Fundamental Issues with Materialism
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Materialism claims conscious experience is an epiphenomenon of complex matter arrangements in the brain, with qualities like colors and sounds generated inside the skull, not existing in the external world.
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The hard problem of consciousness arises from materialism’s definition of matter as excluding qualities, leading to a confusion that is not a real problem but an artifact of bad thinking.
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Materialism attempts to explain qualities in terms of matter, inverting the arrow of description, which is an absurd and illogical reduction.
Scientific and Philosophical Implications
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Science can only tell us how nature behaves, not what it essentially is, while the essence of things is determined by metaphysics, which requires logical coherence, conceptual parsimony, empirical adequacy, and explanatory power.
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Quantum physics has shown that physical realism is untenable, as experiments have demonstrated that physical entities do not have defined properties independent of observation, contradicting a fundamental requirement of materialism.
Alternative Perspectives
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Idealism explains correlations between brain activity and inner experience, why alcohol can change how we feel from within, and why we can’t change the world by volition like we can change our imagination, without postulating anything other than consciousness as an antic category.
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Cosmopsychism, an unnecessary label for idealism, says the universe is conscious, not in consciousness, granting fundamental reality to physicality and adding consciousness, unlike idealism, which says physicality is a description of how consciousness appears.
Critiques of Panpsychism
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Constitutive panpsychism, a reloaded version of materialism, posits that matter has fundamental properties of consciousness, but fails to account for the rich, qualitative inner life that arises from the patterns of excitation in a universal consciousness.
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Panpsychism faces problems: microscopic subjects combining into a compound subject is incoherent, and separate particles don’t exist, like ripples separate from water.
Ethical and Practical Considerations
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Materialism and panpsychism are morally demeaning and meaningless, not the closest to truth, which is demonstrably false, empirically and logically.
