god forbid an online communist community acknowledge that humans actually don’t know everything about the universe. completely unacceptable mod behavior.

just to push back against the redditor atheists, here’s a basic explanation of why i believe what i do, and how i see the concepts involved:

physicalist realism: your consciousness simply doesn’t exist. your experiences? not real. its an illusion. and what is perceiving this illusion? nothing, since experiences are not real, nothing can be experiencing them. Doesn’t that seem logically inconsistent? illusions are real in themselves, and something has to be experiencing the illusion right? well that’s because you are too beholden to language or something, the universe doesn’t have to make sense to your idiot meat brain and it’s stupid monkey ‘’‘’‘logic’‘’‘’. What’s going on inside your head then? nothing but matter bumping into other matter, your experience and perspective probably boil down to math somehow, don’t ask how exactly but we will definitely totally find out sometime in The Future^TM. in short, the Hard Problem of Consciousness isn’t real.

the primary implication of physicalist realism: people, including yourself, literally don’t exist as conscious beings, and are merely flesh-robots deterministically reacting to their environment according to physical rules. anyone’s perceptions of pain, or literally anything else, are nonexistent. illusory and meaningless in any real sense. The only contents of reality are physical phenomena, measured quantities of particles and ‘energy’ bouncing around deterministically until the heat death of the universe.

physicalist realism and its ramifications for ethics and politics: since people aren’t real, none of their opinions or desires matter or mean anything. it doesn’t matter in any real sense whether you kill or abuse or steal or maim or harass anyone, or if anyone does the same to you, as it is only matter interacting with matter according to deterministic physical rules. there is no reason to fight for a better world, not even if you can expect short term improvements in your own personal quality of life, because neither you nor others exist, and your desires and ideas and pain are similarly illusory/nonexistent and meaningless. whatever happens happens and thats it, any feelings about reality don’t matter in an objective sense and were pre-determined at the Big Bang or whatever other start of Time or The Universe like clockwork, and you do not exist enough to actually make meaningful choices, only playing out your Program. you might as well be a selfish asshole and hoard wealth and comfort, since this illusory experience is all you can (not) exist in, or you might as well cause yourself to die, since your consciousness already does not exist. your impact on others literally cannot matter in a meaningful way, since no ones consciousness is real to be victim to your actions, and you literally could not have chosen any other course of action in this physics-based deterministic universe. It would not matter if humanity were to be wiped out by an astronomical event, since life’s value is equivalent to lifeless matter as our consciousness does not exist.

anti-physicalist-realism: your consciousness exists in some sense and has yet to be explained by physics, in even a hypothetical sense. the Hard Problem of Consciousness persists. Physics as it currently stands does not fully and accurately describe every aspect of reality or the universe.

the primary implication of anti-physicalist-realism: Your consciousness is the only thing you can ever have access to in terms of epistemology, and therefore it must be considered the primary grounds of existence, as the reality of consciousness itself is impossible for consciousness to seriously doubt, unlike any particular contents of it. Whatever you are experiencing, whether illusion or not, it is being experienced in some sense, there is a perspective to be experiencing from, even if that perspective’s specific nature is mysterious. It stands to reason then, that the ideas, images, and even people in your consciousness are real in some sense, and not entirely illusory or nonexistent even if their true nature is obscured, and may even have their own internal consciousness perspective, which is as real to them as yours is to you. this means that not only do your ideas and pains and desires matter, since they really exist, but those of others do as well.

anti-physicalist-realism and its ramifications for ethics and politics: since consciousness exists in some sense, its contents are worthy of some consideration. other people like you have their own internal experiences, desires, pains, and ideas, which all really exist in a meaningful sense and warrant consideration. therefore, there may be reasons to consider avoiding harassing, abusing, or hurting others. additionally, regardless of the existence of any ‘afterlife’ or ‘soul’, your actions will at least live on in the real consciousnesses of other people who will come after you, whose Actually Existing Sensations will be affected in some way, meaning that it is necessary to consider your impact on those around you, and even work together for everyone’s benefit even if you personally get no physical reward - your feelings can be reward enough. It would be tragic if humanity were wiped out, since our consciousness and pain and hopes were all real, non-illusory phenomena that distinguished us from inanimate matter or automatic mindless biological reflex

i’m going to keep believing that the hard problem of cosciousness hasn’t been solved or handwaved away successfully, i’m going to keep believing that humanity has yet to discover everything in the universe, i’m going to keep believing that worker ownership of the means of production are necessary to creating a more just society, and that democratic centralism is a good way to accomplish that goal, and i’m going to keep calling myself a Communist, even if i might have specific philosophical/epistemological/ontological differences with certain interpretations of some of it’s ideological founders.