/ig/ Idealism General

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Substance Dualism is laughed at nowadays.

The idea of a ghost in the machine absurd giving the interactions of mind and brain. Destroy a part of the brain and you destroy conscious mechanisms. If the mind were like a ghost piloting the machine then the ghost should remain intact whether the machine is damaged.

However, people take this to imply materialism/physicalism: that we are nothing more than our physical makeup and our mind is either housed in our brains (almost like dualism) or is identical to our brains and/or its functions. This is a non-sequitur. This only implies that substance dualism is false.

More to come on materialism/physicalism (from here on known as physicalism)

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Physicalism suggests that all of reality is composed of matter or the physical, which is supposed to be non-mental and exists independently of consciousness (objective). However, consciousness exists (subjective). We know consciousness exists more certainly than anything at all. Even if you're skeptical about whether you're in the matrix or if this is a dream, you're still aware that you're aware in each scenario. No matter what you're still conscious, this you definitely know for sure if there is anything that can be said to be known for sure. However, this is impossible if all of reality is supposed to be physical, which is non-mental. If all is non-mental how can there be the mental? This is where reductionism fails on its face given the hard problem of consciousness.

From here the only way out for the physicalist is to a) deny consciousness, which is simply contradictory given we are most certain about the our aware of our awareness more than anything in our perceptions or ideas or b) embrace non-reductive physicalism.

However, this cannot work as noted by Jaegwon Kim in the Exclusion Problem. You will either end up lapsing right back into a substance dualism or you will fail to account for mental causation and you're right back to the mind-body problem of substance dualism all over again.

Reductive and non-reductive physicalism fail.

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Idealism works as a perfect alternative to Substance Dualism and Physicalism. Idealism embraces the reality of consciousness without trying to reduce it, thus avoiding the hard problem of consciousness altogether, and embraces an non-physicalist monism which faces no exclusion problem whatsoever so there's no issue of mental causation. No mind-body problem, and no skeptical problems if all of reality is consciousness. This works as a perfect ontology and epistemology and could provide fertile ground for a meta-ethics given morality seems tied to conscious agents most of all rather than non-conscious agents.
>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBsI_ay8K70

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Through mere introspection this conclusion can be obtained and has been known throughout the centuries

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>to intelligent to refute Idealism

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Redpill me on German idealism