Do Idealism and Materialism Have It All Sewn Up?

[peter]

I was pondering the question as to whether an atheist could be an idealist, or whether to admit that something existed beyond the material was to immediately undermine ones credentials as a paid up hard boiled rationalist, so decided to take a quick check on the definition of what idealism actually entails. It appears however that I have it all wrong. I'd assumed that belief in God/Gods would fall into the category of idealism in that God is an Idea (with a capital I in the sense of a Platonic idea that has 'existence' beyond the confines of the skull) rather than a material phenomenon. Googling idealism instead threw up the constraint of exactly the opposite - that idealism is instead only concerned with that which is produced in the mind - that all knowledge of our existence is centered around the ideas produced in our brains and seemed to have nothing to say about the existence of otherwise of the non-material beyond the mind itself.

I don't know about you (and I may have got the whole thing entirely wrong from my cursory search), but to me this makes idealism almost a special case of materialism rather than an encompassing of all 'that which cannot be put together with atoms'. And if that is the case - then where does belief in the spiritual fall if it as seen as existent beyond the inside of our heads. If it isn't idealism, and it isn't materialism (and it definitely isn't that) - then what is it?

[Zarathustra]

I don't know about you (and I may have got the whole thing entirely wrong from my cursory search), but to me this makes idealism almost a special case of materialism rather than an encompassing of all 'that which cannot be put together with atoms'. And if that is the case - then where does belief in the spiritual fall if it as seen as existent beyond the inside of our heads. If it isn't idealism, and it isn't materialism (and it definitely isn't that) - then what is it?

Idealism is most certainly not a special case of materialism. I think you are looking at idealism "from the outside," with the bias of scientific realism which our 21st century culture takes for granted. You are thinking that the mind is produced by the brain, and therefore everything "in the mind" is actually a physical event in the brain, so that idealism reduces to materialism. This is just reductionism.

An atheist could be an idealist. Belief in god is not dependent upon realism. Indeed, if the universe isn't real, then there is no need of a creator. Of course, this begs the question of where the subjective mind came from that is imagining all this stuff.

[peter]

Agreed Z- the mind reduced to incredibly complex patterns of neuronal activity overlaid on the physical matrix of the brain. But Google idealism and it is in terms of brain produced activity that it is defined. There was no mention (in the granted cursory glance I gave the results) of those ideas having existential reality beyond the mind; In fact no pronouncement of what might actually constitute the mind at all. This must be the critical test of where idealism sits in relation to materialism; if idealism as a doctrine/belief system (or however you describe it) is truly separate from material, then the material can have no place in it........


............ hang on ........


unless you take the mind as being the true reality and the physical infrastructure of the brain as being a product of that, just as much as everything else?

Hmmm........

[Zarathustra]

Google idealism and it is in terms of brain produced activity that it is defined.

I've never seen any version of idealism that makes mention of brains.

There was no mention (in the granted cursory glance I gave the results) of those ideas having existential reality beyond the mind; In fact no pronouncement of what might actually constitute the mind at all.

Correct.

This must be the critical test of where idealism sits in relation to materialism; if idealism as a doctrine/belief system (or however you describe it) is truly separate from material, then the material can have no place in it........

Exactly right. There is no matter or materialism in idealism. On this view, matter is just an abstraction, an idea that we invent based on our mental Impressions, which has no reality beyond these impressions.

............ hang on ........


unless you take the mind as being the true reality and the physical infrastructure of the brain as being a product of that, just as much as everything else?

Hmmm........

Yes, in idealism mind is the ultimate reality. Reality would be like the Matrix except without all the hardware to make it happen.

There are not many people who take idealism seriously nowadays. It was proposed because of the epistemological certainty we can have for our conscious experience, whereas our knowledge of external objects is in doubt. Our direct knowledge is of our mental experience, which mediates our knowledge of external objects. Indeed, the idealists assumed we can have no knowledge of the latter because we do not directly perceive them. Empiricists like Berkeley thought this would ground our knowledge directly on empirical evidence. But empiricism is wrong. Our knowledge goes well beyond what we directly perceive. Deutsche gave an excellent critique of empiricism in his book, if you want to refresh yourself with that argument. Empirical evidence is important to check the validity of theories, but absolute empiricism leads to idealism and solipsism, even skepticism (as Hume showed).

[peter]

Gosh yes; these are slippery ideas Z! I need seriously to refresh - whatever handle I ever had on them seems to be loosening as easily as it was hard to grasp in the first place!

[Fist and Faith]

What does "directly perceive" mean?

[Zarathustra]

What does "directly perceive" mean?

When looking at an apple, I directly perceive the color red--an experience in my consciousness. But the fact that it is an apple outside of me is mediated by many more factors than this immediate experience, such as my previous experience with apples, my learning how to walk in three dimensional space, my muscle memory that trains me to expect that reaching out will allow me to grasp objects, etc.

All we ever experience are different states of our own consciousness. This is what we immediately perceive (or "apprehend," if you want a more general term). Everything else beyond these states of consciousness is inferred by our reason and mediated by our sense organs. That is why Kant invented terms like "thing in itself" (noumenon) distinct from phenomenon.

[Fist and Faith]

Sadly, that didn't help me. And I'm entirely willing to take the blame. Do you directly perceive the apple?

[Zarathustra]

Do you directly perceive the apple?

No, you directly see a "holographic" representation in your mind of an object that we assume is outside our heads. That object is only indirectly seen.

Even if we didn't have the subjective hurdle to jump, we'd have to say that we don't directly see the apple, we see light waves that are bouncing off of it. And our sense organs mediate this transmission of input data, such that someone who is color blind is seeing something different from me, though we assume it's the same object. But our immediate experience is the mental state itself, which we unthinkingly apply to external objects.

However, there is something to be said about this realization occurring only after reflection. In our "natural attitude," our pre-thematic, uncritical, unreflective view, we do seem to directly perceive apples and other objects in the world. The illusion of getting "out of our heads" is pretty convincing and seems to be immediate. But if this were the case, if we actually saw objects directly, we'd never be fooled by illusions. In an important sense, our experience of the world is itself an illusion (the illusion of immediacy), because perception seems to transcend our minds, when everything we experience is actually, literally in our minds. All experience is mental, obviously.

This dovetails nicely with my last post in the evolution thread. We assume that perception is accurate because if it weren't, we wouldn't have been able to navigate the real world in order to survive. But it is reason that corrects our imperfect senses and carries us beyond mere appearance. And it is reason that turns an appearance of an apple into the apprehension of an external object. The way that appearances morph together in a reasonable way presents the world in its transcendent nature. For instance, walking around an object, changing our place relative to it, produces a multiplicity of appearances that change in a reasonable way that makes sense precisely as if the apple were external to us. It is this pattern of appearance through time, this unity of appearance in its multiplicity, that convinces us on a visceral level that the world is real and external to us. It's the same reason that VR can seem real: as perceptions change from one moment to the next, they do so in a reasonable fashion that is consistent with a 3d world in which we are immersed as objects in relation to other objects. If this consistent geometrical order were violated (e.g. a flaw in the VR program), the illusion would break down.

So we come to know the world intuitively and instinctively because of its consistency, its geometrical order and unity. An apple doesn't smear into a 1000 different objects as we pick it up and rotate it in our hands (not unless we're on LSD!). It retains a unity as a single object because each one of these appearances from different angles all meld together in a coherent way. Our apprehension of this "melding" and "coherence" isn't itself a perception, it is an act of reason. We only perceive one moment at a time. But our reason carries us beyond the moment to detect patterns through time, "stitching together" these momentary perceptions. We don't even realize we're doing it, just as we don't realize we have internalized the rules of grammar by the time we learn to talk. The "rules" of reality (e.g. 3d space and our place in it) is learned by the time we crawl, walk, and manipulate objects.

[Fist and Faith]

Not getting your second paragraph at the moment, but I'll look at it again later.

How much reason is required to "turn an appearance of an apple into the apprehension of an external object"? I don't imagine a mouse has much reason. A fly even less. Does a fly not know the pile of shit it is approaching is external?

[Zarathustra]

How much reason is required to "turn an appearance of an apple into the apprehension of an external object"? I don't imagine a mouse has much reason. A fly even less. Does a fly not know the pile of shit it is approaching is external?

Well, this is why I've been saying for months that meaning is inherent in the world, and consciousness is the apprehension of this meaning. Anything that is conscious, which ostensibly includes mice and flies, can recognize this bare level of meaning/order. So yes, they have a rudimentary reason, though it is likely unreflective, uncritical, etc.

I suppose we could say that this recognition is instinctive, such that they aren't conscious of it at all. It is not inconceivable that evolution could have honed them with the correct responses to their perceptions to mimic the understanding of the world as a 3d space. But if that's the case, it's not necessary that flies or mice know that these objects are external to them. They wouldn't have the intelligence to make the inner/outer distinction, which depends upon self-awareness. If they don't think of themselves as distinct objects among all these other objects, their experience might as well be like a dream. The ontological status of the objects of their world would be irrelevant.

So either they have enough intelligence/reason to construct an illusion of experiences "as if external to me," or they simply operate on instinct and don't experience objects as external at all. But if the latter is the case, at some point life crosses over into the former.

[Fist and Faith]

It seems like we only directly perceive what is in our mind. We don't perceive the apple, or its redness, anywhere outside of our minds. Which we don't perceive so much as create. The redness only exists when our minds interpret particular frequencies of the em spectrum. So we don't perceive anything at all. Our minds never do anything but interpret the data they receive. (Well, they do other things.) There is no perception, only interpretation/creation. Even if what our minds come up with IS useful, and DOES represent what is really out there.

[Zarathustra]

Well, we have perceptual experiences, so it's incorrect to say that we don't perceive anything. It's just that the content of these experiences are subjective qualia. We perceive redness. Sometimes we perceive redness even where there are no red objects "out there," such as when we are hallucinating or dreaming. This is why it's problematic to say that we are perceiving objective, external objects, because the difference between hallucinating/dreaming and "normal" perception isn't decided on the basis of the perceptions themselves, but rather other criteria--usually the consistency, stability, and coherence of those perceptions. Dreams and hallucinations show us impossible, improbable, and ephemeral things.

[peter]

Great little series of posts guys! Like very much the VR analogy Z used above; entirely makes sense to me.

Another level of perception is the one where we consider how we perceive what we perceive inside our minds; do we perceive our mental activity as from a cinema seat, viewing a film as it were - or are we the actor within the film of the perception (risks here of an ad infinitum regression surely?)

Last question; if we take (using the language of math to illuminate the idea) the two sets of materialism and idealism as being distinct - meaning there being no overlap between the two - is there anything left outside one or other of these sets to fall into a third class not covered by the first two? Do they indeed, "have it all sewn up"?

[Zarathustra]

Peter, I think one thing that Dennett got right was criticizing the idea of a "Cartesian theater" in the mind, where we're watching all our mental experiences like a passive audience. I think your second option is closer to the truth, i.e. that we're an actor in this "movie." It's not really a projection coming to us as much as it is something we're immersed within and actively interpreting/controlling through our focus, our concepts, our intuition, our understanding. And, of course, we are living our lives through this phenomenal "field." We not just in it, we are it. Our lives are literally comprised of the flowing mental landscape of our experiences, but, crucially, experienced in a way as if we are in the world.

Obviously we transcend our subjectivity. We don't do it completely or all the time. But the great "miracle" of our being is that even though we're literally in our heads, we nevertheless transcend to the world beyond us. Our being is being-in-the-world. It actually takes an effort to back off from this natural attitude and reflect upon how paradoxical it is. The thematic attitude we achieve with such effort--treating our experience as something to analyze rather than something lived through--is a kind of artificial or secondary relation to our experiences. It is something we have to do over and above our effortless 1st order experience of being-in-the-world.

Because of this obvious union of mind and world, and the transcendence of subjective to the objective, I don't think that materialism and idealism have it "all sewn up." I think there must be a third possibility in the middle, one that joins these together, and that it must be some form of neutral monism. What that means is that mind and matter aren't two distinct things, that at a fundamental level they must be two sides of the same coin, or two ends of a spectrum, or even interchangeable like matter and energy. The fact that it is possible to reach an objective world through subjective experience means that the two "ends" of reality do meet in the middle, or they were never separate to begin with. Maybe one is just the inverse of the other, like those drawings you see that can be either a vase or two faces staring at each other, depending on which parts you take as the foreground/background.

This is another reason why I think that reductive materialism has got it wrong.