In a material reductionist world, the last people we should be asking for answers to human consciousness are material scientists.
It is entirely possible that our consciousness is received like a TV airway signal (though more likely through some means of entanglement).
Do you think consciousness is nothing more than in your head? If so, why? If not, why?
Journalist and Author Graham Han[censored… holy crap, people…] speaks about human consciousness, the flaws in the materialistic approach to it, and the sickness we suffer from a lack of spirituality (not to be confused with religious indoctrination).
Cant watch video at moment. But I think consciousness is an eternal field like the electromagnetic field. Our body conducts / warps it to create the “I”. I’m a property dualist. I dont think reality can be ontologically reduced to the material/physical world.
I just believe that reality is composed of one substance but that substance has two properties: mental and physical. It gets around causality issues with substance dualism, to a degree (if mental substances are separate from physical substances, how do they interact?). It’s really just an ontological position about the substance of reality’s “baseline”.
Its a difficult concept to prove, considering that to be empirical one must measure material phenomenon, which of course, are not mental properties in this framework. And even then, material properties are only existent in the context of our awareness and experiences of such properties. Neither the mental or the physical can truly be isolated from our being - the quantum “observer”.
Which leads me to conclude that there is one substance with dualistic properties - like fire displaying both light and heat.
The only alternative is that material properties are actually subsets of the mental. Which is an interesting proposition with a lot of strange consequences.
This is pretty much what I think as well…have always thought consciousness is a property of reality itself…so much of physics makes more sense if this is so.
I don’t believe in traditional notions of the afterlife (i.e. any type of afterlife is simply a return to this base consciousness which probably “results in (feels like)” having no consciousness at all.
Right. And even then, I dont think its possible to meaningfully “exist” without consciousness. You can’t experience “nothing” - its an oxymoron (?). To experience is for something to be. The difference is, at death, theres no mnemonic biological systems to process time, so the nature of consciousness is no longer bound to our bodies, and there’s no ability to be conscious in the normative sense.
This is why I think “I” am immediately reborn upon death in some other biological form - since the death of my mnemonic system causes the perception of time to stop. But since consciousness is fundamental, and since “nothing” cant be experienced, I simply become the experience of a new mnemonic system.
Its not that parts of who I am carry over, but more so that what “I” am is not a segregated/isolated part of reality as a whole. I came from star dust before already. I can do it again. But, being that my previous mnemonic systems have died, I’ll have no memory of past experiences.
And more so, this notion describes all of consciousnesses as shared, fundamentally, yet warped by our individual biologies.
I think consciousness is something more. Two, somewhat off topic, observations. First, the effort to distinguish “religious indoctrination” from the spirit and consciousness. This is like trying to differentiate sports from athleticism. The two have strong connections which should not be severed.
Second, is premonitions. Over the years I have had a few strong premonitions which have had me hypothesizing that consciousness may not always begin at a certain point in time and then only move relentlessly forward. I’ve wondered about the possibility of strong conscious vibrations moving in a more explosive manner where fall-out also moves backwards through time…hence the premonition.
Omniscience… I forget who said it, but someone used the analogy of the brain being more if a limiting valve of consciousness than a creator. That’s not to make a value judgement on whether or not saud limitation is preferrable. Ignorance is bliss. But per your point, it could be that all knowledge is embedded in some “conscious” field. Its fun to think about, but would require a massive amount of a priori speculation.
