- #36
loseyourname
Staff Emeritus
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Canute said:It is provably a logical impossibility if idealism is provably unfalsifiable.
I have a hypothesis. I believe that clock hands go around the clock because they are being pushed by invisible, immaterial gremlins that can only be known through my faith. They cannot be detected empirically. This is an unfalsifiable hypothesis. Does it make any material explanation of the clock (you know, gears, electricity, gravity and such) a logical impossibility?
Yeah, that's the old argument. I suppose I'd make it as well if I was a well paid neuroscientist. I can imagine it still being made in a thousand years time. However logical analysis suggests it does not hold water. This is partly for the reasons that Chalmers and others give, but also because a physical account would falsify idealism. If you can show that idealism is falsifiable then that changes everything, but it appears to be impossible to do that.
The reason it is ignored by neuroscience is because an unfalsifiable hypothesis is considered an invalid hypothesis by scientific standards. A true hypothesis must be testable somehow and must accept negative evidence. This is why theists and dualists will never go away, because even if a completely physical explanation of all phenomena observed in our universe is achieved, they can simply continue to assert that there is more to it. However, for the sake of parsimony (commonly known as Occam's razor) we discard hypotheses like the one about gremlins in clocks because they are superfluous. A clock can be understood on purely physical terms. So might human consciousness. Idealism has no bearing on this; it is a factually meaningless hypothesis and I'm surprised that you continue to cling to it.