Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

If I am following your last two paragraphs, you object to physicalism because it recognizes only one kind of 'stuff', yet it is fine that, under objective idealism, "'mind stuff' is the best 'thing' that we can use to describe everything." Is that not inconsistent?


Not at all. Objective Idealism doesn't claim physicalism is wrong because it only has "one kind of stuff", but rather about what kind of stuff that one "stuff" is.

The failure many see in physicalism is that the physical sciences can't (yet, if ever) tell us how there's a qualitative nature to our experience — that it feels like something to experience at all. How the eye turns photons into nerve signals, and increasing amounts about how the brain processes those signals into content, sure. What it's like to experience color, or even how there is such a thing as experiencing color and not merely electrochemical signals traversing myelinated tubes, not so much.

Consider, however: all of the content of your experience could somehow be false (think of how true and vivid a dream can feel, for example), but the simple, content-irrespective fact that you are having an experience can't be faked, can it? Wouldn't you still have an experience of having a faked experience? This is variously called an illusion, an emergent phenomenon, the "hard problem of consciousness", and many other things, with varying degrees of politeness.

Objective Idealism posits instead that this very experiential-ness itself is the fundamental "stuff" of reality, and that all of the content of what you experience, — specifically including the experience you have of being an individual, distinct "you", and even the phenomena that we call "matter" and "energy", themselves — somehow supervenes on it.

For now, the question isn't falsifiable, so it's often also dismissed as meaningless — not least by people who subscribe to physicalism and don't want to play any more, when this line of inquiry comes up...

EDIT: phrasing.


I object to physicalism because it doesn't allow for abstraction. It's basically being willfully blind to "everything humans think about and do." A chair is a collection of atoms and the forces that bind them, our ideas of chairs and their purpose are just meaningless fluff.

If we reframe to say that the atoms and forces of the chair are made of the same stuff as our thoughts, then that's way more in-line with how humans actually do things.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: