AuthorityI’ve been thinking about materialism and idealism again, mostly because I feel like the usual debates miss the part that actually feels strange.
People usually rush to pick a side. Either your brain creates your consciousness, or the physical world is just an appearance inside your mind. Both directions make sense on the surface, but they both start getting incredibly weird once you follow them all the way down.
The physical side is hard to ignore because the brain clearly matters. If consciousness had no relation to the body, anesthesia would completely break the theory. So no, I’m not interested in pretending the body is irrelevant, that version of idealism feels way too convenient.
But the materialist story gets just as trippy when you slow it down.
We say the brain produces consciousness, and we point to things like brain scans and neuroscience papers as proof. But the catch is that all of this evidence is still appearing inside our experience. You have to use your consciousness to see the scan or process the theory. Even the sentence “the brain produces consciousness” is just another concept your consciousness is aware of.
That is the loop I can’t just skip over.
It doesn't make the brain fake. I still prefer not walking into walls, because the physical world has consequences and doesn't care about your metaphysics. But the reality is that we never actually interact with matter from outside our own awareness. We can never step out of our experience, inspect reality from some clean, neutral place, and return with raw matter in our hands. Matter might be the absolute best explanation we have for why our experience is so stable, but it is still an explanation formed entirely inside that experience.
On the flip side, idealism has its own massive problem waiting in the dark.
If consciousness is the fundamental building block of reality, why does the physical world have so much rigid structure? Why does it push back against us, and why does the physical body dictate so much of our experience? You can’t just say “everything is consciousness” and leave it there. That explains too much too easily, which usually means it hasn't actually explained enough.
I’m not interested in arguing who is right. What fascinates me is that moment where both views just hit a wall.
It honestly just leaves me spinning on this one paradox. We talk about the brain creating consciousness, but our entire understanding of a "brain" is a model built by our consciousness. It’s like trying to take a picture of the camera you're currently holding. We are using our experience to explain the existence of our experience, and it's impossible to tell what's actually holding the whole thing up.
I wrote an essay about this topic if you want to dive deeper.
