alt Hacker NewsI once read a comment on here that I found interesting but haven't been able to find it again.
Basically it flipped the problem on its head. We're arguing how you start at the physical substrate and get to consciousness. They argued that you could start with consciousness and argue how you get to the physical side (experimentation via your conscious experience, etc). It was from a religious individual who called the conscious experience God and went further into how we all share this sliver of godhood.
Does anyone who knows philosophical "camps" know the terms for what I'm trying to remember? I guess I've leaned "materialist" for most of my life, but what other common philosophies (as in the academic discipline) are there?
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What you describe sounds like variation of Berkeley's subjective idealism:
Panpsychism? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism
I don't think I've shared my thoughts on here, but this sounds a lot like my thought process: what if you start with nothing but consciousness, then find a path to a physical universe?
Consciousness is inherently about awareness, so at some point the consciousness would be aware of itself. Now it has the concepts of before/after, and from that opposites, incrementing, subtracting, 1 dimensional space etc. Eventually through this process you could "spawn up" other consciousnesses each expanding their individual bubbles of experience and understanding, eventually getting complex enough to create an entire universe with physical matter that can be experienced by other consciousnesses.
One thing is certain: we are talking about consciousness. This means that the world does not work like this: there is physics, and above it there is consciousness which is merely monitoring the physics. This cannot be true (or is unlikely), since we are discussing consciousness and therefore the physical act of talking is driven by something that knows that consciousness exists. There must be a link back from consciousness to physics. A simpler way is to assume that physics IS consciousness. Physics as a science is a kind of introspective activity.
Another "camp" is panpsychism, which is often seen as a polar opposite of materialism. David Chalmers and Philip Goff are the two most prominent people pushing it.
They espouse consciousness or subjective experience is fundamental and contained in all matter.
There's a long history of anti-dualism in Kabbalist traditions, Christian Mysticism and Gnosticism.
For example, the Gospel of Thomas sayings #3, #77 and #113.
Yes, it's called idealism. And the whole field of it is a pile of fallacies of ambiguity that can take years to see and treat with caution.
Advaita Vedanta or Alan Watts style looking - essentially the idea that there are no separate things or events, sort of like Whitehead's process philosophy. Trippy stuff and a little bit out there, but consistent with some other ways of looking at things. What is real by Adam Becker goes into some underpinnings here too.
>Basically it flipped the problem on its head.
I thought it was me[1], but I don't remember making the "shared godhood" argument
Get familiar with Donald Hoffman - plenty of good podcasts with him.
Closest thing is probably Bernardo Kastrup’s analytic idealism.
This side is traditionally called "idealist", and it usually very quickly collapses into solipsism of different varieties.
There is not much you can show against the "there is a single existing soul that has many different persons (as opposed to each person having a different, personal soul) that dreams about the 'physical' reality" hypothesis except "I don't think my imagination is that good", really.