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:

  • space_comrade [he/him]
    ·
    3 years ago

    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

      • space_comrade [he/him]
        ·
        3 years ago

        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.

          • space_comrade [he/him]
            ·
            3 years ago

            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.

    • CoconutOctopus [it/its]
      ·
      3 years ago

      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.

      • space_comrade [he/him]
        ·
        3 years ago

        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.

          • space_comrade [he/him]
            ·
            3 years ago

            Not sure I understand completely, does that mean a hylopsychist is essentially agnostic about how consciousness and matter relate to each other?

              • space_comrade [he/him]
                ·
                3 years ago

                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?

                  • space_comrade [he/him]
                    ·
                    3 years ago

                    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?