Yes, you read that right.
The materialist view of consciousness is actually mystical.
I know it’s ironic, but think about it.
How is it that unconscious matter is able to give rise to the novelty that is conscious experience?
It’s like magic…
I’m actually very much pro-science and rationality, but consciousness is just one of those things that defies the mundane.
There is something truly special about consciousness.
Do you guys agree?
Yes, I agree. But I’ve never had a problem with the mystical.
I think baseline/default experience is mystical/spiritual w/o having to do anything special.
Folks programming or reverse-engineering the experience of the senses… and not just detection programs that do not involve experience… likely agree. Especially if they haven’t succeeded, or can’t explain how they succeeded. …unless they poorly explain it because they don’t want to agree.
If they have succeeded, and they have a good explanation, please link me to it.
If it’s mysterious how consciousness is realized by and in brains, it’s much more mysterious how it could be realized by and “in” immaterial souls.
I’ve put quotation marks around in, because an immaterial soul with the size of a mathematical point doesn’t have any inside or interior. As opposed to three-dimensional brains, souls are zero-dimensional things lacking an inner space, where consciousness-producing structures and processes could be located. Therefore, the emergence of consciousness from an immaterial soul would be a truly magical creation from nothing.
I don’t think materialism actually means anything anymore. It used to be a committment to substance: everything is matter. But matter ain’t what it used to be: it includes all this weird 20th century qm stuff. If scientists find something they call it physical/material, regardless. It now means ‘considered real’.
No, it doesn’t. (Reductive) Materialism (aka Physicalism) is still anything but an empty doctrine. It holds that…
“The materialist, holding that the world is matter, is not wedded to any one doctrine of the nature of matter.”
(Williams, Donald Cary. “Naturalism and the Nature of Things.” In Principles of Empirical Realism: Philosophical Essays, 212-238. Springfield, IL: Charles C Thomas, 1966. p. 220)
“As soon as physical realism is set forth with some degree of precision and polish, the same detractors who once charged it with being an odious grotesquerie are ready to charge it with being an obvious truism, having no intelligible alternative. On the contrary, the statement of materialism thus clarified not only means something; it means something distinctive, arresting, illuminating, a thesis so far from empty and obvious that, unfortunately, it has been expressly denied by a great majority of philosophers and philosophasters. It has seldom been wholly without adherents; it is the philosophy taken for granted by a good many educated men, including especially those engineers and scientists who have not been corrupted by mysticism or phenomenalism; but most of the populace of Christendom, and most metaphysicians dignified with livings, lay or ecclesiastical, have emphatically refused to admit that everything in the universe can be ruined or repaired by local rearrangement. They have believed in enormous amounts of nonphysical, nonspatial, and even nontemporal reality, beyond the corruption of moth and rust, either supplementing material reality or supplanting it: minds, soul, spirits, and ideas, transcendent ideals and eternal objects, numbers, principles, angels, and Pure Being.”
(Williams, Donald Cary. “Naturalism and the Nature of Things.” In Principles of Empirical Realism: Philosophical Essays, 212-238. Springfield, IL: Charles C Thomas, 1966. p. 224)
"[T]he intuition behind physicalism, or materialism, seems quite clear, and does not seem to depend on any sophisticated account, let alone definition, of what it is to be physical. When it comes to it, physicalism is just the view that life, mind and society have arisen in a lifeless, mindless and nonsocial world, depend for their reality on the basic laws of that world (which are not recognizably biological, psychological or social) and in fact are merely special ways in which the stuff of that world behaves.
What this suggests is that by default we can call the lifeless, mindless and nonsocial the physical, or better: merely physical. The idea is that physicalism relies on a commonsense conception of ‘dead matter’. This is a tacitly negative understanding of ‘physical’: not very much metaphysically interesting, and certainly too poor to count as a definition of ‘physical’. On the other hand, insofar as we can come by an account of what is characteristic to the living, the mental and the social—not an easy affair, it seems, but more tractable than defining ‘physical’ from scratch—, it will not be completely uninformative either.
More importantly, it seems precisely good enough to articulate the core idea of physicalism. We can imagine several parties, each with their own understanding of ‘physical’, but all in agreement on one point: life, mind and society do not require an irreducibly or sui generis ‘vital’, ‘psychic’ or ‘societal’ addition to the ‘physical’, whatever that is supposed to be. Also, a physical domain that is demarcated negatively can easily be seen to comprise, apart from properties like charge or spin, properties like weight, length, shape, transparency, treacliness, etc.; as well as chemical properties like being a catalyst or being a corrosive substance. This, it seems, articulates fairly precisely the notion of ‘physical’ as we find it in the discussions on the metaphysics of mind."
(De Muijnck, Wim. Dependencies, Connections, and Other Relations: A Theory of Mental Causation. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2003. pp. 15-6)
My MESTing instinct tells me that reductive materialism/physicalism is the most parsimonious of theories available.
“If it’s mysterious how consciousness is realized by and in brains, it’s much more mysterious how it could be realized by and “in” immaterial souls.”
^^^
the qualities needed to be considered matter have changed over time. Now we have things have fields, massless particles, particles in superposition, and so on. And these ‘things’ have different properties or lack properties that matter or the physical had in earlier conceptions. And this is not limited to the subatomic realm. We find it, and it is considered real, so the set not just of objects but the traits that real things have or don’t have has expanded. Not just the number of things considered real but the properties they need to have or have has expanded. I see no reason to assume that in practice this will not continue. How could it, for example, possibly be falsified? We found something, it’s not physical/material in the ways we thought matter/the physical was, so it’s a different substance and the materialist now accepts a pluralism or dualism. I doubt that. Further what is this substance claim?
You tell a Medieval theologian that approximately 95 quadrillion neutrinos are passing through his body each day. The MT asks the materialist - and you consider that matter? The materialist says yes, so the MT responds, ok well, if you include that in matter, perhaps angels are matter, but man you’ve got a wide open definition. And neutrinos, unlike some other ‘particles’ (and or waves), have mass.
To me, this is a loaded question. In my view, it’s not that unconscious matter gives rises to conscious experience (nor is the latter a novelty), but conscious experience is simply what it’s like to be a certain “material” being. So consciousness is everywhere, although not all objects are conscious (some objects are just mental constructs on the part of subjects, others are subjects in their own right).
(Note: ‘[T]hat I believe only in the material world does not mean that I believe only in matter. That is to say, I believe matter in turn consists of radiation or vacuum: matter is a “collapsed wave function” or a “quantum excitation of a field”, etc.’ (Source: a post in the “When Nietzsche Took Cocaine” (sic) thread, translating from a private email I wrote.)
Materialism is a highly general worldview that is compatible even with revolutionary theoretical changes in physics (qua basic science of MEST), as long as the ontology of physics doesn’t include any basic vital/biological or mental/psychological entities—be they objects/substances or attributes (properties: qualities/quantities).
The OED defines “matter” as “physical or corporeal substance in general”; and material/physical substances, bodies, and “corpuscles” (elementary particles) are particular manifestations of matter.
(If angels existed and had bodies, they would be material substances.)
However, that doesn’t decide the question of the ultimate ontological nature and structure of MEST; and, in particular, it doesn’t answer the question of how many physical substances there really are. For instance, the whole world might be one physical substance, with all other apparent ones being ontologically reducible to “bundles” of physical attributes had by the one physical world-substance. (Hello Spinoza!)
On the one hand, the physical is eternally subsumed (whole). That means substance instantiates quality via the physical, so quality is more essential than the physical. On the other hand, the physical is eternally subsumed. Love is not love without demonstration. So in actuality the demonstration is as essential as the quality it demonstrates.
I find Vonhamsonshmidt cosmology to be the most comprehensive and inclusive. We basically exist in an onto-eternal thermodynamic pump that continuously recycles systems that have reached maximum entropy. The energy is conserved as each universe undergoes its big chill… some kind of atomically empty shell of a system remains… a tranzillion times colder than manhattan in the winter. How the energy lost to entropy becomes the stuff of new universes is unknown and involves physics we have no understanding of.
A simple line of Vonhamsonshmidtian logic is that if the whole system is infinite and local universes have always existed in them, they would have all reached absolute entropy by now. And yet, ours has not. Therefore it a) had a beginning and will eventually crunch or freeze, and b) it began in a pre-existing space time with no boundaries… the space in which universes happen… which never began to exist and can never not exist. So, the big bang did happen, but it wasn’t the beginning of everything nor need (nor could) it be. If it was, you’d have logical problems with uncaused causes and all that shit.
Regarding consciousness, it’s an emergent phenomena that results from sequenced brain states that, on account of the capacity to have sustained awareness of the past and the present via a functioning memory, produces a reflective sensual awareness of a ‘self’ that is sustained over time.
Hume’s bundle theory of impressions inspired Gustave Vonhamsonshmidt to create a theoretical framework for chronophenomenological pre-reflective cogito sequencing to determine the reductive value of using a functionalist approach. Indeed, very few know that Vonhamsonshmidt was a pioneer of functionalism and a little known precursor to N’s eternal recurrence theory (the onto-eternal thermodynamic pump theory). In fact it is rumored that N had read of Vonhamsonshmidt in a weekly academic news digest while on hiatus from his professorship and traveling through Europe.
That is a cyclic universe model and it had a beginning. Oh sorry, you said that.
Did you make up “ Vonhamsonshmidt “? 
“on account of” … so … sounds mutually productive… irreducibly complex… NOT a sequential development/emergence
Development (experience unlocking innate capacity) happens after the fact, & wouldn’t be possible otherwise.
I didn’t say it was incompatible with the changes in physics.
You haven’t addressed the point I was making. In fact,
If it doesn’t address the utlimate nature of MEST, than it hasn’t addressed substance. It looks like it is making a claim about substance, but given the expanding category that materialism covers, where anything, regardless of qualities, if confirmed to exist, is considered mattter, then we haven’t actually made such a claim, anymore.
It’s like a holdover from an old disagreement with other monists - like idealists - or dualists - often religious ones, but it not longer has the specific substrance claim it used ot have. It’s metaphorical, which is in fact misleading.
As for the ultimate physical nature and structure of MEST, there is—alas—neither a scientific nor a philosophical consensus.
Contemporary materialists do not define their view simplistically as “Everything is matter” or “Everything is a material substance”. They are aware of the distinctions between ontological categories; and they know very well that (physical) properties, relations, states of affairs/facts, states, events, or processes aren’t (physical/material) substances or (physical/material) objects.
Materialists do not even have to be substance-ontologists at all, because they can endorse process-ontology instead. Materialists can believe that physical substances are ontologically reducible to physical processes (lacking a substantial substrate), or that energy is ontologically prior to matter.
Materialists aren’t wedded to any particular physical theory of (the ultimate nature and structure of) MEST; nor are they wedded to any particular general ontological category system.
By the way, many think materialism entails determinism; but this isn’t true either.
Many contemporary materialists prefer to call themselves physicalists, in order to avoid the wrong impression that they stubbornly cling to an obsolete pre-20th-century physics, “to the billiard-ball physics of the nineteenth century.” (J. J. C. Smart)
However, no matter how fashionable the term physicalism now is, I still prefer the good old term materialism.
“[Materialism] was so named when the best physics of the day was the physics of matter alone. Now our best physics acknowledges other bearers of fundamental properties: parts of pervasive fields, parts of causally active spacetime. But it would be pedantry to change the name on that account, and disown our intellectual ancestors. Or worse, it would be a tacky marketing ploy, akin to British Rail’s decree that second class passengers shall now be called ‘standard class customers’.”
(Lewis, David. “Reduction of Mind.” In A Companion to the Philosophy of Mind, edited by Samuel D. Guttenplan, 412-431. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994. p. 413)
“I say ‘materialistic’ where some would rather say ‘physicalistic’: an adequate theory must be consistent with the truth and completeness of some theory in much the style of present-day physics. (‘Completeness’ is to be explained in terms of supervenience.)
Some fear that ‘materialism’ conveys a commitment that this ultimate physics must be a physics of matter alone: no fields, no radiation, no causally active spacetime. Not so! Let us proclaim our solidarity with forebears who, like us, wanted their philosophy to agree with ultimate physics. Let us not chide and disown them for their less advanced ideas about what ultimate physics might say.”(Lewis, David. “Naming the Colours.” In Papers in Metaphysics and Epistemology, 332-358. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. p. 332n2)
…it’s a series of (al)chemical events, like all transmutations of matter from one form to another are.
My original response was to someone questioning, at least indirectly, the classification of consciousness as matter. Is there a dualism? How does consciousness fit in the schema of unconscious matter ? and so on. My reaction was to say that materialism is not a substance claim anymore. In that sense, I meant that it doesn’t mean anything - and matierials/physicalists should probably come up with another name. Otherwise if it is taken as a substance claim, which many people identifying as materialists/physicalist think it does, then conclusions are often drawn about, for example, the nature of anything new will be. What it’s qualities will be if it is real and so on. So my reaction to the OP is to say that we don’t have try to make, for example, consciousness work as matter, at least in any of the old senses of that word. We may well discover things that behave or exist in ways or have qualities that we don’t associate with matter, yet.
I think it would be better to change the name to reflect it no longer be a substance claim. Further, if you look up the definition in many places, including philosophical dictionaries it will include the substance claim.
In any case, all the points you make are good ones, I think if they were known, for example to the OP writer, then that person would probably frame the question differently.
None of which is me saying dualism or pluralism is the case and even the older version of Materialism is wrong. I’m a pragmatist. I’m happy to think everything is matter/physical sometimes, since that can be useful.
I didn’t think that materialism had to be a deterministic. Though tell that to some people who identify as physicalists/materialists. Which again does not mean that I think there is free will or not.
I don’t think they should do so.
I’m not sure what you mean by “substance claim”—“substantive claim”?
Anyway, materialism/physicalism does mean something, being anything but vacuous.
Materialists don’t say that consciousness is matter or a material substance, but that it’s a state of matter or material substances, with conscious states being caused or constituted by neural states of brains.