Dualism: materialism is only as our mind sees it (Identity)

by David Turell , Tuesday, January 12, 2021, 05:14 (1192 days ago) @ David Turell

What is materialism, if not a mind's interpretation?:

https://mindmatters.ai/2021/01/science-based-reasons-why-materialism-is-a-dead-end/

"First—and we sometimes forget this—science only exists as it is perceived by the human mind. We could do it well or badly or someway in between. We could succeed or fail. But it is a world of ideas, not things. He writes,

"Materialism—the view that nature is fundamentally constituted by matter outside and independent of mind—is a metaphysics, in that it makes statements about what nature essentially is. As such, it is also a theoretical inference: we cannot empirically observe matter outside and independent of mind, for we are forever locked in mind. All we can observe are the contents of perception, which are inherently mental. Even the output of measurement instruments is only accessible to us insofar as it is mentally perceived.

"Perhaps one reason we sometimes forget this is that we imagine science to be the equipment scientists use or the journals in which they express their ideas. But is actually the ideas themselves, sometimes expressed as massive explanations of cell biology or sometimes as simply as E=MC^2.

"For starters, there is nothing about the parameters of material arrangements—say, the position and momentum of the atoms constituting our brain—in terms of which we could deduce, at least in principle, how it feels to fall in love, to taste wine, or to listen to a Vivaldi sonata. There is an impassable explanatory gap between material quantities and experiential qualities, which philosophers refer to as the ‘hard problem of consciousness.’ Many people don’t recognize this gap because they think of matter as already having intrinsic qualities—such as color, taste, etc.—which contradicts mainstream materialism: according to the latter, color, taste, etc., are all generated by our brain, inside our skull. They don’t exist in the world out there, which is supposedly purely abstract.

"Materialism has the advantage of being simple: You are your body. Your mind is your brain. The universe is a collection of rocks floating around.

"But the fact that we can even think these things shows that that’s not really the universe we live in."

comment: I can expect the comment that the material brain conjures all of these impressions, but the point is the impressions we have are second hand representations of the outside world. We only know what the brain allows us to think it is as we use our mind to drive the the brain to produce impressions and thought. The mind uses the brain as a material tool, and produces immaterial thoughts and concepts..