I was fortunate to work closely with a philosopher and got introduced to some ideas in philosophy. I came across this mind-blowing idea called Idealism.

This post will require a large amount of open-mindedness. It’s about what consciousness is. I will talk about the common misconceptions of Idealism and why I disagree with some mainstream ideas. Then I will try to introduce Idealism.

Some of the following ideas will seem very controversial to a 21st-century mind, but I think they offer a plausible and useful point of view, if you take it slow. It took me a few months to get over my strong biases to understand what they are really talking about. I don’t think my blog post can explain better than the prior arts on the topic, but maybe I can help to explain in newbie terms. I hope you relax and enjoy the ride 🙂

Benefits of Idealism (I will describe Idealism later)

Why does it even matter where and what consciousness is? Why consider another worldview when your current one works just fine?

From different angles, we discover different things. Seeing the world through the lenses of Materialism (the mind cannot exist without the matter), we focus on the matter, which has helped us develop science and technologies. The benefits of science are not to be discounted. I think there are benefits in an alternative point of view called Idealism.

I think Idealism may help us find peace, both between cultures and within ourselves. On top of that, it provides a valid answer to the mind-body problem.

The mind-body problem

This is not the proper definition in Philosophy, but here’s how I think about it.

What and where is consciousness? Do the cells in the brain create consciousness? Where do we experience sights and sounds?

What Idealism isn’t about

Idealism isn’t the first impression you get from Wikipedia, which may go along the following lines,

• Everything is made up by your mind.
• All other humans are your imagination.
• Nothing is real, and you are in a dream or simulation.

Instead, it explains that everything that we perceive exists, and our thoughts and sensations exist too.

Consciousness

Where does your experience of seeing a car, hearing the sound of it and thinking “it’s noisy” happen? Where does the concept of water exist?

We conveniently say it’s in our brains, when we actually mean in our minds/consciousness. We assume that there is a mind somewhere inside the skull, because we don’t know where else it could be. But there’s no evidence that the experience of hearing sound or feeling vibrations is located in the physical brain. 

Here’s my definition of consciousness, it’s where experiences happen.

What’s insufficient about science

Science is limited by what we can perceive. What if there are dimensions that we can’t sense? We can develop radars and microscopes to enhance our senses, but can we eventually get a full picture of the reality?

Science is based on empirical observations. We rarely think about this, but it’s an assumption that our senses reflect the reality. We experience senses that don’t reflect the reality in dreams and other situations. But can we be so sure that if the majority of population agrees on a perception then it must be true? Or is it just true for the majority of humans?

Also consider, where does science exist? Is it in consciousness? Can science figure out what consciousness is and how it’s created from the inside of it?

Could it be that science isn’t the best tool for understanding consciousness?

Some mainstream ideas and my criticism on them

I experience thoughts and sensations, which includes sight, sound, taste, and other body sensations.

Where is this persona that owns all these sensations? What is it made of? What is ownership anyway? Isn’t ownership a concept humans made up?

As mentioned in the book, The Hidden Life of Trees, when giraffes start eating the leaves of a tree, the tree would not only produce a substance to make their leaves bitter, but also signal other trees to do the same. Could trees be conscious?

Where is the distinction between a tree and the rest of the world that’s not the tree? Does your tree include the fallen leaves that had turned into dirt? How about the birds that eat the fruits and spread the seeds? To an alien, what we call trees and birds might all look like one system, like a car where some parts move and some parts don’t.

I think the distinction between objects only exists in our minds. They are there to help us navigate the world.

This is an assumption, because you could have sensations of an object in a dream and the object disappears as soon as you wake up. Note: claiming that it’s an assumption doesn’t claim that nothing exists. An alternative could be that matter exists inside consciousness and consciousness exists.

What if your perception isn’t all of consciousness? What if it’s there is a bigger consciousness where things exist, and our minds are attached to this common place?

The Idealism point of view

(Warnings: you may get distracted by thoughts like “Are you saying my life is a lie and that I don’t know anything about the world at all?”, or “This person REALY needs to learn about science”. I can only say that It’s not how it first seems. I’m probably not explaining it well, because people write books to explain this. )

There is one big consciousness that includes everything, and that’s all there is. We are parts of this one consciousness, and our experiences are reflections of what happens, like mirrors. Since we are connected, our experiences are consistent.

This doesn’t mean you and your stuffs don’t exist anymore. Think it about the word consciousness as the universe. Everything still exists, just in a different place and probably not in the way we that know them. The items that you know of are parts of the universe, and you have perceptions and mental representations of them.

Where is the peace as promised?

I think if you think from the perspective that everything is one big system, it helps you realise a lot of things that we thought were real and significant are just concepts in our minds.

With this view, hatred and insecurity disappear. For example, it becomes apparent that labelling of someone or something as being inherently bad doesn’t make them so. You’d realise that most of the things people think they need in order to be happy are just concepts too. Putting things into perspecitve helps you go past the hang-ups, so you can be free and happy in spite of what happens.

Further readings

I’ve only scratched the surface of these ideas and don’t want to mislead. If you’d like more details on Idealism, here’s a great book that explains well, Brief Peeks Beyond.

I also got inspired by the talks and books from Alan Watts. His explanations made a lot of sense to me. Can recommend 🙂

One more note. If consciousness is about experiencing, then perhaps the best way to study it is to pay more attention to our experiences, rather than thinking about it in words. Practising meditation helped me understand a lot of what I’ve mentioned above, maybe it would help you too.

Conclusion

We may not be able to prove what’s true, because all we know for sure is our subjective experiences. But we can still benefit from these models of the world.

The point of this post isn’t to prove which point of view is true, but to show that science also relies on assumptions, and that science isn’t all we have.

• Idealism
• mind-body
• Philosophy
• the mind
• thoughts