[lbo-talk] Materialism is a form of idealism

Chris Doss lookoverhere1 at yahoo.com
Thu Sep 3 17:33:45 PDT 2009


This is not evidence that ideas are not matter. Indeed, as always and inherently, it is the opposite. Because evidence is an idea. :) Really, people didn't only learn yesterday that the body determines the mind! All idealists know that. Plato was perfectly aware that when you drink alcohol or get a spear through your head, you think differently. But that didn't bother them, because the body and alcohol and spears are ideas. (Plato was actually an idealist in a different sense than that that I discuss below, but bear with me.)

The brain is an object of experience. Electrical impulses in the brain are an object of experience. Artificial limbs are objects of experience. No one has ever seen a brain, an electrical impulse, or an artificial limb that is not an object of experience, nor can they, and there is no conceivable evidence that anything corresponds to them outside of experience, because any evidence you gain will, again, be an object of experience. "Experience" is something that happens to a consciousness, that is, an idea. So, what you have done is correlate objects of experience, that is, ideas, saying, this thing I experience correlates to that thing I experience in such and such a way. To use an old example, you do not refute Berkeley by kicking a rock and saying, "I refute Berkeley thus!" Because you didn't kick a rock, you kicked an idea of a rock, or rather, rocks were ideas all along.

The entire pattern of correlation could be explained, if you wanted to do so, in a purely solipsistic manner. There is no difference to the dreamer between dream and reality. And Occam's razor says, to the dreamer, "your dream is real," because that is indeed the simplest explanation.

These arguments are all really, really old. Thousands of years old.

My opinion is that materialism and idealism are both wrong, being metaphysical positions, and metaphysics, as this Kant guy showed, is impossible. However, idealism is at least consistent, whereas materialism is balls-up nonsense from the inside-out.

Again, I am talking about metaphysical materialism here, not e.g. historical materialism. The truth or falsity of historical materialism does not hinge on the metaphysical nature of the universe, but on the relation between events, er, objects of experience.

--- On Thu, 9/3/09, c b <cb31450 at gmail.com> wrote:
> That's not persuasive to me. You'll have to elaborate.
> Ideas are
> material. They are electric impulses in the brain. I just
> saw a 60
> minutes show wherein the latest brain physiology allows
> paralyzed
> people to control artificial limbs with hitech stuff. In
> other words,
> they have decoded the brain waves or ideas, like "left" or
> "right",
> "up" ,"down" such that they can use them to do exactly what
> they mean
> (!). No more mind/body problem in philo 101.
> Anyway, ideas are matter.



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