Does Idealism Need Defense from Nietzsche and Materialism?

  Nietzsche is not someone that I have much regard for. He was perhaps the worst popular philosopher about. People like him because he was a profound atheist-racist. Cause and effect are terms one may use of course yet they are just words. People have known for quite a while that the complete field in which people are embedded as phenomenal aspects with consciousness has its own direction and function in which people go along as well. Words are pragmatic approximations; associations of meaning that people share rather than things-in-themselves, for-themselves. Words are for others and descriptions of experience is what they are generally.

Most of physic’s descriptions of what is known is also for pragmatic value. It isn’t necessary to try to make the words themselves too real or ultimate; it is just so they work and coincide with what may be known of the field that is reality. There are fields within fields obviously- the standard four. Yet there may be others. Mind however is the tool people experience and interpret reality with. Reality is an idea one encounters while awake or even asleep dreaming about the field phenomena one has encountered or sensed.

Interactive physical extension from mind with body and the Universal field elements including gravity, sunshine- photons- heat energy etc is what goes into the mind, or is presented in it. That is all a rather miraculous event to me, and I thank God for that. The volume that is the Universe- regardless of the scientific opinion about it not existing before a singularity, seems to have been intellectually deleted simply because nothing can be known about that paradigm with anything that exists in the space-time Universe. Even so physical cosmologists posit Universes arising and being spawned or spun off in a chain from white hole, and black hole contractions and expansions- as if none of those existed in a volume of nothingness, or for that matter in an idea of God whom has structured the experience of phenomenal being interacting with humans and minds.

Idealism from Berkeley left things uncertain rather than definite. There used to be a large financial prize offered for disproving his version of ideaism and nobody ever won that. Humans have will, or seem to, yet even Tegmark showed in his level 4 multiverse paradigm that one alternate way of being , using Everett’s many worlds solutions to the wave-function collapse paradigm where the wave doesn’t need to collapse- instead a new Universe is made to exist, or one’s mind is switched to one of an infinite number of possible Universes appropriate for where the thought that prompted the vector of mind took a mind, could be pure thought in a mathematical Universe. Fundamentally a Universe made of mathematical relations is as reasonable as Leibniz’s paradigm of one-dimensional spiritual monads comprising the basis of what is called matter that might be considered to be particle physics. Quarks and gluons and points may be a limit for research and the plank length the threshold of uncertainty too difficult to overcome. Energy too at a certain minimal level become an empty paradigm that was better suited to describe relations of ‘work’ at a more entangled, higher level of matter. One can call the phenomena matter becomes it is convenient and traditional to do so and for the complexity of using another term about field entanglement or embedded-ness that few would understand.

Mind is phenomenalism though,. One may wish to negate thought and say it is just physical however that seems to me to be a tautology in a sense. Human thought is about the sole known entity able to go against the normal thermodynamic flow of nature and the physics of the Universe with will. That too is remarkable for any conscious being able to choose to go in a different direction of it’s own. None of that means that ideaism is controverted at all. The entire physical Universe occurs somewhere even if the Utopian nowhere of that is a blank disc in a manner of speaking in the mind of God. Physicists want the universe to be self-creating or self-bailing from nothing. They have the space-time of a Universe creating virtual particles from an initial field vacuum that is space-time even before the space-time Universe existed. The space-time universe with potential field energy in the vacuum is not the nothingness that contains the space-time Universe even as a singularity of infinitely small size (nearly) theoretically with all of the virtual energy arising from itself containing all of the energy the universe would ever have. Some avoid the paradigm by inventing a cyclical universe that only gets so small and bounces back or whatever. Others believe it exists ion the surface event horizon area of a hypershere higher dimensional Universe, yet that just kicks the can down the road. A dot smaller than a period containing all of the future energy a Universe would have need exist someplace. The idea that it did not is implicitly contradictory; nothing- absolute nothing existed and there were no existing fields with potential virtual energy to become entangled and yet they suddenly did and that occurred in a volume that didn’t exist and never did. The physical universe is thus like a dream that occurred without a body or mind pre-existing it, and that is rather imponderable.

Reason is good and itself phenomenal. I suppose if anything can be indeterminate it need be mind. Scientists- especially behaviorists like to say that free will doesn’t exist and that mind just goes with the rather Taoist field flows of individual needs biologically in the heterodox phenomenal field experience. C.D. Broad wrote a book long ago named ‘Mind and Its Place in Nature’. A more contemporary title might be ‘Mind and It’s Place in Undetermined Quantum Fields of Space-Time’ and provide a more refined description.

I don’t think ideaism needs saving at all when there really isn’t certainty about the purpose or construction components of matter itself. There is a large difference between ideaism and the paradigm where Billy Mummy in The Twilight Zone creates his own reality for others or for-himself as if he were God, I don’t actually know what that is called, except it isn’t idealism.

Materialism and Idealism

 Sartre considered his philosophical method to be a continuation of traditional French rationalism began by Descartes. Reason with the mind and thought to consider being including subjective epistemology.

Bishop Berkeley had a different approach in inventing the philosophy of ideaism that later was changed in popular use to idealism. In his ‘Three Dialogues’ he demonstrated that all of the world could be an idea or reality created by God and a human perceiver of existence could be nothing more than a mind in a jar sort of configuration. That is the extension of the body and senses could be simply presented by God to a mind. It was a very advanced theory that would work well with some paradigms of modern science, virtual reality, holographic Universe, Level 4 Tegmarkian Universe or matrix sorts of things for illustrative purposes.

Berkeley definitely did not regard the human perceiver as creating his own reality to perceive. That idea is more of a derivative from 20th century quantum mechanics and the Schrodinger wave function collapse idea applied dubiously yet logically- even it is is partly incorrect as if it were the cat in a quantum box dead and alive simultaneously in a super-positioned state that isn’t determined until observed. Of course people recently have claimed to have ‘solved’ that paradox too; it is of great social value to be one who solves things, even if the solution lasts for just long enough to get recognition and prestige.

Materialism as a term philosophy probably works these days only in an economic prioritization kind of way rather than philosophically. One can say for example, that one believes matter is the reality, and that is also known today as physicalism. The term is somewhat self-defining. Matter is convertible to energy and at the core people can’t really identity what energy is- an amount of work or something like that. Gluons are force carrying particles- bosuns. And what is force made of? It is a description and could almost be better explained with a chemistry criterion of recombining elements. Mass however is what matter is and at some point there is a tie for all of those sub-atomic particles into field and particles smaller than the Plank length, yet particles all seem to acquire mass from fields as sorts of temporal quantum knots in harp strings analogously. It seems like a paradox that fields cannot be less than the Plank length in range, and if there were some that are the angels dancing on the plank length taking shape all the standard model zoo of particle physics may be their fault.

Anyway materialism tends to dissolve into quantum ideas about how many angels or gluons can dance on a pinhead- not Beavus or Butthead, and so the idea that people create there own reality by perceiving it can be regarded as a half-truth, but only a half-truth, if they think about it (and the ideas scatter in a super-positioning experiment into a non-deterministic state a priori). Materialism is a kind of idealism of approximation. Quantum reality does seem to be a concatenation of approximations and quantization that is also convertible into a theory known as materialism somewhat incorrectly in my opinion.