The Absurdity of Emergent Consciousness within the Materialist Framework

[Scholar]

Here is an easy way to make materialism look bad.

 

Most materialist posit that Consciousness is the result of physical matter, more accurately a specific configuration of matter present in what we call the functioning brain. If the materialist doesn't deny consciousness altogether, which would be absurd in the first place, he will have a hard time to argue away this small, overlooked fact about his or her worldview.

 

If we assume that a brain is unique in that it can give rise to consciousness, we basically have to admit the following.

The universe started out as purely physical entity, nothing within it was akin to experience and consciousness. All that existed were physical motions, which over the span of billions of years gave rise to a lonely planet earth, which in all unlikelihood gave rise to physical motions so specific, so unique, that it would somehow give rise to a completely new substance unseen in the entirety of the universe. A substance unlike anything that has every existed before, a substance so foreign it cannot be even called substance. Consciousness was born, experience was born, because the wavefunction of the universe decided that this specific configuration was to give birth to that which might have never existed at all, and that which never existed anywhere else.

 

This is so absurd, it's as if you were playing with your marbel set and then suddenly, just at the specific alignment of your marbels in the perfect and impossibly lucky way, a unicorn would emerge infront of you from nothingness. Not an usual unicorn that is, rather an interdimensional unicorn made from a substance existing nowhere else in the universe. A substance that is unlike anything the universe has ever held inside it. This is the current paradigm of western civilization, and everyone accepts it as if it was pure rationality, as if it was undeniable truth. As if any alternative was completely absurd and unthinkable.

 

You live in a world in which the most sophisticated scientists believe in this absurdity. They think the universe is dead, void of consciousness, and that only matter ordained by the great, unconscious chaos of the universe to be worthy of giving rise to consciousness does so.

It's interesting how the self-evident can be render to be obvious falsehood if you step aside and shift your perspective.

 

 

The Truth is revealed not in one perspective, but rather in noticing that which remains between all perspectives. No Perspective is that which is contained within all perspectives. This is why shifting perspective is one of the most important tools to come to see truth. Not because the new perspective shows you what is true, but because the new perspectives shows you what has been so clearly falsehood.

 

You shift your consciousness not to gain new knowledge, to see a deeper reality, but rather, so that that which you thought to be reality falls away, any only that which is True remains.

[Someone here]

What you call consciousness is what they call matter.   

Both new age mysticism and materialism are stuck in duality........  It's like either we have unexplainable free floating mystical consciousness.. Without anything sourcing it.. Or we have dumb lifeless matter that gives arise to an appearance of consciousness. 

There is only one fundamental reality either way.   If there is something underneath consciousness it will be consciousness. If consciousness arises from matter.. That means matter is potentially consciousness.   It's the same thing at the end.  I don't get what the hustle is about lol.

[No Self]

There is little substance behind the claim that protons, neutrons and electrons in a particular configuration give rise to consciousness. It is just a way for scientists to shield their walled garden from having to consider religious or spiritual concepts.

[Carl-Richard]

If I were to play devil's advocate, there was a time in the universe's early history that not even hydrogen atoms existed. They only formed after some time when the universe cooled down. The concept of emergence posits that new forms have always and will always emerge out from pre-existing structures, and that is what drives the evolution of the universe. This is therefore compatible with the idea that consciousness is an emergent phenomena of complex computational structures, coincidentally neurobiological machines (brains).

Rationalists have no problem accepting absurd statements if they've been indoctrinated into accepting them. To cross your gut-feeling in favor of your intellect is seen more or less like a badge of honor. Self-righteousness and self-bias is a deadly combination.

I think a way of addressing the problem that a materialist would be more able to understand is to point out the fact that calling it "emergent phenomena" in the first place is actually just a euphemism for "non-physical" or "immaterial" (atleast in the way that they're using the word). There is no physical/causal mechanism there, only a fancy word which serves as a materialistic "God of the gaps"-argument ("if we're not sure how, then Matter did it").

If consciousness is an emergent phenomena (non-physical), then to say it's still "caused" by something physical is a contradiction, because then you would have no reason to not just call it a physical phenomena. If the physical nature of the causal mechanism was known, then you would for sure just call it physical. There is no physical evidence of such a thing; no measurements, no mechanisms. The inclination towards the word "emergent" only comes from a lack of confidence.

The problem is that most materialists don't have the epistemological impetus to go down that line of reasoning in the first place, so the probability that they will be able to follow the arguments or let alone have an open mind is close to zero.

To truly entangle the indoctrination of materialism takes a rigorous and thorough investigation of its assumptions and the phenomenology of experience. I have a video example of how this may look with Rupert Spira taking answers from a "trained scientist" with materialistic concerns:

 

Edited October 1, 2020 by Carl-Richard

[cetus]

3 hours ago, Scholar said:

Here is an easy way to make materialism look bad.

  Have compassion for materialism. After all, it holds the world in it's place during your absence.

[Oppositionless]

what do consciousness and matter have in common?-

can you find a ground for either?

[Rilles]

Once you realize youre experiencing a slice of subjective experience materialism becomes completely absurd. There is noone but you and your thoughts here. You dont know where you came from... Except from what you were told from others within this subjective experience. When did history happen... How do you know it happened... Did you experience a big bang... All youve experienced is your personal story. Its very very strange. 

[Adamq8]

Materialism is the ultimate trick that GOD plays on himself to get him to think that the objective world is true and that matter is the most important to somehow keep you invested in this world, cause when GOD realize it self it knows that the whole life and world process is totally a hallucination.

[Scholar]

9 hours ago, Carl-Richard said:

If I were to play devil's advocate, there was a time in the universe's early history that not even hydrogen atoms existed. They only formed after some time when the universe cooled down. The concept of emergence posits that new forms have always and will always emerge out from pre-existing structures, and that is what drives the evolution of the universe. This is therefore compatible with the idea that consciousness is an emergent phenomena of complex computational structures, coincidentally neurobiological machines (brains).

But hydrogen atoms didn't pop into existence from nothing at all, we can clearly explain why what was before hydrogen atoms came to become hydrogen atoms. There is no new substance suddenly existing in the universe. It's not like suddenly all this material popped into existence from nothing at all, it's more that the parts of the atoms finally decided to come together to form an atom.

Emergent phenomena to the materialist aren't really emergent, it just means that something on a higher, more complex level is unlike what it is made out of viewed from a less complex level. For example the emergent wave is different from particles that make up the wave, but the wave is still made from the particles, and we can clearly understand the wave as nothing but an accumilitation of particles.

 

This is fundamentally different from consciousness. Consciousness isn't made out of atoms, otherwise atoms would have to be experience, which the materialist would of course deny.

 

And even more importantly, the emergent phenomena aren't non-physical. Notice that they all are physical in nature, they all decribe motion. Because fundamentally, we have come to understand the world through our perception of motion. So everything we can possibly capture to be real in the materialist framework must be reducable to motion. Everything is nothing but potential motion. The entire idea of materialism is to reduce everything to causal, physical states. Anything that seems emergent might only seem so because we have not yet come to understand the full causal link between the cause and the effect.

 

Emergence is when a group of physical parts give, through their interaction, rise to a new behaviour not observed in the individual parts. There is nothing mysterious, nor non-physical about it, from the materialist POV. What is important is that we can clearly come to understand the emergent behaviour as nothing but the interaction of the parts. This is reductionism, meaning everything can be reduce to the behaviour of it's parts.

 

I don't see how any of that can explain consciousness, so I think my initial critique still applies. Consciousness cannot be the sum of it's parts, because if it were, the parts would have to be consciousness. Much the parts of anything physical must be physical. It wouldn't make sense, from the materialist POV, to just have a magical switch into a new substance.

[Carl-Richard]

1 hour ago, Scholar said:

I don't see how any of that can explain consciousness, so I think my initial critique still applies. Consciousness cannot be the sum of it's parts, because if it were, the parts would have to be consciousness. Much the parts of anything physical must be physical. It wouldn't make sense, from the materialist POV, to just have a magical switch into a new substance.

The materialist tries to deny that consciousness is a "new substance", but at the same time they try to hide their lack of explainations by misusing a fancy term. It's really confusing.

Edited October 1, 2020 by Carl-Richard