Idéalisme et matérialisme
Commençons par quelques citations qui devraient maintenant vous sembler familières. La première est d'Albert Einstein : "L'espace et le temps sont des modes par lesquels nous pensons, et non des conditions dans lesquelles nous vivons.
La seconde vient d'Ikhwan al-Sufa, un philosophe arabe qui a vécu près de 3 000 ans avant Einstein : "L'espace est une forme abstraite de la matière et n'existe que dans la conscience.
Pour information, ces citations ne proviennent pas de la page Facebook de ma grand-mère, mais d'une étude de l'université de Stanford. site web consacré à Einstein et à la gravité.
L'Université de Stanford nous aidera également à définir certains concepts philosophiques - grâce à leur excellente Encyclopédie de la philosophie - - car nous allons nous plonger rapidement dans l'"idéalisme".
Donald Hoffman est un idéaliste. Sa théorie de l'interface de la perception (PTI) postule que nous interagissons avec la réalité par l'intermédiaire de l'interface mentale de notre expérience, qui est fournie par notre cerveau. C'est à peu près la description de ce que l'on appelle : Idéalisme épistémologique. Défini par l'encyclopédie Stanford comme suit :
"Tout ce que nous pouvons connaître de la réalité nous est présenté par l'esprit".
Everything we experience and know is a mental projection based on sense data and memory. Hopefully, after the last few chapters, this should no longer be a hazy concept – but no worries, we’re about to look at our relationship with reality once again from two different perspectives : philosophy and neurology.
So, are you a materialist or an idealist? Where do you stand, philosophically speaking?
Do you live in the real world of solid things separated by empty space? Are you and the world really as they appear to be? Or are you stuck in some fuzzy wuzzy mental projection? Are you and your world a product of your own imagination?
Obviously, it feels like the world we experience is real – we behave like materialists (or Realists, a similar worldview). But, spoiler alert! Despite materialism being the dominant consensus model of reality for the past century or so, even materialists must accept “epistemological idealism” and reject “naive realism”.
The naive notion that we always perceive life “out there” as it really is, doesn’t hold up. Because of visual illusions for example, or because the reality we see is nothing like what physics tells us. Or simply because we don’t all have the same experiences, and though we may all be wrong, we can’t all be right – especially when these experiences are contradictory.
Et si nous acceptons le modèle neurologique actuel de la conscience - nous y reviendrons dans un instant - nous devons accepter que l'expérience est mentale.
If we accept that our experience of a material world is actually a mental state, does this mean that we can conclude that actual reality is fundamentally something mental? If my experience of reality is happening in my mind does this necessarily mean that the universe is made of mind, spirit, or pure consciousness?
No – that would be a huge (illogical) leap. Like a fish swimming in the sea who concludes that the whole universe must be made of water.
Néanmoins, j'ai l'impression que certaines personnes affirment que la réalité est fondamentalement une sorte d'esprit immatériel.
These folks are ontological or metaphysical Idealists. They espouse what could be called Hard Idealism, as opposed to its softer cousin : Epistemological Idealism.
Avant d'explorer le raisonnement qui sous-tend leur vision du monde, permettez-moi de planter une épingle là où se trouve le principal point de confusion :
Lorsque l'on dit : "la réalité est fondamentalement une construction mentale", tout dépend de ce que l'on entend par "réalité".
Do we mean “what we see when we look at the world”? Or do we mean some fundamental hidden truth about the world that exists independently from us?As we look at the arguments, we need to keep this dichotomy in mind, in order to spot any sudden bait and switch between these two concepts.
Insérer Dieu ici
Maybe I’m poisoning the waters before we even dive in, so apologies, but there’s something else I’ve noticed about the people who identify as hardcore Idealists. They’re biased. Which doesn’t mean that Realism wins, because let’s face it : we all are.
We’re all born into a particular culture, and many of us on both sides of the realist vs idealist debate have been bathed in some version of Platonic idealism. This is the idea that matter is somehow less than its essence. Matter is somehow corrupted, less pure than its essence, which is some sort of ideal, perfect, timeless immaterial “form”.
We feel that our “spirit” or “soul” is who we really are. That our spirit is somehow superior, more essential than our material incarnation.
So when Idealists argue for the primacy of consciousness over matter, they are often defending a religious indoctrination. When they speak of consciousness as the “immaterial ground of existence”, they’re actually talking about God.
Donald Hoffman’s father was a Christian preacher of the fundamentalist, new Earth creationist flavor. So basically all in, a Bible literalist. Even if Donald struck out on his own, becoming a respected scientist, he was born into a world where God was ever present – at home, in school, in church. So when he insists that consciousness is in some way more fundamental than its contents – contents like spacetime and the objects we perceive for example – with nothing to back up his claim, I get suspicious. I’m thinking : presuppositions!
Since I’m sharing my suspicions rather than simply laying out the arguments – I might as well come clean : I can’t stand Bernardo Kastrup! Or at least I can’t bear listening to him or reading his stuff anymore.
Bernardo m'est apparu comme l'éminent défenseur de l'idéalisme moderne, et je l'ai donc écouté. J'ai lu son livre Je l'ai parcouru à plusieurs reprises, en échouant la plupart du temps lamentablement à comprendre de quoi il parlait.
Failure is painful, and so now I’ve become somewhat resistant to Mr. Kastrup. I’m suspicious of his cleverness, suspicious of his mysterious statements that remain mysterious however many times I try to engage with them. This of course may be entirely my fault – my difficulty comprehending complex math doesn’t mean that trigonometry is a load of nonsense.
Anyway, you have been warned. In spite of all that, I’m still going to present what little I have managed to grok from Kastrup’s book.
L'idée du monde
Bernardo commence bien en formulant le débat entre matérialistes et idéalistes en deux questions simples :
Are mind and matter polar opposites? Or does one arise from the other?
If we’ve never really explored this subject, these might seem like silly questions to ask. Are mind and matter opposites? We might say “of course they are! – that’s what we mean when we say those words”. Thoughts and ideas are not at all like hard solid objects.
But apparently thinking about this kind of stuff confuses the issue somewhat. It tips our familiar conclusions upside down – it challenges our normal experience.
Both sides in this debate actually agree that mind and matter are very much intertwined. Both assert that one arises from the other – that’s not where the disagreement lies. Materialists might insist that we have demonstrated extensively that consciousness is an emergent property of the brain. By fiddling with brains we can directly affect mental states. Idealists will reply : “it’s all in your mind dude – even your experiences and ideas about brains”.
Bernardo says : “we do not – and fundamentally cannot- know matter as confidently as we know mind”. By which he means that our experience of a material world is an inference based on our interpretation of sense data and memory. The “screen of perception” he calls it. Which sounds a lot like Hoffman’s mental Interface of perception.
“We cannot know matter as confidently as we know mind, because our knowledge of the world begins not with matter but with perception”. This is basically epistemological idealism.
The experiences we have of the world feel so real to us, that we confuse that experience for truth. When I stub my toe, the pain I feel is a hard solid fact. When I look at the sky, the blue I’m seeing seems to be happening “out there”. We can make accurate predictions about the world out there, we can navigate that world effectively. All of which creates the impression that we are directly perceiving reality. We forget that what we are directly perceiving is a mental experience.
De la même manière que nous ne nous rendons généralement pas compte que nous rêvons lorsque nous rêvons, les rêves semblent réels.
Materialism is basically the failure to understand that the material world is a cognitive construct. We interpret sense data, we are not directly perceiving reality as it is. Matter is an inference, thus mental – mind is the only certainty.
That last bit : “mind is the only certainty” is very much in line with Descartes’s : “cogito ergo sum”. Descartes’ statement being the finality of “radical doubt” – his conclusion being that the only thing of which we can be certain is the mental experience.
Quoi qu'il en soit, l'idéaliste conclut que ce que nous appelons le "monde physique" est plus précisément défini comme le "contenu de la conscience".
Il est évident que tout ce que nous pouvons percevoir of reality is necessarily a mental state. But if an idealist is correct in asserting that we cannot be certain that the world is physical, on what basis can we assert that the totality of existence is exclusively mental?
Bernardo does seem to assert that. He believes in a “universal mind” as the ground of all being. In his words : Universal mind is the “ontological primitive” (because he’s a philosophy guy) – which just means : that from which everything else arises, the source of the whole shebang.
He posits that reality is basically the expression of this universal mind, and that our subjective experience, our personal minds are like little pockets of consciousness. He believes that the one universal mind has somehow dissociated itself, and that this dissociation or segregation is responsible for all the seemingly separate identities that exist in the world.
Malheureusement, comme je l'ai déjà dit, je ne vois pas pourquoi - je ne vois pas les étapes logiques ou les raisons qui mènent à sa conclusion.
To back up his idea that our subjective experience is a dissociated bubble of the universal mind, he points to the mental health condition known as “Dissociative identity disorder” (DID). Which is just sad and troubling, and in no way an argument for his hypothesis – other than to say “hey! these things happen, it’s not impossible”.
As for his main reasons why we should believe that fundamental reality is necessarily mental, you’re going to have to ask him. As I said : I don’t get it – and I give up.
Mais terminons par quelques-uns des arguments que j'ai réussi à saisir :
- Si nous n'étions pas conscients, nous ne pourrions même pas déduire qu'il existe un monde matériel.
Our experience of the world is a mental state, and the material world is merely an inference within that mental state. So we can say stuff like : the mental state is fundamental, the material world is a secondary inference. At which point we are invited to commit one of 2 fallacies. The Definist fallacy, where we have used the word “fundamental” to describe our mental experience of the world – therefore Gotcha! fundamental reality is mental? Or the fallacy of composition, where we conclude that the whole of reality is mental because the only bit of reality I can be certain of is mental.
- Si nous acceptons la primauté de l'état mental et que les objets dont nous faisons l'expérience sont des constructions mentales, prétendre que la conscience émerge de la matière est une supposition contraire à la réalité.
Claiming that consciousness is an emergent property of the brain is wrong, because we can only be certain of consciousness ie. cogito ergo sum. Brains are merely part of the conceptual content of consciousness. Scientists demonstrating that human consciousness is tightly correlated to human brains are missing that important point.
The main problem with this argument is that it’s not an argument for anything – it’s an argument against the opposing camp at best. Unfortunately, even if we manage to prove conclusively that all Materialist claims are wrong, this does nothing to prove that Idealism is correct or even possible. For example, if you can prove that abiogenesis and the theory of evolution are wrong, we still cannot be certain that God did it.
- Le principe de l'observateur (en physique quantique), qui concerne la manière dont une situation donnée est affectée lorsque nous interagissons avec elle - par le biais d'une mesure ou d'une perception.
Bernardo presents this as an example of a spooky “mind over matter” event – as in the power of awareness or consciousness to transform material reality. But this is a rather personal interpretation on his part – and in no way representative of the scientific consensus. And even if we accept his definition as correct – then we would also have to take into account all the scientific demonstrations to the contrary. For example, how conscious experience is dependent on brain states – ie. that consciousness is determined by matter.
Bernardo also makes an argument from Jungian Archetypes. Which is about how our collective consciousness manifests in the material world. For example, our belief in concepts like money, or human rights, become actual objects in the real world as dollar bills or legislation. Make of that what you will.
At which point Dr. Kastrup feels comfortable enough, having shown that he is no fool, to sign off with a couple of religious statements that he feels are appropriate. So let’s just repeat them here :
“The world is the thought of God” Thomas Aquinas & “To see god is to be god” Sri Ramana Maharshi.
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