On the Fractal Error of Materialism
Let us start from a position of ontological agnosticism and absolute skepticism. In this spirit, we are not going to make the assumption that the defining ontological assumptions of the two metaphysical systems that we are going to examine -- objective idealism and materialism -- are internally coherent enough in their implications to be consistent with the existence of any possible world. We will endeavor to regard our preferred ontology not as the fleshed-out world-picture that we have come to attach to the set of ontological commitments that constitute its minimal definition, but purely as a list of ontological commitments that we will logically examine in a first-principles manner with the goal of determining whether or not it allows for the properties that our fleshed-out world-picture must have. As a part of this skeptical exercise, I ask the reader to temporarily suspend their belief that their preferred set of ontological commitments is identical to - or even logically ...