Can Berkeleyan idealism be reconciled with the theory of evolution?
I've been thinking about how idealism provides a solution to the hard problem of consciousness, which asks how a collection of unthinking atoms when placed together in some arbitrary configuration - through the process of evolution by natural selection - can give rise to consciousness. An idealist is able to respond that, in fact, non-thinking atoms to not give rise to consciousness at all, because reality does not consist of atoms: all that exists are perceptions of atoms. Thus, idealism dissolves Chalmers’ hard problem of consciousness into a question of not why there are perceptions or states of experience, but what they are.
But a passage in Schopenhauer's World as Will and Idea has really been bothering me. He says, ‘on the one hand, the existence of the whole world is necessarily dependent on the first knowing [conscious] being, however imperfect it be; on the other hand, this first knowing animal is just as necessarily dependent on a long chain of causes and effects which has preceded it, and in which it itself appears a small link.’
Schopenhauer then seems to argue, that to speak of ‘time’ or ‘causation’ before the existence of consciousness is to use these concepts outside of the only realm in which they can be used – as time and causation can only exist if they are perceived in a mind. ‘Outside of knowledge [mind], there was also no before, no time.’
I am hoping someone can help me wrap my head around this. We have mountains of evidence for Darwinian evolution. Does the idealist argue that with the birth of consciousness, evolutionary history is created in the mind of the conscious being? In that case where do minds come from? Is that akin to asking where does the universe come from?
Would a Berkeleyan idealist argue that God creates in us our perception of evidence for the past, but prior to consciousness, it didn't actually happen?