Hello and Namaste.
There are three philosophical terms we need to understand first: idealism, Realism and Materialism.
"All materialists are realists, in that they postulate that reality is outside of mind. Materialism adds another notion: Mind itself is supposedly created by matter. There are realists who are not materialists: For instance, dualists are also realists, but not materialists".
I do believe in Idealism for many reasons, mainly because pure materialism sounds too absurd for me. In the words of Bernardo Kastrup, a philosopher of science:
"The materialist worldview entails that matter is the primary medium of reality, and that subjective experience is somehow generated by matter in the form of a brain. The implication of materialism is that everything you experience is actually a kind of hallucination generated by your brain, and resides solely inside your head. This way, when you see the stars at night, materialism states that your skull is actually beyond the stars.
The 'real' reality, according to materialism, is not what you see, hear, and feel everyday, but an abstract world of subatomic particles and energy fields fundamentally beyond direct empirical verification. This is highly inflationary, unprovable, and extremely counterintuitive.
The strength of materialism is that it can explain the consistency of experience across observers. People seem to agree that they
all share the same world. Materialism can explain it by postulating that the 'real' world is outside of anyone's mind, and modulates each person's experience of it. But the price materialism pays for this explanation is that unprovable, counter-intuitive universe outside of mind that I spoke of above.
Now, the strength of idealism is that it does not need to postulate such unprovable universe, granting reality only to what we can verify empirically and directly: subjective experience itself. As such, idealism is more skeptical. Its challenge is to explain the consistency of experience across observers. People tend to ask how our minds can conspire to create the illusion of a shared reality under idealism. Yet, this very question is based on a misunderstanding: If idealism is correct, then
it is our bodies -- including our brains -- that are in mind, not mind in our bodies.
You could think of your body as an avatar in a collective dream, like in the movie Inception.
The brain, in my view, is just an image of a mental process, analogously to how flames are just an image of the process of combustion. For the same reason that flames aren't the cause of fire -- but the image of fire -- the brain isn't the cause of mind, but an image of a mental process.
There is no reason to think that there are separate minds; there is no need to require any conspiracy. Reality can be a projection of a single 'collective unconscious,' similarly to how a part of your mind generates the universe of your nightly dreams.
Mind may be, and probably is, just one. Our personal psyches may be just split-off complexes of a single mind, similarly to how someone suffering from Multiple Identity Disorder can host multiple split-off complexes in his or her psyche.
Let's suppose that realism could account for everything in nature. That still wouldn't make it the best explanation, for realism requires many unprovable assumptions. For instance, it requires that there be a whole universe fundamentally beyond experiential knowledge, and that processes in this unprovable universe actually generate consciousness by some magical step. If one could explain nature without making these extraordinarily inflationary and unprovable postulates, one would certainly have a better explanation.
Now, having said all this, it is not true that realism can explain the whole of nature. For one, it cannot explain the most obvious and overwhelming aspect of reality: conscious experience itself. There is simply no explanation for how dead matter, under certain circumstances, can suddenly light up with awareness, which is called the 'hard problem of consciousness' in philosophy.
In its 125th anniversary edition, Science magazine has selected the 'hard problem' as the second most important unanswered question in science. It should have been the first".
Pranams.
Bookmarks