirical data, because the present we experience allows us to do this.

    But even to correctly locate the sun and planets required that we dismiss much empirical data (the appearance of these bodies orbiting the earth) as misleading and deceptive. This allowed that the application of logic could produce a more true model. From this we derived a basic understanding of "gravity", as an invisible force of causation which acts over a huge expanse of space.

    Now, if our temporal experience of the present was an extremely long period of time, millions or billions of years, the planets would orbit the sun so fast from this perspective, just like the electrons orbiting the nucleus of the atom, so that we could not properly locate the planets, and we'd have to employ probabilities as to where they might be at a given "moment" (a moment from that perspective would consist of numerous years).

    What I think we can take away from this, is that it makes no sense at all to think about reality without a perspective, the supposed independent reality. The true nature of time makes it impossible that "reality" as we conceive of it could be independent from a perspective. If, in a thought experiment, we attempt to remove the temporal perspective of the present, then the entire temporal duration of the reality which we are trying to conceptualize must exist 'at the same time'. We'd have no principle whereby we could speak of the state of things at this time, or the state of things at that time, because this or that time is completely perspectival. And since things are actively moving and changing, reality becomes completely unintelligible if we try to talk about the state of things all the time.
  • Corvus
    3.3k
    Is extreme idealism not prone to illusion and misrepresentation of the world? Even with all the justification, your own mind created evidence, logic and justification without the external reference would be still illusive and deceptive. How do you prove it is real, and doubtless knowledge?
  • Philosophim
    2.6k
    Hello Wayfarer! We have disagreed in the past on many of your posts, but this is well written and sensible. I am almost entirely in agreement with the underlying concept I believe you are trying to convey. Where I think you run into conflict is your use of vocabulary to describe certain concepts as you are stuck in the philosophical models of those who have come before you. In our evolution of concepts and models, we of course must start with what we are given, and often times we try to evolve the meaning of the original concept and model to our new understanding. So I will pose a couple of questions for you about your word choice.

    First, the idea of a "mind created world". The issue is that you have to explain what you mean, because culturally, this word 'create' in the phrase is seen as meaning that the mind literally creates the world. Of course you're not claiming that. But if you have to clarify the phrase, perhaps a new phrase would work better? For example, a "mind modeled world" We don't really "create" the world, we model it. The only creation is the model, not the world itself. The mistake is thinking our models ARE the world. They are merely the way we understand it.

    You'll get a lot less pushback and people will be able to understand what you're saying without you needing to counter an initial normative pushback. The "model" is the "ideal" of idealism. So where does this leave "the thing that is modeled"? A very simple cultural word that needs no clarification is, "the physical". Now I know you have an emotional reaction to this, but you are already evolving out of the white picket fence of philosophical terminology. Terminology is merely a model. It is an invention of some guy somewhere, that can have cultural or personal attachment beyond what the model is trying to convey. Like it or not, "the physical" is a culturally relevant term which can reach a wide audience and quickly conveys what you want to. Like you refined idealism to fit into our underlying sensibilities about the world, so we can do with physicalism.

    So humor me for a minute. The ideal is our model of the physical, or the real. We cannot understand the physical without the ideal. And I believe when this is conveyed to others clearly, almost everyone comes to agree with the underlying concept, even the physicalists, whether they use the same words or not to convey it. The real question is how we marry the ideal and the real. Because currently your definition of idealism is an accurate descriptor that "we model the world". But it does not tell us which models of the world are better than others.

    Just as you tweaked and clarified that idealism does not mean we are a solipsistic existence, do you not find it charitable to allow physicalism to be " a model that the physical is the fundamental upon which we apply our models", while naturalism to be "a model that only natural laws and forces, as depicted in the natural sciences, are ideals we can objectively match to the real"? The debate can be less about debating specific semantics and "gotchas" about broad general theories which have been messily cobbled together from multiple philosophers over centuries, and instead using the underlying cultural and general understanding of those words to tackle the truly important underlying concept, "A methodology that allows us as accurate of a match between the ideal and real as possible".

    If you are interested, I would love to hear your input on such a discussion: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/14044/knowledge-and-induction-within-your-self-context/p1 You have the intelligence and background to give this a serious discussion, and you may find the epistemological approach I use overlaps much of what you are trying to convey.
  • RogueAI
    2.9k
    Is extreme idealism not prone to illusion and misrepresentation of the world? Even with all the justification, your own mind created evidence, logic and justification without the external reference would be still illusive and deceptive. How do you prove it is real, and doubtless knowledge?Corvus

    I can't speak for Wayfarer, but as an idealist, my own thoughts on that are idealism inevitably leads to god for just that sort of reason.
  • Corvus
    3.3k
    I can't speak for Wayfarer, but as an idealist, my own thoughts on that are idealism inevitably leads to god for just that sort of reason.RogueAI

    Perhaps that is the reason why we don't know anything about God, because he is hiding in the idealist's mind. :D
  • Wayfarer
    22.7k
    The only creation is the model, not the world itself. The mistake is thinking our models ARE the world. They are merely the way we understand it.Philosophim

    Thank you for the courteous response. At back of your critique is the assumption that ‘the real world’ is what is internalised or modelled by the brain or the mind. The real world exists independently of our model of it, which can be better or worse, depending on how knowledgeable we are or the quality of the signals we receive.

    But the problem is, how do you distinguish the model from the world? How can you, on the one hand, look at 'the model', and, on the other 'the real world'? That already assumes a perspective outside the model - that you're able to compare one with the other. But if your experience-of-the-world IS the model, and you're inside it, then how do you step outside it to compare it with the world itself?

    In science, you develop a hypothesis, then you test against it. Your experimental results and observations will tend to confirm or overturn it. That's philosophy of science 101. But the question we're considering is a question of a different order, because it concerns the nature of experience itself, not a specific question about a particular subject. That's what distinguishes it as a philosophical question, not a scientific one.

    There's an anecdote from the realm of quantum physics. It is re-told by Werner Heisenberg in his book Physics and Beyond and concerns a visit to Copenhagen by members of the Vienna Circle who were addressed by Neils Bohr. At the end of the lecture he asked if there were any questions, and was nonplussed to recieve only polite applause. He was dismayed by this, and said that if the audience was not shocked by quantum physics, then they could not have understood it. And what I'm suggesting is a similarly radical. It should be considered shocking. But it's also suggested by a great deal of current science. (Ironic that science ends up torpedoeing materialism, but there it is.)




    Even with all the justification, your own mind created evidence, logic and justification without the external reference would be still illusive and deceptive. How do you prove it is real, and doubtless knowledge?Corvus

    That's the question of all philosophy, and I'm not claiming any kind of omniscience or ultimate answers. The main point of 'the mind-created world' is against the assumed consensus that the mind is the result of a material, physical or mindless process. This attitude is deeply embedded in modern culture, the 'evolutionary-materialist' view of the mind. This is the view that living beings are essentially physical and that the mind, therefore, is simply the output of physical processes that can be understood solely through evolutionary biology and through the understanding neural and biological processes. This attitude is grounded in the primacy of the objective sciences and the view that scientific analysis is the arbiter of what is real. It is generally empiricist in attitude, tending towards varieties of positivism.

    So the mind-created world is pointing out the priority of conscious experience as the primary datum of reality. In so doing, I'm aligning with the mainstream of idealist philosophy both Eastern and Western, also drawing on phenomenology and existentialism. I'm arguing that even the so-called 'hard sciences' have an irreducibly subjective aspect or component, which, for practical purposes, is screened out or ignored, but which, in reality is essential to any kind of science.

    An essential point is that the accepted materialist consensus creates a kind of false consciousness - it generates a false idea of the nature of being, which is very easy to swallow, because it is the mainstream consensus. But it is changing very rapidly, in part because of much greater insight and sophistication within science itself.

    I'm not sure what you mean by 'extreme idealism', but give these modern editions of Berkeley a squiz. He's surprisingly persuasive.
  • Corvus
    3.3k
    I'm not sure what you mean by 'extreme idealism', but give these modern editions of Berkeley a squiz. He's surprisingly persuasive.Wayfarer

    If you say, Esse est percipi, then it is an idealism. But if you say you create the world in your mind, then I see it as an "extreme idealism". :)
  • Wayfarer
    22.7k
    A world. There's a difference.
  • Corvus
    3.3k
    A world. There's a difference.Wayfarer

    Isn't the created world in your mind more prone to be illusive than the perceived world?
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