Idealism

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Because they are similar.

They both receive and act upon inputs, they both control something (computers can be used to control things at least), they both store the inputs they have received as well as the results of the input, etc.

Your statement is a trivial tautology. When you get to the details of how the neural system works you will notice there is virtually no resemblance between the brain and nervous system Your brain is devoid of binary components.

We have no man made entity that functions anywhere like our brain.

ruveyn

I dunno, if Idealism is true, then we have a problem of explaining why there is all of these histories and material explanations. None of those are needed if unperceived things do not exist. I mean, what perceived the Big Bang? Nothing. But we have a universe that can be easily extrapolated towards that theory. The same with evolution. The same with geology. Etc. We come to materialistic conclusions in all of those, but nothing in idealism predicts that.

Even further, when one looks at minds, we can see the mindstuff of others, and ourselves, corresponding quite well to a set of physical objects. Nothing in idealism requires this, but materialism clearly requires this.

Finally, more traditional ontologies(such as those containing matter) are just plain more intuitive.

The first question is obvious. Of course consciousness has to be possible to exist. However, what makes consciousness possible is a more complicated question. I will have to admit that my immediate response is to say "Brain stuff happens". By that I simply mean that the psychology of consciousness is a very difficult question, and the answers we are coming to tend to shock our initial intuitions about the workings of consciousness. A good philosopher on the matter I would say is Dan Dennett: http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_dennett_on ... sness.html . So, it is hard for me to answer the question without a complete understanding of consciousness, but through scientific means we are learning more on the problem, and some of our findings do make the issue more complicated than an Idealist approach(which treats mind stuff as simple and basic) would suggest.



I'd have to say that neither has an objective existence in the view I prefer. Then again, I think that libertarian free will is a bit of a confusing mess. It requires something that is neither arbitrary nor determinate, and in avoiding either side of that we have various problems. Compatibilist free will is totally compatible with a materialist ontology, but whether it exists in this one is still.... a difficult question. Humans respond to reason, but they are not the well-integrated beings that work primarily by their conscious reasons that they think they are. Moral facts are difficult. I mean, if a moral facts are determined by reason, then ontology doesn't matter. Any entity with reason can be moral. If moral facts are determined by a being's nature, the materialism can have a set of beings with a certain nature. The problem really arises that most moral accounts are not very good in and of themselves, and that humans accept morality on the grounds of an intuition rather than an argument, but that even then the moral intuitions people are a combination of innate variation and environmental components to an extent that causes moral disagreements that mostly appear irresolvable by reason/appeal to an objective ontology.

So.... while I think it is possible to these exist in my ontology, I just don't think they exist.

as close as I'm willing to get to idealism is moderate semiotic relativism. I believe that the way that we process the information around us, our semiotic relationships with objects, places, experiences, etc. effect more about what we see as reality than reality does. However I am not prepared to discount reality altogether, even if this is a simulation or a dream it is still as real as it needs to be for me.

Why assume that the big bang needs to be perceived by anything other than your own mind in retrospective? A hard idealist would see no reason to grant this assertion. A hard idealist could even doubt the accuracy of your faculties, from an inductive position would require you to justify this point. Citing the external world, to justify the reality of the external world simply argues in a circle. The question is simply where our epistemology begins. You seem to want to work deductively, but the whole point of idealism is that you have not established anything yet.

As to your other statements we have been over free will, you are just assuming materialism and working from there, which in terms of creating explanitory power for your epistemology is akin to shooting yourself in the foot and wondering why you can't run fast.

Probably the most interesting place to post from, I am broken down on the side of a road.

Edit:

Just found 50 dollars on the side of the road next to my car, can pay for the tow truck and my army mates are mixing me gin martinis when I get back. Who says there is no providence in the small things?

To begin with, the idea of 'the mind' is problematic at best, and is not consistent with neuroscience.

See mental fictionalism
http://www.unc.edu/~megw/MentFic.pdf


'Proper function' is arbitrary at best, if not outright nonsense gibberish.


Again nonsense



It is you who is making the baseless assertion that materialism fails.

There are no moral facts. Only moral opinions. Morality is doxa, not logos.

ruveyn

That certainly is a view. Though I would argue that it is pretty silly to hold to fictionalism and attempt to build an epistemology. The simple and powerful refutation to this position is to simply ask, 'who is making the objection?' The more one accepts fictionalism, the less powerful one's warrant for believing in a principle, even naturalism, becomes. It is certainly not logical for someone to embrace a hard eleiminative materialism and still claim that there anything like a person to ask the question. Rather, it just places the world above the perception of it, when, our basic perception is actually all we really have to go on as a starting point. As such, idealism and solipsism are actually similarly eleiminative but they do not remove warrant for having a basic starting principle.



Ok, you can disregard proper function if you want but the point is you are actually giving something up which establishes warrant. You seem to think I am asserting that 'proper function' as a concept must be true. My position is not nearly so simplistic as that and if I wanted to make statements as simple or silly, I would do so and would do so with brevity.



So, now we have your epistemology, no mind, no induction and no moral knowlege. You pretty much have no epistemology, since there is no mind to ask the question, no principle to build upon, no ability to build upon a base with induction and zero moral worth in your decisions. Go your hardest, you can even give up free will. I am not exactly sold on your reductionist position. For myself, when I look to build an epistemology, I will, if two principles are roughly the same, chose to believe in the one that builds an epistemology. It is just strange to set out upon a path to build a theory of mind and knowlege and embrace positions that establish neither and in some ways works against both, especially of there are alternative positions to hold to.



No, this is not my claim. Rather I am arguing that establishing a base through pure logical positivism. That is, reaching materialism through pure induction, fails and has failed for the better part of a century, hence why logical positivism is a dead concept.

'Who' (an 'agent') and 'making the objection' (an 'action') is already inside the fiction known as 'folk psychology'. Outside that context the question makes no sense. See also the discussion of 'cognitive suicide' in the article.


Since 'epistemology', 'science' (indeed language) are all fictions, therefore one can still build fictions based on the fiction that is 'the mind'.


That is obvious. Reality does not need to be perceived.


And the conclusion (i.e. neuroscience) contradicts the common understanding of 'the mind'. The whole 'starting point' doesn't work.


OK. I think warrant is problematic at best to begin with. I just accept that absolute / complete knowledge of reality is impossible.


What is the point of 'building an epistemology'?

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No that is not my objection either. What I am saying is that simply because one cannot 'prove' materialism by induction (or whatever 'epistemology') does not imply the negation of materialism (OR naturalism) being true.

I'm not sure that the sort of idealism I would be persuaded by requires that material things don't exist, full stop, only that they their existence is dependent upon mind or that mind is ontologically prior to matter. All of these material explanations come from our minds, they exist within our minds. The idea or theory of the Big Bang is in our minds.



There is work underway to better understand consciousness through neuroscience, but I'm not sure that work can speak to the question of how it is possible that consciousness can arise in a world where it is not already there in some form. I'm not sure about this, perhaps I'm making a confusion between possibility and conceivibility. Does analogy help here?

For example, it is possible that a chair could be made from a block of wood but that chair coming about doesn't require that is was already conceived of by the wood from which it was formed. But here the consciousness is external to the wood, so the analogy is not a good one as we are speaking of a world where consciousness is internal to or part of that world.

Please correct me of this idea I have that the possibility of consciousness implies the conceivability of consciousness which implies the existence of consciousness prior to its appearance in matter.

But, the idea of the Big Bang is derived from the fact that the perceived world suggests a history. The problem is that an unobserved history must either NOT exist(which is bizarre and more like the 5 minute hypothesis, which we're fine with rejecting normally) or we have to posit some mysterious and otherwise unobserved observer.

The theory of the Big Bang is an interpretation of an external world, particularly of a history.

I mean, I am not really arguing that "material things do not exist", it's just that the dependence cannot be worked in with our notions of history.


I don't understand the leap you are making from "conceivability".

I mean, here are the issues:
1) Technically speaking possible things don't have to be conceivable. So, we could have some issue built in our brain where we cannot understand a fact about reality.

2) Conceivability is a test on whether we can conceive it. It's epistemology, not ontology.

3) If the idea is that consciousness is a phenomenon built from a material arrangement, then how would consciousness differ than any other material fact?

Last edited by Awesomelyglorious on 23 Jan 2012, 10:56 am, edited 1 time in total.

It sure was not perceived (assuming it happened) by our eyes.

ruveyn

I agree with the statement, I am not a follower of solipsism but it certainly is a world-view that is relativly logically consistant.

You cannot the brain out of the vat that way. Good luck going up to a confirmed solipsist and saying 'I and the external world are real because I was around before you'. Their world-view cannot be disproved by fictional backstory. I have only ever met one such person and he treats history the same way you or I would take a dream in that took place in Game of Thrones, it has a backstory, interesting but not as evidence of an objective anything.

couldn't the world be a material conciounsnis duality as in everything is material and consionis? they constantly create eachother and thus they are both real and unreal at the same time