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Philosophy - - (+4|-0)
Are you materialist, idealist or dualist?(self)
6 commentsbyxoenix

Materialist: Everything is matter. Consciousness and thought are products of matter (your body.)

Idealist: The world is a product of your thoughts.

Dualist: Everything in the world is matter, but consciousness and the soul are spiritual. God is separate from his creation.

This is just my impression, so you're also free to debate the definitions.

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[-]JasonCarswell2(+2|0)

Santa makes lots of lists.

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[-]jerryk0(0|0)

I'm whatever I want to be, but, I'm not really quite sure what that is, at all, these days.

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[-]xoenix1(+1|0)

Does anything work better to model the world and history than dialectical materialism?

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[-]jerryk0(0|0)

It's a legitimate question. Marx's adaptation of Hegelian dialectics -- thesis, antithesis, synthesis -- to real world problems and situations, rather than just abstract ideals, is quite powerful. It's worked well for the Chinese lately, in improving the lot of Chinese citizens. I suspect much of my actual thinking could be classified as falling into the category of dialectical materialism.

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[-]LarrySwinger0(0|0)

I'm a phenomenologist and idealist. I think that the only things we have absolute certainty about are our experiences. But we can infer some things. Any conception of mind simply 'emerging' from the interaction of matter doesn't do justice to our actual experiences; those are of a fundamentally different substance than what can by modeled by an n-dimensional physical world. You can have a physical world without minds (everyone being a philosophical zombie), or minds that interact in an illusionary physical world. Therein lies the difference. You cannot have a physical world that requires the existence of minds. So any emergence of consciousness from the interaction of matter is just a way of explaining away the presence of consciousness.

This leaves two possibilities: dualism and idealism. The reason why I subscribe to the latter is because mind and matter appear to interact, which they cannot if they are of a different substance. On a superficial level, we have apparently free will, and on the quantum level we discover that the breakdown of superpositions depends on observation. That could extend to the macrocosmos as well; see Schroedinger's Cat. So if we are to believe we are more than just observers, then mind and matter must be of the same substance.

The way I imagine this is that mind and matter exist on a spectrum. Matter is in fact what emerges from mental stuff that vibrates at a lower frequency.

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