Do Ideas Exist, and Is the World Just a Story? What Else Is There?

Free will appears mysterious when we consider it as a physical phenomenon. But we need it to understand actions, morals, justice etcetera. I think the resolution about the question about existence of free will lies in the question about what it means for something to exist.

Monism is the view that everything is of one basic substance or mode of existence. There are two monistic worldviews (that I know of):

Materialism : Everything that exist is matter or processes of matter. Thoughts are things. This correspond well with our basic intuitions about what it means to exist.

Idealism : Everything that exists are ideas or thoughts. Things are thoughts. This is less intuitive, but idealists have a good case insofar that the mind is our primary reality. Anything in the physical world must take the form of an idea for the mind to handle it.

I think both of these worldviews are failing. Not because their assertion about the material world or the mind respectively are wrong, but because they are incomplete ways to understand reality. To make either of them an end-all-explanation creates absurdities like denial of free will or denial of existence of the world when nobody is experiencing it respectively.

A combined worldview is to be dualist. That is basically a belief that the objective (material) and the subjective viewpoints are equally real. This view is prominent in Christian thinking but it has also support among atheist thinkers like Thomas Nagel.

I think the dualist view has much better explanatory power for the human condition. But I think there may be more to reality than just this. This view is called pluralism.

Consider the mathematical objects like the Mandelbrot set. This object neither fits in a materialistic or idealistic view, but it has kind of properties of both a thing and an idea. One notable difference is that both things and ideas appear to be temporal. While numbers and mathematical object would exist independent of time. Thus I am thinking the Mandelbrot set may have been hiding in the domain of mathematics even before the universe got started, and then it was discovered in the last century.

We should not be surprised that there is a need for many ways to understand reality. All these views are only narratives (theories, myths, stories) that humans create. Reality is something else – the best we can hope for are that our narratives has a useful correspondence to reality in the domain where they are applicable. Einsteins theory of relativity is excellent for understanding effects of gravity. It is not so suited to explaining concepts like passion or numbers.

(Written 2025)