Ask Lemmy

​In philosophy, the axioms are exactly what is being debated so it isn't as rigorous.

That’s not true. There are rules of logical inference that can be taken as axioms. These axioms are the reason why, as you stated, if all the premises in a valid argument are true then the conclusion must also be true.

Formal logic only guarantees that if the premises are true, the conclusion logically follows, it doesn't guarantee that the premises are actually true in reality.

Of course. But this still gives us a lot to talk about. If someone makes an argument, they must defend the premises. If you disagree with the conclusion of the argument, you must find a flaw with one of the premises, etc

This is literally changing the definition. In biology and common parlance, consciousness is defined as an emergent property or function of a biological brain

This is not the definition, so I’m no changing anything. In all my years of studying this topic in an academic setting, the definition I have always come across is something like “subjective inner experience; the feeling of what it’s like to be something.” What you are doing here is you are including your preferred ontology into the very definition of consciousness itself, so when someone disagrees you claim they are wrong by definition. Its a sneaky move but its not going to work here

but I'm afraid you're not going to be able to convince me of idealism without strong evidence

Can you convince me of materialism with some strong evidence? You can’t. And don’t say that I’m reversing the burden of proof here, because that misses the point: namely, that these are not ideas that you necessarily can prove using evidence. They are primarily philosophical/metaphysical views, rather than scientific hypotheses, and so they must be evaluated using different tools. 

If we look at the cosmological timeline, the universe existed for billions of years before biological organisms evolved. If reality requires the "collective perception of many agents" to exist, how did the universe exist before agents evolved to perceive it?

This is a good critique, because it addresses the logical coherence of the views being discussed here. It is, in other words, a philosophical critique.

Recall that in my first message about this that I wasn’t trying to defend idealism, I was just saying that Bsit and you were trying to talk past one another. That was because his defense was philosophical and your rebuttal was scientific. But now there has been a shift, and your rebuttals are philosophical in nature. So now everyone seems to be on the same page.

This is exactly where I was trying to get things, so as far as I’m concerned my work is done here.