>>74
For me, there are only choices I see. Making hypotheses without confirming data would be a waste of time. Even the most crazy projects, like SETI, have some confirming data.
Actually there are physical evidences/confirming data for some such theories, however science can never "prove" anything, it can only disprove some false theories.
What is "consciousness"? It's a vague term. I'm afraid, you yourself don't see what you're talking about.
The fact that I have unified experience: sound, images, other senses; that such senses have some continuity over (subjective) time. If you think the term is nonsense, just say so. There is just one problem with this: you infer the material world's existence through your senses (by induction) and then from that inference you see that anyone claiming to be conscious is delusional about it as there's no such thing as mental experience in the material world, except you just used your own senses to infer the material world's existence, so it's self-defeating. There are also more subtle contradictions with this as shown by the "Movie Graph Argument" or "China Brain" thought experiment (the only problem is that in the China Brain example, the author does not see that there is a solution to the problem which is free from absurdities).
I do believe what I'm saying, because I havent seen better theory, than subjective idealism.
My favorite candidate for now is a form of "arithmetical"/computationalist neutral monism (in it, both mind and matter are a consequence of "immaterial" natural number relations). Unlike a lot of philosophical/metaphysical theories, it makes some very solid predictions about the shape of physical law (confirming some of the laws of quantum mechanics) as well as future expected experiences (some of which let you set it apart from other theories, thus making it
falsifiable). Is it possible that I am wrong? sure, no beliefs or mine are absolute, it's just the one which I have the highest confidence value for now, if it's wrong, then some extra "magic" will have to exist to explain both physical and mental phenomena, and some rather counterintuitive things will be possible (beyond what most scientists expect today). Why this theory and not another? It follows as a consequence of a few rather simple assumptions, but any assumption has a chance of being wrong, no matter how much it makes sense to me right now. Still, I must bet on what makes most sense to me, and I don't have any problem with that.
Anyways, the problem with subjective idealism is that it's not really falsifiable (unlike my form of neutral monism) and it cannot be used to predict anything. What's worse is that it's a solipsistic theory - it only says that you have mind, it doesn't claim that I have mind. In my case, I can predict that both of us have minds and even a wide array of properties of those minds, as well as what the physical world is, why it exists, what is its relation to one's mind, why does that exist and so on.
"consistency" is a buzzword and in reality, there are no contradictions, except those we invent/define.
I didn't say that reality is inconsistent. I think that whatever reality is, it cannot be inconsistent. It's not a buzzword, it has a very specific meaning: a contradiction or paradox in beliefs - it happens when you prove that something is both true and false starting from some assumption or axiom. In the real world, it could be something like someone holding contradictory beliefs, such as "this person is my father and is not my father", where each of the terms in that sentence have un-ambigous meaning within that person's mind.
except those we invent/define.
Of course contradictions are in our own mind - they just show that some of our reasoning or beliefs are wrong and we must re-examine them.