I don’t have two real points of view. But this sentence made no sense imo:
“But, neither should you confuse your subjectivity with your body or mind as is commonly done.”
Can you explain what it means? What is ‘you’ here?
The body mind complex that appears as an object of consciousness.
Okay and then what does the sentence mean?
Well, seeing how I strongly suggest that we (our minds/souls) literally did not exist prior to our birth from our mother’s womb just a few short years ago, then it makes no sense to say that we’ve “forgotten” something that we’ve never actually known.
We are in the dark, so to speak, about the truth of reality and that of our ultimate destiny because in order for us humans to not exist in a constant state of amazement and bewilderment at the fact that we are standing on an orb that is not only flying through space at approximately 67,000 miles per hour,…
…but is spinning us (along with huge land masses, and vast oceans, and bustling human metropolises, etc.) around and around - TOPSY-TURVY - in a rotisserie cycle that only takes a mere 24 HOURS to complete,…
…again, for us to not exist in a constant state of amazement and bewilderment at the utter strangeness of our situation, our general level of consciousness has been purposely attenuated (dampened by design) in such a way that makes our truly bizarre state of existence feel completely natural and logical to us.
Again, we haven’t “forgotten” anything, no, we (most of us) are simply not awake enough to see past the thin veneer of this dream-like illusion we call a universe.
As the perfect (and pertinent) analogy, we are not awake enough to comprehend what exists above and outside of this universe similar to the way we were once not awake enough to comprehend what existed above and outside of our mother’s womb.
Oh, we can see our origin quite easily, for it was the moment when the proverbial “lights came on” after popping out of our mother’s womb.
Of course, it’s a different story when it comes to comprehending the origin of this fantastic setting (the universe) from which new minds/souls can effloresce from the very fabric of the setting itself.
I agree with that, felix, with the clarification that it is conscious “AGENTS” (like yourself) that have the capacity to create worlds.
Indeed, you are immersed in a world created out of the fabric of your very own being every time you (the agent) direct your consciousness inward to think (create) thoughts, and especially when you fall asleep and dream.
I can agree with that also, but, again, with a clarification that it would be more logical to say that the essence (or energy) of “LIFE” is the ground of all being, for consciousness (awareness/wakefulness) is something that living beings acquire through evolutionary processes.
In other words, life itself isn’t conscious, no, it is the living agents of mind that are conscious.
I think we are both aware of the existence of what seems to be the unanswerable mystery of how anything whatsoever (be it life or matter) came into existence.
I mean, it is impossible to imagine how the “somethingness” of reality could have arisen from “nothingness.”
Likewise, it is equally impossible to imagine that the somethingness of reality has always existed as far back as eternity itself.
To me, the mystery is so great that I have often wondered if even God knows the answer.
So much silly cope.
And you wonder why you can’t figure out what consciousness is.
HumAnize wrote:
So much silly cope.And you wonder why you can’t figure out what consciousness is.
If by chance you are talking to me, I’m open to suggestions.
What is consciousness? What is it made out of? And why don’t materialists recognize it as being the singular most important aspect of reality, as opposed to treating it as if it were some sort of secondary byproduct of an accidental arrangement of matter?
And lastly, my “silly cope” (whatever that means) had nothing to do with wondering what consciousness is, no, it was in regard to the mystery of why (and how) there is “somethingness” as opposed to “nothingness.”
If you have any plausible answers to that question, then I’d love to hear them.
That page begins with the question Is This Epiphenomenalism?, with “this” referring to Chalmers’ own naturalistic dualism.
Anyway, epiphenomenalists can deny the ontological possibility of neurological zombie duplicates of conscious agents by arguing that if epiphenomenal consciousness is taken away, the neural processes causing it are also taken away; so there can be no nonconscious neurological duplicates of concious agents.
I’m aware that this argument presupposes a particular conception of causation, according to which factually consciousness-causing neural events necessarily cause conscious events, in the sense that doing so is “part of their essence”. So one and the same neural event cannot cause a conscious event in the actual world and fail to do so in another possible world.
Materialists don’t have to be epiphenomenalists. They needn’t deny that conscious events (can) have effects.
However, from the materialistic point of view, consciousness is not “the singular most important aspect of reality.” Consciousness matters to conscious beings like us; but except for that part of it which is the sum total of conscious physical states, physical reality is independent of consciousness.
There is no mystery, because there is something, and…
“There is just no alternative to being.”
(Rundle, Bede. Why there is Something rather than Nothing. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. p. 112)
Being is and Nonbeing cannot be, so Being is because it must be.
(“Being Nonbeing” is an obvious contradiction in terms.)
The absence of reality is not a possible reality.
To have consciousness is to have a conscious life; but there is no (chemically or physically irreducible) “life energy”, “vital force”, “élan vital”, or “Qi”.
Everything is/needs energy [to be ] so… wrong!
What we eat is converted into energy to fuel our very being… this energy then disseminates into every single cell in our body to animate us, without that process/that energy, all life would be inanimate puppets.
…even machinery needs energy to animate it.
Lmao the absence of reality/being isn’t a reality/being. This isn’t hard.
I suppose it’s pretty much the same as epiphenomenalism, but I see materialists (at least the hardcore kind) as being proponents of “weak emergence,” as opposed to “strong emergence.”
In other words, according to weak emergence, all mental states…
(including what the materialists would call the “illusion” of consciousness and of the self)
…can be traced back to some discoverable (or measurable) cause implicit in the constituent properties of the brain.
Whereas, on the other hand, strong emergence suggests that nothing implicit in brain matter can account for the emergence of consciousness, or, more specifically, the emergence of the “I Am-ness” (the “thinker” of thoughts / “dreamer” of dreams).
Yes, and that’s the problem with materialism; it opts for the primacy of matter over the primacy of life, mind, and consciousness, without which, the existence of matter would be purposeless and meaningless.
However, conversely speaking, without the existence of matter, then life, mind, and consciousness would have nothing through-which to express itself.
In which case, it would seem that mind and matter are indispensable to one another.
I’m obviously just speculating here, but alluding back to my conversation with felix dakat regarding reality being composed of a Spinozan-like “oneness” substance,…
…perhaps we can view mind and matter in the same way we view the particle/wave duality of the quantum realm, in that they (mind and matter) are two complementary (inseparable) aspects of the same fundamental substance (as in two sides of the same coin, so to speak).
No, as I just suggested, physical reality is no more independent of consciousness than the particle aspect of a quantum entity is independent of its wave aspect.
Or, perhaps more accurately, physical reality is no more independent of consciousness than the contents of a dream are independent of the dreamer.
That depends on your frame of reference for “we (our minds/souls)”. Evolutionary biology shows a continuum of evolving biology. Or “we” can be “we the universe.”
There is no birth or death to us from the standpoint of consciousness. People imagining that they are bodies or minds confess ignorance of this fact. From the standpoint of recorded history that ignorance has always been there. So, your right the forgetting as objectively ‘as if’ rather than literal.
Being itself is unbounded. Nothing comes from nothing. Creation ex nihilo is a mistake.
My first duplicate post on the new system.
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Right. Consciousness would in that case be a functional artifact. It is our mechanistic causal assumptions that make that possibility seem tenable. Which is why a physicist like Federico Faggin can challenge them. And he opens up the possibility of free will:
“Crucially, when consciousness and free will are irreducible properties of nature, the evolution of the physical universe can no longer be the work of a “blind watchmaker,” but the result of cooperating and intelligent conscious entities that have always existed and are the ultimate cause of the universe’s eternal becoming.“
Such “ cooperating and intelligence conscious entities” are representations in so far as they appear. How Faggin can claim to know they have always existed I would like to know,
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Yes, it does.
And I suggest that sometime in the distant past, the evolving biology on this planet reached a point where brains became capable of replicating (in a familial manner) the SOUL of this universe.
In other words, what I am suggesting is that the true purpose of this universe (which, in truth, is the mind of a higher Being - the mind of a higher consciousness, to stay on topic 
) is to function as the “cosmic womb” of one of the near infinite members of the highest species of being in all of reality.
Indeed, that is the core implication of Christianity, in that the Bible allegedly quotes the Creator of this universe as saying:
“…Let us make man in OUR image, after OUR likeness…”
How do you think “new” eternal souls are formed?
For surely you can’t believe that all souls that will ever exist were somehow magically awakened into existence - all at once - at some specific moment in past eternity, and have been doomed to forever cycle in-and-out of corporeality with no discernable purpose or ultimate goal?
How incredibly boring and stagnant reality would be if such were the case.
The point is that even God requires a mechanistic process when it comes to conceiving her own offspring (us), and thus the human womb/human brain is how it’s done.
The trick to understanding our situation is to realize that we are not yet fully born, for only via the process of physical death will we awaken into our true and eternal form (the same form as God):
“…it doth not yet appear what we shall be: but we know that, when he shall appear, we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is…”
Sorry for all of the Biblical quotes, but even though all of the world’s religions are mostly comprised of mythological nonsense, I suggest that they do nevertheless contain “nuggets” of truth.
We’re back to that same question that you keep avoiding, which is,…
…What aspect of this “we the universe” grabbed hold of the fabric of reality and shaped it into the unfathomable order of the untold trillions of suns and planets that make up this closed bubble of reality in which we are suspended?
And if you suggest anything that even remotely implies that the blind and mindless processes of “chance” did it, then you need to dig a little deeper for a more logical answer.
I’m sorry, but offering vague platitudes such as “being itself is unbounded” doesn’t even come close to addressing the mystery of how “being” itself came into being.
And simply implying that that’s just the way it is, is the equivalent of quantum physicists being told to “…shut up and calculate…”.
Because it didn’t. You can’t explain something that didn’t happen.
Seeds subscribes to one of the most self-refuting arguments in philosophy: that the unfathomable order of our world implies some kind of designer. It can design a whole universe while humans can only design say computers.
But if we think again, an entity that can design a whole universe, should belong to a realm of an even far more unfathomable order. Well that just made the problem it was trying to explain, worse.
Our conversations never seem to end well, but I feel the need to correct your misrepresentation of what it is you say I subscribe to.
First of all, what in the world is self-refuting about promoting a theory that favors intelligence being responsible for the order of the universe, as opposed to the blind and mindless processes of chance being responsible?
If anything, it’s the latter that is self-refuting because it’s so utterly implausible and ridiculous.
And secondly, what you stated above (as it pertains to my theory) is the equivalent of saying that a human mother can drive a car, build a log cabin, design and build a computer, etc., etc., while the unborn fetus in her abdomen can only kick and thrash about in the amniotic water of her womb.
And the point is that in the same way that a human fetus is indeed limited in what it can do relative to what its mother can do, likewise, adult humans are limited in what they can do relative to what the Designer and Creator of this universe can do.
Yes!
By Jove, now you’re getting it!
The Entity that designed and created our entire universe does indeed belong to a realm of an even more unfathomable order than this one.
And that would be in precisely the same way (metaphorically speaking) that the outer earthly realm that the human mother belongs to (is aware of and experiences) is of greater complexity and order than what the fetus in her womb is aware of and experiences.
Furthermore, the Designer Entity we are speaking of is not “in” the universe (as your reply seems to imply).
No, the Designer of the universe is no more “in” the universe than a human mother is “in” the womb with her fetus.
On the contrary, the universe is “in” the Designer, for it (the universe) is created from the living (holographic-like) mental fabric of the Designer’s mind.
This is nothing new, for it is the key assertion of Panentheism and Berkeleyanism.
How is it worse when it simply implies that we humans are not yet fully born?
Good grief, even Jesus allegedly insisted that in order for us to enter into the higher context of reality that exists above and outside of this context of reality…
“…Ye must be born AGAIN…”
…(“of the spirit”).
Now I have always been self-reflective enough to realize and admit that I may be wrong about all of this craziness I’m proclaiming.
However, this isn’t rocket science, Atla,…
…no, it is the most natural and organic (“as below, so above”) vision we can possibly have regarding our ultimate and eternal form and destiny.
(Note: Lest I be accused of sidetracking this thread, this is all still related to the topic of the “analysis of consciousness,” for I am simply offering a speculative suggestion of the heights to which consciousness is capable of evolving into.)