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> I don't understand how idealism can be a complete theory of the world. What are the minds made of? Ask an M-theorist "what are strings and branes made of?" T

> I don't understand how idealism can be a complete theory of the world. What are the minds made of? Ask an M-theorist "what are strings and branes made of?" They'd probably say something like "in M-theory, they are fundamental entities, they are not made out of anything more basic". Well, an idealist can say the exact same thing about minds. Different minds have different properties, just as different strings and branes can have different properties, but for both theories they are entities which cannot be reduced to anything more fundamental. > What are the physical laws that govern their working? From an idealist point of view, I'd say physical laws are regular patterns which exist in the experiences of minds. So, your question then becomes: What regular patterns in the experiences of minds govern the working of minds? The question doesn't make a lot of sense; the best sense I can make of it is – exactly the physical laws you are familiar with. They govern the workings of minds, for (as far as we know) minds always have experiences compatible with the truth of those laws. > How do we know there are more kinds not just one, my own (and arrive at solipsism)? I would say that the existence of other minds is an innate idea, an a priori concept. It is a belief which does not require any evidence to justify – because the entire idea that "beliefs require evidential justification" is part of an epistemic value system which has the existence of other minds as one of its unquestionable presuppositions. > The Standard Model at least posits a simple world, made of a relative handful of basic elements that follow some simple laws. Minds are extremely complex objects, and it seems very hard to accept them as irreducible - especially if you chose to believe that other people and their minds exist as well. But how are you defining "simple" and "complex" here? From another point of view, the physicalist world is enormously more complex than the idealist world. If we assume there are no omniscient minds, then the universe must contain a vast quantity of irreducibly complex information which no mind will ever know – I've read one physicist suggesting that the information-theoretic complexity of the observable universe is on the order of 10^120 bits – whereas a (non-theistic) idealist can say that no mind will ever know the vast majority of that information, and if no mind ever knows that information it never actually exists, so in a (non-theistic) idealist worldview the infomation-theoretic complexity of the observable universe is likely to be substantially less, meaning the universe is substantially simpler. (Whether the same would hold in a theistic idealist worldview is a more complicated question which I suggest we leave to the side.) Now, you might object to how I am defining "simple" and "complex" here; but the terms have no precise and unique definition – and even if some theory is simpler than another by some specific definition of "simple" and "complex", why should we care? Even if preferring theories which are "simpler" in some specific way turns out to be the most productive approach to the natural sciences (compared to preferring theories which are "simpler" in some other way) – why should we assume that the same must be true for other disciplines with quite distinct methodologies, such as philosophy? > Having read a bit about Berkeley's idealism from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy [0], to me it seems that it is simply a re-stating of mind-matter dualism with other terms I'm sympathetic to Berkeley-style idealism, but wouldn't defend every detail of Berkeley's views. Some idealisms do contain some degree of dualism – the mind itself vs the contents of the mind, experiencer-vs-experiences, my own mind vs the minds of others – but I don't agree that any of those dualisms can simply be reduced to or identified with the dualism of mind-vs-matter – and there is no single mind-matter dualism, since mind-matter dualism exists in multiple varieties: substance dualism, property dualism, hylemorphic dualism, etc, which disagree with each other about what mind and matter are and how they are related to each other. > But then what is causing the ideas? According to him, a special spirit called God This is one element of Berkeley's views I definitely disagree with. I think he is too quick to resort to God as an answer to questions which I believe can be answered without invoking the concept of a divine being. (You can be an idealist without being a theist – McTaggart is a famous example of an atheist idealist – and even a theistic idealist might prefer to invoke the concept of God more sparingly than Berkeley does.) In my view, causation is simply another kind of pattern which exists in the experiences of minds – to ask "what causes experiences" becomes equivalent to "what experience-patterns of the particular type we call 'causation' do experiences participate in?" – the obvious response to which is "the answer will be different for every experience". An idealist can provide a theory of causation without bringing God into it.

tsimionescu 5y ago
> Ask an M-theorist "what are strings and branes made of?" They'd probably say something like "in M-theory, they are fundamental entities, they are not made out of anything more basic". Well, an idealist can say the exact same thing about minds. Different minds have different properties, just as different strings and branes can have different properties, but for both theories they are entities which cannot be reduced to anything more fundamental. Well, here is where we get to my claim about complexity. The important point about strings or branes or particles in the SM is that they are characterized by extremely few parameters. I'm less familiar with string theory, but particles in the SM have electrical charge (+1 or -1), color charge (red, green, blue), anti-color charge(antired, antigreen, antiblue), spin (0, 1/2, or 1) and mass (this can take 16 possible values). There are 17 fundamental particles, and the theory describes all of their possible interactions based on the numbers above. Contrast this with the minds of idealism: to be in any way recognizable as the concept we call mind in our daily lives, minds must be characterized by probably thousands of parameters. If a particular version of idealism recognizes other people and the broad strokes of the world as we know it, it must at least allow for tens of billions of different "fundamental constituents", the different minds of all humans that have ever lived, if not an unbounded number given that more humans will be born in the future. But even then, if we accept minds as irreducible as we must with fundamental particles or strings, we should still be able to come up with a theory of the properties of minds, and dynamical laws that describe their interactions with other minds and/or ideas or other constituents of the idealistic universe. Are there any philosophers or scientists who have attempted to do so? And I don't think it's fair to say you accept all physical laws as describing the universe, as the physical laws describing two electrons exchanging a photon have no room for "a mind" in that picture. So, if you don't accept materialism (that is, don't accept that minds are an emergent phenomenon, with physical reality being fundamental and irreducible) then you don't have a complete description of reality until you also have a different set of laws which explain the functioning of minds.
- skissane 5y ago
  > The important point about strings or branes or particles in the SM is that they are characterized by extremely few parameters. You seem to be espousing the following principle: "All else being equal, prefer the theory whose fundamental entities are described by the fewest parameters". But why should anyone accept this principle? Even if it turns out to be the most productive methodology for the discipline of physics, why should we expect it to also be the best choice for other disciplines with rather different methodologies, such as philosophy? > Contrast this with the minds of idealism: to be in any way recognizable as the concept we call mind in our daily lives, minds must be characterized by probably thousands of parameters. I think your philosophy just moves the complexity elsewhere. You claim that the experiences of everyday life are somehow either reducible to or emergent from the Standard Model (a claim which is actually a philosophical interpretation of the Standard Model rather than part of the Standard Model proper), but you cannot give a complete explanation of how to do so – I'm sure you could provide some extremely high-level outline, but in doing so you must skip over innumerable details. Even just what we know of those details, is so enormously complex that I don't think anyone in the world could possibly know or understand all of it, only some little corner of it in which they've built up expertise – and there remain massive gaps all over our collective knowledge. It seems very doubtful we'll ever assemble a complete picture – indeed, the idea that we ever will is a rather massive leap of faith. And yet, it is claimed, this unimaginably complex complete explanation must exist in theory, even if it will never be fully known in practice. Why aren't you counting that complexity? I expect you'll claim that all that complexity is "hidden in" the simplicity of the Standard Model, waiting to emerge from it – but how can you actually know that is true? It looks to me like a gigantic unproven and unprovable assumption. > we should still be able to come up with a theory of the properties of minds, and dynamical laws that describe their interactions with other minds and/or ideas or other constituents of the idealistic universe Why ought we expect to be able to do that? > And I don't think it's fair to say you accept all physical laws as describing the universe, as the physical laws describing two electrons exchanging a photon have no room for "a mind" in that picture. Absolutely there are minds in that picture. How do you know those laws are "true"? Well, certain minds derived some testable hypotheses from them, minds performed some experiments and observations to confirm or disconfirm those hypotheses – and then communicated the results to other minds, and convinced other minds to repeat those experiments/observations who in turn also communicated their results, and eventually there is enough experimental/observational data to convince a sufficient supermajority of minds who possess the property of being members of the relevant scientific community that the law is "true". And when we say that law is "true", all we are really saying is that minds have done the things I mentioned in the preceding sentence; and also, since minds have in the past found the law a useful conceptual tool for predicting (certain aspects of) their future experiences, it is reasonable for minds to expect the law will continue in the future to be a useful tool for so doing.

tsimionescu 5y ago

> Ask an M-theorist "what are strings and branes made of?" They'd probably say something like "in M-theory, they are fundamental entities, they are not made out of anything more basic". Well, an idealist can say the exact same thing about minds. Different minds have different properties, just as different strings and branes can have different properties, but for both theories they are entities which cannot be reduced to anything more fundamental. Well, here is where we get to my claim about complexity. The important point about strings or branes or particles in the SM is that they are characterized by extremely few parameters. I'm less familiar with string theory, but particles in the SM have electrical charge (+1 or -1), color charge (red, green, blue), anti-color charge(antired, antigreen, antiblue), spin (0, 1/2, or 1) and mass (this can take 16 possible values). There are 17 fundamental particles, and the theory describes all of their possible interactions based on the numbers above. Contrast this with the minds of idealism: to be in any way recognizable as the concept we call mind in our daily lives, minds must be characterized by probably thousands of parameters. If a particular version of idealism recognizes other people and the broad strokes of the world as we know it, it must at least allow for tens of billions of different "fundamental constituents", the different minds of all humans that have ever lived, if not an unbounded number given that more humans will be born in the future. But even then, if we accept minds as irreducible as we must with fundamental particles or strings, we should still be able to come up with a theory of the properties of minds, and dynamical laws that describe their interactions with other minds and/or ideas or other constituents of the idealistic universe. Are there any philosophers or scientists who have attempted to do so? And I don't think it's fair to say you accept all physical laws as describing the universe, as the physical laws describing two electrons exchanging a photon have no room for "a mind" in that picture. So, if you don't accept materialism (that is, don't accept that minds are an emergent phenomenon, with physical reality being fundamental and irreducible) then you don't have a complete description of reality until you also have a different set of laws which explain the functioning of minds.

skissane 5y ago
> The important point about strings or branes or particles in the SM is that they are characterized by extremely few parameters. You seem to be espousing the following principle: "All else being equal, prefer the theory whose fundamental entities are described by the fewest parameters". But why should anyone accept this principle? Even if it turns out to be the most productive methodology for the discipline of physics, why should we expect it to also be the best choice for other disciplines with rather different methodologies, such as philosophy? > Contrast this with the minds of idealism: to be in any way recognizable as the concept we call mind in our daily lives, minds must be characterized by probably thousands of parameters. I think your philosophy just moves the complexity elsewhere. You claim that the experiences of everyday life are somehow either reducible to or emergent from the Standard Model (a claim which is actually a philosophical interpretation of the Standard Model rather than part of the Standard Model proper), but you cannot give a complete explanation of how to do so – I'm sure you could provide some extremely high-level outline, but in doing so you must skip over innumerable details. Even just what we know of those details, is so enormously complex that I don't think anyone in the world could possibly know or understand all of it, only some little corner of it in which they've built up expertise – and there remain massive gaps all over our collective knowledge. It seems very doubtful we'll ever assemble a complete picture – indeed, the idea that we ever will is a rather massive leap of faith. And yet, it is claimed, this unimaginably complex complete explanation must exist in theory, even if it will never be fully known in practice. Why aren't you counting that complexity? I expect you'll claim that all that complexity is "hidden in" the simplicity of the Standard Model, waiting to emerge from it – but how can you actually know that is true? It looks to me like a gigantic unproven and unprovable assumption. > we should still be able to come up with a theory of the properties of minds, and dynamical laws that describe their interactions with other minds and/or ideas or other constituents of the idealistic universe Why ought we expect to be able to do that? > And I don't think it's fair to say you accept all physical laws as describing the universe, as the physical laws describing two electrons exchanging a photon have no room for "a mind" in that picture. Absolutely there are minds in that picture. How do you know those laws are "true"? Well, certain minds derived some testable hypotheses from them, minds performed some experiments and observations to confirm or disconfirm those hypotheses – and then communicated the results to other minds, and convinced other minds to repeat those experiments/observations who in turn also communicated their results, and eventually there is enough experimental/observational data to convince a sufficient supermajority of minds who possess the property of being members of the relevant scientific community that the law is "true". And when we say that law is "true", all we are really saying is that minds have done the things I mentioned in the preceding sentence; and also, since minds have in the past found the law a useful conceptual tool for predicting (certain aspects of) their future experiences, it is reasonable for minds to expect the law will continue in the future to be a useful tool for so doing.