I feel like I understand communist theory pretty well at a basic level, and I believe in it, but I just don’t see what part of it requires belief in an objective world of matter. I don’t believe in matter and I’m still a communist. And it seems that in the 21st century most people believe in materialism but not communism. What part of “people should have access to the stuff they need to live” requires believing that such stuff is real? After all, there are nonmaterial industries and they still need communism. Workers in the music industry are producing something that nearly everyone can agree only exists in our heads. And they’re still exploited by capital, despite musical instruments being relatively cheap these days, because capital owns the system of distribution networks and access to consumers that is the means of profitability for music. Spotify isn’t material, it’s a computer program. It’s information. It’s a thoughtform. Yet it’s still a means of production that ought to be seized for the liberation of the musician worker. What does materialism have to do with any of this?
And I say that human behaviour is not defined by whatever may be real, it’s only defined by human perception, which does not align with whatever may be real if anything is.
That is fundamentally impossible. It would imply you could conceive of things you’ve never seen before, but a baby which was blind their entire life would have no idea what people look like or even conceive of what sight in general looks like.
According to conventional neuroscience, the brain is somehow capable of transforming 130 million binary nervous system signals into the sensation of sight, without having been taught to do so. Likewise, the interface theory of perception holds that the mind is capable of transforming whatever does exist into the perceptual interface we see today.
It was taught to do so. Our brain neurons were formed into specific patterns. That was the teaching.
If genes can configure a brain to produce sensations in the absence of stimuli, what is hard to believe about conscious realism?
But there’s not an absence of stimuli. Genes encode for light receptors, which respond to light. This triggers something that is then amplified as a chemical signal, which is then sent to the brain, where the signals are then processed into an ‘image’.