You don't understand my point. I'd still like science to explore consciousness properly. At the moment it seemingly can't because it can't process any information that is obviously outside materialistic explanations. For example, in Irreducible Mind there is a discussion of a phenomenon called "Maternal Impressions". The author points out that at one ime these were reported at a certain rate, but the number of reports fell sharply when it was discovered that the fetus doesn't have a nervous connections with its mother. This discovery rendered the phenomenon totally impossible to explain (as opposed to very hard) conventionally, so doctors were reluctant to report it!
This, I think, is the problem - science just needs a leg out of the box of materialism and it can begin to explore again. I don't think Idealism can ever give it that leg up, because as it stands right now, Idealism is utterly vague. Hardly anyone will research a subject if from the point of view of accepted scientific dogma and speculation the nul result is the only possible one, and anything else will be treated as error/fraud on the part of the experimenter. Furthermore, if there is no theory on which to hang the results, the research will be doubly damned.
I would still judge Idealism to be the most probable ultimate theory.
David
I'm puzzled, David. You seem to want a more down-to earth theory and yet you still judge Idealism to be the most probable ultimate one. I would say that Idealism is about as far away from a down-to-earth theory as one can get, whereas materialism is is predicated on being as down-to-earth as possible. Until the advent of quantum physics, the universe was deemed to be celestial clockwork, best described by Newton for inanimate objects and Darwin for animate ones. Not a trace of telos anywhere in the real world was allowed; we had cracked all the great mysteries and found ourselves to be totally insignificant "mindless robots" as Alex so aptly puts it.
Present-day science shouldn't be able, according to its own claimed rationality, to ignore the implications of quantum physics, and yet whilst on the one hand it avers its findings, on the other it still proceeds as if it didn't exist. It still wants to come up with a theory of everything that is consistent with a clockwork universe. Despite this, it constantly delves in metaphysical realms by postulating dubious ideas about the big bang, dark matter and energy, black holes, multi-universes, invisible dimensions as in string theory, and so on.
These are far from down-to-earth and yet science feels very comfortable with them, deeming them not as ridiculous as the idea that the universe has a purpose. Moreover, a sizeable proportion of the general public places undying faith in science's utterances as if they were written in tablets of stone -- this despite the fact that most non-scientists can understand hardly a word of them. And then there's the scientists themselves, who might understand them, but shut their eyes to the many flaws in their own thinking.
Why? It's probably in no small part down to unjustifiable faith in mathematics, which is only as good as the premises it's based on. Mathematics can be indisputably correct in and of itself, but the things it describes can still be complete poppycock. That's not such a big problem where postulates can be empirically tested, but where they can't (as in much of modern cosmology and the neo-Darwinian version of evolution), it is. The contortions that scientists are prepared to engage in to tweak their theories so as not to have to admit to a purposive universe are comical. For such "down-to-earth" people, it's amazing how far out on a limb they're prepared to go.
To reiterate, you think Idealism is probably the best ultimate theory of everything, but you baulk at the idea that MAL might not be self-reflective. Let me play along with that. Imagine that MAL
is self-reflective. If it is, then its mental capacity would presumably be unimaginably greater than ours. Why then would it have created the universe, along with us? What possible utility would there be for it in that?
Maybe we'd be akin to pets for it, or things to help keep it amused and entertained in its otherwise splendid isolation. Or, maybe MAL is some kind of scientist that is experimenting and diverting itself that way. IMO, this is perilously close to the dualistic and Abrahamic notion of God -- a bigger and more powerful version of man, with similar motivations: the great and invisible dictator who knows no bounds to the arbitrary exercise of its will.
Or then again, maybe it would hope for us to evolve and to become Gods in our own right, apparently without forcing us in that direction, (because, after all, we do seem to have free will). But here again, that would be projecting human-like motivations onto it, such as justice, love and nurturing.
If we put aside our tendency to anthropomorphism, it's possible to envisage a version of MAL that isn't like that. In and of itself, for whatever reason or none, it is what it is: inherently an ordered and regularised entity which presents itself to us through our perceptions as everything from what we interpret as subatomic particles to planets, stars, galaxies and galaxy clusters, which behave in ways we've only superficially modelled through our science.
It might have no idea what it is,
except insofar as it is able to see itself through the limited self-reflective abilities of what we think of as animate beings ("dissociated alters" in Bernardo's terminology). And what do we perceive these animate beings to be composed of? What do we think of them as being? Why, incredibly intricate and hierarchical collections of interacting particles -- IOW, made of the very stuff we interpret the non-animate universe to be composed. But then, we often make the mistake of assigning consciousness to these perceived collections instead of regarding them as the
appearance, to our perception, of varying degrees of self-reflective consciousnesses arising and evolving in MAL.
I asked whether Bacteria were conscious and whether their consciousness was self-reflective. To answer my own question, I suspect that both are true, albeit that bacteria seem to be at a much lower level than we are. Bacteria may have been the first tentative "embodiments" (perhaps more accurately,
appearances) of MAL's "desire" (for want of a better word) to find a way to view itself, to come to know itself. And at each stage, animate beings have the capacity to transcend themselves, to evolve to higher levels, each with appearances that are correspondingly more complex.
Rather than address the argument over panpsychism by saying that the "stuff of the universe" is not
all self-reflective (but that some is), I'd say that
none of it is self-reflective. Why argue over the self-reflectivity of what merely
appears to us, or at any rate is
interpreted by us as "material particles" or collections thereof? "Things" as they appear to us are all "made of the same stuff", i.e. the "underlying substrate of the universe"; in some cases those appearances mirror a degree of tentative groping for self-reflection by MAL, and in others, not. The mirroring aspect is key to this idea, and in my view helps reduce the dualistic mode of expression in Idealism, which can never be completely eliminated because language is an inherently dualistic mode of expression, and that's why I sometimes have to use inverted commas to try to make my meaning clearer.
Why is Idealism less "down to earth" than materialism or dualism or many other -isms? It's probably only because language has habituated us into thinking at least partially in dualistic terms, into separating the universe into that which is self-reflectively conscious and that which isn't. It's an artificial separation of ontological categories that may not actually exist.
We aren't, as I see it, separate from MAL (or God if one prefers). We are its "organs" of self-perception and inseparable from it and its inchoate and ineffable "strivings" to come to know itself.