[Nonduality Salon] Material Consciousness

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Pesi

nondualitysalon ; AdvaitaToZen

Monday, September 01, 2008 4:57 PM

[Nonduality Salon] Material Consciousness

 

Few people would argue that lifehas a material base, that livingcells are made of protein, molecules,and atoms.

Given the rest of your argument in this post and others, I realise the above is a typo - but, ironically, it is a very interesting Freudian slip on your part nonetheless.

 

The vast majority of the world does not believe that "life" has a material base - at least not in the sense of consciousness.

 

Few people doubt thatemotions and thoughts are the resultof chemicals in the brain.

See above, the great religions of the world number their followers in the billions - eliminativist materialists are very few in comparison.

 

So whynot consciousness? What is the difficulty?What would consciousness lose if declaredmaterial too?

Were consciousness declared material, it (or, at the very least, the word 'consciousness') would be superflous, since we'd be talking about nothing but mechanics.

 

But your argument is fallacious for a more obvious reason - we have no evidence that there is any kind of 'ultimate substance' underlying objective reality. It seems to be nothing but the operation of laws.

 

In my opinion nothing,except that it would no longer keep thehope of surviving death alive. And thereis the rub!

Given the fact that there is more evidence for NDE's, OBES, Psi-activity, ghosts and what have you than there is for some magical self-sustaining and self-perpetuating substance underlying all of reality it does not seem logical to theorise in the way you are doing.

 

Certainly, I would not argue in favour of any particular religion (in it's esoteric or exoteric flavour), but the foundation of them all is much stronger than materialism (substance theory).

 

IMO If consciousness requires life, andlife is material, then, consciousnessmust be material too. It wasn't a hardcase. Case close! )

With the word "life" you seem to mean biology (plants and animals) only. But this only leaves you with a cat chasing it's own tail.

 

To explain, consider Daniel Dennett's notion of a thermostat as the simplest and most rudimentary "thinker". Now, I won't go into why this is certainly an interesting model of a single neuron (brain cell), but the point is that Dennett is asserting here that consciousness is equivalent with processess (specifially, information processing).

 

What then is "life" in materialism? If consciousness is information processing then one need does not require a plant or animal to demonstrate this - the desktop computer does just fine. Is it "life" also? Conscious?

 

Ignoring the lack evidence for any substance "out there" that materialism obviously requires, could my computer ever demonstrate psi-ability the way humans have in such studies as the Ganzfeld?

 

I very much doubt it.

 

Regards,

Stephen