Idealism is when you think that the world is determined by ideas, materialism is when you think that the world is determined by material. Facts don't care about your feelings! :gun-shapiro:
I think about it from the perspective on each of how we change the world. idealism would have it that if we change minds, we change the future, that our ideas create reality. materialism is the opposite. our ideas reflect things that we believe about the world but we can believe whatever we like and nothing will change because present conditions, including our ideas about ourselves and our conditions, are uniquely determined by the earlier conditions from which they arose. so, if you wish to change the world, you must meaningfully change present circumstances.
... I want to continue this post to talk about dialectics and historical materialism but I just got with a nasty aura that's robbed me of my last remaining brain cells.
this is the kind of nerd shit that's condescending and gets on people's nerves. philosophical materialism is the position that all that exists is the material, phenomenological world, that the world of concepts and ideals does not exist separately from it and does not in fact exist. so what? this is a political board. what does that actually translate into for people who want to actually do things in the world? how do you get there without talking about Hegel and Marx?
Im just telling you that you are wrong, Im not being condescending.
No sane human actually believes that one's ideas dictate how the world works, that if you think differently, the world will literally change due to your will. It's just a ridiculous strawman for intellectually lazy vulgar materialists to abuse. In these interpretations, idealism means focusing on "subjectivity" rather than focusing on "objectivity" like materialism, and of course, facts and logic triumph over feelings, so materialism is superior. Basically forcefully removing as much human subjectivity from the equation to obtain some "materialist" position that seems objectively correct. In the political context, this is manifested in brainworms such as economic determinism and all sorts of other essentialism and reductionism that seek to reduce history and society into a mechanical process, where the facts and logic of "the material conditions" dictate its progress, regardless of your feelings.
The materialism of Marx is not about the rejection and exclusion of human subjectivity, it is in fact the opposite. It is about embracing them and incorporating them into the equation to lead humanity to liberation.
No sane human actually believes that one’s ideas dictate how the world works, that if you think differently, the world will literally change due to your will.
It's funny that you call this a strawman because I've never seen any leftist on here or anywhere say, suggest that anyone believes this is the case. Tbh this whole post reeks of wrecker shit. If you think your comrades seriously misunderstand a foundational concept to marxism, shouldn't you at least post some kind of basic explanation?
have you looked at the responses in this thread, this is what people literally think is idealism and materialism. I hoped that the post will make people realize that they are seriously misunderstanding a foundational concept to marxism, and that they would actually go read marx. Theses On Feuerbach from The German Ideology in particular, in regards to materialism.
Yeah I thought that was like the textbook definition of materialism vs idealism
materialism is when you ensure that your soldiers are properly supplied with boots and such
On more than one occasion I’ve come across bands described as having lyrics that explore materialism and then realize it’s the other kind of materialism :too-bad:
western philosophers and not considering the working class to be a particularly unpleasant type of animal challenge (impossible)
Its just a the inherent contradiction of considering gobble-di-goop all day whilst the working class is struggling to get food to their mouths.
EDIT: AKA I think therefore I am VS. I am hungry therefore I am
yes, that was the intention. a lot of :wonder-who-thats-for: energy in this thread, unsurprisingly
Hot take: Dialectical materialism should be rebranded as dialectical monism.
A purely materialist/physicalist stance on the mind-body problem is untenable, undialectical and leads to all sorts of brainworms.
Sure it is, but by saying that cause and effect are entirely in the physical brain you're denying consciousness in of itself any causal efficacy and are declaring it entirely an epiphenomenon of matter, this is problematic when you consider evolution: https://web.archive.org/web/20210112001208/https://iai.tv/articles/consciousness-cannot-have-evolved-auid-1302
but its clear that material factors entirely determine what we percieve and therefore how we act.
This is not clear at all actually. Mainstream neuroscience assumes this often but doesn't really have enough empirical data to back it up or a coherent account to wrap all the data up in a nice package. There's still a whole bunch of processes in the brain that are a mystery.
Not sure where you're going with that honestly. I'm just saying the jury's still out on this one and that mainstream science doesn't have as clear of a view as often presented in popsci publications.
Never said so, but we seem to be leaving philosophy up to the scientists which is equally bad IMO.
This kind of takes the "hard problem" of consciousness as a given and pins both your metaphysics and epistemology on it. There's also a pretty broad swath of philosophers (not just neuroscientists) who consider the "hard problem" to be, like a lot of philosophical problems, to be a problem with the philosophical language we use to discuss consciousness, and not a problem relating to consciousness itself.
Edit to add: For example, if we knew for a fact that qualia weren't produced by purely physical processes, then the existence of "blindsight" (the ability of people who are neurologically blind to respond to visual stimuli they can't consciously see) would be a real poser - the brain damage that causes it would have to somehow also damage something non-physical that produces qualia.
Sounds a lot like panpsychism, which is kinda ill-defined itself because the word could mean a lot of things but I'd categorize most formulations of it as a form of physicalism and by extend it suffers from the same problem described in the article.
Not sure I understand completely, does that mean a hylopsychist is essentially agnostic about how consciousness and matter relate to each other?
Sounds like we might be on the same page actually, what are your views on how your personal consciousness relates to the world? Does your personal consciousness have causal efficacy in of itself or are its contents entirely dependent on the external world, however you define such an external world?
Thanks for the answer but I still don't feel as if its a proper response to the article.
What you're talking about still suffers from the combination problem (https://philpapers.org/browse/the-combination-problem-for-panpsychism) and it doesn't at all explain why our conscious experience is exactly as it is given what we know about evolution.
If all our conscious experience is derived from the material world it doesn't really make sense for us evolutionarily speaking to experience pain when somebody stabs us or pleasure when we orgasm, it seems as if the contents of our experience could very well be reverse in those cases and our bodies would still react the same as before. In a way it also feels like a fine-tuning problem.
Why not just give consciousness in of itself causal efficacy and rid yourself of these kinds of problems?
It doesn't work at all IMO, it misses the point just as much as any other physicalist framework.
A coherent account of how matter produces phenomenal consciousness.
On a purely pragmatic level? Sure it probably works perfectly fine. On a philosophical level you're missing a whole lot though.
On a philosophical level it is entirely untenable. Maybe "brainworms" was an exaggeration, but I have seen a lot of neuroscientist hot takes regarding the topic that make just about zero sense.
I think we're comparing apples to oranges here. I'm talking about ontology, not concrete methods of analyzing behavior or psychology.
Yes, that's called vulgar materialism, even old Marx wrote about it. Good modern sci does make a lot of dialectical considerations as part of the scientific method. Engels knew that, wrote it. There was a lot of lib moaning by professors in my upperclassmen classes about how diamat is an incredible tool but 'muh scary politics'. Anti-Duhring was a highly suggested read, but I know my uni experience was rare (that prof was a secret comrade) and I wouldn't go recommending scientists being the sole philosophers any time soon, especially of the fields mentioned in this thread. In the far future? Oh heck yes, breakdown of divisions of labor.
Neuroscience barely looks at the most common cell in nervous tissue, the humble glia. They aren't sexy enough for funding like neurons are. There are also other neural mesh sites in the body but we focus exclusively on the most obvious organs. Hard to figure how something works when you only look at so much of it, just saying. Then comes the issues of definitions, what is consciousness to the layman is different than that of the philosopher than that of the neuroscientist than that of the anesthesiologist than that of the youtuber psychic, though there are overlaps.
Idk, the first part of the take afaik would only be hot among Derrida-derived lenses (like Zizek his most popular student) which consider it a pleuralism, imo would only have an argument in idealistic materialism straight out of Hegel's work, though they have a tendency to blanket apply what is to Hegel onto Marx 1-1.
Edit; On more thought, Lenin might have been like 'technically yes, actually <much words>' since monism/pluralism usually is featured from an idealistic philosophical view rather than material (and if it is it tends to be the metaphysical 'vulgar' sort) and also tends to be very undynamic in expressions of the world so it fails to grasp complexities of the world (which has a history and such). Yes, but not so fast.
My hot takes since that's fun, Consciousness receptor? No. Consciousness generator? Also no. Damn right consciousness especially of the pop culture type is an illusion, deal with it, and you're a different person every day, every moment, ship of Theseus my fat ass, ship of pure cope. Its just easier to call it that way because of how we process things and the limitations of language-symbolism, psych... As humans. So arrogant to think we're the only ones that are alive, perceive and process in this place. Our other cellular siblings do all those things too, also deal with it, even the so-called 'simple' ones.
Now what illusions can do vs what we know of the world, hell if I know, we can do a lot by just imagining things especially as children, or even being asleep. I know it's one part our brain (or whatever neural mesh or sensory processor thingy) is an incredible bio computer of sorts doing calcs constantly, the other parts no clue. I do know from historical dev, whatever it is has some material underpinning somewhere, perhaps one day we'll figure it out if lucky. Unfortunately, human tendency is to run into something unknown and be quick attribute mysticism to it or blame some religious figure.
Idk, the first part of the take afaik would only be hot among Derrida-derived lenses
the trace would be a form of putting back the dualism/pluralism into a monism, with caveats obviously, so the take is Derrida compatible
Just to check idealism is where you think ideas come internally from who you are while materialism is where you think the ideas you have are a product of your surroundings and environment?
so an idealist watching back to the future would think that Marty's parents should have ended up the same as they are the same people so should have always acted the same way
Idealism is more like thinking that the ideas of man drove the course of history and social development. As a prominent example, western liberals often attribute their prosperity to their values and "democracy" or the "free market" and whatnot. Another example is a baby leftist diving into and ancom worldview and being frustratingly confused as to why nobody seems to give a shit about the lack of actual freedom and democracy that isn't possible under capitalism. (This was me at one point). The example you gave is downstream of that, but probably not the best example. I think it would be better described by the term "essentialism".
On the other hand a materialist will recognize that people's ideals have some effect on the way society is organized, and the way historical events unfold, but the material world shapes all of these things and forms a "dialectic relationship".
In other words, idealism is when you think that the world is determined by ideas, materialism is when you think that the world is determined by material :very-smart:
There's an inherent contradiction with Idealism because Ideas work or do not work largely depending on the material environment where you apply them. Furthermore, there's the question of how ideas emerge in the first place. We are all influenced by the conditions of the world around us and the world that Was (our memories, formative experiences, and the stories of others), so the idea that Ideas themselves don't form based on material conditions is just flat out wrong.
But it wouldn't be wrong to say that materialists would also say that ideology is the product of a material infrastructure
It cuts both ways with material forces having the stronger effect from my understanding.
I think it's an oversimplification to phrase it as a one way interaction, and carries the implication that ideology doesn't matter, which would introduce a huge blind spot to one's analysis. In a "chicken or the egg" sense the material world obviously existed first and shaped the ideologies of people and continues to do so. It is ridiculous for liberals (and monarchists, and other idealists) to view their ideals as done sorry of "triumph" over the material world without further analysis (which would obviously expose them to the uncomfortable contradictions that they've created for themselves).
oh yeah totally
the ideological whatever reinforces the material thingy
Idealism is when you think that the world is determined by ideas
Yo, Plato was wack.
