philosophy, materialism, idealism, phenomenologyI know very little about philosophy, so my understanding of this is probably rudimentary, inaccurate and naive, but maybe some of you have some insight.
The way I understand it, there are two fundamentally different ways of perceiving/analysing existence.
Materialism is a broad category of philosophies which assert that the fundamental building block of nature is matter, and that everything we experience — including consciousness — is a consequence of complex interactions of matter, i.e. an emergent property
Idealism, if I understand it right, is the competing set of philosophies in which consciousness (or “mind” or “soul” or whatever you wanna call it) is granted fundamentality status, and which maintains that the existence of matter is predicated on the presence of a conscious observer.
Feel free to rip these definitions to shreds, but if you do, please pay attention to the rest of my question nonetheless.
As the argument goes, everyone makes an implicit assumption (called an ontological commitment) either one way or the other, whether they know it or not (until they are made aware of the dichotomy and start thinking about it). Now, it is my understanding that there is a strong correlation between (initial) materialism and atheism, and between (initial) idealism and theism.
Further, I am told, both fundamental ways of thinking are incompatible; so incompatible, in fact, that people from both groups violently talk past each other because they talk in terms of concepts that are completely alien to the other. (To give two examples: the typical atheist, who is typically a materialist, cannot understand how a theist can argue that a creator must exist to explain the first cause, yet the creator itself doesn’t need a cause; at the same time, the typical theist, who is typically an idealist, cannot understand how the materialist can be contented with an explanation that requires matter to “come from nothing”.)
Here is my question: How can I, as a staunch materialist, understand the thinking behind idealism (and hence, theism) without having to listen to (or read) idealists, whom I don’t understand because they talk in terms that are alien to me?
The debate may seem like an argument over the veracity of materialism or metaphysical naturalism but this is actually a debate over what constitutes a valid explanation; it's a debate over the validity of faith.
Atheists usually know of faith only because we've been introduced to it by theists. Faith, the belief in something without evidence, is usually not part of an atheist's world view (and for the rest of this post, that's the kind of atheist I will refer to whenever I will use the term atheist unless I explicitly).
As Eliezer Yudkowsky once said, if someone from a society which has never developed supernatural beliefs has a discussion with a theist, it would probably look like this:
"The universe was created by God -"
"By what?"
"By a, ah, um, God is the Creator - the Mind that chose to make the universe -"
"So the universe was created by an intelligent agent. Well, that's the standard Simulation Hypothesis, but do you have actual evidence confirming this? You sounded very certain -"
"No, not like the Matrix! God isn't in another universe simulating this one, God just... is. He's indescribable. He's the First Cause, the Creator of everything -"
"Okay, that sounds like you just postulated an ontologically basic mental entity. And you offered a mysterious answer to a mysterious question. Besides, where are you getting all this stuff? Could you maybe start by telling us about your evidence - the new observation you're trying to interpret?"
"I don't need any evidence! I have faith!"
"You have what?"
To an atheist, faith being a valid justification is not an intelligible concept. We understand what people mean by that but we don't understand how it's a valid explanation of one's belief.
We're not alone in that, by the way. As the Invisible Pink Unicorn, Russell's teapot, Santa Claus, and the Tooth Fairy demonstrate, all humans do not consider faith without evidence to justify a belief except when it comes to religion, where belief without evidence is deemed reasonable.
While that may seem like special pleading to an atheist ("Why do you believe in your god but not Santa Claus?"), it isn't. Theists almost always believe that their religious beliefs best explain something about the Universe. Perhaps it's why something exists rather than nothing, or the level of complexity in the Universe, or the origin of morality but, whatever it is, a theist will feel that his or her religious belief best explains what they know of the Universe.
Atheists will disagree over the validity of that explanation and that is where the real disagreement is. Atheists feel that gods do not meet the criteria for a good explanation: </p>
To atheists, a god is a complex, untestable hypothesis that violate many of the laws we know govern the physical world and offer no predictions. As such, it is a bad explanation and thus is abandoned. That is the core difference between the two world views: different views of what makes a valid explanation for the unknown. A theist's views will be coherent if you grant their standard of what qualifies as a good explanation. Everything else in their worldview is decided according to that one single assumption. It's because you do not grant them or realize the presence of that first assumption that their views seem illogical or incomprehensible. Note that, while I used atheist and theist here, the terms can be easily replaced by materialist and dualist. The above explanation applies to nearly all conflicts where one party believes in the supernatural while the other does not. It might be best to understand Dualism, the explanation of the world that does not reduce all things to solely material existence, by understanding what it seeks to explain. There are two important concepts deployed in this notion. One is that of substance, the other is the dualism of these substances. A substance is characterized by its properties, but, according to those who believe in substances, it is more than the collection of the properties it possesses, it is the thing which possesses them. So the mind is not just a collection of thoughts, but is that which thinks, an immaterial substance over and above its immaterial states. Properties are the properties of objects. If one is a property dualist, one may wonder what kinds of objects possess the irreducible or immaterial properties in which one believes... Now one might try to think of these subjects as just bundles of the immaterial states. This is Hume's view. But if one thinks that the owner of these states is something quite over and above the states themselves, and is immaterial, as they are, one will be a substance dualist. (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) The fact that someone would, from the perspective of a materialist, contrive or conjure up such a system is evidence of the person trying to interpret the world around them. It is not a defect of their reasoning, instead it is typically argued that there is a cognitive dissonance in the concept of materialist claims to knowledge, principally that they have no intuitive understanding of qualitative knowledge. Here is an example from the SEP: [I]magine a future scientist who has lacked a certain sensory modality from birth, but who has acquired a perfect scientific understanding of how this modality operates in others. This scientist — call him Harpo — may have been born stone deaf, but become the world's greatest expert on the machinery of hearing: he knows everything that there is to know within the range of the physical and behavioural sciences about hearing. Suppose that Harpo, thanks to developments in neurosurgery, has an operation which finally enables him to hear. It is suggested that he will then learn something he did not know before, which can be expressed as what it is like to hear, or the qualitative or phenomenal nature of sound. These qualitative features of experience are generally referred to as qualia. If Harpo learns something new, he did not know everything before. He knew all the physical facts before. So what he learns on coming to hear — the facts about the nature of experience or the nature of qualia — are non-physical. This establishes at least a state or property dualism. (See Jackson (1982); Robinson (1982)) (cit. SEP) Frequently, people who cannot commit to the ontological leap of materialism are often hung up on the qualia mentioned above. A materialist rebuttal is often, "there's an up until now uncalculated variable for that." The dualist riposte is "intuitively speaking, the idea of being able to know all things a priori, as a matter of variables, without experiencing them sounds far fetched."