Deriving Idealism from Emergent Spacetime

Many people today believe that our universe is nothing more than the byproduct of tiny atoms bouncing around in an empty void and everything else emerges from that. However this materialistic picture of reality is fading away and a new picture of reality is needed to replace materialism. I will argue in this video that given recent discoveries in quantum cosmology and the nature of spacetime that the best explanation is the metaphysics of idealism.

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[MatthewHendren]

The music got so eerie when talking about mice and quantum. What a pair. Lol

[carmellasummersyoung]

Also, if the holographic principle is true and 3D reality is a projection from a 2D surface, I don’t see how that’s not compatible with materialism/physicalism. Why can’t the quantum information or processes of quantum entanglement not be physical? Just because we are “projections” does not make us any less real, in the same way that a hologram toy is still constructed from a physical medium.

[jimmyfaulkner]

What is and what does Hilbert Space mean? And why is this Hilbert Space or this layer of reality not physical?

[carmellasummersyoung]

This isn’t very rigorous at all. Firstly, you seem to (at least implicitly) characterize materialism/physicalism as the view that the universe is made of tiny bits of matter that bounce around according to deterministic laws. This is very out of date and a very strange way to characterize the position. This issue is probably one of the reasons that the term “physicalist” has become more popular than “Materialist” in recent times, since the word ‘material’ does seem to conjure these very Newtonian clockwork-esque images of small billiard balls. Generally, and as a matter of historical fact, “physicalism” and “materialism” are synonyms.
I feel as though this mischaracterization is what makes way for the main argument of the video which seems to be that realism about quantum theory and quantum information makes matter, as colloquially understood, non-fundamental, thereby refuting materialism.
Of course, almost no philosophers that call themselves physicalists would deny the physical reality of these things, should these theories be end up being empirically robust. You could definitely raise issues with how exactly “physicalism” is to be understood as a metaphysical position and this has been done before (Hempel’s dilemma), but I think current many physicalists would rather reject physicalism than adopt the view that the physicalism metaphysics could be directly contradicted by discoveries in fundamental physics.
Further, you are extremely imprecise with your “emergence” language. It almost seems as though there is a simultaneous conflation between physicalism and reductionism as well as equivocation between strong and weak emergence, since you repeatedly stress the point that spacetime is emergent from quantum states.
Reductionism is the view that higher-level phenomena can be “reduced” to or thought of as “made from” lower-level phenomena. This is imprecise in itself as there are many types of reductionism. But there are lots of intuitive examples of reduction in science. E.g. the idea that temperature can be reduced to the motions of atoms and molecules.
Similarly, there are multiple kinds of “emergence.”
Weak emergence: Higher level phenomena existing as a result of lower level phenomena.
Strong emergence: Higher level phenomena that cannot be reduced to lower level phenomena.

As you can see, the former is entirely compatible with reductionism. To say “X is weakly emergent from Y” is also to say “X reduces to Y.” Whereas the latter is not compatible. In fact, the concepts are exact opposites.
If the aim of this video was about finding examples of strong emergence in physics, it would be a good foundation on which to build an argument against physical reductionism. But it’s unclear whether this is what’s happening because you seem to have equivocated the terms of debate, misunderstood the scope of evidence being presented, or both. This makes the argument incredibly difficult to pin down.