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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   2783 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 12, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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In my opinion, it's relatively easy to "debunk" materialism. I'd recommend watching Bernardo Kastrup's playlist, he's the leading proponent of Idealism these days. In his version, which he calls Analytic Idealism, consciousness is essentially all there is, and matter is a phenomenon of consciousness instead of the other way around. This is the view I subscribe to now. Some version of this view has popped up throughout human history and across cultures, it's arguably the mainstream view amongst the more philosophical strands of Hinduism (like Advaita Vedanta), Kabbalah has some overlap, the German Idealists mostly believed this (especially Schopenhauer who wrote clearly enough to remove any doubt about the content of his beliefs). Unsure how respected Kastrup is in academia, but he's definitely the person responsible for popularizing it in the last 10 years. Philip Goff is another recommended watch, his interview on Alex O'Connor's channel makes his case for panpsychism, a slightly different view that is essentially physicalism but with the caveat that consciousness is an inherent property of matter and not an emergent property of the interactions between certain sorts of matter. I think this view requires more assumptions than analytic idealism so I don't subscribe to it. That being said, it does address some of the major problems with materialism.

The basic case for Analytic Idealism goes a bit like this (this is far from a rigorous philosophical proof but it will suffice for now, will try to answer any questions about it):

  1. We should prefer monism to dualism because it requires strictly fewer assumptions. Any dualist ontology has to explain how two fundamentally different substances interact with each other according to a set of laws, which suggests they might actually be the same substance.
  2. That leads us to the question of what the fundamental substance of the universe is, for which matter/energy and consciousness/spirit are the two leading candidates, where one has to be a phenomenon of the other
  3. The mainstream scientific view is materialism, the view that matter is the fundamental substance (FS), and consciousness is a phenomenon of matter. This leads to the Hard Problem of Consciousness as you mentioned. As I'll explain, I don't think the Hard Problem of Consciousness is a real problem that humans need to solve, just a problem for Materialism as a worldview. It's like saying "the Hard Problem of Geocentrism is explaining why Mercury is in retrograde if the Sun revolves around the Earth". The answer is that the assumption is wrong, the sun does not revolve around the Earth.
  4. The main problem with materialism is that epiphenomenalism, one of its corollaries, doesn't have any good explanation for it. Epiphenomenalism is the view that physical events produce consciousness, but because physical events are all that occur (under materialism), consciousness itself has no impact on physical events. But if consciousness doesn't "do" anything, there doesn't seem to be any reason why we should be conscious. If seeing a tiger produces a feeling of fear, and the fear triggers a response (us running away), then it makes perfect evolutionary sense why we're conscious (to experience fear, for example). But if the process of the photons bouncing off a tiger, hitting our eyes, triggering an electrochemical response that leads to our leg muscle fibers twitching is sufficient, the fear we experience is just there for no reason. This is where physicalists tend to disagree with me. They are content to say that the electrochemical response in the brain that eventually leads to us running away simply is the felt sense of fear. Why should this particular physical process also be a qualia whereas, say, a clock ticking isn't? It's not even clear what in principle we could discover that would explain this sudden appearance of 1st-personness from 3rd person phenomena.
  5. If Analytic Idealism, the monist view that consciousness is all there is, and matter is a phenomenon of consciousness, doesn't have an equivalently hard-to-explain problem, we should prefer it to materialism. The Idealist equivalent to the hard problem of consciousness is the Hard Problem of Matter: if reality is fundamentally consciousness, shouldn't there only be a single "self" and not seemingly separate selves? This is nowhere nearly as problematic because we have an example of a single field of consciousness segmenting itself already: dreams. In your dreams, a single field of consciousness (your mind) localizes a "self" within itself that experiences phenomena as being external to it. We can extrapolate that it's possible for a universal field of consciousness to segment itself into selves that perceive themselves as separate from each other.
  6. Therefore, the most likely ontology is Analytic Idealism

Something else worth considering are theories of personal identity. Who are you really? And what makes you you as opposed to anyone else? This link does a great job of summarizing the three primary categories of views: Closed Individualism (CI), Empty Individualism (EI), and Open Individualism (OI). The last of which I subscribe to now. OI takes the position that there is a single self. Every experience in the universe is experienced by this Universal Subject. It should be worth noting that these views are ontology-agnostic. This video by the late Mario Montano makes the case that Open Individualism should be the default perspective under physicalism as well as Idealism. Practically what this means is that "you", that is, your deepest identity and not just the one associated with the human reading this now, will never die. But you should live as if everyone is you, that is, the difference between you and your father and a dog and your worst enemy isn't meaningfully different than the difference between you on your last birthday and you on your next birthday. Torturing your worst enemy is the moral equivalent of torturing your future self.

I'll second @Magusoflight 's suggestion that you look into NDEs. In particular, I can recommend the book Why An Afterlife Obviously Exists by Jens Amberts. It makes the case that NDEs are evidence of an afterlife because:

  1. Hundreds of millions of people have had them
  2. Pretty much everyone who has had one comes to believe in an afterlife
  3. No religious group is more likely to experience them
  4. There is a lot of overlap in their phenomenology and semantic content

One thing that stands out is just how profoundly meaningfully they feel. Just as your friends feel more "real" than the characters you meet in your dreams, the entities people meet in NDEs feel like the closest, most intimate friends, that they've known for an eternity. If the primary purpose of the brain isn't to produce consciousness, but to sustain the ego in attachment to our bodies, then it seem plausible that NDEs, which occur during periods of extremely low brain activity, are peaks at what the afterlife.

As to what I believe, there's things I'm sure of and others that are more speculative. I'm 100% sure consciousness does not end at death. Reincarnation in the traditional Hindu sense, I think, is plausible but unlikely (20%). But what really inspires me is the evolution of humanity. It seems implausible that one species of mammals can so dramatically develop their understanding of the universe that they can bend the world to their will and improve their lives by leaps and bounds without being somehow divinely ordained. So if I had to integrate all of these observations into a single belief system, it might look something like this: We are all God in potential. The purpose of life and history, the telos of the universe, is for God to develop a fuller understanding of itself to reach increasingly more intense, wonderful states of being. To approach what Plato called The Form Of The Good. Everything we do is, in some twisted sense, in service of this goal. Failure in this life can be a temporary setback. But with intelligence and perseverance, and a deeper understanding of our shared being, all will eventually taste the fruits of heaven.

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