Physicalists Concede the Whole Debate
Materialists, or sometimes referred to as “physicalists,” are those who believe there is an objective reality independent of the conscious mind that we can come to know through the scientific method. On the other hand, idealists believe material reality does not even exist and that we are all “trapped in our own minds” so to speak, or some even talk about us being disassociation from a “cosmic” mind.
Idealism, in my view, is quite a silly belief with poor justification. However, my criticism here is not of idealists, but of materialists. Materialists these days have a habit of conceding the entire debate from the get-go in all areas, and thus argue entirely out of a corner in a position impossible to defend. If I ever find myself in a discussion between idealists and materialists, I find myself arguing with the materialist more to stop conceding to everything the idealist says.
There are two places major areas in modern philosophy where idealists try to poke their head in: the “hard problem of consciousness” and the “measurement problem.” Both of these will need to be addressed individually and we will see how materialists concede the entire debate, and if you call into question the premises the idealists begin with, then the entire idealist position falls apart.
The Hard Problem of Consciousness
The “hard problem” in its modern form goes back to Thomas Nagel who argued in his paper “What is it like to be a bat?” that there seems to be an explanatory gap between objective reality and subjective experience. David Chalmers then cites Nagel as having demonstrated this in his paper “Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness” where he points out that any attempt to explain consciousness in terms of behavior or function misses Nagel’s point. He categorizes those explanations into the “easy problem,” but states that the “hard problem” is about the gap between objective reality and subjective experience. This is clearly just a reformulation of the mind-body problem.
Most materialists these days will concede that such an explanatory gap exists, but give a vague promise that “one day” the sciences will provide a solution if we are patient enough. Karl Popper had derided these people as promissory materialists because every day that passes, not only do we not get any closer to this promise being fulfilled, but it is unclear what a solution could even possibility look like.
You see, if you start from a premise that there is a gap between subjective experience and objective reality, then you are inherently presupposing that objective reality is nonexperiential. If it is nonexperiential, then it is not observable. If it is not observable, we cannot investigate it, and nothing can be said about it as the material sciences are driven by observation. It is thus unclear how we could ever possibly make an observation that could solve a problem regarding something that can never be observed.
You cannot presume a fundamental gap between subjective experience and objective reality and then later fill that gap without contradicting yourself. You have to question the very foundations of this assumption. What is it that leads us to claim such an explanatory gap exists in the first place? The moment you actually ask these questions, you figure out very quickly that idealists have little defense to this. Materialists thus put themselves into a difficult position for no reason.
To become an idealist, it is a three step process.
The first step is that you have to be convinced of metaphysical realism which is the belief that objective reality is nonexperiential and something which cannot be observed can thus only be presumed to exist as an a priori metaphysical assumption, which exists in opposition to your subjective experience of your everyday life.
The second step is for the idealist to point out that this philosophy leads to a lot of confusion regarding an explanatory gap as to how objective reality gives rise to subjective experience, which they label this confusion as the “hard problem” or the “mind-body problem.” They thus have to merely show you that there is a real problem in your philosophy.
The third step is to then posit that if this objective reality is entirely metaphysical and unobservable, and just leading to confusion, then it should be discarded. All that exists is the mind and its contents. This is three step process is how the overwhelming majority of idealists are converted to idealism.
Most materialists concede the first point and even partially concede the second point, not only accepting metaphysical realism but then additionally accepting it seems to have a major problem at its core. The only difference between them and the idealists is that they do not make the jump to say the problem is unsolvable and therefore one should embrace idealism, but either give the vague promise that the material sciences can and will solve it one day, or another common retort I have seen is to say that “humanity is just too stupid to solve it, so it doesn’t matter.”
Yet, what is actually the justification for conceding ground at the very first step? Why should we accept metaphysical realism to begin with? It seems rather strange when you think about it. Our entire understanding of the material world as derived from the material sciences stems from observation. Observation is what drives the material sciences. Even fundamental particles are defined in terms of their observables. Yet, what is observation if not experience? Is the entire objective world entirely unreachable to us, and is the world of experience we are immersed in every day just some illusion and a veil that prevents us from seeing true reality?
Nagel’s argument in his famous essay goes like this: experience is point-of-view dependent and objective reality is point-of-view independent, and thus experience cannot be part of objective reality. It must, as he concludes, be a product of the mammalian brain. Chalmers provides no new insight to this but simply quotes Nagel as having proven that experience is subjective.
Yet, if there is one thing the material sciences have demonstrated, it is precisely that objective reality is indeed point-of-view dependent. You cannot describe just about anything without specifying a coordinate system, a point-of-view. In general relativity, the passage of time can change based on point of view (time dilation), the length of rulers can change (length contraction), and the velocity of objects can change. In relational quantum mechanics, we further find that all the variable states of particles are also dependent upon the point-of-view, the context under which a system is observed.
There just is no point-of-view independent reality. Describing anything in the real world requires specifying a coordinate system, a context, under which it is being described. This was pointed out by the philosopher Jocelyn Benoist in his notion of contextual realism, that experience can be interpreted as equivalent to reality itself if one merely presumes that reality depends upon context. That is to say, what we experience is objective reality as it actually exists independent of the observer but dependent upon the context of that experience.
There just is no objective reality independent of context. Nagel’s, and thus Chalmers’, argument simply does not follow. Objective reality is not some invisible, purely metaphysical thing beyond the veil of experience. Objective reality is experience, it is the reality we are immersed in every day. Everything you see around you and in front of you, that is objective reality (from your context) and nothing else.
It was Ludwig Feuerbach who was one of the earlier writers to point out that denying that experience is something real makes no sense from a materialist perspective. How can the material brain even create something not real? How can a not real thing even be? There clearly must be some equivalence between matter and experience in order for materialism to even make sense at all.
Materialism can only justify itself from an a posteriori position. It cannot be something presumed as an axiom. As a starting position, it makes more sense to have a neutral monist point of view, and then to defend a description of the world according to the material sciences directly as something derived from our observations — our experience — of it.
Idealism, on the other hand, cannot be derived from an a posteriori point of view. No discoveries of the physical sciences — based on observation — can give credence to idealism. Even if we find it quite strange or unintuitive, that would just be how nature works. Thus, idealists necessarily have to defend their positions from purely metaphysical grounds, arguing in favor of “cosmic consciousness” and whatnot as an a priori axiom which they convince you is necessary for logical consistency.
If one begins with a neutral starting point, therefore, only materialism — derived from the material sciences — actually can be arrived at as a reasonable method of reducing reality.
The Measurement Problem
Quantum mechanics goes against our metaphysical realist understanding of the world. Newtonian mechanics has a one-to-one relationship between metaphysical objects and experiential objects. If you fire a cannonball from point A to point B and only observed it (experienced it) at those two points, you can trace its path using the mathematics for all its positions in between. Even though you never observed the object actually at those positions, you can be assured that if you repeated the experiment and observed it, you would indeed see it exactly where you predicted.
Yet, in quantum mechanics, if you fire a photon from point A to point B, and you observed it at those two locations only, you cannot fill in the gap between those two points to say where the particle is. If you try to just look at where the photon is between those two points, the particle no longer ends up at point B but point C. The experiment changes from an A→B to an A→C experiment. If you change the experiment as a result of looking, then you are no longer observing the A→B experiment but the A→C experiment. You know where the photon is between A and C, but not between A and B.
Take, for example, the Hawthorne effect in psychology. If a patient knows you are observing them, it could alter their behavior. Hence, you cannot derive the behavior of the patient as they would behave independent of observation from a study whereby the patient knows they are being observed. In the example with the photon, we cannot derive the position of the photon in between A and B in the experiment A→B from its position in between A and C in the experiment A→C. Indeed, attempts to fill in the gaps always lead to contradictions, such as violations of the speed of light limit (Bell’s theorem), or sometimes even seemingly backwards-in-time causation (delayed choice experiment).
This leads to a breakdown between the one-to-one equivalence between metaphysical objects — as described in the mathematics — and experiential objects, as observed in real life. We cannot say what the particle is even doing when we are not looking at it, and thus calls into question metaphysical realism itself. This brings the mind-body problem to the forefront of the physical sciences: what is a measurement if not an observation, and what is an observation if not an experience? The measurement problem directly implies that you cannot derive a metaphysical reality independent of observation from the physical sciences.
Of course, idealists love this. Many idealists these days try to use quantum mechanics to “prove” that realism is untenable and thus materialists should switch sides to the idealists. Many people are indeed sucked into this, I even observed a physicist who I follow on social media gradually devolve into complete mysticism, talking about “cosmic consciousness” and whatnot, when grappling with understanding quantum mechanics.
There is, again, a three step process here: convince you of metaphysical realism, show you it leads to a contradiction in quantum mechanics, then tell you to abandon it and join the idealists. It is a very similar playbook the idealists use in regards to the “hard problem.”
Indeed, not only is it a similar problem, but materialists always concede ground in the same way. They accept the first premise, and then in the second, they agree there is a fundamental problem, but give the vague promise that “science will solve it some day.”
However, this position is more difficult to sustain when it comes to fundamental physics. Claiming that the measurement problem needs a scientific solution inherently suggests that quantum theory is wrong and must be replaced by a new theory entirely or at the very minimum supplemented by additional mathematics to fix the problem.
I have noticed that even much of the physics community who cares about these issues and wishes to defend realism often take a position that there must indeed be something wrong with quantum theory and propose an alternative theory with additional questionable mathematics in its place: pilot wave theory, the Many Worlds theory, superdeterminism, or objective collapse theories.
All the idealist then has to do is point out that either the additional mathematical complexity is entirely unjustifiable and has no empirical backing, or that in most cases, it leads to entirely new predictions which contradict with quantum field theory. Do you really want to hinge your entire philosophy on our best fundamental theory of nature being wrong? Quantum theory has been around for over a century. I would not make that bet.
Rather, just like in the case of the “hard problem,” we have to question the very premise the idealists start from: we have to reject metaphysical realism. If reality is point-of-view dependent, if it is context dependent, then there is simply no requirement that you have to “fill in the gaps.” Objective reality would not be some metaphysical construct existing independent of observation, but would be exactly what we observe, but we must take into account the context of that observation.
The photon does not exist between point A and point B, it only exists during those interactions, and when we measure the midway point and change the experiment from one of A→B to one of A→C, we are changing the context in which we are observing the system from, i.e. we are changing our point-of-view. Under this new point of view, we can assign the photon a state in between point A and point C when it interacted with our midway detector, but cannot assign it one under A→B, because they are different contexts. That is just how objective reality works and there simply is no problem.
That is to say, it is not quite correct to say we cannot describe the photon’s state independent of observation as if human conscious observation plays a role. It is more accurate to state that we cannot describe the photon’s state independent of context. In different contexts, we can assign more or less states to particles. It is therefore meaningless to talk about assigning states at all without specifying the context, the point of view. None of this has to do with conscious observers, but rather, selecting a coordinate system.
I am, of course, not the first to point this out. I would recommend reading the authors Carlo Rovelli and Francois-Igor Pris who have written extensively on this. Rovelli points out that you can just replace “observation” with “interaction” and quantum mechanics ceases to be a theory that has to make reference to “measurement,” but it does become a theory whereby you cannot specify the properties of systems without answering the question of in “relation to what?” and thus providing a coordinate system.
This is also the view of Pris who argues that quantum mechanics is merely a context-dependent theory where the properties a system has depends on a specified context. The wave function is merely a way of accounting for that context, their “point of view,” in relation to the system they are making predictions for. When they measure the system, their context changes, and thus they have to update their accounting for their context by changing the wave function. However, this “collapse” of the wave function does not imply they disturbed the system.
Take, for example, Galilean relativity, whereby if you move to a different reference frame, the velocity of an object will appear to change. There clearly is a statistical dependence upon its perceived velocity and how you look at it, but that does not mean you changing your reference frame disturbed it, and thus does not imply you are not revealing how it really is independent of your observation. That is indeed exactly how it is independent of your observation, but not independent of the context of your observation.
This is precisely the way realists should interpret quantum mechanics. It is the only interpretation that is both philosophically realist and does not propose quantum theory is somehow wrong, and does not propose additional metaphysical entities that cannot be confirmed through experimental observation. It, additionally, avoids purely utilitarian explanations like Copenhagen or QBism which avoid talking about nature at all.
