I challenge you: your best argument for materialism

[Spindrift]

Lost interested in this for today, folks. The silliness is a little too concentrated for my taste for now... Will check back tomorrow to see if anyone has ACTUALLY BEEN ABLE TO ADD ANYTHING TO THE LIST!

How's this for your list?

The assumption that "Consciousness is the only carrier of reality anyone can ever know for sure; it is the one undeniable, empirical fact of existence." is false and has never been proven.

 

[ehcks]

So he comes in trying to sell his book, finds no buyers, and walks off in a huff.

Do we have anyone for an actual conversation on materialism or are we done here?

 

[MikeG]

I see that you have a habit of declaring yourself the winner, bored with us not teaching you anything, and stomping off in a huff.......

Guys, once again, I am getting nothing out of this. Frankly, there has been absolutely nothing of substance in the criticism I got so far. The reason for my investing time in here is to get proper criticism. It's my second attempt and second disappointment.

This whole discussion seems to be a kind of theater where people compete to try to 'look smart' or something, with little regard to true curiosity and intellectual honesty. Time is too precious for me; I'm interested in authenticity.

And I am OK if you tell yourself that I am bailing out.

So long!

 

[Ron_Tomkins]

Lost interested in this for today, folks. The silliness is a little too concentrated for my taste for now... Will check back tomorrow to see if anyone has ACTUALLY BEEN ABLE TO ADD ANYTHING TO THE LIST!

You seem so focused on people adding anything to your precious list, that you were a bit too quick to ignore Spindrift's post. He asked you some very challenging questions that put your whole belief in jeopardy. Perhaps you'd like to start addressing those, if you want to gain any credibility.

 

[tsig]

Nothing to add to the list? Nada? I am hoping at least SOME people here actually have something of relevance to say.

At the risk of being turned into a pile of smoldering ashes, I think not.

 

[Giordano]

http://www.bernardokastrup.com

There, the copyright is mine.

Nothing to add to the list? Nada?

I indicated that you should present your arguments here. Not as a citation of another website that I have no inclination to explore. And I am not interested in generating an Internet presence for your book or your website. So If you wish to discuss something here, then do so here. Thanks!

I just read: you are gone (at least for now). Okay!

 

[tsig]

So he comes in trying to sell his book, finds no buyers, and walks off in a huff.

Do we have anyone for an actual conversation on materialism or are we done here?

Unless you have something to add to his list which he will then use to sell his book.

 

[ehcks]

Unless you have something to add to his list which he will then use to sell his book.

Well, I thought I did, but he "refuted" it by saying that his beliefs are unfalsifiable.

 

[The Man]

So my challenge to you is this: can you come up with other, better arguments for materialism, beyond the ones I list below? I doubt, but remain curious and open minded.

Sure, you're writing a book.

 

[GlennB]

Finally something with content. I would argue that the existence of consciousness is the primary datum of reality and the one undeniable empirical fact. And that is the sole ontological entity (and therefore primitive) that monistic idealism requires. Now, the argument behind monistic idealism, of course, also requires that we grant validity to logic, although, as you point out, we cannot use logic to argue for the validity of logic. In this sense, certain things are indeed assumed, but none more than what materialism assumes. My goal isn't to prove anything (that's for naive positivists), but to show that, as far as logic and empirical evidence go, monistic idealism is a far BETTER ontology than materialism.

Bingo! I crossed off all my buzzwords in one short post.

 

[Darat]

This is such a complete misunderstanding of philosophy of science! Materialism is an ontology, not an experimental outcome or conclusion. It's one of several possible ontological interpretations of experimental outcomes. All that can be experimentally demonstrated are the patterns and regularities of reality, not their ontological interpretations.

So what does it matter?

 

[Giordano]

Bingo! I crossed off all my buzzwords in one short post.

My jargon bingo card also has on it the word "transformative" so I guess I loss...

 

[abaddon]

My output is widely published. I am not hiding anything.
http://www.bernardokastrup.com

Yes, you are. Buy my book, visit my website. I will not deign to actually present anything resembling and actual argument here.

This has all happened before, and it will all happen again.

If you cannot be bothered presenting anything here, why should anyone be bothered following your spam?

 

[Robin]

http://www.bernardokastrup.com

There, the copyright is mine.

Nothing to add to the list? Nada?

Your title asks for defenders of Materialism and yet your post asks for us to refute your version of Idealism.

Your assumption, then, is that there are only two metaphysical systems that have been proposed, but there are not.

So you need to clarify which you want.

The next problem is that I can hardly refute a claim that I haven't seen. Giving us a link to a general website does not help - exactly what part of that website do you want us to address? There are different flavours of Idealism, we need to know which one in particular.

So if you could give a link to a statement of your metaphysical claim then at least we have something to address.

Too often here we find someone claiming that everything is consciousness and when we probe we find that they mean that there is some consciousness that is not currently conscious. So, in other words, they are claiming Materialism with some of the labels changed.

Are you proposing a Theistic version of Idealism, as Berkeley proposed, with one mind which controls the perceptions and keeps them consistent?

Or are you proposing a subjective Idealism such as Erwin Schrodinger believed?

So, if you are asking us to refute something, give us a link to the claim itself. But if you give us a link to an entire book then I am afraid that my backlog of reading will not permit me to to get to it for some time.

Perhaps you could give us the gist of it, something more definite than you have in the OP but short enough for us to read in a realistic time.

 

[Robin]

From the blog:

The implication is that all reality, including our bodies and brains, are in consciousness, not consciousness in our bodies and brains. My worldview is compatible with a classical view of nature: it doesn't exclude the possibility that objects may exist in definite states and locations even if no living creature is observing them. Indeed, my worldview accepts a non-personal form of consciousness underlying all nature, in which objects can still exist as non-personal experiences, with definite outlines, even when not observed by personal psyches.

So what we are dealing with here is the usual claim that everything is consciousness, but that some consciousness is not conscious and that non-conscious consciousness is observed by conscious consciousness.

And so if we swap labels it is pretty much identical to Materialism.

Because of a natural mechanism of amplification that I explain in Chapter 5 of the book, and briefly summarize in this article, the movements of water within each whirlpool obfuscate the movements outside the whirlpool. Therefore, a living creature is self-reflectively aware only of the ripples that penetrate the rim of its own whirlpool – in our case, our skin, eyes, ears, tongue, and nose – but is unaware of everything else going on in the stream.

Again - you are claiming that there is something going on, of which nothing is aware.

So if there is something happening, and there is nothing that is aware of it, then that thing cannot be called consciousness, without altering the meaning of the word. You are just proposing one more "Materialism in denial" type of metaphysics.

For Idealism to be the case there must be nothing whatsoever that happens without something being aware of it, such as in Berkeleyan Idealism.

 

[RussDill]

Lost interested in this for today, folks. The silliness is a little too concentrated for my taste for now... Will check back tomorrow to see if anyone has ACTUALLY BEEN ABLE TO ADD ANYTHING TO THE LIST!

Look, its pretty simple. I think everyone here has already agreed that it's impossible to prove that the universe is purely materialistic. We could exist in a universe that is actively trying to deceive us. For an extreme example, see 'last thursdayism'.

So no one here is going to offer up a proof that materialism is true. For whatever proof or evidence offered, there is a more complicated version of the universe that is making that evidence up.

The only thing left then is for you to prove the converse, that we are not living in a universe of materialism. I'll check back tomorrow if you have anything that hasn't already been hashed out for thousands of years now.

 

[Robin]

And, incidentally, "monistic Idealism" is a tautology. Idealism is, by definition, monistic.

 

[Bernardo]

Your title asks for defenders of Materialism and yet your post asks for us to refute your version of Idealism.

Your assumption, then, is that there are only two metaphysical systems that have been proposed, but there are not.

So you need to clarify which you want.

The next problem is that I can hardly refute a claim that I haven't seen. Giving us a link to a general website does not help - exactly what part of that website do you want us to address? There are different flavours of Idealism, we need to know which one in particular.

So if you could give a link to a statement of your metaphysical claim then at least we have something to address.

Too often here we find someone claiming that everything is consciousness and when we probe we find that they mean that there is some consciousness that is not currently conscious. So, in other words, they are claiming Materialism with some of the labels changed.

Are you proposing a Theistic version of Idealism, as Berkeley proposed, with one mind which controls the perceptions and keeps them consistent?

Or are you proposing a subjective Idealism such as Erwin Schrodinger believed?

So, if you are asking us to refute something, give us a link to the claim itself. But if you give us a link to an entire book then I am afraid that my backlog of reading will not permit me to to get to it for some time.

Perhaps you could give us the gist of it, something more definite than you have in the OP but short enough for us to read in a realistic time.

You request is fair, but it goes a bit beyond my original intention. My point was: if I claim that, since consciousness is the only carrier of reality anyone can ever know for sure, all reality is in consciousness (even though not necessarily in your personal consciousness alone, as in solipsism), can you think of an argument against this generic claim beyond the 16 I already listed?

Your fair request assumes that my goal was to get into a detailed debate of my particular formulation of idealism here. That wasn't the intent for two reasons: I sincerely don't think this is the right forum for such a debate (even though you may be the right person), and the copyright-related rules of this forum make it impossible for any author to elaborate much on his ideas here.

Here are some articles in which I summarize some of the key points of my formulation:

http://www.bernardokastrup.com/2014/09/we-need-more-skepticism.html
http://www.bernardokastrup.com/2014/06/ways-materialists-beg-question.html
http://www.bernardokastrup.com/2014/05/the-top-10-most-fallacious-arguments-of.html
http://www.bernardokastrup.com/2014/08/the-greatest-contradiction-of-common.html

I would be sincerely interested in knowing if you can think of an extra argument beyond the 16 listed. Cheers, Bernardo.

 

[Bernardo]

From the blog:

So what we are dealing with here is the usual claim that everything is consciousness, but that some consciousness is not conscious and that non-conscious consciousness is observed by conscious consciousness.

And so if we swap labels it is pretty much identical to Materialism.

No. My claim is that instead of conscious mind and unconscious matter, what we have is amplified and obfuscated contents of consciousness. Like the stars are still in the sky at noon, obfuscated contents of consciousness are still in consciousness, but we aren't self-reflectively (or lucidly) aware of them. This turns the fundamental dualism implicit in materialism into a matter of degree of consciousness instead. It is anything but equivalent to materialism: neither in the number of postulated ontological entities nor in its implications.

Again - you are claiming that there is something going on, of which nothing is aware.

No. I am claiming that something is going on of which we are not lucidly aware, but indeed conscious at a deep, obfuscated level below self-reflectiveness.

So if there is something happening, and there is nothing that is aware of it, then that thing cannot be called consciousness, without altering the meaning of the word. You are just proposing one more "Materialism in denial" type of metaphysics.

For Idealism to be the case there must be nothing whatsoever that happens without something being aware of it, such as in Berkeleyan Idealism.

See answers above. What Berkeley called 'God' I'd rather call mind-at-large, to avoid overloaded attributions.

 

[PixyMisa]

You request is fair, but it goes a bit beyond my original intention. My point was: if I claim that, since consciousness is the only carrier of reality anyone can ever know for sure, all reality is in consciousness (even though not necessarily in your personal consciousness alone, as in solipsism), can you think of an argument against this generic claim beyond the 16 I already listed?

Yes. Your position is useless.