Consciousness is fundamental to reality. Science-based thinking (but not science itself) has put matter as the fundamental element but actually has never been able to prove it. To be able to prove that matter gives rise to consciousness, you’d have to step out of consciousness and point to matter. Which you cannot do. Not talking about individual consciousness where you can just point at someone’s brain: that experience of pointing at someone’s brain is happening inside consciousness, how else would you know about it.

Not to be confused with Solipsism, that’s the thinking mind. I’m talking about Idealism, the raw state of pure experience before thought.

Science-based thinking has put matter as the fundamental element but actually has never been able to prove it.

The scientific method has never proved anything ever. It just fails to disprove, and the theory gets stronger every single time.

I would posit that you (and Plato) are just wildly defining undisprovable concepts that serve no purpose and can neither be proven nor disproven. Which makes your hypothesis more like a religion.

Which makes your hypothesis more like a religion.

I wouldn’t be so dismissive. This is a very active area of research, and sometimes philosophical ideas like this can be the launchpad from which new scientific theories can be constructed.

An example of this is panpsychism (the idea that all matter has some level of consciousness). Many consider this a woo-woo theory. But now we have Integrated Information Theory, which is probably the most popular theory of consciousness right now. And it is a panpsychist theory: if its mathematical measure of consciousness is correct, then all matter would have some nonzero level of consciousness. 

Now, I don’t subscribe to this theory, but thats not the point. My point is that with immature fields of research like this, we have to tolerate philosophical speculations (we have to start from somewhere, right?). So though you may not like these speculations right now, there is a really real chance they may the groundwork for an innovative scientific theory.

So let’s not immediately shut down these ideas by labelling them as “religion”. Lets give these ideas room to breathe, grow and mature, because thats how we make progress when we’re just starting out. 

I wouldn’t be so dismissive. This is a very active area of research

Well, like with all religions speculative fields with zero evidence back it, I’ll consider it further when they present some empirically testable claims. Right now, it rests on the same level as “The rock-god Unk-Amun who lies in backyard created the universe via timetravel, which can be shown by the number of atoms in Unk-Amun”.

Or possibly “The number of peas on my dinnerplate shows the level of my household’s Runath”. What is Runath? Well, it’s obviously the thing that’s measured by the number of peas on my dinnerplate.

it is a panpsychist theory

That does not speak in it’s favor.

it is a panpsychist theory

That does not speak in it’s favor.

If you want to be that guy who dismisses the most well respected theory from a field you know nothing about, then okay. Just know that this makes you sound very stupid. 

It’s an untestable “theory” that has no predictive power and explains nothing. It’s literally useless.

It’s an untestable “theory” that has no predictive power and explains nothing

This is false, it makes a number of concrete predictions and the theory is mathematically precise. 

Really? Name one for me.

There’s the obvious one implied by the name, that states of consciousness will be associated with high degrees of integrated information.

This can be used to predict who will recover from a coma:

Moreover, IIT leads to experimental predictions, for instance that the loss and recovery of consciousness should be associated with the breakdown and recovery of information integration.

Source

Then there’s other stuff.

ITT predicts that directed grids should be found especially in brain areas devoted to the perception of stimulus sequences, most likely in auditory areas dealing with sounds, speech, and music, but also in areas dealing with visual or body motion. This prediction could be tested through methods well suited to examining anatomical and functional connectivity at the level of individual neurons or minicolumns

Source

According to IIT, the seat of consciousness is instead likely to be in the sensory representation in the back of the brain, where the neural wiring seems to have the right character. According to IIT, the seat of consciousness is instead likely to be in the sensory representation in the back of the brain, where the neural wiring seems to have the right character. …

The test subjects would be presented with a series of varied images, such as faces, clocks and letters of the alphabet in different fonts. They would see each image for 0.5 to 1.5 seconds. At the beginning of each series, two specific images would be defined as targets (say, the face of a woman and a vintage clock), and participants were given the reporting task of pressing a button if they saw either of them. Other faces and objects in the images would therefore be task-relevant (because they fell into the same categories as the targets), but no report was required. Other types of images in the series, such as alphabet letters and meaningless symbols, would be task-irrelevant. The test was run repeatedly with different targets in the series so that each set of stimuli could be tested as both task-relevant and task-irrelevant. State-of-the-art brain signal decoders would correlate neural firing patterns with what the subjects were seeing.…IT, on the other hand, predicted that the brain patterns of consciousness would vary with the tasks, because carrying out a task would involve the prefrontal cortex and perception stripped of a task would not. This “pure” form of consciousness would only require the sensory hot zone at the back of the brain. The connectivity and duration of the signals for consciousness of an image would match the duration of the visual stimulus.

Source

The first prediction is that a subject’s conscious experience at a time can be affected by the disabling of neurons that were already inactive at that time. The second is that even if a subject’s entire brain is “silent,” meaning that all of its neurons are inactive (but not disabled), the subject can still have a conscious experience.

Source

Want me to keep going or is that enough?

Evidence for IIT, which we don’t have, does not prove idealism and the person you are defending is arguing for idealism.

The things you posit are falsifiable, the claims they have been putting forward are not. Hence my initial questions surrounding panpsychism to them before they started trying to use logical fallacies against a mainstream scientific position.

Right, I agree with you (my only quibble is that we do technically have evidence for IIT; it just isn’t definitive).

I misunderstood the guy in my first comment. At this point I know he isn’t defending IIT. All I’m saying is that IIT has legitimized a theory that once seemed crazy (panpsychism). It’s conceivable to me that something similar could happen with idealism, because not a single scientist or academic philosopher alive has any idea whats going on with consciousness. And when we dismiss ideas like idealism, we are implicitly assuming that we have some grasp of what’s going on, but we don’t.