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Consciousness is fundamental to reality. Science-based thinking (but not science itself) has put matter as the fundamental element but actually has never been able to prove it. To be able to prove that matter gives rise to consciousness, you'd have to step out of consciousness and point to matter. Which you cannot do. Not talking about individual consciousness where you can just point at someone's brain: that experience of pointing at someone's brain is happening inside consciousness, how else would you know about it.
Not to be confused with Solipsism, that's the thinking mind. I'm talking about Idealism, the raw state of pure experience before thought.
This is actually an implication on one of the worlds leading theory of consciousness, Integrated Information Theory. It gives a mathematical measure of consciousness (as integrated information) and one of the surprising implications of that is that theres actually no matter that has zero integrated information. If we use this metric to measure human consciousness the implication is that a rock, say, has a small amount of consciousness.
Of course this theory is not without its issues, and I don’t personally subscribe to it, but I think it goes to show you that we all need to be more open minded to alternative possibilities to the typical “consciousness is just neurons firing” view. We don’t actually understand consciousness well enough to be jumping to that conclusion yet.
Yeah, I haven't looked into that one. Just read old philosophy and also a bit on analytic idealism from Bernardo Kastrup
https://philarchive.org/rec/KASAIA-3
It's gaining a bit of mainstream recognition but... A lot of cultural baggage resists it.
Yeah I feel you on that one. People who haven’t looked into this topic think that you have to think that consciousness is nothing more than neural firings or youre some sort of religious apologist, even though when you actually look into what researchers in this field are saying they are in large part skeptical of that viewpoint
Unfortunately they're not talking about IIT.
So more/less controversial depending on your views on mysticism I suppose.
You'd have to prove all matter has consciousness for this right? Rocks, the sun, hydrogen atoms. We have evidence for the existence of reality before life but not the other way around.
So just to be clear, you think an electron is conscious in some small way? Or are you saying consciousness exists with or without matter?
Or rather, nothing exists until it is perceived?
Consciousness is the principle within which electrons exist.
Well then sounds like you're suggesting the universe is consciousness in and of itself as many religions do.
I thought you were talking about panpsychism which at least has potential paths to falsifiability.
Falsifiability? Prove that matter exists before consciousness.
Rocks aren't conscious.
Rocks have existed longer than brains.
The argument isn't if rocks have individual consciousness.
The fact is that rocks exist inside consciousness.
Universe-is-a-brain theory, got it.
Trouble is the burden of proof lies with you on that.
The scientific method has never proved anything ever. It just fails to disprove, and the theory gets stronger every single time.
I would posit that you (and Plato) are just wildly defining undisprovable concepts that serve no purpose and can neither be proven nor disproven. Which makes your hypothesis more like a religion.
I wouldn’t be so dismissive. This is a very active area of research, and sometimes philosophical ideas like this can be the launchpad from which new scientific theories can be constructed.
An example of this is panpsychism (the idea that all matter has some level of consciousness). Many consider this a woo-woo theory. But now we have Integrated Information Theory, which is probably the most popular theory of consciousness right now. And it is a panpsychist theory: if its mathematical measure of consciousness is correct, then all matter would have some nonzero level of consciousness.
Now, I don’t subscribe to this theory, but thats not the point. My point is that with immature fields of research like this, we have to tolerate philosophical speculations (we have to start from somewhere, right?). So though you may not like these speculations right now, there is a really real chance they may the groundwork for an innovative scientific theory.
So let’s not immediately shut down these ideas by labelling them as “religion”. Lets give these ideas room to breathe, grow and mature, because thats how we make progress when we’re just starting out.