/ig/ Idealism General

Why no interest in eastern philosophy? Many ways in which they are compatible with idealism and even solipsism

>Continental philosophy

You do. Everything that you can interact with must itself be mental given that monism is true and Idealism is true.

From what I understand, idealism doesn't hold that there is no objective reality. It just holds that there is no justifiable reason to reify that reality as an ontologically separate "thing in itself". Reality is the union (in the math, set theory sense) of all subjectivity. But subjectivity is not free to arbitrarily change things.
I'm no expert in the field, though. Someone correct me if I'm wrong.

>how do you expain the fact that people see the same things, and agree massively about what they sense

This is actually a big problem for non-Idealists, not Idealists. If we were perceiving an objective reality, then why aren't they perceiving the same thing?

We can explain the differences in perception quite easily with mechanisms like top-down processing. Our pre-conceptions prime our experience to see things one way or the other, but we're still seeing the same thing.

>one or two cups?

It's the same cup. All of reality is grounded in one substance. It's monism just like physicalism, it's just that the substance is mental instead of physical. So chairs are still chairs, cars are cars. it's just that they are fundamentally constructed within the mind instead of a "physical" reality.

>how do minds form in the absense of 'stuff'

They don't form. Consciousness is not emergent.

>how do minds die?

The same way anything else would. You are one with your body so if your body is destroyed you are destroyed

>shells

The world around you is composed of consciousness. Think of it like in your dreams. It's just ideas and perceptions. Dreams are private, reality is intersubjective.

>what is the world behind my head like?

turn around and see

>*kicks rock*

oh so you can interact with the rock? that must itself be mental as well

>From what I understand, idealism doesn't hold that there is no objective reality.

You're right that a denial of an objective reality is not a necessary condition for Idealism. Your explanation about reifying what we experience into an objective reality that is somehow distinct from consciousness is a good point to make though.

>But subjectivity is not free to arbitrarily change things.

Another good point. If it was true that all things that are mental are subject to our control then nobody would ever have nightmares or scary hallucinations or mental illness in general.

> Why can't we control what is mentally constructed

If the world of experience was completely constructed by your mind, then maybe you could - but the world of experience is instead a compound, consisting of A) innate organizing functions, which we each call our individual "mind," and B) raw sense data, encountered by the mind from some exterior source, which is taken up and organized according to the latter's characteristic functions. The operations of the mind are predictable, regular, and introspectively knowable since they are the mind's own nature, intimate to itself - but automatic, spontaneous, thus not under arbitrary, willful control. The complementary sense data is also not under arbitrary control, but for a different reason: it is given from without, confronted. The sensory content of experience is unpredictable, but the form of experience is predictable - all of the above being simply how an individual human mind generates representations of its (the human mind's) relations with things-in-themselves that are independent from it.

So some would say, at least.

> how do you expain the fact that people see the same things, and agree massively about what they sense

Different individual minds all constituted and functioning in essentially the same way, relating to the same things-in-themselves that are independent of their individual minds, thus resulting in a communally shared system of private representations that can nonetheless be agreed upon sufficiently.

> how do minds form in the absense of 'stuff'

Minds are at the foundation of all existence, the "arche" in the very ancient Greek sense, and physical "stuff" is one kind of mental product, rather than cognition being one kind of physical product.

This doesn't answer every question - idealist systems can't unravel every mystery of how and why minds work, hence the recourses to God or Will and/or the intrinsic limits of human knowledge - but it aims to answer more questions about the mind's suitability to the world (How can we have infallible knowledge of purely logical and mathematical laws that yet apply to the physical world? How can we have reliable knowledge of spatiotemporal laws, like those of causality and spatial division and temporal succession? How can we feel moral obligation and guilt in ways that are binding yet not reducible to physical laws?) than can be answered from non-idealist premises.

> how do minds die?

They don't - they only adjust to different realms of intuitive data.

> is the world around me just composed of the outer 'shells' of the things I see that are closest to my eyes, or do I see hwole objects?

The world around you, occupying external space, is a representation generated by your individual mind (and your physical body, including your eyes and nervous system (!) is all merely part of this mental representation). Whatever you see/touch/taste/smell/hear/etc. is known by you (and your mentally healthy neighbors) adequately and truthfully *as representation* - but apart from all human perspectives, apart from all human ways of knowing, those objects are non-spatial, non-temporal things-in-themselves. You can't know what such things-in-themselves are like, independent of your mental relation to them; you can only know what they're like when they're processed through the human functions of cognition that you share with the other individuals of your species.

> what is the world behind my head like? is there jus nothing? some sort of existential placeholder in my mind for 'wall'? material uninterpreted reality?

You can't know, or even picture in your imagination. You can only dwell on the merely logical concept of "that which is independent from the spatiotemporally defined ways of being." This is a brute requirement of rationality, not any insight that could illuminate some supernatural, empyrean realm.

> *kicks rock*

*misunderstands the argument*

havent seen you in awhile Kantface user how are your studies coming along?

Very gradually, thankyoukindly.

If matter is simply an illusion, then what is the cause of the illusion?

The Idealist doesn't necessarily have to see what you call "matter" as an illusion. Just that everything is made up of consciousness just like the objects of the dream, except this is a shared dream.

*shared dream of common object(s).*

Matter in dreams is illusory. That analogy doesn't help you. But allow me to rephrase: Why do we not see the thing in itself?

Well I hope they don't get you down, I often hear worrying things about academia. I do miss seeing you and that Aquinas/Scotus fellow spar.

Semi related to that have your studies helped you religiously/ helped you find God?

What do you imagine the world is like when it's not being imagined by anyone?

No, you see a distortion of it, which isn't actually that incorrect scientifically. We aren't actually perceiving the thing as it is, merely what our photoreceptors can pick up on.

...

My question was why. Why do we not see the thing in itself, if everything is really mental?
There is an analogy I like using to refute Physicalism, of a movie theater. The projector and its projection are matter, and the screen is mind. But it is more expedient to say the screen is the thing experiencing and the projection is the thing experienced. According to Physicalism, the screen is an illusion, just a product of the projector. But if you run a projector on open air you get no image. Hence, an illusion cannot occur without a thing to experience the illusion, so even if mind were really matter then something of another substance would still need to exist to experience the illusion. This analogy works just as well against Idealism, since it posits the projection is really an illusion and part of the screen. Yet this removes the projector, and no projector means no image. If everything were truly mental, there would be no reason for such illusion to exist, I should be able to perceive the thing in itself. So, again, why do we not perceive the thing as it is?

The philosopher Berkeley once said
In the dark to a maid in his bed:
"No perception, my dear,
Means I'm not really here,
But only a thought in your head."

>Matter in dreams is illusory.
You're missing the point entirely. The objects in your dream: are they made of matter yes or no? If they are made of matter you're saying they're real in your worldview, and that's absurd. However if you deny they are made of matter then what are they made of? They're made of ideas, sensations, all in the mind. You still feel, see, smell, taste etc. even if you're lucid dreaming you still experience it all.

Just apply that to waking life. It's not hard at all. Every object is still an object, it's just made up of consciousness instead of this mystery stuff called "matter" that transcends consciousness.

>Why do we not see the thing in itself?

In a materialist or dualist worldview you couldn't. In an idealist worldview you can. Since all is one, and all is consciousness, you are seeing the real thing. In materialism and dualism, in order to save the existence of the mind, you'll have to say that the mind just interprets the physical material world and so it just gives you a copy rather than the real thing in itself.

> have your studies helped you religiously/ helped you find God?

I've become more open to the plausibility of Religious Mystery since my initiation to secularism, since existence-in-general has become more weird and inexplicable the more I've researched different worldviews. But so far this has supported skepticism/atheistic agnosticism/open-mindedness rather than any theism - such that, if I had to guess, I'd say that the various religious traditions have approached some truth about nature that isn't as theistic as they'd hope, but is more supernatural than naive scientism would expect.

> I do miss seeing you and that Aquinas/Scotus fellow spar.

Thanks, that was fun yet brief. That tradition of theophilosophy is sophisticated enough to allow for a compelling opponent, yet dogmatic enough (in my judgement) to be vulenrable.

> I often hear worrying things about academia

Well then take comfort in the fact that I'm not trying to get a job in that world.

>Why do we not see the thing in itself, if everything is really mental?
It depends on what you believe. If you believe there's some kind of deity, it made you that way, or allowed for you to develop in that way. If you believe existence is random chance, the reason is that it's just the way we evolved to see, hear, etc. Some animals can perceive objects in greater or lesser depth than we, so there's no real reason as to why, just coincidence. Either we never evolved to perceive things in their total detail, or we did and lost the ability.

As for the screen analogy, the screen would be the physical brain, and the image projected on it would be the electronic signals and neuroreceptors through which the body conveys that information.

>I'm not trying to get a job in that world.
Thats is good news.

>t, yet dogmatic enough (in my judgement) to be vulenrable.

How so Im just a dabbler who have read things like Edward Feser's book but it seems like it would be very difficult to refute or undo Aristotlian/Thomist theism without just going full Hume on them an being unreasonably skeptical.

One last question what is your favourite work of fiction?

>The objects in your dream: are they made of matter yes or no?
No.
>However if you deny they are made of matter then what are they made of?
Nothing, they are mere illusions.
>They're made of ideas, sensations, all in the mind
They are made of chemicals.
>You still feel, see, smell, taste etc. even if you're lucid dreaming you still experience it all
That is because the thing perceiving still interacts with the perception itself, even if the perception itself is at that time detatched from real matter.
>In a materialist or dualist worldview you couldn't.
Why not?
>In an idealist worldview you can
My thoughts look like a computer screen? The reason this is obviously wrong is because it is self-evidently true that my thoughts are different from my chair, my computer, my hands etc etc.
>Since all is one, and all is consciousness, you are seeing the real thing
How dissapointing the "real thing" is.
>In materialism and dualism, in order to save the existence of the mind, you'll have to say that the mind just interprets the physical material world and so it just gives you a copy rather than the real thing in itself.
You've got it wrong. In my view, you see the thing in itself, but indirectly through the lens of purely mental perception.
>As for the screen analogy, the screen would be the physical brain, and the image projected on it would be the electronic signals and neuroreceptors through which the body conveys that information.
This would mean that the mind and the brain are the same thing, which means mind is really matter, and the image is being projected on itself, which is incoherent. The thing experiencing and the thing experienced must both really exist in order for experience to exist.

>This would mean that the mind and the brain are the same thing
No, the Brain is the physical apparatus that allows for the mind to exist. The mind is the signal being perceived. It's like how the radio is the machine that allows a broadcast to be perceived, not the broadcast itself.

Does the signal come from the brain? If yes, then the mind is a component of the brain, which is all I claimed.

Elaborate on the "some exterior source"

Depends on what signals you're talking about. Our direct perceptions of the outside world come through the PNS and are processed by the Brain, so they don't originate there.
However, your brain can signal and make its own perceptions. When you think of an apple, you are making it out of previously perceived information, not an actual apple.

The physical brain would in fact send out a "broadcast" but all matter ultimately does in the form of sense data.

>Depends on what signals you're talking about
The one you mentioned here >The mind is the signal being perceived.

If the mind is simply in the brain then I, not my body, am an illusion. This raises the question, what is experiencing the illusion that is me?

Because it's not philosophy you hippy. Western Idealism still adheres to greek-invented logic just as much as materialism. Go back to your yoga.

The mind is not the brain, it is the culmination of sense data and a priori data being provided to the CNS by the outside world, via the PNS, and the CNS itself.
It cannot exist simply as the brain, and therefore is not simply the brain.

Does the mind exist external the brain?

Maybe, but it's undetectable by modern instruments, if it does.

How about the intrument of reason? Did I not prove the mind is external to the brain? Would not the mind be simply the brain if it were not external to the brain?

The sense data that makes the mind is external, it's not actually present in the brain. I don't know if the actual reasoning element is external or just the brain itself, or sense data originating from it.

When I say mind, I don't mean the sense data, I mean the thing perceiving and reacting to the sense data. If this is simply the brain then it doesn't actually exist, it's just an illusion being produced by chemicals in the brain. But as I demonstrated an illusion requires a participant to occur, an illusion cannot exist in a vacuum. So there has to be some transcendent mind which is external to the material world.

Why does there have to be some kind of transcendental mind that can't be measured? Why can't it just be a physical phenomenon unto itself?
Living organisms can experience sense data without having a brain or a mind. Why isn't the mind just a psychological phenomenon experienced by a complex machine evolved to produce internal sense data that it interprets itself?
The brain isn't the projector projecting on itself, it's billions of neurons sending signals to one another, so it's like a projector/screen that can project and in turn be projected upon by other neurons.

pure sophistry

>minds are immaterial

prove it

>Why does there have to be some kind of transcendental mind that can't be measured? Why can't it just be a physical phenomenon unto itself?
Because that would require it to be in the brain since there's nowhere else in the material world for it to be.
>Living organisms can experience sense data without having a brain or a mind
True, but they cannot possess sentience without them. An insect can ask "How", but it cannot ask "Why". Hence they are mere machines, they are not truly thinking things.
>Why isn't the mind just a psychological phenomenon experienced by a complex machine evolved to produce internal sense data that it interprets itself?
Machines follow their course, they are utterly lacking in intuition. If I think the thought "I exist", then I must be, otherwise how could I even think the thought? If the chemicals of the biological machine produce the phenomenon at random, it should just be a flash in the pan that I do not even notice. But the fact I experience thought at all proves I am a thinking thing, which is real, not a chemical illusion.
>The brain isn't the projector projecting on itself, it's billions of neurons sending signals to one another, so it's like a projector/screen that can project and in turn be projected upon by other neurons.
That may be true of the brain, but not of the mind, since the thing experiencing and the thing experienced cannot be the same thing. So a human being without a transcending mind is a projector playing on thin air.

>Machines follow their course, they are utterly lacking in intuition
But if a Machine is programmed with intuition, it will act with it. Just because most machines aren't programmed to be intelligent or sapient, doesn't mean they couldn't be. AI proves that.
>If I think the thought "I exist", then I must be, otherwise how could I even think the thought
Because you're programmed to think that way. Nature has chosen that predisposition, because a body that considers itself as alive is better at surviving than one that just mindlessly interprets data on the spot.
>If the chemicals of the biological machine produce the phenomenon at random, it should just be a flash in the pan that I do not even notice
No, because noticing is part of the process, and even then, there are processes you don't notice immediately. It's not random, because it's programmed to react to certain stimuli in a controlled, repeatable manner. You shiver when you're cold, whenever you're cold; you hear when your ears receive audible stimuli.

>But if a Machine is programmed with intuition
Programmed with intuition? Are you listening to yourself? Programming is the setting of a course which will be mindlessly followed, it might be possible to create a machine with intuition, but in no meaningful sense can anything be programmed with intuition.
>Because you're programmed to think that way.
But if I were programmed to think that way, I wouldn't actually be thinking that way, I'd be simulating the thought, showing what it would look like if it were real. Now, I can't show you my thoughts to prove it is real, but you can show yourself your own thoughts to prove it.
>It's not random, because it's programmed to react to certain stimuli in a controlled, repeatable manner. You shiver when you're cold, whenever you're cold; you hear when your ears receive audible stimuli.
Cold and audible stimuli are external to my body. This only works if my mind is external to my body, which is my whole point.

bump

All of this is an argument for monism, not idealism.

>In philosophy, idealism is the group of philosophies which assert that reality, or reality as we can know it, is fundamentally mental, mentally constructed, or otherwise immaterial.

I think this statement is meaningless. Whatever is the ultimate reality of the universe (if there is one) is reality. If this just a dream of a godhead, then that is reality, and thus its not immaterial. Material doesn't mean physical, it means knowable. Its something you can assign a label, model and name to. Space isn't a physical object or thing, but it does exist and is material because we can describe it and interact with it.

Therefore, it is not about whether the universe is material or mentally constructed, those concepts mean nothing, its about whether the universe is knowable.

> How so Im just a dabbler who have read things like Edward Feser's book but it seems like it would be very difficult to refute or undo Aristotlian/Thomist theism without just going full Hume on them an being unreasonably skeptical.

I think Aquinas' faith commitment does too much damage to the impartiality of his project (and I find some aspects of Kant's philosophy to be similarly suspicious, especially his moral postulates), and exposes him to what I believe are logical inconsistencies of Christian doctrine, such as the trinity, the supposed moral perfection of God's judgement, and the origin of evil.

But these weren't the issues that Thomist user and I were arguing about; we were instead disagreeing about whether Aquinas' Aristotelian model of perception implies that the knower has direct access to the external world (user's thesis) or implies that the knower only has direct access to their own mental representation of what's mind-independent (my thesis). I think such insistence on direct access to the mind-independent world is another vulnerability, one whose naivete isn't overcome by even such very sophisticated medieval models of cognition. But I have to admit that I studied the scholastics longer ago, and less intensively, compared to the time I've spent with transcendental idealism, so there's much I might be missing or misremembering. I've read a few chapters about and excerpts from Duns Scotus, and though I'm much more familiar with Aquinas I haven't even completed either of his Summas.

> One last question what is your favourite work of fiction?

I don't think I've read enough fiction to have a favorite. In high school I really liked Lord of the Flies.

> Elaborate on the "some exterior source"

"Exterior" as in "not part of the individual's mind or that mind's products" - and though you'll come across terms like "outside the mind" or "external to the knower," these words shouldn't be taken to mean that the source is spatially exterior to the knower. For these idealistic systems, space is something generated by the human mind along with the rest of the mind's representations, so when you experience a physical object which is X inches in diameter and Y inches in depth and Z textured on its surface, you are experiencing your mind's representation of something that, on its own, is not in space (or time) at all.

"Source" as in something that factors, in a foundational way, into the rational account you give of how you can be a conscious experiencer at all. You have knowledge of a spatiotemporally ordered world, and of your inner stream of thought/desire/imagination; these facts of consciousness sit there like problems to be investigated, like results of some process you can seek to explore. The data of experience is a consequence of something, and where there is a consequence there is a logically connected ground to which you can infer to provide the reason for the consequence. The ever-varying, unpredictable sensory characteristics of experienced objects are a consequence of how your mind registers its relations with things that are wholly apart from it; in your rational self-examination as an intelligent being, these mind-independent things serve as logical grounds for the consequences you have immediate awareness of.

Such things are not causes; causation occurs over time, governing the world of mental representation but not the domain of being that is independent from human mental representations. You can't know what such a domain is like, but you can conclude that there must be such a domain, and you can use empty logical functions (Kant's first table of judgements) to think incompletely about it.

India invented logic independently of the Greeks. All you have is hollow platitudes about hippie caricatures.