Speaking of physicalism... two people on the Vedanta list recently debated "which came first, mind or matter"?
My response:
From a first person viewpoint, as in humble Goethian German existentialism, there are times when honesty demands we say "I do not know." Nor do any of us here. I have a pretty inflated idea of how much I think I know compared to other people, but never so inflated that I would claim to see more than 15 billion years in any direction in space and time. 'Which came first, mind or matter?" No, we don't know. I often see debates which remind me of a cartoon of a fetus speculating about the sex lives of its parents -- with more empirical basis perhaps than we humans have for speculating about what lies beyond 15 billion years. Experience also tells me that those who claim to see much further than that are by that very claim showing their testimonies are less reliable than those of most scientists or authentic mystics.
Modern rational thinking, promulgated in great part by Von Neumann (and his follower Raiffa), demands that we learn to discuss first person subjective probabilities, instead of pretending to a false certainty about the things we know the least.
Perhaps I am closer to Kashyap, in attributing a 70% subjective probability for myself that our entire cosmos is ultimately governed by well-defined mathematical dynamics such as PDE or random graphs, operating over a well-defined mathematical space. (e.g. Minkowski space, Fock space, Klein-Kaluza, etc.) But one possibility in that set is the possibility that the cosmos is a kind of torus, bent back on itself in time, such that matter and minds both exist both before and after. One possibility. Another possibility we should not rule out is that of infinite time in both directions, with matter and minds both existing as far back and as far forwards "as we can see" and further. A possibility. And of course, there is a logical possibility of those classic Big Bang theories in which matter actually DOES exist before minds. It does not feel right to me, but I suppose I have no logical right to rule it out, especially not in the context of modern rational discussions of humans today. Some possible mathematical models remind us that the word "mind" itself is just an English word, inherently ambiguous, which may or may not fit certain more precise possibilities.
But in truth, I also attribute something like 30% probability to SOME KIND of "idealism" or "cosmos as mind" or "this cosmos as a dream or simulation" theory. But there are MANY theories possible in that space, and I see little connection between ideological idealism and the kinds of weird things that woulds drive me to make some small allowance for such things. How to sort out how things would REALLY work if they are so weird, and how to test for that level of weirdness in the real life of first person experience? Yet even in such models, it is not obvious how time works, and there are many possibilities. I am often reminded of the movie Inception... but whatever.
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