To be fair, I admit this is unabashed sophistry, the point isn't to actually argue for this viewpoint, but to illustrate by analogy the weaknesses in the materialistic view, which hinges tenuously on certain articles of faith.
Any attempt to demonstrate the existence of the material world in existence, independent on any conscious experience however indirect, such a proof would in itself constitute an indirect conscious experience of the material world.
Thus, we cannot demonstrate the material world exists outside of at least indirect conscious experience. If such a proof exists, it contradicts itself and is not a proof of what it claims to be. In other words, the independent existence of a material world is utterly unverifiable! It is an article of faith, not a scientific fact.
Imagine there are an infinite number of universes, with varying rules and complexity and initial conditions. These universes are like a mathematical set of everything. Time and space and matter and energy and forces are just emergent properties of this particular slice of infinity. Where does this function run? Nowhere, just by being mathematically true, it is true.
Now you can imagine that most of the slices of possibilities are devoid of anything. They don't have space/energy/matter/time etcetera. But an infinitesimally small fraction of all possible universes (which is still an infinite number) do allow complex interactions, and of those slices of realities, our universe does allow things to get complex enough for matter to experience weird consciousness.
On the other hand, this does also mean that somewhere in this infinite field of infinities, there is a universe that contains an absolutely omniscient being called god that runs a simulation for his own pleasure and the result of this simulation is perfectly identical to the universe where there is no god, down to every single planck unit, and possibly beyond that. And from our point of view, there is no difference.
In this viewpoint of the universe, the answer to the question : Is there a god or is there no god? The answer is a boolean yes.
(Fine, I'll argue against my own argument for the sake of having an interesting discussion.)
That may be, but it hinges on a single-observer perspective. The experiences of different observers appears to be largely in agreement. If they were each creating the material world by observing it, surely they wouldn't be in such concord and we may not expect it to persist over time. Even though we can't strictly prove it, we have strong indications that the material world is independent of being experienced.
Against that claim one may argue that conscience may be something we share even though our memories are independent, something like Neoplatonism, the mind of god, Spinozism etc. A rough argument for this is that we all share the same capacity for reason (this essentially mirrors the argument for an independent physical reality).
> If they were each creating the material world by observing it, surely they wouldn't be in such concord and we may not expect it to persist over time.
Why make that assumption?
As a card-carrying idealist, I think language such as “creating the material world by observing it” is best avoided. Here’s what I would say instead:
Minds and their conscious experiences are the most fundamental reality, to which everything else can be reduced and/or from which everything else emerges. Physical events, entities, processes, laws, etc, are simply particular types of patterns in the experiences of minds. The experiences of different minds are (partially) correlated-that correlation is itself another such a pattern. What causes that correlation? Well, causation is also just a pattern; causation is a type of explanation, but every search for explanations must eventually end in something accepted without explanation (the Münchhausen trilemma), so something things just are the way they are, some patterns just exist, without having any other pattern as their cause. It’s patterns all the way down, until we reach minds and their experiences at the bottom. That’s all we can ever know, and all there is to know.
From that viewpoint, talk about “minds creating physical reality” is a rather imperfect metaphor, true in some ways, but also prone to leading to dubious assumptions (like the ones your quoted argument relies on)
And if this is a “faith-based” position-well, no more than materialism is-it is just spinning the arrow of reduction/emergence 180 degrees
Yeah sure. That's sort of where I'm getting at with all of this though. If you closely scrutinize the fundamental assumptions of almost any description of the world, there's inevitably some hand-wavy stuff that simply can't be verified.
For all we can prove about the world, we might just be a single brain in a vat connected to a computer simulation.
Well the present can't be observed from the future, although in the future we're able to observe what was the present as the past. So the experience does not appear to travel backwards, so much as what was can be experienced.
If there is a piece of the word that right now no conscious being is observing, but a year from now somebody will observe (directly or indirectly), does it exist today or will it come into existence a year from now?
To be fair, I admit this is unabashed sophistry, the point isn't to actually argue for this viewpoint, but to illustrate by analogy the weaknesses in the materialistic view, which hinges tenuously on certain articles of faith.