The funny part being that they write it as if the ideas are preposterous. Putting religion at the very basis of the operation of the universe is one hell of a drug.
EDIT: Already made it a comment, but I feel it's important before people get that idea that these people are necessarily our enemies.
People write/read takes like this and come to radically different conclusions due to their different base axioms of human experience. For the target readership of catholicculture.org, they are ones that are trying to understand the universe, with the base assumption being the existence of a Christian god. Many an apologetic has attempted to synthesize the real observable world with a just, righteous god. Regardless of their flawed logics, they are at least interested in taking a holistic approach to the human experience rather than an individual, capitalist, exploitative experience. As someone who as a child dove into the catholic theological worldview, desperate for meaning in this clearly meaning deprived society, these people can be radicalized, and are capable of changing their basis of thought. It takes real effort and patience, but they are much more likely to be a devoted comrade to the human liberatory unification experience than a bourgeois hedonistic individualist, who only cares for themselves and the people closest to them, who would rather not ponder their experience let alone the collective human experience, but rather live their own lives in pursuit of illusory happiness in isolation.
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Yup, if we ever definitively answered the question of what consciousness is made of, all existential philosophy would probably immediately collapse.
It's likely not something that is made of anything, but an experience that comes to being through the transformation of quantity to quality (if we're thinking dialectically). I personally subscribe to Daniel Dennett's line of reasoning that consciousness is a user illusion, and honestly I find that his theories of memetics and a theory of development of human knowledge has potential to be drawn again from a Marxist lens. If you're interested in the subject, look up From Bacteria to Bach and Back. He's a bit radlib and tends to hang around with the four horseman atheist intelligencia, but I find his book striking interesting tones that could lead to further discussion.
I mean, yes, it is an illusion, in the same sense a computer game or a play is an illusion and if i prod at it enough I can tear it apart at the seams and look at the moving parts and go HAH! There's no real world there after all, just a bunch of interacting systemts. Hell, you can do that with actual reality.
But that seems to be not particularly useful?
Well it doesn't necessarily change the conditions we find ourselves and the reality that dialectical materialism of the past helped us to explain and understand, hence why we're all here on chapo.chat as various marxist tendencies. But regardless, the drive for humanity to discover its own nature isn't something I think we should give up on, regardless of the futility and potentially troubling answers. If it weren't for this drive, religion would not have the hold it has on the majority of humanity. Or perhaps I'm misunderstanding what you don't find useful about it
The term "illusion". It's a loaded category. Nobody says "cars don't exist!" because they aren't ontonlogically timeless unitary objects that are air gapped from interaction with the rest of the universe.
The same with consciousness or the self. We experience it, it exists at some level, even if the nature of that existence in unsatisfying or counter intuitive.
To quote the great work of philosophical truth Star Trek IV. "Nothing unreal exists"
Yeah, illusion is a loaded term which I wielded recklessly lol.
Its certainly a real experience, and there's absolutely no taking away from an individuals "individual" experience and life in the world. The world is real, it is no illusion, or else real is a ridiculous designation in the first place. What I really mean to say is that I don't believe the traditional continuous self with free will exists. I believe our conscious seamless moment by moment experience, and our thoughts, aren't dictated by this higher self that we consider "us", rather its a patchwork experience with background processes synthesizing memory and stimulus to form ideas and thoughts, that for some presently unknown reason is evolutionarily advantageous, whether it be in problem solving or otherwise. Which isn't at all to reduce the miracle of our existence and our experience. We can both be a sum of parts that alone are mechanical and lifeless, as well as a living whole conscious being.
Is David Bohm not a serious physicist? What level of seriousness is required here?
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Yes, people have created mathamatical models for it, including, as I've said, some of the most influential physicists of the 20th Century.
Also, basically every theory we take for granted now was considered unorthodox at some point.
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I don't really follow. The theory postulates that mind is inherent in matter, and that what we experience as conciousness is at least partly a byproduct of that. Why does that make us extra special, seems like it makes us less special.
Why does this seem more reasonable to you than the conciousness you experience constantly is an illusion?
Is string theory serious? Because it's a competitor and postulates there are like 11 dimensions or something that we can't see. Seems pretty out there too.
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Like, you have said multiple things about this theory that are directly contradictory to what the theory postulates.
Are you talking about descarte's mind body dualism? This theory is contradictory to that.
When it comes to consciousness, I don't think there's an orthodox opinion.
Also, it's not clear that conscious can be causally explained, because causality relates physical quantities and conscious may be in a different ontological category as things like particles or fields.
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I guess the "evidence" is that it seems to be a fundamentally different thing just as far as our scientific relationship to it goes. Physical quantities can be measured, but the only "measurement" we can make of consciousness is to ask people to describe their subjective experience and correlate it to actual physical measurements like a scan of the brain.
Also, conscious experience is part of the process of measuring physical quantities, so it seems like it's actually more fundamental than physical measurements.
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You can look inside the eye though. Can you look inside consciousness? You can look inside the brain, but that's not the same thing. It's possible that a complete physical description of the brain will not allow us to understanding consciousness.
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Well that's just the thing. We don't have a scientific explanation of the subjective experience of vision, just the physiological function of the eye.
In order to call our understanding of consciousness scientific, we would at least be able to say which physical processes produce conscious experience and why. Like why does an eye produce a sensation of seeing? What is special about the function of an eye? It's just a physical object.
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Physical descriptions of neurons are complete without consciousness though. As you said, we can simulate that stuff on a computer. It's just a physical electromagnetic process like any other. It runs on the same physics as your computer. So where does consciousness come in? It appears to be something which does not actually affect the function of that neural hardware in your brain, it just sort of follows your brain's every move.
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Would it though? How would you even check? If consciousness is physics, then we should be able to measure something about it or at least verify its existence using methods that work for other physical phenomena, right? If all we can measure are it's physical correlates, then it isn't physics, it's something parallel to physics.
Ok, I think that's a very valid point. Maybe the traditional way of thinking about physical ontology is just ass-backwards and creates a purely illusory problem.
Why should the limits of human intelligence determine whether something is a physical process? Why would we assume that some artificial or alien intelligence of arbitrary complexity would never be able to understand it? The question I would ask is whether it would be possible to take a physical description of the system, and create another system with the same physical description that does not have "consciousness". If there isn't evidence of this, or of a mechanism where it would be possible, I don't see why we should say that consciousness is anything outside of materialism.
David Bohm and Freeman Dyson to start. Its not the majority view, but it's a view that is taken seriously by a lot of very smart people.