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OurIt thesisis herenot that the deepest assumptions of Plato's idealism that pervade much of western philosophy are wrong, they are misplaced. Maybe we should take a couple of steps back before we move forward. He is assuming his conclusion. He is making a metaphysical assertion that therethe existence of ideas is both prior and more fundamental than the world of appearances, what we see and sense. In the end this sort of metaphysical question may not have a basicdefinitive erroranswer, but in the deepestspirit assumptionsof abductive reasoning we can explore all of Plato'sthe idealismpractical consequences of our hypothesis. Stated in the positive a modern idealist's first hypothesis would be more like the physicist Max Tegmark who suggests that pervadesthe muchmath of(basic westernphysics philosophy.== simple math => complex emergent phenomina) implies existence.
TheI want to follow the pragmatists who offer thesome bestways wayout out.of pure idealism to more of a stance where ideas are real, but external reality is something else again. They place ideas properly in the space of cognition, in the space of what humans can be analytically aware of. Or maybe in a larger space of what any aware being could know, and to consider whether omniscient awareness is even meaningful. I am more comfortable stating a different set of basic metaphysical hypothesis than saying the other side is wrong. We could both be right in the same way that particles and waves are both right in there own contexts.
The idea is that there is something else that is necessary on a basic level to explain everything we see. Basic physics plus emergence is a handwave to some magic math that connects different levels of description. It is not a handwave to suggest that all that randomness at the fundamental level and confused interpretations of information and a systems theory that is very incomplete might be necessary for emergence. If we call the something else consciousness, then we have Basic physics and basic consiousness plus emergence => a foundational theory of everything. We may even find good mathematical descriptions of these ideas and be able to confirm them, but in the end that doesn't matter. I don't have to postulate any magic math to suggest that what actually happens in the world isn't being guided by our mathematics but must be spontaneously generated from the metaphysical substances. I'm not actually arguing for something more than physics, but for a physics with consciousness. I understand that this model has a fundamental observer problem, and so does physics.
Religion and philosophy can speculate with equal authority on the nature of the expanded spaces thus created and debate them to the end of time. What the mathematicians and physicists have invented to describe the universe is far more awesome than anything in the religious books. The faith that the scientist has that these relations hold for all time and space has to be stronger any religious faith. I'm not just talking about the measurements that cannot be made because of fundamental limitations, but also about the potentially knowable measurements not made because we just don't know how (yet). There is some fascinating work about a 'fourth phase of water', where experiments can be done that suggest there is a lot of hidden information in water and the ways it relates to other molecules in solution. Stuff that cells need to know in order to function.
(we may need a foundation here to be detailed in one of the chapters about artificial wisdom. The foundation is about our concepts for knowing: information, knowing, wisdom and such.)
The idea is that there is something else that is necessary on a basic level to explain everything we see. Basic physics plus emergence is a handwave to some magic math that connects different levels of description. It is not a handwave to suggest that all that randomness at the fundamental level and confused interpretations of information and a systems theory that is very incomplete might be necessary for emergence. If we call the something else consciousness, then we have Basic physics and basic consiousness plus emergence => a foundational theory of everything. We may even find good mathematical descriptions of these ideas and be able to confirm them, but in the end that doesn't matter. I don't have to postulate any magic math to suggest that what actually happens in the world isn't being guided by our mathematics but must be spontaneously generated from the metaphysical substances. I'm not actually arguing for something more than physics, but for a physics with consciousness. I understand that this model has a fundamental observer problem, and so does physics.
Religion and philosophy can speculate with equal authority on the nature of the expanded spaces thus created and debate them to the end of time. What the mathematicians and physicists have invented to describe the universe is far more awesome than anything in the religious books. The faith that the scientist has that these relations hold for all time and space has to be stronger any religious faith. I'm not just talking about the measurements that cannot be made because of fundamental limitations, but also about the potentially knowable measurements not made because we just don't know how (yet). There is some fascinating work about a 'fourth phase of water', where experiments can be done that suggest there is a lot of hidden information in water and the ways it relates to other molecules in solution. Stuff that cells need to know in order to function.
(we may need a foundation here to be detailed in one of the chapters about artificial wisdom. The foundation is about our concepts for knowing: information, knowing, wisdom and such.)