True it is me that needs to do the work. But you’ll set me straight when I don’t call it the way you see it. And that will be a service to me. You flatter me by calling me eminently smart. I venture into metaphysics with trepidation. I have long considered it above my pay grade.
We are just two transcendentalists traveling through a world of haze and convoluted concoctions.
as for materialism, there is material in the world. I don’t know why people make such a big fuss about it. As a synonym of communism, which it originally is, it is a particularly dogmatic and fanatic religion. There is a reason they bother about materialism and not material.
the most convincing arguments ive heard dont actually solve the problem but suggest that to the extent that we use similar language to describe the material and the immaterial, that we can dispense with the immaterial for practical purposes.
That is a curious statement. What would you deem immaterial?
whatever it is that sits opposite the distinction between the material and whatever else it is we’re talking about. like body/material, mind/immaterial. but i dont mean to use immaterial in a technical sense here. just to denote the distinction between material and whatever else it is we’re talking about.
david lewis did a paper called “reduction of mind” that i think i read at a time when i was sitting around in circles and reading a lot of this sort of stuff. you might find it interesting.
As long as we understand each other that when we say “practical purposes,” we mean practical for the purposes of the rhetorical point you want to make. Like I have demonstrated here on this day.
when i say “practical purposes”, i mean, generally, coming up with descriptions of things in the world. it doesn’t necessarily entail a goal other than to have the simplest descriptions that encompass all of what is to be described.
Right, I know, nothing specific, just whatever happens to fit the rhetorical point you are making at the time.
A purpose, a goal. But this is a nice illustration.
Having looked at that paper, which is far to detailed for me to consider fully, Lewis is a materialist and holds that mental states are contingently identical to physical - in particular, neural states. He assumes, as far as I understand, that what you see is what you get, and there is no reason to think otherwise. Therefore, metaphysical idealism would be lost on him, that is, I presume it wouldn’t interest him.
The practical purposes that dispense with the immaterial still remains a phrase which I can’t attach any meaning to. The hypothesis of Kastrup is that matter is a content of consciousness, or mind, which is the ground of being, not the other way around. That means that matter is in consciousness, not consciousness in matter (ie brain).
What did you intend to say in your first statement, that it is a matter of semantics?
But reductionism is essential to science as controlling knowledge. And that’s where modern technology comes from. And that’s what’s driving the world system today. So it’s easy to give lip service to metaphysical idealism. But to actually live a life based on metaphysical idealism would be radical. Exponentially more radical still would be a society with MI at its core like materialism is today.
The case that McGilchrist makes, according to the list of contents of his book, which is out in November, covers two volumes and is very intricate. He is, of course, the brain man, and consequently his arguments are based on his experience in that field. We’ll have to wait to read his books, but the introduction is available to be listened to on YouTube.
I don’t think so. In fact, I don’t think you can ever distinguish between the two. A world that is idealist would seem to us in all details the same as a world that is naturalist. That’s why we can have this discussion in the first place — you can’t rule out either of these isms or others besides, including supernaturalism, because they all yield the same predictions.
In the case of supernaturalism, a miracle or series of miracles might incline us to accept supernaturalism. But we don’t see any such unfalsifiable miracles, at least in the present day. Jesus was alleged to have performed miracles, but because we have no contemporaneous accounts of them, we are entitled to discount such claims, in the same way we discount claims of miracle workers today, because upon investigation we always find some naturalist account of them or trickery on the part of the alleged miracle worker, such as with seances where it can be shown that the medium is not in fact talking to dead people but performing elaborate tricks.
In his paper, David Lewis cites the gestalt of seeing a picture, say a face, in what at bottom is nothing more than a collection of dots. This is supervenience, the face emerging from, or being an epiphenomenon of, the reductive pattern of dots. The physicist Sabine Hossenfelder cites this kind of example too in her discussion of science as reductionism — the face is reduced to the dots, and there is no mystery.
The argument here is that mind, with its qualia, supervenes on a neuronal pattern, or is an epiphenomenon of that pattern. But this is analogous only, and analogies can be misleading. In the case of the picture supervening on the dots, we know exactly how and why this occurs. In the case of the color red, or any other quale supervening on neuronal patterns, we have no idea how or why this happens. This is the hard problem of consciousness.
It may in fact be the case that there is a gestalt from the color red to neurons, in the same way there is a gestalt from the picture to the dots. But unlike the picture to to dots, we don’t have a stepwise account of this for the color red from neurons. All we have is a claim, with the picture rising from dots being an analogy. And all analogies run into trouble sooner or later.
As to Lewis himself, I think it is fair to say that he believes metaphysical idealism is actually true — just not at our world. This is because he argues that all logically possible but non-actual words are in fact actual, but only to their inhabitants. For Lewis, there are actual worlds at which pigs fly, donkeys talk, and the Greek gods are literally real. Therefore there are worlds, for him, at which metaphysical idealism holds. A world, for him, is a spatio-temporally closed (isolated) realm that actually exists provided it is logically possible (can be conceived without logical contradiction). From this, it follows that there are no actual worlds in which four-sided triangles exist, for example.
This doctrine, called extreme modal realism, does not embrace the possibility of the Christian version of God, because such an entity is defined to be necessary. So if such a God fails to exist at one possible world, it necessarily fails to exist at all possible worlds. For Lewis, such a God fails to exist at this world, and so necessarily fails to exist. Greek gods, on the other hand, are contingent entities — could have failed to exist or could have exhibited different properties — and hence there are possible worlds at which they exist, worlds that are actual only to their inhabitants (but not to us).
Lewis also believes everyone lives forever from their own point of view, but with terrifying consequences (not a supernatural hell, but hell on earth). He was said to be very afraid upon his own death.
Lewis was one great philosopher but also one strange cat. He also wrote a paper on the metaphysical implications of backward time travel that is a classic of philosophy, resolving, among other things, the Grandfather Paradox.
Metaphysics is such fun! Now we’re speculating about the consequences of a change in worldwide dominance of theories of metaphysical speculation. Shall we call this meta speculation? Or better : second order speculation.
It seems to me that a shift like that already occurred from the idealism that prevailed before the advent of science (Platonism) to the materialism that dominates now. Yes ? No?
And if so, the change resulted in a radical change in culture and society. The transformation from the pre-modern to the modern world.
Consider how accepting the idealist metaphysics would affect science. Not at all, I would think.
A rough-and-ready description of science is that it investigates the external world to collect data and seek patterns, and then it concocts theories about how all this hangs together, theories that can make testable predictions. If the tests turn out positive we gain confidence (though not certainty) in our theories about the external world.
How would that differ under idealism?
It would just go like this:
A rough-and-ready description of science is that it investigates our mental states to collect data and seek patterns, and then it concocts theories about how all this hangs together, theories that can make testable predictions. If the tests turn out positive we gain confidence (though not certainty) in our theories about our mental states.
Sabine Hossenfelder, a physicist who is a reductionist, takes no stand on whether an external world exists.
I doubt that you’re before and after picture is correct. But if it is that’s a radical change. The consequences of a shift from an idealism to a materialism can be seen, in premodern Europe when it shifted from platonism to aristotelianism. The shift of modern materialism went through an intermediate stage with Descartes mind-body dualism. “Mind” gradually fell away and became reduced to brain. It is only the irreducibility of consciousness that has arrested the trend. Bob can say more about this than I can but Kastrup’s idealism attempts to put consciousness back at the center.
I’d say the kind of idealism Kastrup advocates also denies Descartes’s dualism. It just flips the script: Rather than the mental supervening on the material, the material supervenes on the mental. But both are metaphysical positions that can’t be tested. It’s why I objected earlier, not to Kastrup’s advocacy of idealism, but to his declaration “materialism is baloney.” He may think it is and may be right, but he can’t show that it is.
I agree. Kastrup is an ideal monist. Cartesian dualism was historically an intermediate stage on the way to material monism. First person consciousness stands in the way of that. A proverbial fly in the ointment of total materialism. What is Kastrup’s next step from there? Maybe Bob will tell us. The title “materialism is baloney” may be nothing more than his way of being provocative in order to sell the book. Sometimes a title is a publishers idea with that motive in mind.
Yeah, that could be. I’ve read his essays at Scientific American but not his books. I’ll try to grab the book. Hopefully it is online because I practically live online now. 
Modal realism isn’t true. I mean, to explain it as simple as possible, it’s the idea that something can’t come from nothing; therefor if you imagine it, it must be actually existent.
Fortunately for all beings in existence, there is a realm of unsubstantiated imagination.