It’s interesting for sure. The division between the material eg solidity… table chair carrot is at best blurry under certain conditions such as temperature for most objects. Heat something long enough and you change it, solidity disappears, entropy develops atoms disintegrate, energy is transformed, and matter becomes energy.
Then what is consciousness, we still can’t answer how not to mention why thoughts are generated from the squishy brain which contains many nodes/networks and synapses.
if the brain is matter, the thoughts it generates are themselves non-matter. So whilst we cannot physically teleport ourselves to a different location at will our thoughts can, at least as far as current tech allows it to.
I’m not sure we actually know what physical means any more: strings, quantum waves…?
As I said above, I’m not talking about materialism per say. I’m talking about why, in idealism, consciousness manifests as a range of physical constraints and objects. Why, if everything is thought, are there objects at all?
Consciousness as we understand it seems to imply intentionality. I’ve long thought that idealism absent the idea of a sustaining God or universal mind is incoherent and inconsistent with our experience of a shared world.
But then this confronts us with the question as to why a God or universal mind would create a world of such unimaginable material complexity, not to mention danger and suffering? That said the same question applies if the creation is thought to be a materially real product of a divine creator, and not merely a manifestation of universal consciousness or a godless purposelessly evolved actuality .
It is on account of this question, I think, that the Gnostics postulated a flawed deity, and Schopenhauer posited universal consciousness as a blind will.
There does not seem to be any sensible answer to this question within any of the philosophical traditions, east or west. How much more parsimonious then it seems (to me at least) to suppose that the physical world is simply real independently of consciousness.
Many people don’t like this conclusion because it seems to rob us of our most beguiling fantasy; eternal life.
@John My awareness can drift without intentionality, does that mean that I’m not conscious? Cogito then! As Descartes said but all that leads to is proof that I exist, and no further than that because if it did go further then that it would lead to solipsism and the encounter with real objects would smack the solipsistic point of view back to reality.
Why would the universal mind be incoherent to you ? Or why is it inconsistent ? Curious to know …
I do not argue against the existence of any one thing that we can apprehend, either by sense or reflection. That the things I see with my eyes and touch with my hands do exist, really exist, I make not the least question. The only thing whose existence we deny is that which philosophers call ‘matter’ or ‘corporeal substance’.Berkeley, George.Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, edited by Robert M. Adams, Hackett Publishing, 1979.
What Berkeley is disputing is that there is a material substance which subsists and inheres in the objects of perception but which differs from them in the way suggested by philosophers like John Locke. Recall for Locke that the primary attributes of objects were those subject to precise measurement and which were therefore invariant for any observer. The appearance, colour, and other sensory attributes of the object were secondary and said to inhere in the mind of the observer.
So what he is disputing is not the reality of the physical world, but the metaphysical fiction of an unobservable “corporeal substance” lurking behind perception. It is this ‘corporeal substance’, acting in accordance with physical laws, which materialists claim is the basis for the consistency and uniformity of the world. The principle of objectivity states that this matter exists as it is, independently of any act of cognition or perception on our part, that it possesses an intrinsic or inherent reality.
I say there’s an alternative account of why the world presents itself with such stability, consensus, and apparently-discrete objects without reference to so-called ‘mind-indepenent matter’ . Consider work of mathematician Charles Pinter in Mind and the Cosmic Order. He presents a naturalist account of the role of cognition in the formation of the perceived world which I think is compatible with naturalism.
Pinter points out that the mind-independent universe—the cosmos unobserved by any biological sensorium—is not a collection of pre-existent, discrete objects. It is an undifferentiated flux of fields and energetic interactions. There are no natural boundaries in that unobserved state separating a rock from the dirt it rests on, or a star from the vacuum of space.
The stable, structured world of distinct “things” we perceive arises through the operation of cognition:
The Sieve of Perception: Biological organisms must carve functional boundaries into this continuous flux to survive. A frog must distinguish a fly from a leaf; a human must distinguish a cliff edge from a path.
The Primordial Glance & Gestalts: Cognitive science shows that perception is top-down. We don’t build a scene from combining isolated sensory pixels or fragments; the brain delivers a unified panorama—a Gestalt whole—as a primary experience. The mind then discerns specific objects within that whole. (How the brain does this is still unknown to science, which is referred to as ‘the neural binding problem’ (ref)).
Relational Reality: Take Pinter’s gives an example of three coins arranged on a plane. Are there three things or four? Physically, there are only three coins, but hey form a triangle. The triangle is non-material, yet it isn’t an illusion—it is relationally real. It exists objectively, but only relative to an observer capable of apprehending that pattern.
Newton’s “Simples” vs. Wholes: The fundamental laws of physics (what Pinter calls “simples”) describe local interactions, but no mathematical accumulation of these simple laws produces a recognized whole—like an elliptical orbit or a teacup—without an observer to integrate the pattern.
“The atoms of a teacup do not collude together to form a teacup: The object is a teacup because it is constituted that way from a perspective outside of itself.” (Mind and the Cosmic Order, p. 44)
So why is the world so remarkably stable and shared? Not because it rests on an inert, mind-independent substantia, but because living minds share a common evolutionary and cognitive architecture. We are tuned to the same environmental constraints, parsing the same underlying energy flux into the same structural Gestalts. If we were beings that saw with X-rays and lived for 10,000 years, we’d inhabit a completely different universe, to all intents and purposes.
The physical world is not a hallucination, nor is it made of mindless matter. It is a relational structure—the raw matrix provides the ground, but cognition endows it with form, boundaries, and enduring order. Hence why mind has a foundational role in the nature of reality, and is not a late-comer thrown up by the vagaries of the ‘blind watchmaker’.
I was hoping you’d chime in. This is your area. I guess my key quesion is, Why, if everything is thought, are there objects at all? I’ll have a read of your reply and get back to you.
Roger Scruton is right about the metaphysical idealist, but he’s wrong if he thinks that this proves materialism (physicalist realism). Descartes’ substance dualism is mistaken because it is substance metaphysics, not because it is dualism. Reducing it to substance monism doesn’t fix it. There’s a false dichotomy in play here, forcing a choice between idealism and materialism.
But I don’t think you will recognize this as a satisfactory answer to your principal question.
Thinking is influenced by language use, and many philosophical puzzles are generated because of the inferences made during the thinking process – they model the structure of ‘reality’ on the subject-predicate structure of language (Wittgenstein makes this point in his Philosophical Investigations). Descartes’ cogito is a prime example – that thinking is going on can’t be doubted, but thinking arrives at the inference that “there is thinking, therefore there is a thinker.” This is not only something that CAN be doubted, but it’s something that SHOULD be doubted, because this “thinker” is a linguistic fabrication – i.e. “I” is just another thought. That’s not to say the word “I” is not useful in common speech (or to put it in Nagarjuna’s terms, the “I” has only a “conventional existence”). The thinking process has to undergo a radical change of perspective before this linguistic trap is “seen through.” By no-one.
And so to your question: To what (or to whom) does consciousness “present” with a “world of objects that appear material, that clutter and pollute and constrain”? For what is there “no easy way out”? What must “behave as though [it were a] physical creature, limited and vulnerable to countless everyday hazards such as cars, nuclear bombs, and banana peels”?
If you say it is “to me” that these things are presented, then you have to identify what this “me” consists of. That involves turning attention back upon its own source, and following Hume into the recognition of his bundle theory.
The premise that everything is thought must then be false. Why can’t we accept dualism that is mind/matter ? What is wrong with this idea, I see nothing wrong with this middle ground, else we would succumb to materialism if not idealism
I haven’t said that the idea of a universal mind is incoherent, but that idealism absent a universal mind is incoherent, and inconsistent with a shared world, insofar as it cannot explain how minds supposedly disconnected from one another could share a world if there were no mind-independently existent world to be shared.
The problem with this idea of a “raw matrix” if it implies a pre-cognitive formlessness is that it cannot explain how it is that we experience the same forms. So, you seem to be leaving out one side of the interactional equation. Strangely you seem to be blind to this objection, as I’ve raised it many times previously.
Yes, this seems to be a very different notion of idealism than that of Berkeley or Kastrup, and it sounds like it’s the latter that the OP is depicting. Kant’s form of idealism directly grounds modern empirical realism.
Oh I see, my bad. I agree with you now that idealism sans universal mind is incoherent…although I struggled to follow your logic.
Would then materialism with a universal mind be acceptable? We cannot offer proof that a universal mind exists, but this does not mean that it doesn’t exist, only the existence of proof doesn’t exist. We could be fragments of the universal mind limited by subjective perspective.
in any case, the line between the material and immaterial can be easily blurred, and Einstein did a good job with his matter mass equivalence, which leaves the ultimate mystery alive … what is consciousness?
He’s not trying to prove it. He’s effectively sayign it doesn’t matter since we live as though realism is a true account.
Ok. I think I follow, but I don’t know what this gives us. My question is about the ontology of idealism because I am curious, not because it will make any difference to how I live.
That question isn’t as interesting to me as “why is there eating?” Why is how consciousness presents to us so often predicated on predation and the devouring of other conscious creatures?
Ok. Nice. It’s heading into Kastrupian territory too, or at least Mr K has borrowed from the best, ay?
That question isn’t as interesting to me as “why is there eating?” Why is how consciousness presents to us so often built upon predation and the devouring of other conscious creatures? Consciousness devours itself…
Ok. Nice. It’s heading into Kastrupian territory too, or at least Mr K has borrowed from the best, ay?
As I wrote at the start, I’m not exploring whether idealsim is a true account. I’m asking how some of the models might be said to work, with a specific focus on objects. It’s more of a speculative thread than anything.