Assuming people are actually able and willing to recognize when they start hiding in circular reasoning (or other logical fallacies but by experience, begging the question is most common):
Argument about matter being the foundation of reality. It’s not. And I’d start by questioning your understanding of the word “matter”.
Matter has a specific meaning in physics but for this purpose I’d define matter as anything that exists in the world and behaves according to the rules of physics.
We can do science to determine how matter behaves and we can determine it keeps behaving that way whether any conscious being is interacting with it. That’s why I think matter is more of a foundation of reality than experience. Experience can come and go but matter keeps doing its thing.
Certainly we must rely on experience to learn anything about matter so from an epistemological point of view it is the foundation of knowledge but I do think we can discover a deeper foundation for reality through science.
You know, I feel like I see a surprising amount of people on Lemmy who have stepped out of the basic materialistic view. It’s encouraging but also a bit bizarre. There seems to be a weird subsection of people who are able enough computer nerds to not be scared by the interface here, but have actually looked into some pretty deep philosophical stuff (though some definitely have just done enough psychedelics). I include myself in the weird subsection of course but I really didn’t expect to see as many others here as I have.
Assuming people are actually able and willing to recognize when they start hiding in circular reasoning (or other logical fallacies but by experience, begging the question is most common):
Argument about matter being the foundation of reality. It’s not. And I’d start by questioning your understanding of the word “matter”.
Matter has a specific meaning in physics but for this purpose I’d define matter as anything that exists in the world and behaves according to the rules of physics.
We can do science to determine how matter behaves and we can determine it keeps behaving that way whether any conscious being is interacting with it. That’s why I think matter is more of a foundation of reality than experience. Experience can come and go but matter keeps doing its thing.
Certainly we must rely on experience to learn anything about matter so from an epistemological point of view it is the foundation of knowledge but I do think we can discover a deeper foundation for reality through science.
Qualia is the only fundamental thing
You know, I feel like I see a surprising amount of people on Lemmy who have stepped out of the basic materialistic view. It’s encouraging but also a bit bizarre. There seems to be a weird subsection of people who are able enough computer nerds to not be scared by the interface here, but have actually looked into some pretty deep philosophical stuff (though some definitely have just done enough psychedelics). I include myself in the weird subsection of course but I really didn’t expect to see as many others here as I have.