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> What exactly has it yielded? All of the physics and the sciences downstream of it came out of ancient Greek idea of materialism, the idea that things happen

by chr1 2y ago

> What exactly has it yielded? All of the physics and the sciences downstream of it came out of ancient Greek idea of materialism, the idea that things happen not because of wishes of sapient entities like gods or spirits, but because of matter mindlessly following some simple rules. There was a time when the idea that sun is just a fireball and not some thinking being was as hard to accept, as now is the idea that consciousness is merely a result of computation. Whether this idea is a dead end or not we'll see when we have a computer capable to simulate a human brain. > since we're obviously now seeing scientists reorienting their research based on those inputs, away from fallacious intuitions. Who does this? I have not seen any scientists achieving anything useful from this kind of reorientation.

mekoka 2y ago
You seem to have constructed a strawman out of your very own interpretation of idealism. Idealism doesn't condemn the study of nature (i.e. science). It merely says that nature is "dreamt" and that consciousness is the primordial stuff and of a different category. Scientists generally have no problem with this, since they can go on studying observable nature as the purview of science, as it's intended. The problem begins when some, emboldened by the successes of science with nature, don't heed the warning that studying consciousness with the intuition that it's also an emergent property of nature is a category error. How has idealism been useful? It's prevented those who took the time to understand its arguments from wasting uncountable resources on non-starters, allowing to redirect those resources to something actually useful, whether in science or elsewhere. You seem to be of the notion that investing energies in an attempt to prove an intuition that can simply be reasoned as demonstrably false is justifiable. We'll agree to disagree. 30 years ago the philosopher David Chalmers, a materialist back then, had the particular distinction of articulating and cogently framing the idealist argument, better than any idealist had before, in what he coined The Hard Problem of Consciousness. Many scientists who set out to work on this problem thought that "hard" meant that it can be solved. What Chalmers really meant was impossible problem. For instance, in 1998 he entered in a friendly wager with Christof Koch, a scientist who was working on explaining how the brain gives rise to consciousness. David bet to Christof that 25 years in the future, Christof would have gone nowhere with his research. The bet expired last year, David won. In the meantime he himself had gone from a materialist to dabbling with panpsychism. He seems to currently be laying the foundation of his transition to idealism. I've been watching Koch in recent years, as he engaged with Bernardo Kastrup. I could see that as recently as 2 years ago, Koch still really didn't grok the philosophy behind "the world as mind". Only a few months ago, after Kastrup had managed to help him solidify the pieces of that intuition, I heard him admit for the first time that consciousness cannot be material. He's now reframing his work with this intuition as part of his foundations. The stories of Donald Hoffman and Kastrup himself are similar. Computer scientists who set out to build conscious machines. They respectively got into cognitive science (Hoffman) and philosophy (Kastrup) to understand the nature of consciousness and ended up idealists. Likewise in physics, there are some who still resist quantum nonlocality, which interprets local realism as false (material properties do not exist on their own, they require a "measurer" i.e. an experiencer, aka the moon doesn't exist when no one is looking). Quantum nonlocality was demonstrated experimentally and people won the Nobel prize for it (2022). Scientists who still cling to local realism, when it comes down to it, do so out of religiosity toward matter. They waste resources working on all kinds of increasingly less parsimonious theories, which clash with solidified conclusions from other fields of study. I could go on, but I'll leave it at that. Good luck with the proof of consciousness via artificial brain.
- mannykannot 2y ago
  Earlier today, I got around to viewing the video you linked to in your first reply. As I have been looking into this issue for several years, its trajectory is familiar: start from a re-statement of Frank Jackson's 'knowledge argument' from "Epiphenomenal Qualia", assume that this shows consciousness to be inexplicable as a physical process, jump to the conclusion that consciousness is the fundamental reality on which the physical world supervenes, and throw in some arguments from incredulity to coax the reluctant to make this rather huge leap - plus, in this video, a smattering of vitalism. Jackson's knowledge argument had been fully anticipated by (and probably inspired by, I would guess) Bertrand Russell's aphorism "It is obvious that a man who can see knows things that a blind man cannot know; but a blind man can know the whole of physics." [The Analysis of Matter, 1927.] Fair enough, but where does idealism stand? Is there any non-circular argument for the proposition that learning all of idealism (or any specific variety of panpsychism or dualism, for that matter) would achieve for Russell's blind man what knowing all of physics cannot? Will he come to know what it is like to see the world?
  - mekoka 2y ago
    What you perceive as a "huge leap" is not so much the promotion of consciousness as fundamental, but rather the demotion of matter from that same stance. The former is simply a byproduct of the latter. That in the process it seems to interlock so well with findings in various fields of study should admittedly be considered for now as just a happy accident. But we've abided by the law of parsimony to orient our inquiries on much less hints. > assume that this shows consciousness to be inexplicable as a physical process, jump to the conclusion that consciousness is the fundamental reality on which the physical world supervenes, and throw in some arguments from incredulity to coax the reluctant to make this rather huge leap You must ensure to have a proper grasp of the chasm between qualia and conceptual knowing that is pointed at in the hard problem of consciousness. Anyone who does should see how removed from physical processes qualia are. It's just self-evident, not a belief. The experience of a smell is not a thought. You don't reason the taste of chocolate. Those "things" sit in their own mysterious "weirdness". We experience reality in exactly two ways. Consciousness and matter. Those are the only two big mysteries. So, either matter is first, consciousness is first, or they co-arise independently and somehow coalesce. Those are the three possibilities. To declare any one to be a "huge leap" implies that you conceive of another as more acceptable. If by "huge leap" you mean specifically anything that is not materialism, note that of the three propositions, materialism is by far the least parsimonious and the one that creates the most problems. We culturally favor it as the default stance for two reasons. First, our perception of reality is biased to it. Second, we've had great success studying that perceived reality with science. But as Russell noted, science has only explained how the world works, not what the world is. We've traditionally approached the latter question starting with a "rookie mistake", as Donald Hoffman puts it. We assumed that science also pointed at the world being material. Under analysis, that assumption crumbles, as it's revealed to be built upon other unchecked assumptions, that cause many problems in philosophy and in physics. We have two possible alternatives to materialism. Of the two, consciousness as sole primitive is the most parsimonious and the one which solves most problems in the process, while creating the least. > Is there any non-circular argument for the proposition that learning all of idealism (or any specific variety of panpsychism or dualism, for that matter) would achieve for Russell's blind man what knowing all of physics cannot? I'm not sure that I understood your question here, but there's no such proposition. Idealism is a field of inquiry. It's a set of arguments that eliminate matter as a possible candidate for the basis of reality. Like physics, or any other philosophy, it belongs to conceptual knowledge. It can't give you access to experiential knowing.
strogonoff 2y ago
> All of the physics and the sciences downstream of it came out of ancient Greek idea of materialism, the idea that things happen not because of wishes of sapient entities like gods or spirits, but because of matter mindlessly following some simple rules. False. Natural philosophy of Aristotle et al., a precursor to both modern physics and Abrahamic religions[0], does not[1] assume materialism in the slightest. > I have not seen any scientists achieving anything useful from this kind of reorientation. Please define or qualify “useful”. Useful how and for whom? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unmoved_mover https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unmoved_mover [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Soul https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Soul
- chr1 2y ago
  "Useful" were the things that have allowed us to create new technologies: from internet to medicine to rockets. Belief in idealism not only did not produce anything, it did not even make any measurable impact. Parts of the work of Aristotle that were based on idealism are the parts that have been discarded as hindering understanding of physics or plain wrong.
  - strogonoff 2y ago
    > medicine Sciences that directly concern human flourishing (medicine, psychology, sociology, economy) are either largely stuck in the middle ages (we can barely make things work reliably, and when they occasionally do we are not quite sure why), or in fact invoke materialism-inconsistent ideas to various degrees (e.g., stress being recognised as a cause or contributing factor of numerous diseases). > Belief in idealism not only did not produce anything And what has belief in the materialism produced? Idealism, materialism, dualism, etc. concern theory of mind first and foremost, and would likely be irrelevant to “producing” whatever artefacts you were thinking of. > Parts of the work of Aristotle that were based on idealism are the parts that have been discarded as hindering understanding of physics or plain wrong. Let’s unpack this. 1. Artistotle’s takes on soul and so on are not based on idealism. (Check them out. They have much more in common with Cartesian dualism than with what we refer to idealism, but of course could be based on neither given both were fleshed out after his time.) 2. The parts you refer to were not discarded—on the contrary, they are believed by, probably, most people on the planet today (who follow some Abrahamic religion). 3. Many prominent Western scientists indirectly believe or believed in Aristotle’s takes, too—by being Christian. There is no conflict in a scientist holding that belief if you understand scientific method, its scope, its purpose, and lack of explanatory powers: natural sciences do not concern themselves with non-falsifiable questions such as “why things exist?”, “do I see things as they actually are?”, “what makes me myself?”, “why do I think?”, “does consciousness arise from atoms?”, and so on. In the framework of scientific method, questions like those cannot have a wrong answer—the questions themselves merely lie out of scope. Obviously, that does not make those questions unimportant—it only makes scientific method not a suitable tool for investigating them at this time.

by chr1 2y ago

mekoka 2y ago

You seem to have constructed a strawman out of your very own interpretation of idealism. Idealism doesn't condemn the study of nature (i.e. science). It merely says that nature is "dreamt" and that consciousness is the primordial stuff and of a different category. Scientists generally have no problem with this, since they can go on studying observable nature as the purview of science, as it's intended. The problem begins when some, emboldened by the successes of science with nature, don't heed the warning that studying consciousness with the intuition that it's also an emergent property of nature is a category error. How has idealism been useful? It's prevented those who took the time to understand its arguments from wasting uncountable resources on non-starters, allowing to redirect those resources to something actually useful, whether in science or elsewhere. You seem to be of the notion that investing energies in an attempt to prove an intuition that can simply be reasoned as demonstrably false is justifiable. We'll agree to disagree. 30 years ago the philosopher David Chalmers, a materialist back then, had the particular distinction of articulating and cogently framing the idealist argument, better than any idealist had before, in what he coined The Hard Problem of Consciousness. Many scientists who set out to work on this problem thought that "hard" meant that it can be solved. What Chalmers really meant was impossible problem. For instance, in 1998 he entered in a friendly wager with Christof Koch, a scientist who was working on explaining how the brain gives rise to consciousness. David bet to Christof that 25 years in the future, Christof would have gone nowhere with his research. The bet expired last year, David won. In the meantime he himself had gone from a materialist to dabbling with panpsychism. He seems to currently be laying the foundation of his transition to idealism. I've been watching Koch in recent years, as he engaged with Bernardo Kastrup. I could see that as recently as 2 years ago, Koch still really didn't grok the philosophy behind "the world as mind". Only a few months ago, after Kastrup had managed to help him solidify the pieces of that intuition, I heard him admit for the first time that consciousness cannot be material. He's now reframing his work with this intuition as part of his foundations. The stories of Donald Hoffman and Kastrup himself are similar. Computer scientists who set out to build conscious machines. They respectively got into cognitive science (Hoffman) and philosophy (Kastrup) to understand the nature of consciousness and ended up idealists. Likewise in physics, there are some who still resist quantum nonlocality, which interprets local realism as false (material properties do not exist on their own, they require a "measurer" i.e. an experiencer, aka the moon doesn't exist when no one is looking). Quantum nonlocality was demonstrated experimentally and people won the Nobel prize for it (2022). Scientists who still cling to local realism, when it comes down to it, do so out of religiosity toward matter. They waste resources working on all kinds of increasingly less parsimonious theories, which clash with solidified conclusions from other fields of study. I could go on, but I'll leave it at that. Good luck with the proof of consciousness via artificial brain.

mannykannot 2y ago
Earlier today, I got around to viewing the video you linked to in your first reply. As I have been looking into this issue for several years, its trajectory is familiar: start from a re-statement of Frank Jackson's 'knowledge argument' from "Epiphenomenal Qualia", assume that this shows consciousness to be inexplicable as a physical process, jump to the conclusion that consciousness is the fundamental reality on which the physical world supervenes, and throw in some arguments from incredulity to coax the reluctant to make this rather huge leap - plus, in this video, a smattering of vitalism. Jackson's knowledge argument had been fully anticipated by (and probably inspired by, I would guess) Bertrand Russell's aphorism "It is obvious that a man who can see knows things that a blind man cannot know; but a blind man can know the whole of physics." [The Analysis of Matter, 1927.] Fair enough, but where does idealism stand? Is there any non-circular argument for the proposition that learning all of idealism (or any specific variety of panpsychism or dualism, for that matter) would achieve for Russell's blind man what knowing all of physics cannot? Will he come to know what it is like to see the world?
- mekoka 2y ago
  What you perceive as a "huge leap" is not so much the promotion of consciousness as fundamental, but rather the demotion of matter from that same stance. The former is simply a byproduct of the latter. That in the process it seems to interlock so well with findings in various fields of study should admittedly be considered for now as just a happy accident. But we've abided by the law of parsimony to orient our inquiries on much less hints. > assume that this shows consciousness to be inexplicable as a physical process, jump to the conclusion that consciousness is the fundamental reality on which the physical world supervenes, and throw in some arguments from incredulity to coax the reluctant to make this rather huge leap You must ensure to have a proper grasp of the chasm between qualia and conceptual knowing that is pointed at in the hard problem of consciousness. Anyone who does should see how removed from physical processes qualia are. It's just self-evident, not a belief. The experience of a smell is not a thought. You don't reason the taste of chocolate. Those "things" sit in their own mysterious "weirdness". We experience reality in exactly two ways. Consciousness and matter. Those are the only two big mysteries. So, either matter is first, consciousness is first, or they co-arise independently and somehow coalesce. Those are the three possibilities. To declare any one to be a "huge leap" implies that you conceive of another as more acceptable. If by "huge leap" you mean specifically anything that is not materialism, note that of the three propositions, materialism is by far the least parsimonious and the one that creates the most problems. We culturally favor it as the default stance for two reasons. First, our perception of reality is biased to it. Second, we've had great success studying that perceived reality with science. But as Russell noted, science has only explained how the world works, not what the world is. We've traditionally approached the latter question starting with a "rookie mistake", as Donald Hoffman puts it. We assumed that science also pointed at the world being material. Under analysis, that assumption crumbles, as it's revealed to be built upon other unchecked assumptions, that cause many problems in philosophy and in physics. We have two possible alternatives to materialism. Of the two, consciousness as sole primitive is the most parsimonious and the one which solves most problems in the process, while creating the least. > Is there any non-circular argument for the proposition that learning all of idealism (or any specific variety of panpsychism or dualism, for that matter) would achieve for Russell's blind man what knowing all of physics cannot? I'm not sure that I understood your question here, but there's no such proposition. Idealism is a field of inquiry. It's a set of arguments that eliminate matter as a possible candidate for the basis of reality. Like physics, or any other philosophy, it belongs to conceptual knowledge. It can't give you access to experiential knowing.

strogonoff 2y ago

> All of the physics and the sciences downstream of it came out of ancient Greek idea of materialism, the idea that things happen not because of wishes of sapient entities like gods or spirits, but because of matter mindlessly following some simple rules. False. Natural philosophy of Aristotle et al., a precursor to both modern physics and Abrahamic religions[0], does not[1] assume materialism in the slightest. > I have not seen any scientists achieving anything useful from this kind of reorientation. Please define or qualify “useful”. Useful how and for whom? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unmoved_mover https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unmoved_mover [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Soul https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Soul

chr1 2y ago
"Useful" were the things that have allowed us to create new technologies: from internet to medicine to rockets. Belief in idealism not only did not produce anything, it did not even make any measurable impact. Parts of the work of Aristotle that were based on idealism are the parts that have been discarded as hindering understanding of physics or plain wrong.
- strogonoff 2y ago
  > medicine Sciences that directly concern human flourishing (medicine, psychology, sociology, economy) are either largely stuck in the middle ages (we can barely make things work reliably, and when they occasionally do we are not quite sure why), or in fact invoke materialism-inconsistent ideas to various degrees (e.g., stress being recognised as a cause or contributing factor of numerous diseases). > Belief in idealism not only did not produce anything And what has belief in the materialism produced? Idealism, materialism, dualism, etc. concern theory of mind first and foremost, and would likely be irrelevant to “producing” whatever artefacts you were thinking of. > Parts of the work of Aristotle that were based on idealism are the parts that have been discarded as hindering understanding of physics or plain wrong. Let’s unpack this. 1. Artistotle’s takes on soul and so on are not based on idealism. (Check them out. They have much more in common with Cartesian dualism than with what we refer to idealism, but of course could be based on neither given both were fleshed out after his time.) 2. The parts you refer to were not discarded—on the contrary, they are believed by, probably, most people on the planet today (who follow some Abrahamic religion). 3. Many prominent Western scientists indirectly believe or believed in Aristotle’s takes, too—by being Christian. There is no conflict in a scientist holding that belief if you understand scientific method, its scope, its purpose, and lack of explanatory powers: natural sciences do not concern themselves with non-falsifiable questions such as “why things exist?”, “do I see things as they actually are?”, “what makes me myself?”, “why do I think?”, “does consciousness arise from atoms?”, and so on. In the framework of scientific method, questions like those cannot have a wrong answer—the questions themselves merely lie out of scope. Obviously, that does not make those questions unimportant—it only makes scientific method not a suitable tool for investigating them at this time.