There Is No Meaningful Difference Between AI and Typical Physicalist Philosophy. Only a Shift in Vocabulary.
Analytic Idealism is perhaps the worst kind of idealism one could subscribe to. It hardly seems idealist even in its inspiration, given that the historical idealists were anti-realist, either epistemologically or ontologically about the common-sense conception of the world including causality, space, time, motion.
Parmenides from whom the broader idealist tradition emerged rejected motion outright. Yet Analytic Idealism seems to retain precisely the kind of dynamism that he rejected. Zeno likewise offered arguments against the intelligibility of motion.
Plato, Plotinus, and the Neoplatonists continued along broadly similar lines. Kant, Schopenhauer, Hegel, and Berkeley likewise developed anti-realist arguments regarding the world as ordinarily conceived.
The attempt to make idealism “respectable” and palatable to mainstream cognitive scientists, analytic philosophers who dismiss idealism as antiquated mysticism is precisely what an idealist should not be trying to do.
The founders of the analytic tradition like Russell and Moore offered more of a rhetorical rejection of idealism than a serious refutation.
Moore’s famous paper “The Refutation of Idealism” makes this clear even from the title. Read it carefully and the rhetoric is already there. The paper mainly concerns itself with Berkeley’s esse est percipi rather than the positions of Kant Hegel Schopenhauer or Bradley. Yet it was still presented as a refutation of idealism in general as if all idealists had been refuted.
For Russell and Bradley's most central concerns I would recommend reading “Some Explanations in Reply to Mr. Bradley.”
This is not just a historical genealogy post. I will also offer some criticism's to make the point clear.
Bradley’s most important critique of Russell was this. Given two terms a and b with a relation R between them we have aRb. Now take another pair of terms c and d with a relation S between them so that cSd. What determines that R obtains between a and b while S obtains between c and d?
Simply saying that relations relate their terms does not explain this. A relation by itself has no directedness that tells us why it should relate one particular set of terms rather than another. Russell’s response was essentially to reject the demand for a further explanation. For him it is simply a brute fact that the relation obtains.
But that is not really a refutation of any kind really.
Now we really come to the central issue: this philosophy seems to rely on analogies rather than providing arguments for the position itself.
Kastrup simply accepts realism without asking how apparently physical matter is grounded. Can physics itself provide that grounding?
He seems to accept the existence of the world in something close to a folk-physicalist sense and then calls it an “extrinsic appearance” of Mind at Large.
Let it be if he accepts such pluralistic reality of things whether he calls it mental or physical he seems to ascribe himself .
But what is the argument for such independent things?
Anyone who subscribes to plurality runs directly into the problem of change, regardless of whether the vocabulary is changed to “process,” “event,” or anything else.
If A is a self-existing entity with a determinate identity that does not depend on anything else, then it is without conditions. That which is without conditions is permanent and therefore cannot change. But change requires conditions. If there are multiple such entities and each is independent of everything else, then they can neither genuinely interact nor change.
So no change is possible between them. This is essentially the atomic realism Russell was defending. Introducing relations does nothing to solve the problem. If everything is permanent, the presence or absence of relations cannot produce change. Permanence is the opposite of change. Nothing could genuinely be born from anything else or be destroyed.
Now suppose someone thinks this problem applies only to independent pluralist things and simply declares that everything is “events” That does not solve anything. He has merely relabeled substances as events or processes and called them dynamic.
Ask such a person whether his event or process themselves possess dynamism. If he says yes, then ask whether its earlier and later stages involve an ultimate negation.
If they do, then the earlier and later stages are distinct ,determinate and permanent. Once that distinction is admitted, their determinate identities are back and we have returned to pluralism.
And if the earlier and later relation is real, then the relation cannot exist without its two distinct relata.
Some people, notwithstanding the developments in science, had to abandon their intuition regarding things-in-themselves and treat them merely as:
>The ontological reduction goes all the way down... what is fundamental are structures, patterns, and relations, not individual objects or relata that stand in those relations. Individual things are merely derivative, structural nodes or shadow-projections of a relational matrix, possessing no intrinsic identity independent of the network that constitutes them
Every Thing Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized
This view is more incoherent than anything we have discussed so far. At least with pluralism there was an attempt to provide some genuine grounding for self-existing things. Here the position becomes difficult even to formulate coherently.
I put the argument against it as follows. It claims that the web of relations is fundamental and that the nodes A and B are merely “structural intersections” with no intrinsic substance.
We then ask: Is every identity merely a web of relations between things that have no intrinsic identity?
If yes, then all the intersections are empty. Whatever they originate from would also be empty of any determinate identity. We are left with a web of relations between empty things and a matrix of empty intersections related to other empty intersections.
If the intersections are empty and the threads merely point toward other empty intersections, then there is nothing actually being related.
Neither relationalism nor pluralism can function coherently under the Law of Non-Contradiction. Both are ultimately contradictory.
If there is no inherent existence which grounds itself. So how could it ground anything else or itself be grounded by anything else?
Against the various views of time held today:
Time, as we analyze it, presents the following contradiction. It appears to move toward something that is nonexistent while also coming from something nonexistent. Yet the present is said to depend on things that are nonexistent both ahead and behind it.
And this is how temporality is characterized for any object, regardless of whether general relativity is applied. Eliminating the observer’s privileged position does not change the problem. This is simply how temporal succession is.
The explanation is as follows. You cannot move toward a place you have already reached. If the future already exists, there is no reason for the present to be understood as moving toward it.
Likewise, you cannot say that the present is coming from the past if the past still exists in the same sense. You would still, in some sense, be there, just as eternalism requires.
For time to genuinely move toward the future or come from the past, those moments cannot already be existent. Only then does the claim have any truth-maker; otherwise, it has none.
Presentism:
Seeing this nature of time, one might think the presentist holds the right position. Formally, only (t_n) exists, while (t_{n+1}) and (t_{n-1}) have no reality.
Yet it becomes problematic when the presentist says that the present contains matter, velocity, and change. We can ask the presentist this: if his theory of time is correct and (t_n) alone is ontologically real, then the equations of theoretical physics should ultimately presuppose only (t_n) and still function adequately. After all, he has defined the present as the only reality.
But the presentist continues to use interval-based concepts. If only (t_n) is ontologically real, then the equations of physics have no temporal interval to work with. They cannot function at all. Matter, velocity, and change cannot simply be assumed to exist in a bare present when the physical equations themselves are formulated using differential and interval-based structures.
A bare (t_n) provides nothing sufficient for those equations to operate. The problem strikes at presentism directly.
It is not that physics equations will merely says some matter is present at (t_n). The point is that if the equations cannot even function with (t_n) alone, then how could any physical system be there at all in this?
And thus, presentism is refuted.
Block Universe:
On the other hand, if presentism is abandoned, then after rejecting the nature of time as described above one goes beyond common sense ironically returning to the same kind of move for which idealists were once rejected in order to preserve the equations of physics. He therefore adopts an eternalist model.
Eternalism does at least give us the temporal intervals as existent, but this conception of existence seems to create a different problem for what physics is supposed to describe.
Suppose tn−1, tn, and tn+1 all exist tenselessly and eternally. If someone dies at tn+9, in what sense does he ever cease to exist? If the past remains equally existent, would he not continue to exist at those earlier moments? And if those moments are equally real, why would consciousness not occur there again and again? Ad infinitum .
The eternalist says there is no privileged “now,” appealing to relativity, but that does not by itself explain why this repetition problem should be impossible. After all, the “now” at my birth was still me, just as the “now” at my present is me.
But this model is still not good from the idealist perspective, because matter remains grounded within it in some form. That is precisely why even this model still needs to be criticized.
But again we must note where the inspiration of Block Universe came from itself partially:
When physicist's attempted a project of a complete, unified, purely mathematical-relational description of quantum spacetime itself .
The most direct route to this, historically, is canonical quantization applied to General Relativity, producing what is called canonical quantum gravity, and its main mathematical result is the Wheeler–DeWitt equation.
This website doesn’t allow the equation to be pasted, so you can find it through a Google search.
In ordinary quantum mechanics, physical states evolve in time according to the Schrödinger equation where the Hamiltonian generates change with respect to an background time parameter "t".
But General Relativity says via diffeomorphism invariance (the physical requirement that the laws of physics not depend on which coordinate system, including which time-coordinate, you arbitrarily choose to use) is that there is no privileged background time.
When you attempt to quantize gravity canonically by treating the geometry of space itself as the quantum system, and observing how it evolves you must apply the Hamiltonian constraint, which is the total energy correctly accounted for including gravity's own contribution must vanish because there is no external energy reservoir the universe as a whole could be measured against.
Formally, the result is the Wheeler–DeWitt equation:
The Wheeler–DeWitt equation says
𝐻∣Ψ⟩=0
The generator of time evolution applied to the total quantum state of the universe yields exactly zero. There is no external 𝑡 for the wavefunction of the universe to depend on in the Wheeler-DeWitt formalism (unlike ordinary QM, there is no "outside" reference clock available, since all clocks, being physical systems, must themselves be part of ∣Ψ⟩ and the equation that would generate change with respect to any internal notion of time instead sets that generator's action to zero.
This is famously called "the problem of time" in quantum gravity, and not disputed by anyone in the field is that the wavefunction of the universe ∣Ψ⟩ as described by this equation, is static. It does not evolve. There is no global, fundamental, physical parameter with respect to which ∣Ψ⟩ changes.
Dynamism and the passage of time at the most fundamental level are precisely the phenomena that any complete physical ontology must account for. Yet they disappear mathematically when we try to develop a fully relational background-independent and purely structural quantum description of the universe as a whole.
The reason I am making this point is because there seem to be only two options. Either the time we experience is something special that cannot emerge when the entire quantum system is fundamentally static which requires introduce something outside the physicalist ontology that still needs to be explained, or time itself is an illusion. But then what generates that illusion?
If the entire universe is fundamentally frozen, where could the generation of an illusion even take place? It is like saying that a beggar will somehow give us a billion dollars out of nowhere.
What is even more striking is that those who say time is an illusion still treat the matter appearing within this supposed illusion as physically real. So even the timeless quantum state is said to be physical. But what does “physical” even mean at that point? No energy, no change, no temporal evolution, no probabilities unfolding. What exactly remains physical?
This is indistinguishable from bare nonexistence.
And the proposed responses to solve this problem seem to violate the very premise of relativity by introducing an independent background coordinate or parameter whether through internal clock subsystems or something similar.
Though I have a question: how did this actually inspire block-universe theorists later? It seems to say that not an ounce of matter is present anywhere. So what kind of theory is it to then posit that the entire past present and future exist eternally with matter in 4D spacetime manifold?
Critique of it
Spacetime is modelled as a four-dimensional manifold, a set of points each specified by real number coordinates glued together by a topological and metric structure.
In the standard set-theoretic construction of the real line R(via Dedekind cuts or Cauchy sequences) a point is a zero-dimensional object. It has:
- Zero length (in 1D)
- Zero area (in 2D)
- Zero volume (in 3D)
- Zero duration (on the time axis)
How does an uncountable collection of zero-duration, zero-extension entities constitute an entity that has non-zero duration or non-zero extension?
How could time be what be consisting of zero duration points and yet have non zero duration.
A countable sum of zeros is exactly zero. No exception. This is not a convergent series that approaches some finite value, it is identically zero at every partial sum forever.
It is said that each of these spacetime points contains matter, velocity, change, dynamism, and evolution, in the non-biological sense.
But the critiques of presentism apply here as well. If you can use interval-based concepts at any of these spacetime points, while treating each point as eternal and independently existent, then each point should contain everything required to account for the equations of physics attributed to it. After all, if the point is eternal, it cannot depend on anything else. If the points were dependent on one another, in what sense could they be eternal?
Yet once again, if you isolate a single point and ask what is actually present there, no past or future is available. So no matter should be recoverable from the point alone. On that basis, the block universe faces the same problem and is therefore refuted.
GBU:
The Growing Block Universe, as presented in George Ellis’s quantum-based approach, gives the issue more apparent depth, but it does not solve the problem. It seems to involve a similar sleight of hand to presentism.
The growing-block theorist holds that the past exists tenselessly much like the eternalist while the present is supposed to be the boundary where new reality is added. But the same argument of ours applies to those past spacetime points as well.
But the sleight of hand here is essentially the same one used by the presentist. The GBU theorist uses interval-based vocabulary in the present becoming the future as though the future is already available in some sense.
If only tn exists, as the GBU theorist ultimately wants, then he faces the same problem as the presentist. The present tn must somehow supply everything required for the equations of physics. But he cannot do that. And if he somehow succeeds in showing that tn alone is sufficient, then the presentist can make exactly the same move.
This is all the refutation you need for now .
Now coming back to the state of literature here:
Idealists have in a sense abandoned what it would have meant to be genuine idealists. The hard problem is certainly a problem for many physicalists but it often targets folk physicalism as though it were still the dominant position even though that view was abandoned long ago.
If only over the last four decades idealists had placed greater emphasis on the philosophy of science rather than concentrating so heavily on the philosophy of mind they might have made some progress.