All matter is a cognitive ‘hallucination,’ even the brain itself

Because you cannot derive abstractive capabilities from certain combinations if such capabilities are not present in the simplest forms of matter. You cannot get something from nothing.


We don't even have evidence that the external world is truly "physical" ~ we only know what our senses show us, and we call the stuff we perceive "physical", because it has common properties.


It is the most naive explanation ~ there is nothing "simple" about presuming that our perception of the external world is as it is, because you have to ignore whole swaths of data strongly suggesting that we do not perceive reality as it really is ~ everything from quantum mechanics / physics suggests this.

The simpler explanation is that the physical form shapes and modulates how we perceive sensory data ~ we never perceive the sensory data in and of itself, only what the physical form shapes it into.

We will not reach an agreement on your claim that we cannot get abstractive capabilities from combinations of things that do not have such capabilities individually. I just don't follow your logic.

I don't care if we call the external world physical. It's simply clear that there is something other than our experiences.

I'm not saying that we are perceiving the external world exactly as it is. I'm only suggesting that we are perceiving it somewhat like it is, rather than constructing an elaborate interface to something that is completely different.

I don't know what you mean by a physical form shaping sensory data. It seems to me that we perceive some subset of all the external data, with that perception having more or less fidelity. Then we may significantly bias the data to fit various models of the world that we have developed in order to reduce brainpower, speed up responses, ignore nasty stuff, and so forth. Biases and errors can creep into the process at every level.

~~ Paul