How to Have Your Idealist Cake, and Eat Materialism To!

I think one of the reasons that it was so hard for me to swallow materialism for such a long time is that I couldn’t figure out how to buy materialism without selling my idealism. Subjective, internal space is what I know; objective, external space is theorized and imagined, almost like a fantasy. So I was afraid that buying materialism would be tantamount to trading in reality for a fantasy. If the objective, external, realistic world that I theorize is to be a materialist world, that means that this imagined material world must include, as part of it, appearances and imagination. It must be possible to account for appearances and imagination, Berkeley’s “ideas”, in physical terms. Otherwise, I refused to buy materialism. I would stick with dualism, and if that as well proved incoherent, I could retreat into my idealism and abandon realism altogether.

I believe in Berkeley’s ideas. Could Berkeley’s ideas be matter?

Well, all of the information about the “ideas” can be encoded in matter. Matter is very good at encoding information. It can encode whatever information you want.

So all the information about how the world appears to me can be encoded in matter. “I see a computer screen” could be equivalent to there being a data structure in my brain with an instance variable, {‘visualField’: ‘bitmap with computer screen’}.  All you have to do is give up on the meaning of the term “to see”. The relationship of me to my visual field is just a quale: it has no informational content.  To make materialism work, you simply have to assume that it has no essence either.  This is an easier job than trying to insist that it *has* an essence!  Assume that imagination is just an instance variable, and suddenly it’s very easy to understand how all mental theorizing can be interpreted as information, digitally encoded in the brain of the theorist.