[mjburgess]

> Consciousness the the fundamental reality; it is the only thing we know for sure.

These statements conflate, as idealists do, epistemology and ontology.

What we know "for sure" has no bearing on what's real. These are entirely separate questions.

What an ape might, or might not, feel certain (or any which way about) says nothing about where an ape finds itself. Of course, this is a great injury to our ego, and sense of power to determine the nature of the world by our mind alone -- but such is life.

The world is not human, not at all like a human, and nothing about it follows from us at all. The world is not made in our image. Consciousness is a derivative, secondary phenomenon which is a measurement process occurring in the body of an ape, and whatever it manages to measure with any clarity, has no impact on the nature of that world.

[qsera]

>Consciousness is a derivative, secondary phenomenon which is a measurement process occurring in the body of an ape

Can you define existence without depending on or referring to consciousness?

[mjburgess]

Yes. Though i think you're committing the gentic fallacy here, which is the core fallacy at the heart of idealism and much 19th C. german philosophy.

The properties of the origin of somethign imply nothing about the properties of the product. That a bread factory is made of metal, does not mean bread is.

That in my statement of things in language I am conscious of what I state, says nothing about the truth (or other such properties) of what I say.

A photographic plate is made of metal, the mountain it photographs, of mud.

I am conscious, but when I say, "reality is all that which is extended in space and time" -- the truth of that proposition has nothing to do with my being consiouss -- it is a loaf of bread, a photograph, a product of a process invovling consiousness but in none of its properties, depends upon it.

Every relevant thing we do requires consciousness -- just as everythign a thermometer does requires, say, its own mercury -- but in measuring coffee's temperature, coffee is in no way mercury. And when we measre the world, by photographing it with consciousness, it is in no way conscious.

[qsera]

>reality is all that which is extended in space and time

You are missing the fact that "space" and "time" are also illusions painted on consciousness.

[mjburgess]

Alas, no I am not.

They're properties of the world which consciousness measures.

A mountain is painted in the ink of a photo, the mountain is not an illusion. You're focused only on the measurement, and not what is measured.

[qsera]

The point is that all existence is built on top of consciousness.

I understand your difficulty. It is hard to imagine the universe disappearing if all consciousness cease to exist the next second.

But is that really hard? Don't everything in your dreams disappear when you wake up?

Let me ask another question. Can you differentiate between a consciousness observing a universe, and a consciousness with a sensation of a whole universe, built in?

And the point of that is our subjective experiences only require consciousness, and not a universe that is independent of it.

[pixl97]

>The point is that all existence is built on top of consciousness.

Then if all conscious beings (lets say humans are the only ones for sake of argument) die, then existence ends. Simply put, this does not happen because consciousness occurs in a substrate.

Take the thought experiment of the boltzmann brain, it still requires the assembly of probabilistic entropy to occur, it is not nothing.

[mjburgess]

I've been an idealist. I understand all the arguments. The base fallacy at the heart of all this is the one I mentioned.

On the very last point: the conclusion that consciousness is thin, like a photograph, and the world thick -- follows from the most complete explanatory account of how consiousness works. The idea that there is no world, or that the world is a thin transcendental ego -- this abandons the project of offering an account of consiousness at all and ends up in incoherence.

Within consiousness I am presented with: what I cannot change (fixed perceptions), what I can change (eg., imagined perceptions). This duality is immanent to consiousness itself. The imagination can apprenend the fixed, ie., I can imagine scenarios that I could, in principle, see. So there is, immanent to consiousness already, a representational duality: I have both fixed perceptions that I cannot change, I have mutable perceptions (imaginations) that I can -- and my mutable perceptions are representations of my fixed perceptions.

All of the dynamics of the duality of the represented and representation, of the fixed/external and of the mutable/internal -- are already immanent to consiousness.

What remains to be explained is: why? The obvious answer is that the reason i have fixed perceptions is because they are caused by a world that they depict, and the reason I have variable/mutable perceptions is they are caused by me as I represent that world to myself. The duality immanent to consiousness is explained by the duality of the measured and measuring.

Even if you abandoned the world "external" and replace it with "fixed", you gain nothing. Everything which seems objectionable about this duality is already present. If you simply assert it, rather than explain it, your position is weaker because you've nothing to say.

The causal origin of our fixed perceptions is the world, which impacts our sensory organs, interacts with our bodies, and produces a thin perceptual surface to us which causally-directly depicts the world that we are in. These fixed perceptions are constructed by our bodies thru this process of activation, which we can call "measurement with post processing" ie., a kind of digital camera rather than a chemical one.

But in any case, to answer your final question: yes, the difference is that "consiousness" with this duality of the fixed and the variable, and their representational relationship, only makes sense if part of consciousness isnt being determined by consciousness. The need to say what determine it means the "consiousness is complete" option incoherent, if "consciouness" as a term comes to adopt all the properties it needs to explain the fixed perceptions, then you'll find consiousness becomes both the material and the mental -- and all you have done is empty the word of all its meaning

[pegasus]

Why "alas"?

[mjburgess]

Alas for my interlocutor's argument.

[alsetmusic]

> You are missing the fact that "space" and "time" are also illusions painted on consciousness.

Both of these can be measured. They are not illusions.

Money is an illusion made up by people and agreed upon for basically the whole of the world economy, but not real. Space between me and the lamp on my desk is very real. The age of the world and the age of the universe is very real.

[qsera]

Just like the sensation of hearing a voice is an illusion created by your brain from the vibrations in the air, the perception of depth is an illusion created from the parallax between your eyes. We seem to have an easy time understanding that sound is an illusion, but have a really hard time considering that space and time are similar illusions...They are just some number (like the number of vibrations) that the brain creates a perception for you.

That you can measure it does not change the fact.

>Money is an illusion

Money is a number. Brain does not create an illusion for money, at least not in the sense we are considering here.

[markhahn]

we need to distinguish accounts that are merely self-consistent, and those that are more useful.

the reality-is-illusion meme is self-consistent (panpsychism, simulationism, dream-of-god-ism, whatever). merely being self-consistent isn't good enough.

the alternative (and there is only one) is physicalism and its epistemology, science. the main appeal of this is parsimony, often referred to as Occam's Razor.

[qsera]

> those that are more useful.

Oh it is useful. It answers questions like "why do reality exist". "who created it", "What was before it"...Or may be I should say it does not really answer them but makes the questions irrelevant.

Just like how earth centric hypothesis posed questions like "Why is everything circling the earth and why is earth special", and heliocentric hypothesis made that irrelevant by proving that it is just an illusion caused by observing from the earth.

[mjburgess]

It makes the questions incoherent.

This isnt a benefit, it's a sign that the semantics you're giving language fail to actually model its meaning.

The position isnt self-consistent, unless you engage in the typical idealist peformance of pretending not to know what these questions mean.

In the end, idealism is defeated by the very implausibility of this performance. The idealist, is implicated in the rich ontology of the real world by the very use of language itself. Presupposed is this ontology, and the ordinary truth of ordinary propositions requires it.

If the question, "what was here before I existed?" is meaningful, then idealism is wrong. And it is meaningful, therefore it is wrong.

[king_geedorah]

Not good enough for whom exactly?

[prmph]

You are attributing to me something I never said.

I said nothing about the nature of reality. All that I said is: all my knowledge of the reality (whether it exists independently or me or not) comes from my perception.

There could be an objective reality, or reality could be something created by our consciousness. I don't know. The one thing I do know, however, is what my consciousness perceives. It is in that sense that is is fundamental

[summarybot]

Largely I find your points reductionist and insulting to the very sacred experience that is unfolding for you and me. Consciousness is a primary or even a priori phenomenon from which all of your surmisals stem. You have got it backwards. The fact someone once saw an ape, or saw a nebula, or made a measurement of brain waves, these all had to happen within human-experience. The experiencing itself is irreducible. Consciousness as a byproduct or secondary phenomenon as you claim, is to be expected for someone brought up in the modern era where religion and spirituality were so vehemently eschewed that men leaned too far into the other extreme and became physicalist-materialists claiming the lived experience is but a mere symphony of neurological interactions without consequence. This is a disastrous view. This is basically a swift ticket to a hell-realm. The basic posture is all wrong - you must return to the fundamental facts, namely those of your lived experience. What you claim as primary evidence are in fact secondary observations. And then you use the secondary observations to make claims about a primary nature "out there" and "distinct from" human-experiencing. This is simply not the case. This view is logically untenable. One does not study consciousness by looking at pictures and drawings and photos, just like how one does not study what music sounds like by inspecting the buttons of a saxaphone unblown. The fluid nature of the energetic capacity of mind is very difficult to discern - it's not an everyday occurence, sages spend their whole lives pursuing prayer and meditation in order to catch a mere glimpse at the primal nature of experience. Everything else flows from this. Your mind is the root of all things, it is the common denominator in all moments of your experience.

[mjburgess]

You can read my other comment. You're also committing the genetic fallacy.

Yes, a hand can measure itself. Yes, consciousness as a measurement process of reality can expose to the conscious agent that its own consciousness is a merely a process in the world.

Just as a camera, in photographing a mirror, discovers that it is only a camera located at some point in space and time.

The "back to basics" pov you're talkign about is one which actually abandons everything consciousness tells you about the world, because you're afraid of what you've found.

An ape without a mirror thinks, of course, it is god. What an insult to find the face of this god is only that of an ape.

[summarybot]

No, the genetic fallacy is not germane here. You are conflating the derivation of knowledge and direct knowing, which are distinct. You conflate the ingredients on the back of the label for the taste of the sweets in the pouch. The taste of sweetness is what I am indicating, not the list of ingredients. Also, you are suggesting that there is an impersonal objective spacetime irrespective of observer which is false. There is a generalized case that works for the figures projected for measuring the distances to solar bodies from other solar bodies. But you are basing your analysis on the hidden assumption that the material reality is first. This is an unchallenged assumption in modern science which leads you astray.

[qsera]

>discovers that it is only a camera located at some point in space and time.

It discovers no such thing. It can only measure the signals coming from the sensors. That is its ground truth. If a sensor can produce a signal without having an image fall on it, then that would be what the camera sees.

So in this case, it would perceive the image of a camera in a mirror, but that would not be the reality.

[mjburgess]

It doesnt perceive the image of a camera, it's sensor is that image. What it means to perceive is for that image to form. This is the second great fallacies of idealism: (1) the genetic fallacy above that the origin/product of a process must share properties and (2) this fallacy of ambiguity on the word 'see'/perceive (between the mental act of drawing attention to an aspect of a perception, and the physiological act of forming that perception).

When I open my eye, light hits it, striking off the object which I am seeing. What it means to see is for that object to cause my perception. I am NOT seeing my perception, that doesn't make any sense -- it's incoherent because it's an infinite regress.

When I open my eyes and see the coffee, my body changes to have the perception of that coffee as part of my structure -- I am the photographic plate. Just as the photographic plate isnt taking a picture of itself, neither is my eye or mind.

To see is, akin to the photographic plate, to be changed by the world so that you have an impression of it. You do not see seeing, you see objects.

[qsera]

>To see is, akin to the photographic plate, to be changed by the world so that you have an impression of it

And the point is that you don't need the "world" aka reality to make that change. It can come from within, for example a faulty sensor creating an image of a cloud that does not exist.

And the implication that follows is that just because you percieve something does not mean that it is "real".

This can be made more clear if you understand that every "real" object is made up of pixe dust aka fields. When you see a particle at some point, say an electron, there is actually nothing there...but the space at that location behaves, for some reason, as if there is an electron there...

And that is another problem with the physical idea. What happens if you continuously split an object? If it is really physical, then it should remain physical no matter how many times it is split. But we see that it is not the case.

[mjburgess]

Yip, but once you have to explain law-following fixed perceptual fields (ie., that it always seems as if my fixed visual perceptions follow the laws of physics, and so on; that my audial/touch/visual percetions follow geometry exacvtly; that my actions to intervene on the world are causally deterministic; ...) --- then you've a real difficulty.

The mind doesnt have the right kind of properties to explain that. If you modify "consiousness" to include those properties then it's no longer consiousness at all.

Whatever generates law-like fixed perceptions of the objective has to be as if all of material reality exists in its law-like way.

Yes, P(Material Reality Does Not Exist) > 0 BUT whatever confidence you give to that, say p_illusion,

P(Material Reality Exists as it seems to | the fixed background of law-like perceptions) >>>>> p_illusion

You dont escape the need for the objective, the law-like, the fixed, the external.. just because you locate what generates this in "the mind" (redefined to include this). At that point the "mental origin" of this background is material. You arent making any difference to call it mental or physical.

[summarybot]

You say "you don't see seeing, you see objects" ... Seeing itself is an irreducible fundamental of the universe in the human perspective, that's the point. If it could be reduced and you could split the act of seeing into components, you could say there's the eye [sense faculty], the focal object, and the visual consciousness. You're conflating the three and saying objects are both the eye and the visual consciousness, which is imprecise and unhelpful. A mirror doesn't show you yourself, it shows you a reflection of your external appearance. To say you can see yourself in a mirror is akin to saying you can see a sun in the shadow of a tree.

[GoblinSlayer]

If there's no nature out there, then what is hell?

[summarybot]

The distinction is what appears: appearances, versus what actually abides: reality.