Will David Chalmers ever become an idealist?

[Stoic Warrior]

He was my favorite philosopher for the longest time, and I still respect him and his work to this day.  

I know he's not the most popular guy in these parts, but you have to admit he was a key figure in recent times to make consciousness a real priority in Western philosophy and science.  It's been over two decades since he introduced the concept, and the hard problem of consciousness still remains one of the greatest topics of research and discussion.  

Do you think he is too deep in his materialist paradigm to seriously consider idealism?

Honestly, I feel he hasn’t explored it enough.  I remember reading a Reddit Q &A where he said basically he’s too lazy to do mindfulness and meditation.  He mentioned in an interview that he still believes in a self.  

What are y’alls thoughts?

[Dana Lomas]

As I recall, David and Bernardo got together, with a few other speculators whose names I don't recollect, in China not long ago to discuss the various competing explanations/theories of consciousness. I also recall that not much was reconciled in that meeting of minds. I get the impression that David is more inclined to take an agnostic approach, rather than being a hardcore materialist, and is content to sit on the fence, perhaps because of some perceived career implications. Of course, this is utter speculation on my part. So to answer your question, perhaps he'll commit or admit to a preferred model, once he has no vested interest in not committing. :)

[Lauris Olups]

I came across this Chalmers' paper on idealism recently: http://consc.net/papers/idealism.pdf

It's published this year and ends in a weird way :D

I do not claim that idealism is plausible. No position on the mind–body problem is plausible. Materialism: implausible. Dualism: implausible. Idealism: implausible. Neutral monism: implausible. None of the above: implausible. But the probabilities of all of these views get a boost from the fact that one of the views must be true. Idealism is not significantly less plausible than its main competitors. So even though idealism is implausible, there is a non-negligible probability that it is true

[Rigpa]

I don't think Chalmers is skeptical enough :)

[Dana Lomas]

Hmm ... It seems DC has at least committed to noncommittalism ... or is it implausiblism :)  Surely he is saying he has no answer, in offering one that seems like the ontological equivalent of the Mad Hatter's riddle.

I'd suggest that idealism is the one position that makes all the others possible, in that the one commonality they all share is that they are all ideas -- whatever their plausibility.

[Stoic Warrior]

Thanks for the article Lauris; I just got done speed reading through it, and from what I can tell, he seems to be a little more receptive to it than he was letting on in the conclusion. 

"I conclude that there is significant motivation for cosmic idealism. It shares the general moti- vations for panpsychism, which are strong, and has some extra motivation in addition. Compared to micro-idealism, it deals much better with the problems of spacetime and of holism, and it at least has some extra promise in dealing with the problem of causation and the all-important con- stitution problem. Compared to non-idealist forms of panpsychism and panprotopsychism, it has some advantages in simplicity and comprehensibility, while it has both benefits and costs with respect to the constitution problem. I do not know that the constitution problem can be solved, but there are at least avenues worth exploring. Overall, I think cosmic idealism is the most promising version of idealism, and is about as promising as any version of panpsychism. It should be on the list of the handful of promising approaches to the mind–body problem."

He mentions earlier the "non-subject-involving cosmic idealist view" commonly found in various Buddhist schools and Advaita Vedanta, and he says how "one cost is then to make sense of experiences without subjects of experience."  We already know that the sense of self is dropped with the disintegration of the brain's default mode network https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/lsd-may-chip-away-at-the-brain-s-sense-of-self-network/ , so this really isn't much of an issue.

On Tuesday, November 28, 2017 at 11:26:11 AM UTC-5, Lauris Olups wrote: