Progress in consciousness?

Quote:

Clearly .....
If it cannot be seen, smelled, tasted, heard, or touched, .... it does not exist.
Like 'thought', it just is not real.

I'm not sure what exactly you're referring to...

anyway, you're wrong...if humans were born blind, tasteless, deaf, and callous would you say nothing exists? the senses we have are arbitrary. there are many forms of matter which we cannot detect with our senses. and even for the forms we CAN detect, there must be significant quantities.

also, existing is not just for matter...concepts can exist too.

So how do I claim to know which religious perspective is better? I confess, I DO NOT know that answer objectively. But I'll ask you to decide--since I have no problem with my judgement--by reading the Vedanta texts of the Upanishads, and works by Pat Robertson or Billy Graham.

Some people are smarter than others. There are many people who cannot understand simple abstract concepts like calculus or basic scientific theories. But a "why" is just a LIST of reactions which exlpain the current state of being of an 'object'...and I think that there are certainly humans capable of understanding such a sequence, even for the most complex and abstract why's.

Consciousness springs from a much deeper well than a land bound clay shell.

If consciousness is an emergent phenomena then Krishnamurti, Buddhism nondualism etc. etc. are false; consciousness cannot emerge from a fiction that it itself has created.

If objects of observation are observer dependent; have to be observed to exist as such, then the brain which is rarely observed does >not< give rise to consciousness, for cause and effect only come into existence upon observation. Consciousness has to be prior to that which is observed, prior to the observable uiniverse.

and why must 'consciousness' receive such 'adoration'; surely any living creature has a degree of consciousness which integrates its systems into a functioning unit. As the complexity grows so grows the degree, or perhaps 'complexity' of the more 'capable' entity.

I am a part of it; I am conscious; I am alive. Ergo, the universe is at least to that extent conscious and alive. Who knows the extent of its consciousness and aliveness? Just because there is no possible way of scientifically demonstrating it, that does not warrant the assumption that it is dumb and dead, a mere mass of energy qua matter and gravity. I choose to think of its energy as ultimately something like mind and gravity as a form of attraction. Who knows?

The question is: how did such an "obvious" universe come to be? We give it the name "intelligence" by projection: given that we are intelligent to observe it, there must be something "sufficient" to account for that intelligence. This "sufficient something" could be a mystical one, a theological one, or a statistical one. But it is more legitimate to assign it the name "intelligence" than to act as if it were not necessary

If consciousness is explainable by physical processes, there is no hope for eternal life or the belief that we are the pinnacle of creation.

So let me explain the objection more precisely. Let's take as our example my decision to walk across the room. We say: my decision, a mental event, immediately causes a group of neurons in my brain to fire, a physical event, which ultimately results in my walking across the room. The problem is that if we have something totally nonphysical causing a bunch of neurons to fire, then there is no physical event which causes the firing. That means that some physical energy seems to have appeared out of thin air. Do you see? Even if we say that my decision has some sort of mental energy, and that the decision causes the firing, we still haven't explained where the physical energy, for the firing, came from. It just seems to have popped into existence from nowhere.

As our reading says, there is a physical principle, called the "Principle of the Conservation of Energy." According to this principle, "In all physical processes, the total amount of energy in the universe remains constant." Or in a form you may have heard before: in any change anything undergoes, energy is neither created nor destroyed. This is a basic principle you probably learned about in high school physics. So the point is that nerve firings, which are allegedly caused by a totally nonphysical decision, would appear to violate the Principle of the Conservation of Energy.

jnhofzinser wrote:

We give it the name "intelligence" by projection.... This "sufficient something" could be a mystical one, a theological one, or a statistical one.

And why should we arbitrarily attribute intelligence to events that seem to require nothing more than mindless processes?

Gelisgesti wrote:

Consciousness springs from a much deeper well than a land bound clay shell.

If it comes from somewhere else, why does damage to the clay shell demonstrably impair consciousness?

More practically, perhaps: if consciousness is explainable by physical processes, then what possible point could there be in debating it over the internet?

If, however, our intelligence is simply a result of "unintelligent-by-definition mindless processes", then it would appear that intelligence itself is an illusion: that it is just the convergence of enough of the right "mindless stuff" to create the ego-driven need to "feel intelligent."

Unfortunately, the same must be said of "egos". In effect, self-awareness itself must be an illusion: that it is just the convergence of enough of the right "un-self-aware" stuff to have the observer declare herself "self-aware".

Unfortunately, the same must be said for "observation"...

And it doesn't stop; this is Twyvel's "infinite regress" that represents a stumbling block for the materialist.