Why haven’t you accepted idealism?

>Why haven’t you accepted idealism?
Because fuck you, that's why.

The only important thing is that I know my consciousness exists and it perceives a world. Anything else is dogmatic nonsense.

Strings gonna getchya quantumfag.

Plato, Aristotle, and The Upanishads are the only philosophy you need. I am not joking. The ancients knew the truth better than we ever will. The more learned a person is, the harder it is to see the actual truth. If there were a God, do you think he would hide himself behind an intellectual or logical barrier? No, understanding God is intuitive. As Socrates said, each man is equally capable of achieving wisdom.

Also physicist and same, although among my lot the many-worlds isn't so popular.
That said I personally think "shut up and calculate" is one of the biggest cancers in modern physics and the fact that we've stagnated on finding a real prescriptive interpretation rather than a descriptive calculus is an absolute fucking embarrassment.

I don't put too much stock what most physicists think. Like you say, most don't care - the majority of the rest pick an interpretation that aligns with their metaphysical prejudices.

I'm interested in parsimony. Many-worlds has to be one of the least parsimonious explanations out there, and it struggles to account for the probabilistic decay of a particle.

Idealism is the most parsimonious explanation for the "measurement problem" in QM and the "hard problem of consciousness."

>strings
SUSY confirmed any minute now, right guys?
Get back to compactifying some more dimensions to excuse your failures.

P1 - I am having a sense experience.
P2 - Sensations do not need causes to exist, in the way that events and things do not need causes to exist, except for effects, which have causes by definition.
P3 - The best explanation for my experience is that I am just having it. It is not necessary to introduce something which causes my experience.
C - Idealism is true.

Every theory of nature must rely on at least one ontological primitive since you can't explain one thing in terms of another forever.

Is this b8?

Are you baiting or just not that bright?

Because I am a pragmatist.
Materialism in the sciences despite protesting Cartesian dualism takes a Cartesian methodology in it's approach, it's is either mind or body from the get go and this kind of crypto-dualism is it's downfall.
Here are the facts
Mind and body are both natural
The mind is not made out of material, it is represented in material sign vehicles which carry meaning.
Meaning is a phenomenon that results from life's interpretation of material information. Both of these things are completely natural. Meaning is grounded in material but transcends it by arbitrary relationships that give rise to material standing for something in respect to something else(these words too you, hormones to the physiological system of a plant, genes to a cell)
Basically life makes meaning out of material on a fundamental level, that is the function of life.
I suggest you read this, it's on lib gen
springer.com/us/book/9781402096495
And go over this, it's on sci hub
sciencedirect.com/journal/progress-in-biophysics-and-molecular-biology/vol/119/issue/3
Read the primary literature that interests you and it's s wormhole from there.
link.springer.com/journal/12304

Idealism and materialism are equally silly and will always be because they have a silly foundation.

What's the matter? Can't handle these vibrations? Don't step on a brane, lamebrain lmao

NAA

Remember that this is a nightmare.

Of course not. When the chicken shits the chessboard you don't explain to him why that's not a valid move, you just carry on and not worry because he's clearly not that smart.
But you keep telling yourself that people have to address your arguments seriously and they're only laughing at you because your right.

>your right

I think that to remain intellectual honesty that is to be seen as an argument against attempting a general theory in the first place.

arab fucking shits

I do accept that. This thread is for the majority of us who hold to a universal theory.

If you're happy with whatever "quietism" is then fine.

Not an argument.
God how fucking easy was it to get you to do that?

What do you need the universal theory for? Wouldn't it be more agreeable in the long run to try to adjust yourself to a quietist position rather than to try to adjust the world to conclusions?

The part can never really understand the whole because to give an accurate representation of it, it would have to be as expansive as the whole and therefore identical to it. No theory will ever truly be sufficient and there's no good reason to believe humans can pull it off or even get close to it.

Not having your well-being depend on achieving the impossible grand theory seems like the better approach to me, combined with a pragmatic notion of inquiry into whatever aspects of the universe you want to manipulate.

You can say, if you like, that this theory is internally consistent and the most parsimonious explanation given what we currently know, but it's probably still untrue given what we don't know.

But if you don't think it is congruent with the facts then explain why - that's the interesting part. I'm not really interested in meta-discussion around the psychological value of metaphysical speculation.

> I'm not really interested in meta-discussion around the psychological value of metaphysical speculation.
It seems to most relevant to me though, the problems you have with materialism shown in this paragraph:

>The idea that matter can produce consciousness – what it’s like to be me – is ridiculous. If we hone in on the very instant consciousness is born, unconscious clumps of matter are arranged in some slightly different configuration sufficient to produce consciousness. What could it be about this new configuration of atoms that makes it sufficiently different to the configuration of atoms just prior? How can such a minuscule change to the arrangement of unconscious matter “switch on the lights” to give rise to subjective experience? There is no conceivable way to bridge this explanatory gap.

Are solely intuitive. It feels ridiculous to you, a slight change in configuration having tremendous consequences seems insufficient to you, it seems inconceivable to you, but none of these are actual objections so much as the theory being emotionally unfulfilling.

I don't think reality is obligated to provide humans with emotionally fulfilling answers. The hard problem of consciousness is in a way a notion that it surely couldn't be just that, surely we are more magical and special, to the degree that every sensible explanation will turn out to be too mundane for the conscious entity to explain itself.

The problem itself has to do with the psychological value. You seem to be looking for the right feeling more than a consistent explanation. Trying to drag quantum mysticism and universal consciousness into it seem to me to be signs of that.

Here's a crazy idea: maybe we don't know as much about the physical world as we think. Maybe there's a logical, material explanation for how matter creates consciousness that we haven't come to or simply aren't intelligent enough to see? The problem with your argument is that it assumes that humans are able to completely comprehend the physical world when for all we know we could only be able to fathom a fraction of it.

Universal theories are advantageous for intellectual advancement and non-scientific cultural progress. If we only concerned our reasoning with empirical facts that were immediately open to investigation, humanity would get nowhere. A prime example that I like is ancient atomism - it had no empirical support to render its theories true, and was based on ancient debates on permanence and change in nature, but it nevertheless hit upon a key conceptual invention.

Great philosophers always boldly leap beyond the available data into unknown speculation, and as often as they fall into traps, sometimes achieve a great anticipatory theories. The key thing is that they necessarily have to regard those attempts as something more than mere speculation.

>none of these are actual objections

I said, "There is no conceivable way to bridge this explanatory gap." It's right there at the end of the paragraph, you couldn't really miss it.

The hard problem isn't a problem because it implies we're "just matter." It's a problem because there's no conceivable means of bridging the gap between the objective and the subjective - as I said. We're tying ourselves up in knots trying to work out how the whirlpool produces the water. We've got it backwards.

It's that generally we agree that matter has only objective qualities. Yet it is clear that through consciousness we gain subjective experience so that one is naturally let to conclude that either matter has subjective qualities or that consciousness is not solely a property of matter.

>If we hone in on the very instant consciousness is born, unconscious clumps of matter are arranged in some slightly different configuration sufficient to produce consciousness. What could it be about this new configuration of atoms that makes it sufficiently different to the configuration of atoms just prior? How can such a minuscule change to the arrangement of unconscious matter “switch on the lights” to give rise to subjective experience? There is no conceivable way to bridge this explanatory gap.
How do you know? Is it not conceivable that perhaps there is a range of consciousness, and that some certain configuration of matter provides, say 0.000000000001% consciousness, and that number increases gradually as matter continues to configure itself agreeably? How could we know that there are not several micro-consciousnesses inside our brain - indeed, perhaps in our entire body - screaming to escape us?

Have you ever considered that consciousness isn't a binary state? It's ridiculous to think that matter abruptly produces human consciousness from nothing, but if you see it as a slow, incremental buildup from single-celled organisms to animals to us, it doesn't seem as far-fetched.

>Not an argument.
Of course not. When the chicken shits the chessboard you don't explain to him why that's not a valid move, you just carry on and not worry because he's clearly not that smart.
But you keep telling yourself that people have to address your arguments seriously and they're only laughing at you because your right.

Such questions are irrelevant as we have no working conception of degrees of consciousness so to attempt an answer would be premature without first understanding our own consciousness.
We should first be able to answer what we mean by consciousness and then move on to abstractions rather than trying to deal with some still impossible to understand idea of still more primitive consciousnesses.

>berkeleyan solipsism

Cringe desu

How autistic are you?
Just fucking move on instead of having these cringey responses everytime you sperg out

Even being an emergent property of matter doesn't help answering the most difficult question of how matter which supposedly has purely objective properties produces consciousness, capable of subjective experience.

I still don't get how Hegel is supposed to be an idealist. What the fuck.

universal cognitive categories structuring a transient content

This is panpsychism. You're implying that every inanimate object has its own subjective inner life. In other words, that there is something it is like to be a rock. The problem with panpsychism is, of course, that there is precisely zero evidence that any inanimate object is conscious.

A second problem is that you avoid the hard problem but run into the interaction problem: how is it that "conscious" particles combine together to produce our subjective experience, which is surely different to that of a rock - even one with a similar number of particles.

I think idealism is more parsimonious.

See

Can anyone refute my argument? Step right up, folks.

That wasn't me (the OP). Honest.

>P3 - The best explanation for my experience is that I am just having it. It is not necessary to introduce something which causes my experience.

If no other thing except for a self (with apparently full access to itself?) is posited, why does the self lack all control over appearances?

>I said, "There is no conceivable way to bridge this explanatory gap." It's right there at the end of the paragraph, you couldn't really miss it.
The gap itself exists merely intuitively because somehow you have an idea that it should not follow that you can arrange neurons in a certain way that makes consciousness come online.

Some people don't feel this puzzlement. There's not obviously a problem here to everyone.

It's not as if it's necessary that the self would then have control over its experience, although it might seem "commonsensical".

It isn't that it should or shouldn't be possible; rather, it's that materialists have been unable to explain, even in principle, how arrangements of matter can possibly generate subjective experience. It's a gaping hole in the theory. I don't like theories with gaping holes, do you?

>they take quantum mechanics in pragmatically
>and accept multi-words
Makes no sense, if it's just for calculating might as well smile and say 'it epistemic nigga'.

Just because current theories haven't completely worked out how everythingworks doesn't mean that you should throw the baby out with the bathwater and retreat into idealism because you can't bare being without a coherent grand theory.

It's like returning to folk medicine because modern medicine hasn't solved cancer yet. Sure, you can have an internally consistent folk medicine, but that doesn't make it superior. Internal consistency isn't a virtue without explanatory power.

If the self has no consciousness control over a given experience, how can we make the claim that it is in fact the self?

Explain in more detail

It isn't just that we don't know a possible mechanism might work - nobody has been able to even conceive of a possible

Why hold to a theory with a gaping hole in it, when there's a more parsimonious alternative?

You imply that materialism has greater explanatory power over idealism. It doesn't. In fact, materialists struggle to account for the fact that the physical world does not exist independent of observation, as quantum physics shows.

Consciousness is a complex structure that evolved over a vast period. It exists to make the functions of life more efficacious

That doesn't contradict the OP.

>It exists to make the functions of life more efficacious

*blocks your path*

>In fact, materialists struggle to account for the fact that the physical world does not exist independent of observation, as quantum physics shows.
it does not

Would you like me to find the papers showing that measurable physical properties do not exist before being observed?

Quality thread folks, keep it up.

>Consciousness is a complex structure that evolved over a vast period

Where is the evidence for intermediary stages of consciousness?

>as quantum physics shows.

As everything shows, really. Classical Mechanics are based on Numerological fudge factors and explicitly abstract ideas like "atoms" - a Bronze Age brain teaser.

>An especially unusual version of the observer effect occurs in quantum mechanics, as best demonstrated by the double-slit experiment. Physicists have found that even passive observation of quantum phenomena (by changing the test apparatus and passively 'ruling out' all but one possibility), can actually change the measured result; the 1998 Weizmann experiment is a particularly famous example.[1] These findings have led to a popular misconception that observation by a conscious mind can directly affect reality,[2] though this has been rejected by mainstream science. This misconception is rooted in a poor understanding of the quantum wave function ψ and the quantum measurement process.[3][4][5]

>These findings have led to a popular misconception that observation by a conscious mind can directly affect reality,[2] though this has been rejected by mainstream science. This misconception is rooted in a poor understanding of the quantum wave function ψ and the quantum measurement process.[3][4][5]

>Wikipedia

Saying the physical world does not exist independent of observation is not quite the same thing as a conscious mind directly "affecting" reality - whatever that means. The point is that quantum mechanics refutes realism and possibly materialism.

Read this: arxiv.org/abs/0704.2529

pan psychism is real, idealism will become real, materialism is what is useful

this is the truth if you disagree i am truly sorry

What does observation mean then, if not the literal act of observation?

>hich shows that an objective physical world does not exist independent of observation.
I'm pretty sure this is just a result of our measuring methods being so primitive and obtrusive that we cannot observe certain things without disrupting them

Even if there is a range of consciousness where does that come from?

It only applies to physical entities so small that the instruments used to measure them change their characters. It means that the act of measuring e.g. an electron will have a physical effect on the electron, because the instruments used to measure it interfere with its otherwise "normal" activity. A brick, for example, still operates more or less according to Newtonian and relativistic laws because our measuring devices don't interfere with the nature of its behavior.

That is my layman's understanding, anyway. I'm sure someone who actually studies physics will correct me if I'm wrong

>Why haven’t you accepted idealism?
Because whether it is true or false has zero impact on how we live our lives, its just one of those issues with are fun for niche group of individuals.

Its for the same reason most people dont care one iota about the arguments for non motion of Parmenides or the hyper skeptical "you cant kno nuffin" types.

There is no problem with wikipedia

you didnt read the study

As an idealist who is also an instrumentalist, this is why I don't appeal to quantum mechanics to affirm idealism. There's deductive arguments that can be used to prove Idealism.

God I hate it when non-physicists pull explanations from wikipedia without understanding what they're talking about, and I hate it when they edit the wiki even more.
The Copenhagen interpretation and the von Neumann interpretation (consciousness causes collapse) are both still in play. Neither has been ruled out. The double slit experiment did not disprove these. It's not rejected by mainstream science either, you'll find the Copenhagen interpretation still remains fairly popular among physicists.

No one gives a shit, physicists are illiterate.