Why haven't you accepted idealism and God?
There are three main responses to the mind body problem. Either we accept that a) protons are unconscious and human beings are conscious: meaning that there exists a collection of unthinking atoms somewhere in between the two that when arranged in a slightly different configuration to another, practically identical, collection of unthinking atoms, miraculously gives rise to a first person experience of the self (materialism), or b) telekinetic interaction between the different substances (dualism), or c) the notion of ‘conscious’ protons combining together in though some mysterious mechanism (Panpsychism).
But what if idealism is true?
Contrary to common sense? Well so is physics. Quantum mechanics teaches us that objective reality, contrary to our common sense intuition, does not exist prior to measurement. In the standard Copengagen interpretation of quantum mechanics there exists a ‘Heisenberg cut’ – a boundary between the observer and the observed. Von Neumann argued that all material objects must be placed on the ‘observed’ side of the Heisenberg cut, and that only consciousness can be placed on the ‘observer’ side. The Heisenberg cut is one of the main axioms underlying quantum mechanics, and since ‘dechoherance’ can’t solve the measurement problem, the boundary must be placed somewhere. Defining an observer as an immaterial mind is difficult to accept for someone wedded to materialism; but it is the only way to solve the problem of ‘where to put the cut’, while holding to the Copenhagen interpretation. Otherwise, the measurement problem simply remains a mystery.
Thus, only idealism can solve the hard problem and the measurement problem. But this doctrine raises some serious questions: if the world is nothing but ideas, why do they seem to show more persistence and stability than objects of our imaginations or in our dreams? How is it that these ideas are ordered to such minute details so as to make the most detailed scientific investigations show consistency? When I use the word ‘idea’ here I’m referring to the Berkeleyan notion of ‘ideas of the sense’ – these are the physical objects we passively perceive through our senses, as opposed to what we are able to willingly conjure up in our mind’s eye though imagination. Since these ‘ideas of the sense’ are necessarily the product of a mind, and evidently not of our own mind – because I cannot, however hard I try, imagine anything as remotely detailed and ordered as what we perceive through the senses (even in a dream) – it follows that these ideas must be caused by another, far more powerful, mind.
That mind must be God.