First, I am a physicalist. That means I think science MAY one day explain the nature of reality and difficult phenomena such as "consciousness" and "subjective experience". Please notice the use of MAY as opposed to WILL, lest science is accused of being arrogant. IMO, to say science will NEVER explain these phenomena, even in principle, is an arrogant position that the people who put it forward are blissfully ignorant about.
Lately, there has been an (apparent) resurgence of ideas like Idealism, Dualism, and Panpsychism. In the next few blog posts, I will write about my thoughts on these ideas and try to argue against them one by one. Today I will address Idealism.
It must be noted that like fashion or fad, isms like Idealism and Panpsychism come and go but the Physicalism continues to be present and gets stronger ever since the scientific revolution/enlightenment started with Galileo and even with ancient Greeks thinkers and some Hindu Vedic schools of thoughts.
On YouTube, you will find that this idea/philosophy of Idealism is put forward by people like Donald Hoffman and Bernardo Kastrup. You say, wait, what is Idealism? Oh right, I forgot to tell what I understand it to be.
The idea of Idealism says - we only know for sure what we experience in our mind. Everything else we know is via indirect mechanisms. Therefore there is no objective reality "out there" that is independent of our own experience. In other words, the objective reality out there does not exist. The only thing an individual A experiences should be considered real by them. And all the "external" reality, including other persons and their claim of their own consciousness, is not real. Now, that claim by itself should strike you as absurd and solipsistic and dare I say arrogant. To be fair, the attitude of over-self-confidence, solipsism, and arrogance by itself does not automatically make an idea wrong. The ideas such as the theories of special and general relativity and quantum mechanics, even though they are very counter-intuitive, have earned such a right to confidence by showing its practical verification thru objective means and usefulness. But let me give an example to demonstrate an argument against Idealism:
Let us imagine a thought experiment. Let us say person A and person B do an experiment. Person A who knows person C (and Person B does not know them) tells them (C) to go to the base of Eifel tower every day in the month of May 2022 wearing a very weird outfit that will be easily identifiable as distinct. Person B who knows person D (and Person A does not know them) tells them (D) to go to the base of Eifel tower every day in the month of May 2022 wearing a very weird outfit that will be easily identifiable as distinct. C and D are told that they will meet a weirdly dressed person. Both C and D visit the base of Eifel tower every day in May 2022. Hopefully, they see each other on one of the days. They (C and D) identify each, other due to their distinct, weird outfits. They exchange their names, the date, and what outfit the other person was wearing. C comes back and reports their information about D to A in absence of B. D comes back and reports their information about C to B in absence of A. A and B compare notes in absence of C and D and find that it matches. Hopefully, you will agree that this is a reasonable thought experiment that shows the objective reality of C and D and Eifel tower independent of A's or B's consciousness. Of course, one can make absurd, irrefutable arguments which I alluded to earlier which will/should stop any further rational discussion on this type of experiment. Then there is no point to continue :)
Idealism can be used against itself. If person A claims that only what is in their consciousness is real and another person's consciousness is part of it and is not really real. Then by looking, at it from the perspective of another person B, the consciousness of person A can be said to be unreal and is only part of the consciousness of person B. And as you can see it results in absurdities. To be honest, I do not even understand how people think idealism is true. The human "subjective experience" and intuitions have proven to be not useful when we practically try to understand reality via science and practically use it via applied technology.
See the below video:
Idealism is a qualitatively way more extraordinary claim compared to what Sabine was envisioning about the so-called "statistical independence for which Bernado was demanding substantiation. Basically, according to Idealism, the whole universe is progressively generated as and when the gaze of a conscious entity points at it. Before that and after that it seizes to exist. This means that before the first conscious entity came about there was no reality. When that conscious entity occurred and started gazing at whatever, it got generated. And if the claim is that there is some underlying universal consciousness right from before the big bang, and it continues to exist since then, and it is omni-visionary then the whole universe exists permanently anyways in its gaze. And if such universal consciousness did not exist, the first consciousness came out of nothing, and thus the universe did not exist before that. So all the deep-space vistas from Hubble and JWST are generated when some human consciousness sees those images. Such distant space and time are instantaneously generated, I guess faster than the speed of light. And note that if an image from Hubble or JWST is not seen by any conscious entity, then it does not exist. This is a way more extraordinary claim which will require extremely extraordinary proof. The quibble about whether "statistical independence" should be considered sacrosanct or not is a mere trivial point, which Bernardo seems to insist.
What do you think?
In the next blog post, I will talk about Panpsychism.
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