> and similarly for those who feel that materialism cannot possibly explain consciousness.
Perhaps for some it's indeed a matter of "feelings". But for others it's a conviction built from reasoning that leads to self-validating and irreducible truths. If you seriously go into this, the only possibilities left once you've dug and eliminated all mistaken assumptions are not material. It can be counter-intuitive and does take a bit of work to reason your way to those conclusions, which is why it's admittedly not a popular outlook. But once you grok it, you don't go back. The fact that materialism is slowly going out of style is telling.
Whenever I exchange with someone who makes concessions about consciousness possibly being the product of matter, it's due to one of two things: either some holes haven't yet been covered in their own explorations, or they're still oblivious to some of the implications of their current position.
Materialism is fast being eliminated as a possible antecedent to consciousness with reasoning and logic, not simply with beliefs. Currently, it's being salvaged in popular forms of dualism, where it would be a co-primitive of reality with consciousness (e.g. panpsychism). But even this position is just a short stop-over on the way to idealism, as it creates new problems and is just less parsimonious than simply saying consciousness first.
An example of a relatively elusive and subtle realization to get, but that also becomes rather difficult to renounce once you grok it, are qualia and how they lead to the hard problem of consciousness. Qualia are so enmeshed in our experience that people have a hard time first seeing how divorced from brain activity they actually are. If you don't get qualia, you can't get the hard problem and how it's really an impossible problem (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WX0xWJpr0FY).
Well, idealism simply says that consciousness/humans cannot be understood or explained via simpler concepts. That's the first thing anyone would think of but it is not a useful theory in any way.
The alternative theory was that everything complex can be explained to be a result of simple processes repeated many times. A modern way to say this would be that everything is a computation.
This second approach have turned out to be very useful for explaining many things. It did not explain consciousness so far but we now have many directions to explore.
So while neither position is proven so far, idealism is worse than wrong, it is useless, and if most people believed it, today we would know not much more than ancient Greeks did.
> Well, idealism simply says that consciousness/humans cannot be understood or explained via simpler concepts. That's the first thing anyone would think of but it is not a useful theory in any way.
It doesn't just naively declare it. It reasons it. Idealism never discouraged scientific research. It's simply identified consciousness as being its own category among a set of other categories of problems. One which is beyond our available tools and methodology. That our scientific zeitgeist chose to ignore those hints and proceeded to waste resources chasing its tail is our current reckoning.
> This second approach have turned out to be very useful for explaining many things. It did not explain consciousness so far but we now have many directions to explore.
What exactly has it yielded? There are few serious physicalist researchers working on consciousness nowadays. Not one person on this planet could tell you anything scientifically meaningful about consciousness. None of the big names, Tononi, Koch, Hameroff, Penrose, Seth, etc. The best you'd get out of them is that we now have even more tools giving us better indications of correlates of consciousness. That is, while they all set out to find answers about the engine, we've actually made tremendous progress on the dials. So I guess we could say that these approaches have been valuable in discovering in practice all the theoretical dead-ends that idealism predicted.
At least idealism is proposing a paradigm shift, consciousness first. Not an unreasonable proposition either, since it's consistent with every constraints set in cognitive science and in physics, with the bonus of solving in the process various philosophical problems about consciousness.
> So while neither position is proven so far, idealism is worse than wrong, it is useless, and if most people believed it, today we would know not much more than ancient Greeks did.
A position taken when you either profoundly misunderstand the philosophy, or when you have no clue how to use insights it gives you. Luckily it's not a universal outlook, since we're obviously now seeing scientists reorienting their research based on those inputs, away from fallacious intuitions.
All of the physics and the sciences downstream of it came out of ancient Greek idea of materialism, the idea that things happen not because of wishes of sapient entities like gods or spirits, but because of matter mindlessly following some simple rules.
There was a time when the idea that sun is just a fireball and not some thinking being was as hard to accept, as now is the idea that consciousness is merely a result of computation.
Whether this idea is a dead end or not we'll see when we have a computer capable to simulate a human brain.
> since we're obviously now seeing scientists reorienting their research based on those inputs, away from fallacious intuitions.
Who does this? I have not seen any scientists achieving anything useful from this kind of reorientation.
> All of the physics and the sciences downstream of it came out of ancient Greek idea of materialism, the idea that things happen not because of wishes of sapient entities like gods or spirits, but because of matter mindlessly following some simple rules.
False. Natural philosophy of Aristotle et al., a precursor to both modern physics and Abrahamic religions[0], does not[1] assume materialism in the slightest.
> I have not seen any scientists achieving anything useful from this kind of reorientation.
Please define or qualify “useful”. Useful how and for whom?
"Useful" were the things that have allowed us to create new technologies: from internet to medicine to rockets. Belief in idealism not only did not produce anything, it did not even make any measurable impact.
Parts of the work of Aristotle that were based on idealism are the parts that have been discarded as hindering understanding of physics or plain wrong.
Sciences that directly concern human flourishing (medicine, psychology, sociology, economy) are either largely stuck in the middle ages (we can barely make things work reliably, and when they occasionally do we are not quite sure why), or in fact invoke materialism-inconsistent ideas to various degrees (e.g., stress being recognised as a cause or contributing factor of numerous diseases).
> Belief in idealism not only did not produce anything
And what has belief in the materialism produced?
Idealism, materialism, dualism, etc. concern theory of mind first and foremost, and would likely be irrelevant to “producing” whatever artefacts you were thinking of.
> Parts of the work of Aristotle that were based on idealism are the parts that have been discarded as hindering understanding of physics or plain wrong.
Let’s unpack this.
1. Artistotle’s takes on soul and so on are not based on idealism. (Check them out. They have much more in common with Cartesian dualism than with what we refer to idealism, but of course could be based on neither given both were fleshed out after his time.)
2. The parts you refer to were not discarded—on the contrary, they are believed by, probably, most people on the planet today (who follow some Abrahamic religion).
3. Many prominent Western scientists indirectly believe or believed in Aristotle’s takes, too—by being Christian. There is no conflict in a scientist holding that belief if you understand scientific method, its scope, its purpose, and lack of explanatory powers: natural sciences do not concern themselves with non-falsifiable questions such as “why things exist?”, “do I see things as they actually are?”, “what makes me myself?”, “why do I think?”, “does consciousness arise from atoms?”, and so on. In the framework of scientific method, questions like those cannot have a wrong answer—the questions themselves merely lie out of scope. Obviously, that does not make those questions unimportant—it only makes scientific method not a suitable tool for investigating them at this time.
Why is stress contributing to diseases materialism-inconsistent? In all cases it has a physical mechanism through which the disease is caused.
> Idealism, materialism, dualism, etc. concern theory of mind
Idealism/dualism used to be about other things too. Stepping away from them allowed us to find physics. Now it is concerned with theory of mind only because the other things are explained by physics.
> believed in Aristotle’s takes, too—by being Christian.
I was talking about the actually measurable things he was saying about physics, his takes on soul being successful is irrelevant, since we still do not have any experiment proving that soul exists.
> “does consciousness arise from atoms?”
Science is concerned with the question "whether there exists a Turing machine, output of which is indistinguishable from behavior of a human". This is what most scientists and materialists mean when talking about conciousness.
The other questions are specifically crafted in a way to not have answers, so that idealism/dualism etc. can pretend that they do something useful, while not doing anything.
You seem to insist on painting dualism/idealism/… as a contender to physics. This is a category error that can only be explained by implicitly treating physics as religion. It is not uncommon—many of us are from a generation that is freshly atheist after generations of religious adherence, so once you encounter physics it is tempting to use it as an outlet for all that bottled up religiosity—but is wrong. Physics is orthogonal to materialism and idealism. The core of any natural science (including physics)—empirical observation—implies the existence of the observer as ground truth, but that’s as far as it goes; beyond that is philosophy (or, indeed, religion).
> In all cases it has a physical mechanism through which the disease is caused
If the aforementioned stress is the root cause of the physical consequences, then that is materialism-inconsistent.
> Idealism/dualism used to be about other things too.
?
> Stepping away from them allowed us to find physics.
This is incorrect. The fact that many (or most) natural scientists that outlined and progressed physics as we know it today, Faraday, Newton, Mendel, Euler, Maxwell, all the way back to Aristotle, were some form of dualist (mostly Christian) is well-documented.
> I was talking about the actually measurable things he was saying about physics
Such as?
> since we still do not have any experiment proving that soul exists
There is no experiment that can prove that materialism, idealism or dualism are correct. Those questions are not in scope of natural sciences for that exact reason ;)
> Science is concerned with the question "whether there exists a Turing machine, output of which is indistinguishable from behavior of a human"
That is not natural science, that is philosophy and theory of mind. See behaviourist or illusionist theories of consciousness—there are scientists who believe in them, too. Have you heard of the Chinese room thought experiment or the concept of philosophical zombies?
> If the aforementioned stress is the root cause of the physical consequences, then that is materialism-inconsistent.
E.g. stress increases production of certain hormones, raises blood pressure etc., which over time can be harmful. How is this materialism-inconsistent?
> Have you heard of the Chinese room thought experiment or the concept of philosophical zombies?
Yes, i don't find them particularly convincing. Chinese room is merely a misunderstanding on the part of Searle, because no one argues that computer carrying out the arithmetic operations does the thinking. The program running on the computer does the thinking, and it does not matter what mechanism is used to implement the computation [1]. And philosophical zombies is just a circular argument. Indeed, in the same way i can argue that there exists a combination of letters, (namely "satki") after reading which the conscious part of any human dies and he becomes a philosophical zombie, completely indistinguishable from his former self, and yet not a person.
> That is not natural science, that is philosophy and theory of mind.
Creating software that does things similar to what mind does, is now not simply a science but already a field of engineering, so i don't understand what do you mean.
In general i don't have problem with religions claiming things orthogonal to physics, but your interpretation of idealism is directly in conflict with it. If we manage to simulate brain with high enough accuracy and it does not produce a behavior similar to human behavior, that will be a proof that you are right and computationalism is wrong. But if we manage to do it, you can still say that computation is secondary, and results we get are because a soul gets attracted to a specific type of computation every time it is carried out, (which will be truly orthogonal to physics), or you can still use the philosophical zombie argument, but it is not different from "satki-zombie" argument above.
> stress increases production of certain hormones, raises blood pressure etc., which over time can be harmful. How is this materialism-inconsistent?
Because this roughly simplifies to “stress causes disease” with extra steps inbetween. Materialists are allergic to such claims.
> because no one argues that computer carrying out the arithmetic operations does the thinking. The program running on the computer does the thinking, and it does not matter what mechanism is used to implement the computation [1]
That’s a theory in philosophy of mind, too—a non-falsifiable speculation, like the rest of them.
> Creating software that does things similar to what mind does, is now not simply a science but already a field of engineering, so i don't understand what do you mean.
You said “science is concerned with an implementation of device that behaves like a human would”. I said what we are talking about here is not about that, but about whether that implies there is a consciousness or it’s an unthinking machine. Whether outputting things like a human is enough to consider software conscious, thinking and self-aware in a human-like manner (and thus we are abusing human-like thinking, conscious and self-aware creatures by using ML the way we do), whether consciousness is the substrate as opposed to material world (like Schrödinger, among others, believed), etc. That’s the point of what materialism/idealism/dualism is about, making computers and programs is irrelevant.
> If we manage to simulate brain with high enough accuracy and it does not produce a behavior similar to human behavior, that will be a proof that you are right and computationalism is wrong
No, it only means there is a program that produces behavior similar to human behavior—the “proof” you imagine is not a proof, which can trivially be demonstrated logically (as Chinese room shows). Manipulating syntactic tokens as an LLM does does not mean understanding and manipulating ideas like a human does, unless you hold a particular non-provable and non-falsifiable theory of mind.
You seem to have constructed a strawman out of your very own interpretation of idealism. Idealism doesn't condemn the study of nature (i.e. science). It merely says that nature is "dreamt" and that consciousness is the primordial stuff and of a different category. Scientists generally have no problem with this, since they can go on studying observable nature as the purview of science, as it's intended.
The problem begins when some, emboldened by the successes of science with nature, don't heed the warning that studying consciousness with the intuition that it's also an emergent property of nature is a category error.
How has idealism been useful? It's prevented those who took the time to understand its arguments from wasting uncountable resources on non-starters, allowing to redirect those resources to something actually useful, whether in science or elsewhere. You seem to be of the notion that investing energies in an attempt to prove an intuition that can simply be reasoned as demonstrably false is justifiable. We'll agree to disagree.
30 years ago the philosopher David Chalmers, a materialist back then, had the particular distinction of articulating and cogently framing the idealist argument, better than any idealist had before, in what he coined The Hard Problem of Consciousness. Many scientists who set out to work on this problem thought that "hard" meant that it can be solved. What Chalmers really meant was impossible problem. For instance, in 1998 he entered in a friendly wager with Christof Koch, a scientist who was working on explaining how the brain gives rise to consciousness. David bet to Christof that 25 years in the future, Christof would have gone nowhere with his research. The bet expired last year, David won. In the meantime he himself had gone from a materialist to dabbling with panpsychism. He seems to currently be laying the foundation of his transition to idealism.
I've been watching Koch in recent years, as he engaged with Bernardo Kastrup. I could see that as recently as 2 years ago, Koch still really didn't grok the philosophy behind "the world as mind". Only a few months ago, after Kastrup had managed to help him solidify the pieces of that intuition, I heard him admit for the first time that consciousness cannot be material. He's now reframing his work with this intuition as part of his foundations. The stories of Donald Hoffman and Kastrup himself are similar. Computer scientists who set out to build conscious machines. They respectively got into cognitive science (Hoffman) and philosophy (Kastrup) to understand the nature of consciousness and ended up idealists.
Likewise in physics, there are some who still resist quantum nonlocality, which interprets local realism as false (material properties do not exist on their own, they require a "measurer" i.e. an experiencer, aka the moon doesn't exist when no one is looking). Quantum nonlocality was demonstrated experimentally and people won the Nobel prize for it (2022). Scientists who still cling to local realism, when it comes down to it, do so out of religiosity toward matter. They waste resources working on all kinds of increasingly less parsimonious theories, which clash with solidified conclusions from other fields of study.
I could go on, but I'll leave it at that. Good luck with the proof of consciousness via artificial brain.
Could you please help me to find a strongman interpretation of idealism?
The question i am primarily interested in, is: "whether there exists a Turing machine, output of which is indistinguishable from behavior of a human".
This is a purely abstract, mathematical question and should be in the purview of science. As far as i understand the answer to this question given by Idealism is that 1. it is not possible, and 2. when it is done it will still be impossible because despite behaving 100% the same as a human it will be something entirely different (a philosophical zombie), because 1 is true by definition.
Perhaps the confusion arises because we are just talking about different things? And you are not interested in either behavior of this kind of Turing machine, or in detailed description of physics of matter in the brain?
> Quantum nonlocality was demonstrated experimentally and people won the Nobel prize for it
There are still many interpretations possible, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ER_%3D_EPR or the interpretation proposed by Wolfram Physics project (which i rather like), which keeps local realism, but locality is not on R3 but on a graph.
Earlier today, I got around to viewing the video you linked to in your first reply. As I have been looking into this issue for several years, its trajectory is familiar: start from a re-statement of Frank Jackson's 'knowledge argument' from "Epiphenomenal Qualia", assume that this shows consciousness to be inexplicable as a physical process, jump to the conclusion that consciousness is the fundamental reality on which the physical world supervenes, and throw in some arguments from incredulity to coax the reluctant to make this rather huge leap - plus, in this video, a smattering of vitalism.
Jackson's knowledge argument had been fully anticipated by (and probably inspired by, I would guess) Bertrand Russell's aphorism "It is obvious that a man who can see knows things that a blind man cannot know; but a blind man can know the whole of physics." [The Analysis of Matter, 1927.] Fair enough, but where does idealism stand? Is there any non-circular argument for the proposition that learning all of idealism (or any specific variety of panpsychism or dualism, for that matter) would achieve for Russell's blind man what knowing all of physics cannot? Will he come to know what it is like to see the world?
What you perceive as a "huge leap" is not so much the promotion of consciousness as fundamental, but rather the demotion of matter from that same stance. The former is simply a byproduct of the latter. That in the process it seems to interlock so well with findings in various fields of study should admittedly be considered for now as just a happy accident. But we've abided by the law of parsimony to orient our inquiries on much less hints.
> assume that this shows consciousness to be inexplicable as a physical process, jump to the conclusion that consciousness is the fundamental reality on which the physical world supervenes, and throw in some arguments from incredulity to coax the reluctant to make this rather huge leap
You must ensure to have a proper grasp of the chasm between qualia and conceptual knowing that is pointed at in the hard problem of consciousness. Anyone who does should see how removed from physical processes qualia are. It's just self-evident, not a belief. The experience of a smell is not a thought. You don't reason the taste of chocolate. Those "things" sit in their own mysterious "weirdness".
We experience reality in exactly two ways. Consciousness and matter. Those are the only two big mysteries. So, either matter is first, consciousness is first, or they co-arise independently and somehow coalesce. Those are the three possibilities. To declare any one to be a "huge leap" implies that you conceive of another as more acceptable.
If by "huge leap" you mean specifically anything that is not materialism, note that of the three propositions, materialism is by far the least parsimonious and the one that creates the most problems. We culturally favor it as the default stance for two reasons. First, our perception of reality is biased to it. Second, we've had great success studying that perceived reality with science. But as Russell noted, science has only explained how the world works, not what the world is. We've traditionally approached the latter question starting with a "rookie mistake", as Donald Hoffman puts it. We assumed that science also pointed at the world being material. Under analysis, that assumption crumbles, as it's revealed to be built upon other unchecked assumptions, that cause many problems in philosophy and in physics.
We have two possible alternatives to materialism. Of the two, consciousness as sole primitive is the most parsimonious and the one which solves most problems in the process, while creating the least.
> Is there any non-circular argument for the proposition that learning all of idealism (or any specific variety of panpsychism or dualism, for that matter) would achieve for Russell's blind man what knowing all of physics cannot?
I'm not sure that I understood your question here, but there's no such proposition. Idealism is a field of inquiry. It's a set of arguments that eliminate matter as a possible candidate for the basis of reality. Like physics, or any other philosophy, it belongs to conceptual knowledge. It can't give you access to experiential knowing.
We should start with the question I posed, as this is the crux of the issue here, and without it, everything else here is moot. I will endeavor to set it out as clearly as I can.
As you put great weight on the 'hard problem' being an insurmountable one for (and only for) materialism, I am sure you are well aware of the seminal importance, for that premise, of what has become known as the 'Knowledge Argument' from Frank Jackson's paper "Epiphenomenal Qualia", and in particular, a thought experiment from that paper which goes by several names (such as 'Mary the Neuroscientist'), and which was called, by the philosopher Philip Goff, "the greatest argument against materialism."
This argument has several antecedents, including C. D. Broad's argument that chemistry cannot tell us what ammonia smells like, and, as I mentioned in my previous post, Russells aphorism "it is obvious that a man who can see knows things that a blind man cannot know; but a blind man can know the whole of physics." All these arguments are doing essentially the same thing: pumping the intuition that knowing what it is like to see colors (or have any other phenomenal experience) is not something that could ever be learned by studying the physical sciences (I say they pump the intuition because it is not actually an established fact that the premise is correct, but to be clear, I think it is, at least for human consciousness.)
There is a certain amount of indirection at work here, in specifying only the physical sciences. We get an equally valid question by substituting other academic disciplines for the physical sciences, and in particular, of course, any philosophy of mind: they do not get a pass on this by being anti-materialist, and certainly any philosophy - such as idealism - which is premised first and foremost on the reality and significance of the hard problem, will have to confront this question (among many others) before it can be regarded as the solution to this problem and as providing an explanation of consciousness.
Your reply is apparently that in this respect, idealism is no different than materialism - it will not enable Russell's blind man to know what it is like to see - from which it follows that the knowledge argument cannot be used by idealists against materialism. I am interested in learning, then, what you - and, by extension, idealists - regard as convincing arguments for there being a hard problem for materialism, specifically.
I think that I (finally) understand your question (maybe). Are you asking why the hard problem would apply to materialism, but not to idealism?
If that's indeed the question, the simplest answer is that if reality is fundamentally material, then by extension everything must be material, including consciousness. For reasons already stated (the mind-body problem, the hard problem, etc), the emergence of experiential consciousness as we know it from inert matter is opaque. We don't have a shred of evidence to support it, nor the sliver of a clue to go on.
Conversely, if reality is taken to be fundamentally consciousness, then everything is consciousness. Everything becomes a "figment". There's nothing actually "physical". This is conceivable in theory. One obvious example are our dreams where a reality is projected and interacted with by consciousness. This position isn't subject to the hard problem since everything in reality is all just one thing, consciousness.
Panpsychism and other dualisms just postpone the problems of materialism. But they resurface later, in addition to the new problem that this position requires to be granted at least two fundamental magic tricks to explain the rest.
> I say they pump the intuition because it is not actually an established fact that the premise is correct, but to be clear, I think it is, at least for human consciousness.
I don't see what's being pumped. As we know from the incompleteness theorem, some truths cannot be proven. The fact of our awareness is another that's often doubted by the same people that doubt the divide separating qualia and conceptual knowing. Has their difficulty to grasp at these intuitions somehow become the burden of those who access them as self-evident?
The hard problem is a linchpin. For those who get it, materialism starts to unravel. Those who don't, think those who do are making stuff up, but they also can't give a single example to counter the argument, nor can they conceive for themselves an entirely novel experience purely out of thought. They can't imagine a new color, think a new taste, conceive of a new sense.
> Your reply is apparently that in this respect, idealism is no different than materialism - it will not enable Russell's blind man to know what it is like to see - from which it follows that the knowledge argument cannot be used by idealists against materialism.
As I said, idealism is only a philosophy. It's mostly a process of elimination resting on conjectures such as the hard problem. As possibilities are removed, remaining candidates hint at the likeliest direction, but it's indeed not a final realization. There are some metaphysical speculations resting atop the foundations that reality is mind first. But I'm personally much less invested in speculations. I find the challenge of pulling our cultural head out of the sand of implausibility more of a concern.
Depending how curious (and open-minded) you are about "knowledge" that get the "blind man to know what it is like to see", I'd suggest to look into practices that have this as their main goal. They're about engaging consciousness directly with immediate experience (the senses) and existential curiosity (I am aware that I am, but what am I?) to cultivate the seed of an eventual realization. They're known under the umbrella term "nonduality". As an introduction, I suggest this selection of texts spanning multiple nondual traditions aggregated and read by a Buddhist nun https://www.youtube.com/@SamaneriJayasara.
You say you are concerned with the challenge of pulling our cultural head out of [what you perceive as] the sand of implausibility - well, in that case, I'm the sort of person whose concerns you should be addressing: I don't think the hard problem (if there is one in the form it is conceived of by its proponents) is any harder for materialism than it is for any of the alternatives, but I am willing to give all due consideration to arguments that it is (and by "due consideration", I mean outside of internet discussion threads, even though my wife has banned me playing audio books and podcasts on the topic over the speakers when we are in a car together.)
Unfortunately, your responses in this thread are not making the sort of arguments that are called for by your stated goal. Here, your response continues the theme of reasserting how obvious it seems to you that there is a hard problem which rules out materialism. This is not an argument, it is a belief. You are, of course, entitled to your beliefs, and I am sure you hold them strongly and sincerely, but the fact that you do does not establish that our cultural head is stuck in the sands of implausibility. Repetition does not make them more argument-like, nor does calling them "self-evident", nor insinuating that you see more clearly than others, nor wrapping them in language that might be appropriate for something that has an obvious proof. It is not enough, for an argument, to state propositions that other people who already agree with you will also agree with; that's just preaching to the choir.
For the same reason, your complaint that no counter-arguments are being made falls short: counter-arguments are made to arguments, not unargued opinions.
At this point, I suspect you may be thinking that a commitment to materialism is also a belief - and I would agree! The simple fact is that no -ism has delivered an explanation of consciousness, and when someone tries to tell me it is a fact that that consciousness is just a computation (or a non-computable physical process, Searle and Penrose), I point out that no-one has explained it in those terms.
Nevertheless, there is a counter-argument here, and it is in my previous post, where I argue that the knowledge argument - which is widely regarded as the strongest argument for there being a hard problem that only affects materialism - is exactly as problematic, for any other putative explanation of consciousness, as it is for materialism (which does not rule out it being an illusory problem for any of them.) I may not have been completely clear about what it is and why it matters here, so I will make another attempt.
The 'hard problem' is the claim that phenomenal consciousness and its associated qualia present an insurmountable challenge to materialism. Many people feel - sometimes strongly - that this is obviously so, but philosophers and scientists alike (and on both sides of the fence) rightly expect more justification for accepting this claim than these feelings of incredulity towards materialism.
From your own account here, the hard problem is a necessary prerequisite for idealism: it is, as you said, a linchpin, and it is so in this sense: all the other claims you have made about idealism rest on there being a hard problem to take materialism out of consideration.
Furthermore, for idealism to prevail over materialism, the hard problem must only exist for materialism (or, at least, not present a challenge to idealism), or else idealism would be saddled with exactly the same problem as materialism - a problem that you insist is insurmountable.
So, putting the previous three paragraphs together, the proponents of idealism need a justification for there being a hard problem that applies only to materialism and not to idealism.
In the years of reading papers and other scholarly articles on the issue, I have been struck by how often such justifications ultimately rest on some form of the knowledge argument (at least in this sense, Goff is entirely justified in calling it "the greatest argument against materialism.") To recap, this is the argument which boils down to "you can't learn what it is like to see colors from any physics book."
Does this satisfy idealism's need for justification for the premise that there's a hard problem for materialism that does not apply to idealism itself? It does not, as we can simply substitute 'idealism book' for 'physics book', and the knowledge argument itself gives us no reason to think that the outcome will be any different. In fact, in your first response to this issue, you affirmed that knowing all of a completed idealist philosophy would do no better, in this regard, than knowing all of completed physics.
Furthermore - and this is important - we can see that the knowledge argument is equally applicable to any field of what Torin Alter calls 'discursively learnable' knowledge without making any assumptions about the truth of materialism.
Therefore, in the account of and justification for idealism in what you have written so far, there is at least one piece (the linchpin, no less) missing: an acceptable justification for thinking that there is a hard problem that does not present an equal problem for idealism. You entered this thread in a very assertive manner (your first sentence was " Perhaps for some it's indeed a matter of 'feelings'. But for others it's a conviction built from reasoning that leads to self-validating and irreducible truths", and in your latest post, you adopted the mantle of someone who is pulling our collective heads from the sands of implausibility), but your responses have not, so far, lived up to this rhetoric.
> "you can't learn what it is like to see colors from any physics book."
Why is it an argument against materialism?
To know what it is like to see colors you need to put your brain in a state in which other people's brain gets when they see colors. Physics book simply does not do that by itself.
But if you use learned physics, to electrically stimulate the right neurons in your brain, you can learn what it is like to see colors without ever seeing colors or having eyes.
Even in normal experience the brain is being stimulated. So theoretically, you wouldn't need eyes to experience color. You would only need to replicate the physical properties at the onset of brain activity. Those are called neural correlates of consciousness. However, there's the byproduct as the result of that activity, the experience associated with it. If reality is fundamentally material, there are two possible implications: (1) the very experience itself is physical. That is, the inherent experiences of smelling, or tasting, or seeing a color, in themselves have to be physical. The challenge with this is that we don't know the nature of that physical property and we have no evidence for it (besides counting consciousness itself as evidence, which is begging the question). (2) There's also the view that, rather than the correlates causing the experience, they are the experience. The challenge here becomes to demonstrate which correlate maps to exactly which experience (and not another). Neither of (1) or (2) have been successfully demonstrated.
It is true that neither 1 nor 2 have been successfully demonstrated, but there is quite a double standard here: you claim that idealism has the answers to questions about the mind, but you have not shown it explaining anything. Deducing the reality of idealism from the absence of answers to 1 or 2 is exactly like saying, in 1950, that as biology has not identified the biochemical correlates of cell reproduction, life must be fundamental (I know some people hold this view today, but it is at best a niche view that generates little controversy in either philosophy or science.)
The short answer is that, when the argument is fully set out, one of the conditions is that stimulating one's optic nerve does not count, but it often goes unmentioned. This is rarely an issue (and is easily corrected if it is), as it quickly becomes apparent that allowing stimulation does not even present a prima facie problem and so no-one on either side of the fence finds it at all interesting or useful - the anti-materialists are not interested in this question because they will agree with materialists that if stimulation is allowed, then Mary (the protagonist in the thought experiment) will experience colors, and the materialists are not interested in it because the anti-materialists are not using it.
Nevertheless, it is a good question as to why the knowledge argument would be seen as so persuasive by so many, including by quite a few materialists, who seem to me to go to unnecessary lengths to get around what is not even a problem (illusionism, for example, where it is claimed that phenomenal experience is merely an illusion - but then, as the anti-materialists ask, who is being fooled, and about what?)
Perhaps the first thing to say is that the argument is not presented as the stark observation that you cannot learn what seeing colors is like from reading a physics book; that's what you end up with when you whittle it down to its essentials.
Secondly, there are a couple of features of the argument which make it easy to let its difficulties slide right on by. One of these is what I have been going on about here: by framing the argument in terms of a knowledge of physics, it is easy to miss that it applies to any academic knowledge, not only physics or the physical sciences, and thus including any non-materialist theory. The second is that it uses the word 'knowledge' for two different forms of retained information: sensory information which is acquired directly from sensory experience, and linguistic information which is encoded in sensory information without being that sensory information itself. These are separate domains (the information content of a word is not the information content of the sound when it is heard or of its appearance when read), yet, by referring to both of them as knowledge, the argument invites the reader to accept the way it equivocates between the two, which it does when it points out that the knowledge that can be acquired linguistically does not include the 'raw feels' (yes, that is a term used in the philosophy of mind) of sensory information.
Having said all that, I am still surprised how many people think the argument shows there is a problem for materialism. After all, the physical sciences have explained many sorts of complex phenomena (hurricanes, for example), and no-one thinks that the act of explaining (or learning the explanation of) how hurricanes work should actually create one - yet anyone accepting the knowledge argument is tacitly accepting that if the phenomenon being explained is sensory experience, then an explanation should produce the phenomenon being explained! (but only if it is a materialist explanation!) I guess it somehow doesn't seem paradoxical to many people when both the phenomenon being explained and its explanation are in one's mind.
I think you would be very surprised by how many papers have been, and are still being written about this argument or something following directly from it. Because I have read some of them on academia.edu, I frequently get notices about more. Interestingly, Frank Jackson himself has changed his mind on the matter, but that has had no effect on how influential his argument still is (and, to be fair, it shouldn't.)
I neither recognize in my discourse a sermon targeted at the choir (our psalms are way past this), nor do I feel an obligation on my part to convince you. I don't even register as a blame my failure to communicate my "belief" to you, especially since you say that you were already acquainted with those arguments, which you've looked into in the past, but also failed then to integrate. I doubt that I'd fare any better than your past attempts. For that matter, I also doubt that you're my target audience. But that's totally fine.
I'm indeed interested to blow fresh wind to a more parsimonious direction to our cultural view of reality. Despite this, or perhaps because of this, I don't see much value in debating the subject to the point of sophistry. Philosophy is not my day job. My interest in it is as a tool that informs a practical orientation. Does matter give rise to consciousness? Mounting evidence points to the contrary. To me this is practical. If what you're after is ironclad proof, you won't find it and personally I don't see the practical point.
Opposing views to the knowledge argument take two general forms. Either they deny the distinction between phenomenal experience and conceptual knowing (e.g. Dennett). Or they concede that divide, but posit that phenomenal experience could still be physical in nature, but built into this is a requirement to account today, for some unknown property of matter, of which we have exactly zero evidence and that we might never discover (e.g. Alvin). I personally see either as a cop-out. You're free to assign them the value you see fit and even to think that they successfully reduce the idealist intuition to mere beliefs. I think I recognize glimpses of the tangent the discussion is taking and would rather avoid venturing in ever speculative terrains, that hinge on hopes that some day, some big reveal in physics will be retrofitted to what is currently a baseless, hasty, and problematic assumption. From experience, this tends to drag on and people interested in that sort of exercises tend to already have a somewhat significant, even if tacit, commitment to materialism. No argument will be sufficient, as new pseudo-counters are sought out to justify the hold out.
I think it's best for me to conclude this exchange here. I'll echo the O.P.'s suggested paths of exploration, books/articles/videos by Bernardo Kastrup and Donald Hoffman, who contrary to me, have invested copious amounts of energy to make the modern views of idealism accessible. Their arguments go into details about what I've only evoked as bullet points throughout the thread. They attack the subject from physics, biology, philosophy, neuroscience, and sometimes even venture into the spiritual (why not, if consciousness is indeed fundamental).
Thank you for an interesting discussion. I hope you find the answers you're looking for.
Firstly, I have only just now noticed that you posted two consecutive responses a couple of days ago, and I only responded to the second. In the first, you write " conversely, if reality is taken to be fundamentally consciousness, then everything is consciousness... This position isn't subject to the hard problem since everything in reality is all just one thing, consciousness."[1] Well, we can also say that a materialist theory of consciousness would not be subject to the hard problem, because, in that case, there clearly isn't one, by definition! This is even before we get into the question of what, if anything, it means to say that reality is fundamentally consciousness.
Turning now to your latest post, in your third paragraph, you offer some sort of response to the knowledge argument issue, but it both misrepresents the full scope of materialist responses to the argument, and, more relevantly here, completely misses the point to which that argument is being used in this discussion.
While the latter renders the former moot, I will, for completeness, say something about it. Firstly, I know (from private correspondence) that Daniel Dennett considered "What RoboMary Knows" to contain the essentials of his response to the knowledge argument. In it, he argues that if we had a different neural architecture - one in which we could directly examine and modify the detailed physical state of our brains - then learning what it is like to see colors could be done discursively. The fact that we humans cannot do this is, therefore, a contingent fact of biology which poses no challenge to materialism.
Secondly, you are once again completely mistaken in your guesses about what I think. Personally, I don't feel that the opponents of materialism have shown that consciousness will prove to be inexplicable without new physics, any more than are other biological processes such as metabolism or reproduction. Dennett's response to the knowledge argument is not predicated on new physics, and (while I don't think they are very helpful) neither are the arguments from the phenomenal concepts wing. Part of the rhetorical genius of Jackson's argument is that it nudges readers down the path of thinking that materialism will need new physics to prevail, but, as shown above, no such conclusion is warranted.[2]
Thirdly, though I'm not positing any new physics, I can still note that your characterization of those views as postulating something "of which we have exactly zero evidence and that we might never discover" is rather breathtakingly ironic, given how you are going about justifying idealism. As for avoiding debating the subject to the point of sophistry, I think that would be very helpful here.
As I said, though, this is moot, as it misses the point. I had hoped to forestall this outcome by pointing out that the question I posed is not predicated on any assumption of the truth of materialism, but it seems I should have said more about why that matters, so I will do so now. The question is this: why does the knowledge argument, when cast in terms of complete knowledge of idealism, not establish that there is a hard problem for idealism, just as the corresponding physical-knowledge argument allegedly does for materialism? Instead of replying to that question, you have offered some sort of defense of the knowledge argument against materialism - but the more strongly you promote the latter, the more strongly you support the view that the corresponding knowledge argument against idealism needs a substantive response (I have, of course, just referenced an argument that it is not actually a problem for materialism, but if you were to seize on that argument for your own purpose, it would raise the question "what hard problem?" - if the best and arguably only argument for there being a hard problem is no more (or no less) applicable to idealism than it is to materialism, you cannot use it to establish that there is a hard problem for materialism alone.)
If idealism really does provide an explanation of consciousness, you should have no difficulty responding to this issue, but instead, we have circled around it three times now without getting any closer to a solution. As you yourself put it, the hard problem is the linchpin of idealism: without it, all your arguments for it being the only viable non-materialist option are beside the point. [3]
Well, so much for the third paragraph, but quite a bit of your latest reply is taken up with other, incidental, matters, such as whether at least some of your arguments amount to preaching to the choir. Let's look at a definition, and from Merriam Webster, we have "to speak for or against something to people who already agree with one's opinions." I think we can leave it to third parties to decide for themselves whether your claim that materialism is obviously false for those who "get" qualia (in the right way, of course) fits that definition.
Furthermore, when we put together your statements that, on the one hand, that you are are attempting to pull our collective heads out of the sands of implausibility and blow fresh wind to a more parsimonious direction to our cultural view of reality, while on the other, that you don't have to take into account (or, apparently, respond substantively to) the apparently awkward questions I have been raising, then we can see that you are more interested in the one-way delivery of ideas than in dialogue, which comes across as rather preachy.
Your posts have been moving in the direction of a motte-and-bailey argument. In your first paragraph of your first post in this thread, you were squarely in the bailey, writing "perhaps for some it's indeed a matter of "feelings". But for others it's a conviction built from reasoning that leads to self-validating and irreducible truths [my emphasis]. If you seriously go into this, the only possibilities left once you've dug and eliminated all mistaken assumptions are not material", but now, with "does matter give rise to consciousness? Mounting evidence points to the contrary", you have at least one foot in the motte. I am not, as you put it, after ironclad proof, just arguments strong enough to justify the certainty with which you have, at least up to now, presented idealism.
I thank you for your kind wishes in your last paragraph and I wish the same for you. I imagine you will have more success in that than I will, as I am quite demanding in what I expect in an explanation, and the mind is a hard problem, even if it is not the hard problem.
[2] Penrose has a different argument for that, one that is most commonly rejected on account of its assumption that materialism based on known physics entails that human minds must be logically consistent reasoners.
[3] At least one of those arguments - the one from parsimony - is problematic in its own right: the one and only essential property that any hypothesis of the mental needs in order to prevail is that it actually explains minds, and, so far, we have seen none from any position, materialism included (I am well aware that quite a few physicists think physics will continue to deliver parsimonious theories (The Elegant Universe, and so forth), but that, too, is a belief for which even the inductive form (so far, it has been that way) has a rather obvious confirmation bias problem.)
Perhaps for some it's indeed a matter of "feelings". But for others it's a conviction built from reasoning that leads to self-validating and irreducible truths. If you seriously go into this, the only possibilities left once you've dug and eliminated all mistaken assumptions are not material. It can be counter-intuitive and does take a bit of work to reason your way to those conclusions, which is why it's admittedly not a popular outlook. But once you grok it, you don't go back. The fact that materialism is slowly going out of style is telling.
Whenever I exchange with someone who makes concessions about consciousness possibly being the product of matter, it's due to one of two things: either some holes haven't yet been covered in their own explorations, or they're still oblivious to some of the implications of their current position.
Materialism is fast being eliminated as a possible antecedent to consciousness with reasoning and logic, not simply with beliefs. Currently, it's being salvaged in popular forms of dualism, where it would be a co-primitive of reality with consciousness (e.g. panpsychism). But even this position is just a short stop-over on the way to idealism, as it creates new problems and is just less parsimonious than simply saying consciousness first.
An example of a relatively elusive and subtle realization to get, but that also becomes rather difficult to renounce once you grok it, are qualia and how they lead to the hard problem of consciousness. Qualia are so enmeshed in our experience that people have a hard time first seeing how divorced from brain activity they actually are. If you don't get qualia, you can't get the hard problem and how it's really an impossible problem (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WX0xWJpr0FY).