The Best Possible World

Of those subjectively indistinguishable from our own

There are many ways the world could be, compatible with the surface appearances we all have access to. Some of these possibilities are plausibly better than others. And some are more plausible (i.e., as candidates for being actual) than others. In ‘Idealism and the Best of All (Subjectively Indistinguishable) Possible Worlds’,¹ Helen compares materialist vs idealist conceptions of our reality along these two dimensions.

Why Idealism would be ideal

After setting out Helen’s preferred version of idealism (and the accompanying “naive idealist” account of perception, on which our minds come to literally encompass perceived qualities of worldly objects, like the green surface of the grass), the bulk of the paper explains why this constitutes a “uniquely optimistic view of the world and our place within it.”

Two key virtues of idealism:

(a) “the world we inhabit genuinely is as it appears—trees are green, fire is warm…” By contrast:

For the materialist, there is the world of appearances: the world of bittersweet chocolate, hot tea, and red strawberries. And then there is the world as it truly is: colorless, tasteless, without odor or warmth. What do we know of this real world? Its structure. Its effects. And nothing more.

We’re used to thinking of the world as materialism would have it. And so we’ve made our peace with the (metaphysical and epistemic) disappointments this engenders. Like the fox who cannot reach the grapes, we might try to comfort ourselves with the thought that it wouldn’t be any better for the world to be objectively every bit as vibrant as it seems. But it might be worth reconsidering their assumed sourness if it turns out that the grapes are within our reach after all.

Not actually sour

(b) “we are in literal contact with reality, since perception involves extending our minds to literally overlap with aspects of the physical world.”

The robust connection to reality offered by idealism arguably exposes as farcical the claims of direct (materialist) realists about perception to offer the same. There seems little room, at the end of the day, for the latter view to be anything but a verbal variant of representationalism (much though its advocates would rebel at this characterization!):

If representationalism involves a long causal chain, at the end of which is a reflection of an apple, naïve idealism involves a long causal chain, at the end of which is an open door, and the apple.

Idealists can deliver on the promise of direct contact, because the causal chain generates something new: the bridging laws pick up on the causal chain and react by extending the perceiver’s mind to overlap with the perceived phenomenal qualities of the apple itself, out there in the “tapestry” of reality. No such substantial connection is possible for materialists. They can say that the subject now stands in a “relation of acquaintance” with the perceived object. But without suitable metaphysical underpinnings, this sounds like mere wordplay.

Is Idealism credible?

The paper closes by considering the question, “What should our credence be that—from among the vastness of modal space—our world is among the idealistic ones rather than the materialistic ones?” We all tend to assume a materialistic conception of the physical world. But it isn’t actually so obvious that this assumption is warranted:

Suppose (setting aside preconceptions about what the world is like) that there are two coherent accounts of reality: according to one, reality is just as it seems; according to the other, reality is nothing like it seems. Which seems more plausible? Obviously, that the world is as it seems. Why would one take the world to be other than it seems, unless required to do so by the placement of some other piece of the Cosmic Puzzle? …

Unless forced to hold otherwise by other commitments, we should expect the world to be as it appears; [and] we should expect reality to be directly grasped in perception. Giving up on each of these is a cost. It’s a cost we might have felt that there was no possibility of avoiding. You might have thought you simply had to resign yourself to death, taxes, and the veil of perception. But idealism, it turns out, can free us from the last.

Idealism shows us that the world can be just as it appears, and that the world can be comprehended more thoroughly than merely understanding its structure. Once we see that it is possible to grant each of these intuitive claims, the failure to do so becomes apparent as a cost. Looking out at the space of possible worlds from a theoretically neutral starting point, it looks less plausible that our world is among the materialist worlds—ungraspable, unintelligible, nothing like anything that we’re aware of—and far more plausible that ours is among the idealist worlds: worlds of color, heat, and flow, worlds that we can grasp and comprehend.

Helen concludes:

Of course, there may also be draw-backs to idealism when compared neutrally to materialism. A thorough evaluation of the nature of our world would need to weigh these, too. What is clear is this: (1) It is epistemically possible that our world is an idealist world. There are possible worlds that appear (from the inside) just like our own, where idealism is the correct account of the metaphysics. (2) There are genuine virtues that idealist theories have over their materialist competitors. When we set aside our background commitments regarding the positions of individual pieces and compare the idealist’s way of fitting together the Cosmic Puzzle with the materialist’s, there are important respects in which the idealist has the upper hand. Hence, (3) your credence that our world is an idealist world should not be insignificant—and should probably be much higher than it was prior to reading this paper.

Enticed? Read the whole thing!

1. Possibly my new favourite paper, at least outside of ethics.