08-06-2024, 12:02 PM
Consciousness is really quite simple. The reason so many people grapple with it is because they cannot get rid of the materialist paradigm. The basic idea is the assumption that consciousness emerges from the physical, from the brain, and is the result of firing synapses and chemicals creating an environment where consciousness can thrive. he idea is that consciousness is an emergent property from the physical. The amount of time and effort spent on attempting to explain consciousness in terms of the physical is prodigious, and completely wrong.
Consciousness does not come from the physical. It utilizes (and requires) the physical to manifest. You can still say that consciousness emerges from the physical, but it may be more correct to say it emerges out of the physical in the same way a television program emerges out of the television set. The physical TV has all the circuits and parts necessary to pick up a signal and play it through the TV set. No one would ever claim that the TV program came out of or was created by the TV set itself. The program was created elsewhere and packaged in such a way that it could manifest through the TV set to be seen by the viewer.
When I was a child growing up in the fifties there were quite a few westerns on the three TV channels that were available. I imagined that all the dead cowboys and Indians had to be lying dead in the back of the television set and that if I could get the back of the TV off, that's where I would find them. My father disabused me of this notion when he did that very thing and took the many tubes to the grocery store to a testing machine so he could find the broken ones. There was a lot of dust and cobwebs in back of the TV, but no dead cowboys. Of course I also was afraid to sit in front of the TV in my pajamas because I feared the host of "I Search for Adventure," Jack Douglas, could see I wasn't properly dressed.
You are not going to get anywhere useful in explaining consciousness until you accept the fact that there is more to reality than just the physical. Yes, that's anathema to "science," but you still need to change your ideas of what constitutes reality. Consciousness does not inherently reside "here." Of course, if you call consciousness the "soul" you get into even more trouble with the enlightened people of science, but let's just try it as a mental exercise. For consciousness to manifest in the physical realm it requires a physical brain with all those synapses and chemicals. Once that connection is made you can do what you need to do here. If you need or want to do advanced physics, you need a brain capable of it. That's why apes can't do it. Their brains are not sufficiently developed to allow them to manage those types of thoughts. They still have consciousness, just as all animals do, but their brains are like black and white TV sets without the capacity to show advanced color. Their brains limit their abilities. The growth in the ability of consciousness to express itself requires advanced evolution in brains.
Of course there is a massive feedback loop going on vis-s-vis evolution. You need opposable thumbs and a sufficiently long lifetime to allow for education before you can embark on civilization. So it's complex, to be sure. But NONE of this implies God or Jesus or any of the religious mumbo jumbo that has retarded us as a species. That is what scares materialists the most, the idea that if they accept the duality of consciousness then they must accept dealing with the religious crazies. Don't worry; they're still crazy, but my guess is that the more thoughtful theologians know this very well. As one scientist put it years ago: As you travel up the mountain of understanding searching for the truth, you may very well find the theologians at the top waiting for you.
Consciousness does not come from the physical. It utilizes (and requires) the physical to manifest. You can still say that consciousness emerges from the physical, but it may be more correct to say it emerges out of the physical in the same way a television program emerges out of the television set. The physical TV has all the circuits and parts necessary to pick up a signal and play it through the TV set. No one would ever claim that the TV program came out of or was created by the TV set itself. The program was created elsewhere and packaged in such a way that it could manifest through the TV set to be seen by the viewer.
When I was a child growing up in the fifties there were quite a few westerns on the three TV channels that were available. I imagined that all the dead cowboys and Indians had to be lying dead in the back of the television set and that if I could get the back of the TV off, that's where I would find them. My father disabused me of this notion when he did that very thing and took the many tubes to the grocery store to a testing machine so he could find the broken ones. There was a lot of dust and cobwebs in back of the TV, but no dead cowboys. Of course I also was afraid to sit in front of the TV in my pajamas because I feared the host of "I Search for Adventure," Jack Douglas, could see I wasn't properly dressed.
You are not going to get anywhere useful in explaining consciousness until you accept the fact that there is more to reality than just the physical. Yes, that's anathema to "science," but you still need to change your ideas of what constitutes reality. Consciousness does not inherently reside "here." Of course, if you call consciousness the "soul" you get into even more trouble with the enlightened people of science, but let's just try it as a mental exercise. For consciousness to manifest in the physical realm it requires a physical brain with all those synapses and chemicals. Once that connection is made you can do what you need to do here. If you need or want to do advanced physics, you need a brain capable of it. That's why apes can't do it. Their brains are not sufficiently developed to allow them to manage those types of thoughts. They still have consciousness, just as all animals do, but their brains are like black and white TV sets without the capacity to show advanced color. Their brains limit their abilities. The growth in the ability of consciousness to express itself requires advanced evolution in brains.
Of course there is a massive feedback loop going on vis-s-vis evolution. You need opposable thumbs and a sufficiently long lifetime to allow for education before you can embark on civilization. So it's complex, to be sure. But NONE of this implies God or Jesus or any of the religious mumbo jumbo that has retarded us as a species. That is what scares materialists the most, the idea that if they accept the duality of consciousness then they must accept dealing with the religious crazies. Don't worry; they're still crazy, but my guess is that the more thoughtful theologians know this very well. As one scientist put it years ago: As you travel up the mountain of understanding searching for the truth, you may very well find the theologians at the top waiting for you.
Everything hurts and I'm tired.
