Reply to felix dakat:
Actually becoming and being an immaterialist opened my eyes to what might actually be the true nature of existence. It’s not a matter of “seeming as though one is no longer living in the physical world”, but realizing that one lives in a world, but the world upon honest observation depends upon and actually consists of one’s experience of it as opposed to consisting of something that is not one’s experience of it. Immaterialism looks at existence as it actually presents itself.
Everyone starts off, I think, as a Naive Realist. But if one is lucky enough to have the metaphorical detective magnifying glass placed in one’s hand and told to look hard at one’s existence, this combined with the good fortune to have learned of the belief that the brain creates consciousness and the Process of Perception, Immaterialism falls into place when one performs the logic.
The materialist position: belief in unconscious matter, belief that consciousness somehow comes from and depends upon unconscious matter, and that outside the body and skull of conscious beings there is an unconscious world containing unconscious, non-living doppelgangers of the content of visual perception is the cornerstone of godless science and philosophy. When one looks hard at this belief “at the right angle”, one finds it is akin to the “D.A’s case” in this pivotal scene in the comedy-drama My Cousin Vinny:
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHzOOMdhAhE[/youtube]
The materialist’s case “is an illusion, a magic trick” because…existence only shows up in the form of a person and that which the person experiences, and anything that is not a person or the experience of a person only shows up in the form of something imagined and believed by a person. Mind-independent objects and events are things that are not persons and as one discovers when observing the fiction of the Process of Perception, do not themselves create persons and their experiences and as such, save for the fiction of their signalling the brain due to its ability to create consciousness, are not needed to form persons or experience of persons.
The materialist position is therefore—like the “brick” in the movie example—“as thin as this playing card”.
[Note: The terms “you”, “your”, and “yourself”,as it appears throughout the remainder of this reply is purely rhetorical, as “you” is “a rhetorical person representing someone critically analyzing belief that brains create consciousness, the idea of mind-independent objects and events, and the idea that mind-independent substance is somehow capable of creating subjective experience.”]
As a Naive Realist, Direct Realist, Indirect Realist, or Materialist, when one visually experiences things, one’s mind informs one (in the form of intuition followed by belief) that one’s visual perception is of something (Indirect Realism and Materialism) or is something (Naive and Direct Realism) other than oneself.
Descartes…wrote a response to skepticism about the existence of the external world. He argues that sensory perceptions come to him involuntarily, and are not willed by him. They are external to his senses, and according to Descartes, this is evidence of the existence of something outside of his mind, and thus, an external world. Descartes goes on to show that the things in the external world are material by arguing that God would not deceive him as to the ideas that are being transmitted, and that God has given him the “propensity” to believe that such ideas are caused by material things.
-Wikipedia: Rene Descartes
But sensory perceptions, despite the fact they come to one involuntarily and are often unexpected and unwanted is subjective experience, and consists or is made up of subjective experience. In order to experience anything, or to know that something exists, something must actively appear to present itself before oneself having the substance of your experience of it. If something is not made up of the substance of “your experience of it”, you can’t experience it.
In terms of “your experience of it” and that which supposedly exists when you’re asleep and not having experiences (if dreamless sleep exists) existence may be divided into:
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Your experience of something
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Whatever there is when you’re not experiencing something and everything you do not experience.
Once so divided, one can pick up the playing card of the brain–its ability to create consciousness thought to be a brick (using the “My Cousin Vinny” metaphor) and explained as though it were a brick.
People balk at my statement that human sensory perception is essentially an artificial reality that is something completely different from and that is not the world in the absence of one’s consciousness, but this is true regardless of whether or not you believe the brain creates conscious experience when in absence of Immaterialism you believe that brain’s create consciousness.
How?
Well, your experience of the world (or “a world”) is believed to come from your brain. Nothing else in the universe creates your experience of the world (or “a world”), as it is believed that consciousness—subjective experience—does not exist unless it is create and generated by a brain and did not exist before there were brains.
Thus for those believing the brain creates consciousness, the only thing holding up or supporting experience of the world (or “a world”) is the brain. That’s it. Nothing else creates your consciousness. In the absence of gods, nothing knows you exist, as everything is non-conscious and as such cannot care that you exist or have any concern or plan for your survival. Nothing knows you’re here in a godless world except what’s produced by the brain of another person, if that brain has a neural circuit that can visually perceive your body and movement and produce the experience of hearing your voice and sustaining the idea that you are individually conscious.
Everything on our side of the existence-fence, then, depends upon lucky chance that the brain just happens to possess a neural circuit capable of producing the experience of that which one actually comes to experience. If there isn’t a neural circuit in your brain capable (before the fact, no less) of producing experience x, you can’t experience x.
Doesn’t matter if x exists in the external world in a form that is not your experience of x (as the x that exists in the external world is not created by your brain and isn’t affected in the least by the function or cessation of function of your brain), all that matters is your experience of x, and you have to be lucky enough that your brain just happened to have a neural circuit capable of producing experience x prior to your brain’s production of experience x.
(Note: That’s if your brain produces x. While your brain has the ability to produce x it may not have the opportunity to do so: think of someone who has the neurology to experience Japan and everything they would have seen and done in Japan, but never goes to Japan).
Given this, everything we think and believe about the world, including the idea that there are things that are not you that existed before you were conscious, while you temporarily are not conscious, and after you are no longer conscious comes from your brain. And get this: they only show up in the form of your idea of them, in the form of thoughts about them. They don’t appear in any other form, and they cannot show up as they really are (as they are believed to be): things you do not or cannot experience because they are not your experience, as everything that shows itself to you must appear in the form of and be made out of your experience of them.
Mind-independent objects and events are not created by your brain (as they are believed to exist outside your skull), thus you cannot experience them.
So when you do the detective work to figure out what’s happening, what’s really going on, you have to be careful not to delude yourself into thinking that things that are not you and what you experience, things not created by your brain, are one and the same as you and what you experience, which are created by your brain (for those believing the brain creates consciousness).
Given that things outside your skull and body, if they exist, cannot be one and the same as the conscious experience created by the 3-lb. blob of flesh inside your skull, it follows that your brain creates a virtual or artificial reality of a world that exists and appears as your experience of a world. Easy peasy. If you experience something, that something must something created by your brain and is thus part of the artificial reality created by your brain. Every object, environment, and body and behavior of every person you experience, if the brain creates consciousness and conscious experience can only exist if it is created by the physical brain, comes out of you, as they are part of the world that comes out of you, that is, your brain, as your brain is within your body (for those believing the brain creates consciousness).
The world you experience then, is actually a projected “movie” that comes out of the “movie projector” of your brain, that is inside you. Every object, person, and event you experience comes from inside you, if consciousness comes from the brain.
All science, every scientific fact of biology, geology, physics, and so on and your beliefs regarding them are part of an artificial reality composed of your experience of them comes from inside your body, from your brain.
While the artificial reality part is true, the idea that brains create consciousness makes absolutely no sense.
Long story short, once you realize there is no logical relation between non-subjective experience to subjective experience, and you realize there is no logic to the idea of brains not made of subjective experience producing from itself something it is not (subjective experience), and you realize that the world and every object, environment, and bodies and behaviors of persons within it actually comes from you and are made out of you (your subjective experience of them, without which the objects, environments, and bodies and behaviors of persons would not appear), and given that any external, “you-independent” analogs or doppelgangers of these objects, environments, and bodies of persons if they exist do not themselves create your experience of them (as they are imagined to exist outside your skull and cannot directly reach the brain or themselves form conscious experience independent of brains), you can logically remove the physical world to be left only with the existence of persons and the artificial realities or worlds that they experience, that come from them and are made of them.
An immaterialist, therefore, basically observes an actual fact of existence (the idea that worlds, as they appear within actual existence, are experienced worlds made up of the substance of the person experiencing them), realizes that anything outside this fact exists only in the form of an imaginary idea that must be accepted on faith (Kant), and observing that the latter can logically have nothing to do with the existence of the former abandons the latter, leaving behind non-embodied minds experiencing artificial realities believed to have the same content (though perceived from different perspectives) in other non-embodied minds (giving rise to the idea of consensus reality).