Why Metaphysical Idealism is True

WHY IDEALISM SHOULD BE THE DEFAULT POSITION

1. Your mind exists
2. Other minds apart from your own also exist
3. Things independently exist outside minds
4. Things outside minds can generate minds

A true sceptic realises that materialism violates Occam's razor and concludes that idealism provides the simplest and most effective, metaphysical explanation of reality. Materialism, or physicalism, requires all these four statements to be true. Idealism only requires the first two to be true. As you can see, materialism requires more leaps of faith than idealism.

The only statement that one can be sure of is number one, but in order to avoid the problem of solipsism and pragmatically uphold the theory of mind, both metaphysics must consider that statement number two must be true: other minds exist apart from one's own. This is the only leap of faith required of idealism—and it is a small one since we already know, from personal experience, that a mind can and does exist. It's easy to extrapolate from what is already known and posit the existence of a plurality of the same kind of phenomenon, namely, the conscious perception of other sentient beings.

Materialism requires statements three and four in addition, and both are bigger leaps of faith, since we can never truly confirm that a world exists outside of consciousness without being aware of it in the first place, and we have no evidence nor the slightest idea of how anything unconscious could ever give rise to consciousness. As the scientist Bernardo Kastrup pointed out, '...everything you can ever know comes into consciousness the moment you know it, so the belief that there are things outside consciousness is an abstraction beyond knowledge.' So now consider how bad the last statement is as it postulates that things whose existence you cannot verify are responsible for the only thing you can be absolutely sure to exist: your own consciousness.

Statement number four runs counter to the natural direction of inference, which is, the unknown is inferred from the known, not the other way around. Materialism isn't empirically deduced from the scientific process, it is a belief born out of medieval propaganda to politically subvert the power and influence that ancient religious dogma had over people. It began with the heretical rebellion of the Middle Ages as religion stood in the way of freedom and progress. Materialism isn't just false, it's untenable. The only reason we have come to believe in the last two statements with the advent of the age of reason is that we seem to share a common world. After all, two different individuals can describe the same surroundings and come to a mutual agreement based on what they observe simultaneously. But idealism is congruous with this observation without requiring huge leaps of faith like materialism.

Metaphysical idealism doesn't require solipsism to be true as we have already established. Different conscious observers can agree on a shared mental construct that makes up an ostensibly external reality apart from their egoic minds. One can have one's private dreams as well as share a collective dream, as it were. At the moment, as human beings, we experience a narrow and limited perspective of reality, but without our anthropic avatars, we are, in theory, unbounded consciousness. We are both the part and the whole as access to other states of awareness, including a primordial and pristine cognition, is available to us through certain types of meditation. The interactive holarchy described in the alumnus Cosmin Visan's idealist theory of consciousness—which was brought to my attention recently—aligns well with subjective as well as ostensibly objective, verified facts about reality.


https://youtu.be/CfnF-zer7CQ?si=-hKQgS6FKvckQPa2