Commentary on the TJump/Julien Musolino Discussion on Idealism and Consciousness
Introduction
The aim of this post is to simply provide commentary on a
recent discussion that YouTube atheist TJump had with psychologist and
cognitive scientist Julien Musolino (link here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAl_f9jddHY&t=37s) relating to the soul, consciousness,
idealism and panpsychism. The reason for this post is to correct numerous errors
that both TJump and Julien had regarding the doctrine of idealism and how
consciousness works.
1 – Commentary
The real meat of the discussion begins at 5.03 where TJump
makes the claim that…
“they [idealists]
present a very confident case that we should all believe that the soul is
fundamental to all of reality and that it is not just a product of the brain.”
However TJump seems to be poisoning the well from the get-go
here. No idealist has ever claimed that “the soul is fundamental to all of
reality”. You will never see the word soul used synonymously with mind at large
or universal consciousness anywhere in the works of Berkeley, Bradley, McTaggart,
Fitche, Hegel, Kant, Goff or Kastrup. Using the word soul has radically
different connotations to the term consciousness. The soul is often associated
with the school of substance dualism which is radically different to idealism.
This may not have been intentional but it seems that TJump has either (1) straw
manned the position of idealism to make it easier to attack or (2) doesn’t understand
what idealism actually says. I will side with the latter interpretation for
now.
The next point to discuss is at 5.33 where Julien says…
“idealism…is
notoriously unfalsifiable so it’s hard to actually – at least given our current
state of knowledge.”
The idea trailed off into talking about science which I will
talk about later but the central idea here is the idealism is unfalsifiable. However
this criticism, whilst popular, has little weight because idealism is a school
of ontology, much like materialism. You cannot do a certain science experiment
and show it to be false. This is not an issue, despite how Julien tried to make
it to be one, because you also cannot falsify materialism. This is because they
are ontologies. Science is purely concerned with how reality behaves; not what
reality is. Reality would behave in the same way whether materialism or idealism
is true. They are empirically equivalent so science cannot be used to determine
which school is the best choice. In addition, materialism suffers from exactly the
same problem. No matter how many years we sit scratching our heads no closer to
solving the hard problem of consciousness, materialists always have their ‘Get
out of jail free’ card where they can say “Just give us more time and one day
we will crack it, we will solve the problem one day”. The time can just keep
getting pushed back and blaming the lack of progress on our limited knowledge. His
criticism has little weight because (1) it is an irrelevant criticism in the
first place and (2) it can be equally reversed onto materialism, meaning we
need a symmetry breaker outside of science to determine which school we should
choose.
At 5.54, Julien begins to talk about the relationship between
consciousness and science by stating that…
“and from that
perspective and the extraordinary power that it [materialist science] has had
over several hundred years now, I conclude that the kind of soul that most people
believe in, sometimes it is called popular dualism in the philosophical
literature, is extremely unlikely to exist.”
There are two ideas mangled together here and I will discuss
each in turn. The first is something to the effect of the argument from past
scientific success in favour of materialism. The argument goes similar to what
Julien said by saying that when we assume materialism and use the scientific
method, we seem to get the correct results about how reality works, and our
past supernatural explanations are replaced with demonstratable natural ones. It
shows that materialism is failing when a weak inductive argument is the best that
they can come up with. The argument fails for the same reason that I explained
before – no amount of scientific evidence can be used to confirm or falsify an
ontology. Science when done properly is what is called ‘ontology invariant’ –
it doesn’t care about whether materialism or idealism is true, it simply tells
us how nature behaves. No amount of novel, future, testable predictions (TJump’s
favourite phrase) can be used to make conclusions of a non-scientific nature.
It’s almost a very autistic style response to simply say that because we have
used one pragmatic system in the past that got us results that we therefore
cannot change the system when the time to outgrow it comes.
The second idea Julien brings up is to do with popular
dualism. However, this has no bearing on idealism and I actually agree that the
popular theological conception of the soul that Julien alludes to, the one of
an immaterial soul inhabiting a material body, is highly unlikely to exist
based off the metaphysical issues with the interaction problem. Popular (substance)
dualism is also not compatible with various pieces of neuroscientific data we
have. The reason that Julien seems to talk about popular dualism here rather
than idealism – as TJump directed the original question to be – is because TJump
himself poisoned the question by using the term ‘soul’ – described before.
Idealists shy away from using the term exactly for this reason. It has broad
theological and dualistic connotations that distract from the real conversation
at hand.
Next, at 6.31, Julien continues by saying…
“before you throw
out the entire scientific edifice, you have to do a bit more thinking and you
have to show that your positions can yield some understanding.”
However this criticism is tainted with the same flawed
understanding of the relationship between idealism and science. He seems to
think that if everyone adopted idealism, the entire scientific understanding of
the world would be demolished and would have to be built up again from square
one. However this is false. We would still be able to model falling balls using
SUVAT equations, we would still be able to measure the effects of the Higgs
boson, we would just have a different understanding of what a ball and a Higgs
boson are as ontological items.
It is also quite arrogant to say that idealistic thinkers
have not done enough thinking. Berkeley, Bradley, McTaggart, Fitche, Hegel, Kant,
Goff or Kastrup have surely done lots of thinking about how to understand the
nature of reality. Maybe read some of their works to get a flavour for where
their ideas come from. These thinkers yield great understanding of the nature
of reality, the nature of time, the origins of consciousness and how
consciousness works and manifests. Julien seems to be unaware of any of the key
idealistic thinkers apart from Kastrup (and I will admit Kastrup’s delivery of
ideas does need some improvement).
Julien continues at 6.46 by saying…
“at the heart I
think, of their position is the problem of consciousness, the so called hard
problem [of consciousness] which is, you know, a difficult problem. But there
are a number of possible positions on that problem so…”
Here, Julien is articulating why he believe many people jump
ship from materialism and move to ideas such as dualism, panpsychism and
idealism – confronting the hard problem of consciousness. The hard problem is
undoubtedly a hard problem and has boggled the minds of philosophers and
neuroscientists for decades since its formal christening. However, it is more
than a “difficult problem” as Julien articulates it to be. It is a really difficult
problem with no solution on the horizon or any steps made towards a solution
without resolving to denying many relevant and undeniable aspects of
consciousness (qualia are denied any real existence by Dennett, Churchland and
Frankish). I agree that the hard problem is one of the main motivations for adopting
alternative theories, but it is not at the heart of many idealists’ case. The
hard problem wasn’t even articulated until 1995 by Chalmers so many of the
German and British idealists clearly had other motivations. Their motivations,
like mine, are also epistemic and ontological. Consciousness is the only
reality we are sure of and cannot deny. Rather than creating an abstract model
of matter to explain everything, we could simply expand what we do know –
consciousness – out to everything. No ontological bridges are made and all the
data can be made sense of without burning science to the ground. Again, Julien
seems unaware of the numerous key German and British idealistic thinkers who
articulated their positions similar to this.
You will probably see a repeating pattern here because at
7.44, Julien makes a similar point by saying the following…
“it’s too soon for
people like Goff and company to say, ‘well let’s throw out science and try
something else.’”
The same tired idea is being repeated here again – that idealism
undermines science. No, science should be ontology invariant, the fact that
materialism has become so tied to modern science is a philosophical inference
(a bad one) not a scientific fact. Julien also seems to strawman what panpsychists
like Goff and other idealists say. They have never claimed that we should “throw
out science and try something else”. They have only ever claimed that
materialistic science seems totally unequipped to deal with the hard problem of
consciousness and its associated microproblems. Goff has actually articulated
that a panpsychist metaphysics couped with neuroscience will give us a much
better understanding of how consciousness arises. Julien seems to either (1)
misunderstand the claims of Goff and company, (2) misunderstand the
relationship between materialism and science or (3) be setting up deliberate
strawmen of his opponent’s positions.
At around 8.20-8.40, Julien also exposes the distinction between
primary and secondary qualities of an object and says that using our
understanding of this distinction (that primary qualities are objective and in
the object and secondary qualities are subjective and only in the perceiver)
science has progressed pretty far. However this is just another iteration of
the argument from past scientific success already dealt with before.
At 8.39, Julien also says the following…
“but now, it’s
[materialism] bumping against – so it’s explained all kinds of stuff – but now
bumping against the problem, the so called hard problem.”
My point exactly. Materialism is not equipped to even deal
with the very phenomenon which created it. Materialism is an abstraction
created within consciousness yet materialism cannot explain the very consciousness
which birthed it. This is why I find dogmatic materialists so frustrating
because they fail to see that materialism is not a fact; there is no empirical
evidence for materialism (all evidence is sense experience and qualia). It is a
philosophical abstraction which has cut its own roots off by failing to account
for the primary datum of experience and existence – consciousness.
Then at 8.54, Julien articulates an issue which many
scientists have with idealism and panpsychism which I can be sympathetic to. He
says…
“…or do we need
some radical new approach? So do we need to now do what these people [Goff,
Kastrup] are saying?”
The biggest block that many scientists have towards idealism
is that it seems “radical” because it denies the very foundation which has been
dogmatically enshrined within its doctrine – the doctrine of matter. When idealists
blow this out, it can create such an immediate knee-jerk reaction that many
dismiss idealism off hand. However, using the White Mind state and
introspection (see my post titled The Illusion of Time), we can see that all
that is is experience and the knowing/attention of experience. Everything else
is an inference. Far from radical, idealism brings people back down to earth
and away from radical abstractions and self-defeating inferences.
I’ll give Julien bashing a break for a minute and actually
agree with what he says below at 9.29…
“but I think it’s
very interesting, I think people should pursue all kinds of avenues, that’s
what makes science so interesting and you don’t know ahead of time where
breakthroughs and discoveries are going to come from.”
I wish more scientists has this more open ended attitude to
the question of consciousness because it is the most baffling unsolved puzzle
ever, more puzzling than string theory and Higgs bosons and quantum gravity
combined.
Back to TJump now and at 9.47, he makes a rather long
monologue about his confusion surrounding idealistic and panpsychist arguments…
“When I hear the
arguments I’m very confused by them, like I don’t understand why they think
these are really compelling arguments because if we take the idea that if we
just make consciousness a fundamental thing and say that it’s a part of the
universe – its all just electrons are made of consciousness or whatever – how is
this different from saying consciousness is a composite thing what we just
haven’t discovered yet, like what problem does it solve to make it a fundamental
thing rather than just saying it’s a composite thing?”
Many people think that idealism and panpsychism are silly and
confusing because it forces them to doubt their most fundamental
presupposition, that matter exists. Their entire worldview is based on this
presupposition, so the psychological roadblocks go up immediately. However I
don’t want to unfairly represent TJump’s confusion so I will address his
contention below.
His main counter was to say that positing consciousness as a
fundamental aspect of reality does no more explaining or problem solving than
simply saying that it is a “composite” thing (I assume he means a product of
the brain here) that we simply haven’t discovered yet. However, with TJump’s
theory that it is created by the brain, we need to say 2 things. (1) There is
no evidence that the brain produces consciousness. All we have are correlates
of consciousness. This is not evidence that the brain produces consciousness
because I can use the same datum to point in a completely different direction
(mainly that they are images of our underlying conscious processes, when viewed
in the 3rd person). (2) Appeals to unknowns automatically make you
lose all of your hypothesis’ explanatory power. It terminates any further
explanation until the evidence magically becomes available. And materialists
can simply sit and repeat that old phrase of ‘give us more time and one day we
will get there, one day we will solve it’. It’s an all too convenient escape
hatch. However, when we say that consciousness is a fundamental aspect of
reality, we are not just ad-hoc putting it as such to remove a problem, we are
analysing our epistemic grounds for materialism. Idealists often go right to
the root of how the problem arises (the hard problem arises due to matter being
defined as non-conscious and non-experiential in nature) and see if we can
formulate reality in a better way so that the problem does not arise. The only
argument which counters what I have said here would be the argument from past
scientific success for materialism, but I have dealt with this at length in
previous paragraphs.
Finally, this argument can be reversed as an argument
against materialism. Take the question of “Why is there something rather than
nothing?”. In this we want to explain why matter exists. So what do materialists
do? Posit matter as a fundamental aspect of reality. For example, many posit
some sort of quantum foam as a fundamental layer of reality in order to explain
the existence of everything else we see. Why should materialists be allowed to
posit the thing they are trying to explain the existence of (matter) as fundamental
but the idealist or the panpsychist cannot with consciousness?
If TJump is to prefer the hypothesis that consciousness is
an unknown thing produced by the brain in a way we haven’t discovered yet then
he needs to show how his hypothesis is (1) better supported by the data we
have, (2) has more explanatory power and (3) requires less assumptions,
presuppositions and inferences to idealistic and panpsychist alternatives.
Beginning at 11.42, Julien offers a well deserved steelman
of the non-materialist position against the brain producing consciousness by
saying…
“the problem seems
to be that if you have a computational system that, you know, behaves
intelligently, why should it have a first person perspective? It doesn’t follow
from anything in the computational theory of mind. So it’s completely
mysterious, that it brings up notions like so-called philosophical zombies.”
This steelman was well deserved in a conversation where both
participants seemed relatively unaware of what the doctrines they were
attacking were actually saying.
Jumping to 14.19, TJump once again reiterates his point
about the explanatory symmetry between a panpsychist approach and a materialist
approach by saying…
“Well do you think
that the proposed solution of taking these polyps of consciousness and saying
that they exist fundamentally and somehow produce the brain but we don’t know
how – is that any different from saying…that it’s material and the combinations
of material stuff produce this?”
I have already addressed this criticism so I will not add anything
more to the commentary here.
Skipping ahead to 18.39, Julien offers another critique of
the fundamental consciousness hypothesis by saying…
“What you don’t
want to do for explanatory purposes is take the whole thing, so take my entire
personal, mental life and say, ‘that’s fundamental’ because they you beg the
question – you postulate the very thing you’re trying to explain.”
I have two responses to this objection. The first is the
same as what I said before, that this argument can easily be reversed against
the materialist when they try to explain where matter came from. If the
argument were sound, then the materialist could not postulate a fundamental
material item in order to explain the existence of matter. My second objection
is that idealism never takes our “personal, mental life” and says that it alone
is fundamental. Julien is confusing idealism with solipsism, although no
solipsist has ever said that their personal mind is fundamental, they just say
that their personal mind is all that exists. Idealism says that nature and
reality is fundamentally mental/conscious in nature. It never said that all of
reality is restricted to my personal mind. Finally, the fundamental
consciousness hypothesis is not begging the question. Begging the question is a
fallacy where the proponent creates an argument where the premises assume the
truth of the conclusion. With idealism, the conclusion is that reality is
fundamentally mental/conscious in nature or ontology. However, no idealistic
argument ever assumes that reality is fundamentally as such and then argues
from this to the same conclusion it assumed. You will find this nowhere in the
work of Berkeley, Bradley, McTaggart, Fitche, Hegel, Schelling, Kant, or
Kastrup. Julien’s idea of begging the question as simply postulating the
existence of the very thing you are trying to explain as a fundamental aspect of
reality is definitely not an example of begging the question.
At 20.52, Julien makes an interesting concession which is as
follows…
“The question is
what can we explain, and the answer so far for consciousness is nothing. We can’t
explain a damn thing because we don’t have a clue how it works. So that leads
us to propose all kinds of things.”
And this is entirely accurate. Nobody has a clue how the
brain produces consciousness yet we are told dogmatically that it does. We have
no idea how the brain encodes and decodes memories yet we are dogmatically told
that it does. As stated before, there is no evidence that the brain produces consciousness.
We have correlations through the neuro-correlates of consciousness but that is
it. All evidence the materialist or physicalist will propose can be shown to actually
not be evidence of their hypothesis. This is because if I can use the same evidence
to point in an entirely different direction (to idealism) then it is not
actually evidence of materialism and the brain producing consciousness. It is
like a broken compass that originally points North but then when shaken it
points South West.
However, after making this admission, Julien goes on to
reiterate the argument from past scientific success for materialism which has
been addressed before.
The next interesting section to dissect began at 23.28 which
is copied below where the two discuss the possibility/impossibility of bridging
the hard problem or quantitative/qualitative distinction.
TJump : “The
panpsychists and idealists come back and say, ‘No that’s impossible, it’s
completely impossible that [brains producing consciousness] could happen because
no description could ever give you the sensation of redness, you can’t describe
redness with any kind of descriptive terms in physics, it’s impossible!’”
Julien : “Yeah,
but that’s, I mean you got to be careful about these arguments, you can’t conclude
from our ignorance that something’s impossible, we don’t know. It could be
impossible yes.”
This is interesting. TJump actually does a good job of steelmanning
the idealist position and articulating the quantitative/qualitative
distinction. Julien’s response leaves a lot to be desired.
My first objection would be via the null hypothesis. The
null hypothesis is to always “Rephrase that question in a form that assumes no relationship
between the variables. In other words, assume a treatment has no effect.” (Google
definition). The question here being, does brain activity produce sensory
qualities are qualia? Here, we need to assume that there is no relationship
between the variables until we have sufficient evidence to indicate otherwise. So,
we assume that there is no relationship, especially causally, between sensory
qualities and brain activity until we have sufficient evidence to indicate
otherwise. And in this case there is no evidence, never mind sufficient
evidence (outlined in previous paragraphs). So, sticking with the null
hypothesis, we conclude that brain activity does not produce sensory qualities
and qualia until sufficient evidence comes up to indicate otherwise. It’s not
about it being impossible, it’s about needing sufficient evidence in order to
reject the null hypothesis that the brain does not produce sensory qualities
and qualia.
My second
objection would be that in order to say that something is impossible, we
usually rely on conceptual analysis all the time. For example, we say that married
bachelors are impossible because it is a contradiction by definition. We do a
conceptual analysis of the terms and show that a married bachelor cannot even
be conceived. Square circles are deemed impossible by this same standard, we
could not even conceive of a square circle. Same with this, we cannot even
conceive, in principle or metaphysically, how we can go from pure quantities of
matter to the qualitative realm of qualia and sense experience. Materialists don’t
even have metaphysics on their side. Julien might object and say that we simply
have not got access to the relevant knowledge of how to bridge the gap so we
just have to say that we don’t know and confess our ignorance. However, if he
is to take this line of reasoning, then he would have to say that square
circles and married bachelors are infact possible and maybe we just don’t have
all the relevant knowledge. We cannot conclude from our ignorance that they are
impossible can we?
My final
objection is a modal one. Julien says at the end that it could indeed be an
impossible gap to cross. But if this is so, then there is at least one possible
world (modal logic here) where brains identical in anatomy and structure to
ours cannot produce qualia and sensory qualities. If that situation occurs but
there is another world (possibly ours) where brains identical in anatomy and
structure do produce qualia and sensory qualities, then there must be a
relevant difference between the two worlds which makes it such that qualia and
sensory qualities are only produced in one world but not the other. But since
these brains are identical in both possible worlds there can be no relevant
difference. Therefore, Julien is faced with two options (1) accept that the gap
really is impossible to cross or (2) show the exact relevant difference between
the brains which makes it so that one produces qualia and the other does not.
Since (2) is not an option based on the scenario he set up, he has to fall into
(1). Brains of our anatomy either produce qualia in all possible worlds or no
possible worlds. It is either true or impossible. I say impossible based off
the reasons given before and the null hypothesis.
TJump and
Julien loop around again to talking about the relationship between idealism and
science in this exchange beginning at 25.48…
TJump : “Do you think that the
arguments alone are going to be sufficient for that [belief in non-materialism]
or are they [non-materialists] going to need some testable predictions?”
Julien : “Oh they’re going to need
much more than the arguments; I mean the arguments are interesting and they may
be a good start to start looking somewhere but…I mean think about the
asymmetry. If you want to flip modern science upside down, okay, you can do
that but I mean think about the strength of the prior on modern science and
materialism and physicalism, it’s just astronomical.”
TJump’s
leading question and Julien’s response here again show how the two conflate the
relationship between ontological questions and scientific enquiry. First, I
want to respond directly to TJump’s challenge of “testable predictions”.
Idealism and materialism are empirically equivalent theories, meaning they can
both make sense of the data of reality. This also means that they can form the
same predictions about how reality will behave (all science is concerned about).
There is nothing stopping either one making any prediction. Therefore, no
testable prediction could be used to confirm idealism or materialism. You
cannot use empirical evidence to justify metaphysical claims. When talking
about the ontology of nature, we need to do conceptual analysis, ontological
examination, and compare which has the most theoretical virtues such as
simplicity, lack of inferences, explanatory power, explanatory scope, etc…
Julien’s
response is very similar to his other responses where he ties in materialism
with science and says that questioning materialism would lead to science being
diminished being flipped “upside down”. Our understanding of what reality is would
be flipped upside down, but science would remain relatively unscathed. We would
still know that medicines work by inducing certain chemical reactions. We would
just have a different understanding of what a chemical reaction is. I agree
that modern idealism’s biggest problem is that it is still in its infancy. This
is because materialism has had millennia to flourish and develop its understanding.
Imagine if everyone became an idealist for one year. All doctors, all physicists,
all technicians, all engineers, all philosophers. Imagine how much our
understanding of reality would change if all our minds worked together. The
asymmetry is simply due to the fact that so few people have been idealists and
that materialism has rather foolishly been tied inseparably to science since
the early 1900s.
The next
point to address is that just after this response, TJump brought up the idea of
empirical equivalence and when responding to the idea that both materialism and
idealism are empirically equivalent, Julien said at 27.38…
“No. I don’t think they are. I don’t
think they are. If they did [were] then most scientists would be idealists but
they’re not.”
What’s
strange about this reply is that Julien gives no piece of empirical evidence from
neuroscience, psychology, cognitive science, physics, chemistry, biology or
anywhere in order to back up his point. He just asserts that they are not
empirically equivalent without any proper justification. His actual reason for
believing that they aren’t is silly at best. The fact that most scientists are
materialists is rather a symptom of cultural programming than deep ontological analysis.
He admits just a few seconds later that most scientists never think about these
deep ontological questions, showing further that most scientists are
materialists simply because that is how the culture rolls in the 21st
century. Not a good response at all from Julien.
His next
point that I want to respond to is from 29.06 where Julien again shows that he
doesn’t seem to understand the doctrine of idealism or panpsychism too well…
“We take it for granted, intuitively
at least, which may or may not be correct, that there is a world out there that’s
independent of our mental experience. Could that be wrong, yes of course.”
Again, the
issue with this response is that idealism, nor panpsychism has ever claimed
that there is no world outside of our mental experience. Julien seems to be
confusing idealism with solipsism. Just because there is a world which is
outside of our personal mental experience, does not mean that there is a world
outside mental experience or consciousness itself.
Next, at
32.34, is a long section where Julien articulates a point I agree with
massively but ends up shooting himself in the foot in the process of uttering
it. See below…
TJump : “You did mention that you
don’t think that both of the hypothesis of materialism and idealism/panpsychism
explain reality equivalently, so what would be a good example to bring up that
could show something that the materialist worldview explains better…for in my
conversations with idealists. What would be a good way to explain that?”
Julien : “I guess we have to distinguish
here between physical theories and metaphysical theories. Everything could be
true of science even in a - so let’s
suppose that we live in the matrix, well within the matrix there are still
rules. So what you can say what science is is trying to understand the rules of
the matrix, even though we know that the whole thing is a matrix whilst science
would still be very very useful within the matrix because it would explain the
rules of the matrix. So scientists are usually trying to be neutral about
metaphysics because these are often questions that we can’t really answer.”
The best
part of this non-answer is that I almost agree with Julien’s assessment of
science here. The only part of it I disagree with is when he says that “scientists
are usually trying to be neutral about metaphysics”. This is flatly false.
Modern science is dripping in materialism. The mere idea of idealism sends modern
scientists into crisis mode. Scientists today don’t even understand the
metaphysical shackles they are chained to. This response also seems to
completely show why TJump’s question has no answer. There is no piece of data
that materialism can explain that idealism cannot explain. However there is one
giant piece of data that idealism can explain but materialism has no
explanation for – consciousness.
At 34.17, Julien
also says the following…
“People could say ‘Look yes I am an
idealist and I believe in all the methodologies you believe in but I think that
the world is really a figment of our imagination, and that explains things better.”
Yet again,
Julien is showing that he does not understand what idealism is saying. Idealism
does not say and has never said that the world is just a figment of our
imagination. Nowhere in any idealistic philosopher’s works will you find this
idea. The closest anyone got to this was Berkeley and even he didn’t go this
far into the depths of solipsism. This is probably getting repetitive but I
want to highlight that I don’t think that TJump or Julien fully grasp the
doctrines of idealism and other non-materialistic ontologies.
Then, at
34.49, Julien repeats his assertion of unfalsifiability by saying…
“Idealism is simply, currently is
unfalsifiable, so, you know, does it explain things better, no, I mean there is
nothing in it that says, ‘Look if you make those metaphysical assumptions, then
you can explain things that if you don’t make those metaphysical assumptions
you couldn’t explain.”
The claim of
unfalsifiability plagues all metaphysical ontologies. After just articulating
that science is not a good tool for accessing metaphysical and ontological
questions, Julien then says that idealism is not a good theory because it cannot
be falsified (meaning in the scientific sense of the word). For the last time, no empirical evidence can
be used to confirm of falsify an ontology. End of.
There was only
10 minutes of the discussion left where the two discussed idealism and
consciousness and they then went on to talk about ethics and free will. The
rest of the discussion on idealism and consciousness was running over the same
territory I have already responded to here so I will end this section here.
2 –
Conclusion
To conclude this longer style blog post, both TJump and Julien Musolino made some fundamental errors when critiquing and discussing idealism and consciousness. Note that the original title of the livestream was “Why idealism and panpsychism are silly” but TJump changed it to “The soul, idealism and panpsychism” a few days later. Idealism is far from silly, but an ever emerging threat to the materialist paradigm that deserves to be taken more seriously.
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