The heart of the matter

A few hours ago, I had a lively and productive dialogue with Canadian author and filmmaker Jean-Francois Martel, which is now episode 6 of my Inception Dialogues podcast. See the video below. As my regular readers know, Martel and I exchanged criticisms through our respective blogs in the past couple of months. See, for instance, this article. However, this latest dialogue helped both of us notice more commonalities between our respective positions than we had realized before.

One particular topic, however, deserves further elaboration than what was discussed in the dialogue. Martel considered it the heart of our disagreement: one hour, 2 minutes and 25 seconds into the video, he refers to my four-point argument against materialism, as discussed in my earlier book Why Materialism Is Baloney. The four points consist of increasingly inflationary statements about reality that are entailed by materialism. Here they are:

1. Your conscious perceptions exist;
2. The conscious perceptions of other living entities different from your own, also exist;
3. There are things that exist independently of, and outside, conscious perception;
4. Things that exist independently of, and outside conscious perception generate conscious perception.

In a nutshell, a materialist must grant all four points. An agnostic realist must grant the first three. An idealist grants only the first two. And finally, a solipsist grants the first point alone. As an idealist, I grant points one and two, but not points three and four. As an agnostic realist, Martel grants points one, two and three. His motivation is the following:

How does statement two not imply statement three? ... Because for there to be other living beings that I can then judge to be conscious or not conscious, I need to believe they exist outside of me.

To believe that they exist outside of you – that is, outside the stream of conscious experiences you call your life – does not require that they exist outside consciousness itself. It only requires that there be other streams of conscious experience different from your own, which is precisely what is stated in point two. By denying point three, I don't deny the inner lives of other people, since their inner lives are in consciousness. I don't deny that you have an inner life – a personal stream of experiences – different from mine and ordinarily inaccessible to me. I don't deny that you have experiences that I don't necessarily have. But your inner life is in consciousness and so is mine. By acknowledging that you have your own inner life I am not forced to acknowledge that this inner life is hosted, generated, modulated, or otherwise couched in anything outside consciousness. I am simply acknowledging a broader variety of experiences than those I ordinarily have access to as an individual. And the inner lives of other living beings appear in my inner life as the subjective images I call other bodies. My subjective inner life appears in your inner life as your subjective perception of my body. Only subjective experience is required.

This is a simple but often misunderstood point. The idealist denies that anything exists outside consciousness, but not outside his own personal stream of mentation. Indeed, the idealist acknowledges that countless other experiences do exist, which happen to not be included in his own inner life. None of this implies that there must exist anything outside experience itself, since I am only talking about different streams of experience. I can grant validity to statements one and two above without any need to grant it to statements three or four.

I'd like to summarize some key points that I've had to make in the comments section below:

1. If one says that the qualities of experience – or qualia in philosophical jargon – like the redness of red or the taste of an orange exist in the world, as opposed to inside our heads, then the world necessarily entails at least one non-personal/trans-personal experiencer. There is no escape from this, since experience by definition entails an experiencer. Redness cannot exist without being experienced as such, since redness is an experience. The only valid point of debate is whether the experiencer is human (or at least human-like) or non-human, embodied or disembodied. I argue that it is disembodied – bodies existing as experiences within the experiencer – and not even human-like.
2. One cannot explain how different people experience the same world unless one infers something transpersonal, which binds together different streams of personal experience information-wise. Under materialism, a universe of matter outside mind is such an inference. The most parsimonious inference, however, is to simply extend the one thing we know for sure to exist – i.e. mind – beyond its face-value personal boundaries. This is analogous to inferring that the Earth extends beyond the horizon in order to explain the cycle of day and night, instead of postulating a flying spaghetti monster who pulls the sun out of the sky. It is impossible to offer a coherent ontology that isn't solipsist and doesn't infer something beyond ordinary personal experience.
3. My formulation of idealism differs from Berkeley's subjective idealism in at least two points: (a) I argue for a single subject, explaining the apparent multiplicity of subjects as a top-down dissociative process. Berkeley never addressed this issue directly, implicitly assuming many subjects; and (b) I argue that the cognition of the non-dissociated aspect of mind-at-large ('God' in Berkeley's formulation) is not human-like, so it experiences the world in a manner incommensurable with human perception (details in this essay). In Berkeley's formulation, God perceives the world just as we do.
4. If one's goal is to offer a viable alternative to materialism as the ontology that grounds our cultural narrative, unarticulated, disconnected intuitions and ambiguities won't do. One needs a coherent, unambiguous and explicit system that (a) explains everything materialism does; (b) preferably explains at least some of what materialism does not explain but which has been empirically verified; and (c) does all this preferably with less ontological categories than materialism. I argue that my formulation of idealism does all three.