Video Nugget: Objective Idealism with Adam Crabtree

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Just putting it out there; I could be called an objective idealist, and I find a lot of these ideas very weak, to be honest. I don’t see how nature fundamentally having the character of mind necessarily suggests that the laws of nature are subject to change... I don’t even see how it suggests that all of nature has some degree of free will.

For one, we don’t know to what extent the experience of the cosmic consciousness would resemble or differ from the individual consciousness produced/mediated by a brain, but my intuition is that it would differ quite dramatically— in one of two ways. Either the cosmic kind is generated/mediated by material systems of the universe, analogously to our own brains, in which case it would either be operating on a much higher level (just as a human brain operates on a higher level than a mouse’s brain), though I find that improbable, as presumably the apparently-material systems of the universe would arise from the consciousness and not vice versa (I don’t think this would even qualify as idealism, since the consciousness would just be an emergent property of the material systems). If the mind is what underlies all else, then it could go either way— it’s consciousness could be on an incredibly high level, or it could be extremely diffuse, not even resembling the acute awareness of a human mind— or perhaps both. In any case, it might be totally incomparable to our own experience of mind.

However, setting that aside... Even if the cosmic mind had similar properties to our own minds— quite a lot of our own minds are *unconscious*. I cannot possibly make myself conscious of the cognitive functions that make me conscious, or that generate my capacity for language, or that make snap judgements before I am even aware of them... Likewise, it would be entirely possible for the material processes of nature to have the character of being mental processes, but to still be happening without the conscious intention, or even awareness, of the cosmic consciousness. We simply don’t know enough to guess, in my estimation, and there is nothing in our scientific knowledge which would lead me to conclude that (a) an individual atom has free will or (b) that the laws of nature are in principle subject to change (there are individual constants which it seems may be changing, but that just means they presumably must not be constants and must be underpinned by more fundamental constants). If anything, I find it more imaginable that the universe itself has a will, and perhaps part of that will could include directing where atoms will go in their lifetimes (although I am skeptical even if that)... But to attribute intention or will to a single atom sounds more like some kind of panpsychism or animism than an inference from objective idealism to me.