3 ms·

> People think qualia must just show up this way because if you're committed to materialism, it seems there's no other option. But that's not an argument, it's

> People think qualia must just show up this way because if you're committed to materialism, it seems there's no other option. But that's not an argument, it's just faith in materialism. What other explanation is there? A magic fairy unicorn in the sky is making the qualia possible? How does that solve the problem you are pointing to, wouldn't we still want to get there via "first principals" ? And if we did find a magic unicorn in the sky, we'd study it and probably eventually understand how it works, what forces are acting upon it or vice versa. And once we'd done all that, someone on a forum would say of course this can't explain qualia because its "just materialism".

MacsHeadroom 6y ago
If you start at first principles you don't find support for a fundamentally material reality. Idealist monism is the alternative. i.e. the universe and everything in it is fundamentally mental phenomena (qualia) which may only appear to have material properties by the extent of their disenfranchisement from more connected phenomenal clusters.
- dr_dshiv 6y ago
  Right. See Bernard Kastrup's work. Or, Plato. Or Max Tegmark. In my experience, most people can't follow their arguments because their woo detector turns on and their rational faculty turns off.
namero999 6y ago
It's not much different than the magic unicorn in the sky that makes fermions pop into existence out of thin air (our current understanding of fundamental physics postulates just that). Every ontology gets a free miracle, you can't reduce everything in terms of something else, either you'll never stop or you'll get into circular reasoning. You get to choose your ontological primitive. A "particle" or "consciousness" do not have different woo-factor. But by choosing consciousness as a primitive you can explain much more of what we observe in nature (and as a nice side effect, there might be positive existential implications with such a worldview).

MacsHeadroom 6y ago

If you start at first principles you don't find support for a fundamentally material reality. Idealist monism is the alternative. i.e. the universe and everything in it is fundamentally mental phenomena (qualia) which may only appear to have material properties by the extent of their disenfranchisement from more connected phenomenal clusters.

dr_dshiv 6y ago
Right. See Bernard Kastrup's work. Or, Plato. Or Max Tegmark. In my experience, most people can't follow their arguments because their woo detector turns on and their rational faculty turns off.

namero999 6y ago

It's not much different than the magic unicorn in the sky that makes fermions pop into existence out of thin air (our current understanding of fundamental physics postulates just that). Every ontology gets a free miracle, you can't reduce everything in terms of something else, either you'll never stop or you'll get into circular reasoning. You get to choose your ontological primitive. A "particle" or "consciousness" do not have different woo-factor. But by choosing consciousness as a primitive you can explain much more of what we observe in nature (and as a nice side effect, there might be positive existential implications with such a worldview).