In Defense of Idealism

Here the argument is that not only does the normal, consensual, common sense view of the world have some intrinsically limiting aspects to it but that it is possibly just plain wrong. The challenge here is to directly challenge our inherited views about the world without throwing them out and replacing them with more BS. In the early period of rebellion against the prevailing materialist paradigm, there is a temptation to exercise open mindedness to the exclusion of healthy skepticism. The result is almost always a mishmash of views that are in turn accepted without reason and become yet another set of beliefs, that not only need defending, but becoming extra baggage that just slows, or potentially, retards any further progress. So, what we need is open mindedness AND skepticism in equal measure. This basic view is tempered with a realisation that there will always be limits to human knowledge and that living in doubt and uncertainty is healthy and natural. With that said, it’s useful to have certain arrows in our mental quiver that may prove invaluable allies along the ‘way’.

The principle assumption to be challenged and ultimately let go of is:

“There is an objective world ‘out there’ that presents itself through our senses to be constructed and interpreted by our brains. This objective world is ALL there is and at a fundamental level has the following basic properties – matter, energy, space, time and motion.”

This classical materialist proposition has been very successful in transforming our understanding of the natural world and through the scientific method has successfully overturned many superstitious religious beliefs. It has been so successful that most scientists still hold this view today more than 300 years after the Age of Enlightenment. Cracks in this view began to appear about 100 years ago with Einstein’s Relativity Theory and the cracks widened beyond Einstein’s wildest dreams with the advent of Quantum Mechanics. The subtlety of the challenge to the materialist view is in the fact that alternatives, that are less limiting than the above proposition, are possible and that do not require the relinquishing of the scientific method, mathematics, logic or reason. The alternate idealist view can in some ways better describe reality in a more parsimonious way, as Bernado Kastrup so eloquently argues.

The logical consequences of the above materialist statement are the following:

• The visible universe is a mechanistic machine following deterministic laws.
• The brain is the product of an evolutionary process within this mechanistic universe.
• Mind is the product or epiphenomena of the brain.
• There is nothing else besides the material world of the five senses.
• Our conscious experience is the brains attempt to mirror the external reality internally.

Of course, the argument is compelling as it appeals to our innate common sense. There are clear correlates of brain activity and experience and evolutionary forces have produced more and more complex brains, ending in … us. So, before tackling this view let’s remind ourselves of the commonly held belief, before Kepler and Tycho Brahe’s revolution, that the earth was the centre of the universe. This belief was also highly appealing to common sense. It certainly does appear that everything revolves around us. However, careful observation, data and mathematics directly countered this view and completely over turned it.

So let’s look more closely at two basic assumptions of the materialist view:

“Consciousness is the product of physical interactions of matter. Consciousness is therefore not a fundamental property of the universe but arises ‘somehow’ within it.”

“We exist in an ‘objective’ universe.”

As to the first, we are expected to just accept that, for now, scientific materialism gives us a promissory note that one day we will understand just how consciousness ‘emerges’ from matter. Even though there are no deducible emergent principles they would even hint at mind or consciousness in matter. All other emergent properties in nature can, at the very least, be understood in relationship to their component parts. For example, snowflakes emerge from the hexagonal properties of cooling water molecules. So, for now, we must just accept it arises through some sort of ‘magic’.

Applying Occam’s Razor, we can postulate a much simpler proposition: - that consciousness is THE fundamental property of the universe, all phenomena occur and evolve IN consciousness to the point where dissociated forms of consciousness can have a first-person experience of the phenomenological universe.

Donald Hoffman describes the scientific dilemna:

“In short, the scientific study of consciousness is in the embarrassing position of having no scientific theory of consciousness. This remarkable situation provokes several responses. The first concludes that, although consciousness arises naturalistically from brain activity, humans lack the cognitive capacities required to formulate a scientific theory. As McGinn (1989) puts it, ‘we know that brains are the de facto causal basis of consciousness, but we have, it seems, no understanding whatever of how this can be so.’ Pinker (1997) agrees. After asking how conscious experience arises from physical systems he answers (Pinker 1997, pp. 146–147):
Beats the heck out of me. I have some prejudices, but no idea of how to begin to look for a defensible answer. And neither does anyone else. The computational theory of mind offers no insight; neither does any finding in neuroscience, once you clear up the usual confusion of sentience with access and self-knowledge.

A second response concludes that we must keep experimenting until we find the empirical fact that leads to a theoretical breakthrough. This is a defensible position and, indeed, the position of most researchers in the field.

A third response claims there is no mind-body problem, on at least two different grounds: There is no mind to reduce to body, or no body to which mind can be reduced. The first of these two arguments is sometimes asserted by eliminative materialists, who claim that nothing in reality corresponds to our folk psychological notions of consciousness (Churchland 1981, Churchland 1986, Dennett 1978). As neuroscience progresses we will not reduce such notions to neural activity; we will abandon them, much as we abandoned phlogiston. We will instead adopt the language of neurophysiology.

The second argument, that there is no body to which mind can be reduced, is made most notably by Chomsky (1980, 2000), who argues that there has been no coherent formulation of the mind-body problem since Newton introduced action-at-a-distance and, thereby, destroyed any principled demarcation between the physical and non-physical. Chomsky concludes that consciousness is a property of organized matter, no more reducible than rocks or electromagnetism (Chomsky 2000, p. 86). However, what counts as matter is no clearer than what counts as physical. And why should we expect, in the non-dualistic setting that Chomsky endorses, that consciousness is a property of matter rather than vice versa?”

As to the “We exist in an ‘objective’ universe” postulate, this view is intuited and argued for but seriously challenged by experiment. The classic double slit experiment just won’t go quietly into the night. It suggests that the universe is rather an information system in which ‘things’ may just be results of observation rather than the other way around. Light can be a particle or a wave depending on what you choose to observe.

Other provocative and problematic experiments:

• An experimental test of non-local realism
• Experimental non-classicality of an indivisible quantum system
• Quantum erasure with causally disconnected choice
• Wheeler's delayed-choice gedanken experiment with a single atom

So, it seems more in keeping with philosophical parsimony, as well as scientific observation, that fundamentally reality could very well be:

• Mind or Consciousness
• Mathematical
• Informational
• Digital
• Virtual

… And that Space, Time, Matter, Energy and Motion are derived properties of the above context rather than the other way around.

Some well known advocates of the idealist view:

1. Donald Hoffman (Cognitive Science)
2. Tom Campbell (Physicist)
3. Bernardo Kastrup (Philosophical perspective)
4. John Haglin (Physicist)
5. Amit Goswami (Physicist)
6. Max Tegmark (Physics and Cosmology)