Saturday, 19 May 2018



If there were two heterogenous sorts of facts, one concerning objective matters in the external world and the other concerning internal matters in a subjective world then the task of where and how they map onto each other might represent a legitimately challenging 'hard problem', but this would require the existence of a more encompassing realm where both sets of facts existed side by side. The idea of such a realm however seems to be incoherent, or at the very least a kind of theological assumption, a kind of mythology. In fact there is only experience with its complex internal relationships and if a hard problem appears it ought to be that of justifying the peculair eminence accorded to the 'beings of reason' which make up the projected world of material reality. Idealism is closer to grasping this self-evident monism, that is it is closer to assigning the correct status to beings of reason. Idealism is not the mirror image of materialism, it doesn't render objective reality ghostly in the same way as materialism renders subjectivity ghostly, or epiphenomenal, the notion of experiential reality at the base of idealism in no way resembles the phenomenon of mind as projected and problematised by naturalism, there is no reason for it to do so. It is closer to simply observing, in the most unprejudiced way possible, that there is only one kind of fact in the sense that any two facts that are in meaningful relation must share the same kind of factuality. If it is impossible to carry this out completely in theory, this simple points to an inherent limitation of theorising, which could be the starting point for another enterprise of knowing altogether. 

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