Comment by qsera
6 days ago
>reality is all that which is extended in space and time
You are missing the fact that "space" and "time" are also illusions painted on consciousness.
6 days ago
>reality is all that which is extended in space and time
You are missing the fact that "space" and "time" are also illusions painted on consciousness.
Alas, no I am not.
They're properties of the world which consciousness measures.
A mountain is painted in the ink of a photo, the mountain is not an illusion. You're focused only on the measurement, and not what is measured.
The point is that all existence is built on top of consciousness.
I understand your difficulty. It is hard to imagine the universe disappearing if all consciousness cease to exist the next second.
But is that really hard? Don't everything in your dreams disappear when you wake up?
Let me ask another question. Can you differentiate between a consciousness observing a universe, and a consciousness with a sensation of a whole universe, built in?
And the point of that is our subjective experiences only require consciousness, and not a universe that is independent of it.
>The point is that all existence is built on top of consciousness.
Then if all conscious beings (lets say humans are the only ones for sake of argument) die, then existence ends. Simply put, this does not happen because consciousness occurs in a substrate.
Take the thought experiment of the boltzmann brain, it still requires the assembly of probabilistic entropy to occur, it is not nothing.
8 replies →
I've been an idealist. I understand all the arguments. The base fallacy at the heart of all this is the one I mentioned.
On the very last point: the conclusion that consciousness is thin, like a photograph, and the world thick -- follows from the most complete explanatory account of how consiousness works. The idea that there is no world, or that the world is a thin transcendental ego -- this abandons the project of offering an account of consiousness at all and ends up in incoherence.
Within consiousness I am presented with: what I cannot change (fixed perceptions), what I can change (eg., imagined perceptions). This duality is immanent to consiousness itself. The imagination can apprenend the fixed, ie., I can imagine scenarios that I could, in principle, see. So there is, immanent to consiousness already, a representational duality: I have both fixed perceptions that I cannot change, I have mutable perceptions (imaginations) that I can -- and my mutable perceptions are representations of my fixed perceptions.
All of the dynamics of the duality of the represented and representation, of the fixed/external and of the mutable/internal -- are already immanent to consiousness.
What remains to be explained is: why? The obvious answer is that the reason i have fixed perceptions is because they are caused by a world that they depict, and the reason I have variable/mutable perceptions is they are caused by me as I represent that world to myself. The duality immanent to consiousness is explained by the duality of the measured and measuring.
Even if you abandoned the world "external" and replace it with "fixed", you gain nothing. Everything which seems objectionable about this duality is already present. If you simply assert it, rather than explain it, your position is weaker because you've nothing to say.
The causal origin of our fixed perceptions is the world, which impacts our sensory organs, interacts with our bodies, and produces a thin perceptual surface to us which causally-directly depicts the world that we are in. These fixed perceptions are constructed by our bodies thru this process of activation, which we can call "measurement with post processing" ie., a kind of digital camera rather than a chemical one.
But in any case, to answer your final question: yes, the difference is that "consiousness" with this duality of the fixed and the variable, and their representational relationship, only makes sense if part of consciousness isnt being determined by consciousness. The need to say what determine it means the "consiousness is complete" option incoherent, if "consciouness" as a term comes to adopt all the properties it needs to explain the fixed perceptions, then you'll find consiousness becomes both the material and the mental -- and all you have done is empty the word of all its meaning
12 replies →
Why "alas"?
Alas for my interlocutor's argument.
> You are missing the fact that "space" and "time" are also illusions painted on consciousness.
Both of these can be measured. They are not illusions.
Money is an illusion made up by people and agreed upon for basically the whole of the world economy, but not real. Space between me and the lamp on my desk is very real. The age of the world and the age of the universe is very real.
Just like the sensation of hearing a voice is an illusion created by your brain from the vibrations in the air, the perception of depth is an illusion created from the parallax between your eyes. We seem to have an easy time understanding that sound is an illusion, but have a really hard time considering that space and time are similar illusions...They are just some number (like the number of vibrations) that the brain creates a perception for you.
That you can measure it does not change the fact.
>Money is an illusion
Money is a number. Brain does not create an illusion for money, at least not in the sense we are considering here.
we need to distinguish accounts that are merely self-consistent, and those that are more useful.
the reality-is-illusion meme is self-consistent (panpsychism, simulationism, dream-of-god-ism, whatever). merely being self-consistent isn't good enough.
the alternative (and there is only one) is physicalism and its epistemology, science. the main appeal of this is parsimony, often referred to as Occam's Razor.
> those that are more useful.
Oh it is useful. It answers questions like "why do reality exist". "who created it", "What was before it"...Or may be I should say it does not really answer them but makes the questions irrelevant.
Just like how earth centric hypothesis posed questions like "Why is everything circling the earth and why is earth special", and heliocentric hypothesis made that irrelevant by proving that it is just an illusion caused by observing from the earth.
It makes the questions incoherent.
This isnt a benefit, it's a sign that the semantics you're giving language fail to actually model its meaning.
The position isnt self-consistent, unless you engage in the typical idealist peformance of pretending not to know what these questions mean.
In the end, idealism is defeated by the very implausibility of this performance. The idealist, is implicated in the rich ontology of the real world by the very use of language itself. Presupposed is this ontology, and the ordinary truth of ordinary propositions requires it.
If the question, "what was here before I existed?" is meaningful, then idealism is wrong. And it is meaningful, therefore it is wrong.
5 replies →
Not good enough for whom exactly?