"Nothing you see is real" Donald Hofffman video

[Magical Realist]

Ah, but there is a need to explain a single originating mind

Uh no there isn't. To self-originate IS the explanation for it. You can't go on ad infinitum explaining everything. There has to be an irreducible ontic substrate that is just given. One if you are monist. Two if you are dualist.

[Syne]

No, "self-origination" is the vacuous woo people like Ortho pass off as enlightenment.
But I agree that there is an irreducible. But "mind" is not "just given," otherwise we'd all agree on it.

So what else could be the basest irreducible? Is mind the simplest thing upon which everything else can be built? What about quantum particles? Neither seem very simple (as in parsimonious - the least assumptions that explain the most) to me.

“Form is no other than emptiness; emptiness no other than form. Form is exactly emptiness; emptiness exactly form. Sensation, conception, discrimination, and consciousness are also like this..”
- Buddha, The Heart Sutra

[C C]

Really, just Kant adapted to the computer age.

But Kant's view included empirical realism -- that phenomena are indeed real from the standpoint that the extrospective world is universally available to other human minds, and that personal thoughts and wishes alone can not directly affect its events ("objective" in those respects). That was part of his goal -- to prevent the phenomenal world from being degraded, to protect its legitimacy from any ultimate manner of existence (like Plato's intellectual realm of generative principles -- which today is retrospectively interpreted as space-less and time-less; immaterial).

https://iep.utm.edu/kantview/#H2

The most important element of Kant’s mature metaphysics and epistemology is his doctrine of transcendental idealism, which received its fullest discussion in Critique of Pure Reason (1781/87). Transcendental idealism is the thesis that the empirical world that we experience (the “phenomenal” world of “appearances”) is to be distinguished from the world of things as they are in themselves. The most significant aspect of this distinction is that while the empirical world exists in space and time, things in themselves are neither spatial nor temporal.

Transcendental idealism has wide-ranging consequences. On the positive side, Kant takes transcendental idealism to entail an “empirical realism,” according to which humans have direct epistemic access to the natural, physical world and can even have a priori cognition of basic features of all possible experienceable objects.

On the negative side, Kant argues that we cannot have knowledge of things in themselves. Further, since traditional metaphysics deals with things in themselves, answers to the questions of traditional metaphysics (for example, regarding God or free will) can never be answered [proven] by human minds. [But pragmatic arguments can still be made defending some of those concepts, since the "opponent who denies has no certainty" either.]

Nothing You See is Real (Donald Hoffman) ... https://youtu.be/UWHYThrfRYU

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/UWHYThrfRYU

[Magical Realist]

“Form is no other than emptiness; emptiness no other than form. Form is exactly emptiness; emptiness exactly form. Sensation, conception, discrimination, and consciousness are also like this..”
- Buddha, The Heart Sutra

I love that! To me it suggests a hylomorphic duality of ontic substrates: pure form being empty of substance., and pure substance, being void of form. Essence and existence. Mind and matter. Abstract and concrete. And so forth. Both intermingling together in one mode of conscious experience.

"Pure Being and pure nothing are, therefore, the same. What is the truth is neither being nor nothing, but that being — does not pass over but has passed over — into nothing, and nothing into being. But it is equally true that they are not undistinguished from each other, that, on the contrary, they are not the same, that they are absolutely distinct, and yet that they are unseparated and inseparable and that each immediately vanishes in its opposite. Their truth is therefore, this movement of the immediate vanishing of the one into the other: becoming, a movement in which both are distinguished, but by a difference which has equally immediately resolved itself."

Eastern philosophy seems to concur on this equivalence between Being and Nothing, the meditative union of the conscious self with the All at once establishing "everywhereness" yet "nowhereness". The dissolution of the self into pure unqualifiable Being/Nothing or presence/absence."---Hegel

[Syne]

But it seems a stretch to assume nothing, which is singularly empty, somehow is/becomes a multitude of being, without a singular intermediary of being. That singular being could be thought of as two hemispheres of a brain, one nothing and the other the conceptual not nothing.

[Magical Realist]

But it seems a stretch to assume nothing, which is singularly empty, somehow is/becomes a multitude of being, without a singular intermediary of being. That singular being could be thought of as two hemispheres of a brain, one nothing and the other the conceptual not nothing.

Agreed. See my new post in the Middle Way thread.