The question I need answers to... why would I not form a hypothetical line of causality based on abiogenesis? Is there a better theory at this time? I — Christoffer

I think abiogenesis is compelling because it blurs a fundamental distinction: that between life and non-life, or at least, makes it appear less fundamental. Modern naturalism has an implicit commitment to there being only a single substance, that substance being matter (or nowadays matter-energy) from which everything is formed. As a satirical blog post expressed it:

I believe in a single substance, the mother of all forces, which engenders the life and consciousness of everything, visible and invisible. I believe in a single Lord, biology, the unique son of the substance of the world, born from the mother substance after centuries of random shuffling of material: the encapsulated reflection of the great material sea, the epiphenomenal light of primordial darkness, the false reflection of the real world, consubstantial with the mother-substance. It is he who has descended from the shadows of the mother-substance, he who has taken on flesh from matter, he who plays at the illusion of thought from flesh, he who has become the Human Brain. I acknowledge a single method for the elimination of error, thus ultimately eliminating myself and returning to the mother substance. Amen.

Satirical, but not too far from the truth. There's a deep conviction in modern culture, that because science has displaced religion, then it must provide an origin story, and that origin story has to be seen in physicalist terms. In a way, it also solves the problem of anxiety, by eliminating metaphysical anxiety and providing a sense of certainty (false, in my view.)

But there is growing dissent from physicalism. The biologist I started off quoting, Marcello Barbieri, questions the phyicalist account not from any religious point of view but acknowledging that the 'chemical paradigm' cannot account for the fundamental characteristics of life. (Worth looking at that article What is Information?) For that matter in the emerging field of biosemiotics there are some (not all) who reject physicalism.

None of that is providing any other scientific theory that has its roots in all data and surrounding theories presented in science on the topic. The satire that science acts as another form of religion is only true for those who need to defend their own belief in fantasy/magic/religion. So when someone puts trust in science, not through belief but through trust in unbiased methods and facts, the people who are unable to experience the world through anything but religious or mystical belief, view that trust, wrongly, as just "another belief system".

Disregarding random minorities of nutjobs actually viewing science as a religion, this is not true at all for people actually forming their worldview though a foundation in science.

The problem with your counter-argument is that your premisses only revolve around doubt. A doubt in a current scientific theory with support not through scientific consensus but specific individual doubters. This doubt focuses on a pure observation of how nature behaves right now and through that concluding "truths" about life's formation, even though, for everyone involved in theorizing, there's still a gap in which we don't know the exact processes that happened at the formation of life. So the doubters can only conclude new data on the complexity to solve that unknown event, it's not in any way a dismissal of the validity of abiogenesis as a scientific theory. That's not how science works and that's not what biosemiotics is really about.

"Doubt", in science, is nothing weird or strange, it's a foundational pillar of science. It's part of how to stay unbiased in research and formation of theories. But doubt, in itself, does not prove or disprove anything. It only points towards a part of a topic of study that needs more clarification and explanation. To conclude abiogenesis wrong because there are more differences in how information and chemistry fit together than previously thought, is not how science works. What it does is to add new data or a new perspective that expands the problem that scientists seek to solve.

The consensus still holds abiogenesis as a primary theory for the origin of life, that hasn't changed. And I won't adhere to another speculation just because abiogenesis isn't fully completed yet and biosemiotics does not change or disprove abiogenesis at all. There's enough data and logic to it to be considered the closest to truth we have right now. To use a theory's incompleteness in order to invite extreme wild speculation far from the data and facts that so far exist, is basically a total misunderstanding of science or an inability to actually understand the scientific process due to a world view so biased towards belief in the mystical or magic that the concept of science cannot be understood in the first place. This is exactly the same as quantum physics. There's so much evidence and proof in quantum physics that no one doubts the data and facts on that topic, and it's already used as applied science in things like modern electronics. But there's still not a complete theory, there are tons of things yet to be explained and we don't have a unified theory yet. Does that mean we can dismiss everything quantum because it's not complete? No, so why would we make up some wild speculation instead of abiogenesis when new data is discovered? Not until it's been completely disproven and another theory has more validity in line with all data will something like abiogenesis be abandoned, and the ones who would abandon it in an instance would be the scientists themselves, because they don't act through belief, they trust the data they arrive at because it's cold and hard compared to the fluffy comfortable and unreliable speculations of fantasy.

Science is also the only system and method of understanding actual truths within the confidence of the world/universe as we know it. Disregarding the wild metaphysical speculations like "brain in a vat" type stuff that has no actual impact and application in the world, science, compared to any other biased speculation like the religious, magical fantasy or mysticism, has actual consequences in the world we live in. All of our technology is a result of scientific research.

It's not a question of belief. It is a question of trust in that the science can have applied results. Our expanding understanding of everything is not a comfort blanket, it is an instinctual curiosity and interest in knowledge. Religion and fantasy, on the other hand, is pure comfort. Abandon all unknowns and surrender over to a finite explanation in order to drift through life without fear. So it's no wonder that in a world built upon scientific discoveries, religious people feel threatened and become increasingly biased in their reasoning and opposition against science.

We still live in a deeply superstitious, religious and foolish world and I think that's why there's so much confusion surrounding science. I would argue that it is actually impossible for a deeply religious person to understand a purely scientific mind due to the differences in how those two minds fundamentally experience the world.

The religious mind cannot fathom the pure reason of the scientific mind because that's not how that religious mind process information and form concepts about the world around them. And the deeply scientific mind can never settle on a mystical or magical conclusion to anything because of their distinct perception of the border between fantasy and fact.

But since science has an almost flawless track record of providing truths about the world that can actually be applied in practice, compared to religion and mysticism, there is very little reason to look elsewhere than science for actual answers to complex questions. The problem is rather if the person has a religious or scientific mind; can they actually understand the difference between science and religious speculation? Because whenever I hear counterarguments about how "science works as a religion" whenever someone refers to science as their source in the explanation of something, I just roll my eyes at how deep of a misunderstanding it is regarding how science actually works and how scientific minds actually process information and form concepts about anything around them.

Biosemiotics does not cancel abiogenesis as a theory because it doesn't really focus on the formation of life in the first place. At the moment it's closer to philosophy than science, and is only focusing on the evolution of biological systems, not how life started. Nothing says it didn't form through an abiogenetic formation and was part of life's formation. The field of biosemiotics is not a "counter" to abiogenesis.

Since life only begins at the molecular level, there is no need to search for life on all the scales below.
Since the philosophy of mind addresses consciousness as an entity in its own right, it fails to present it as an (emergent) consequence of life. — Wolfgang

What philosophy of mind claims is IRRELEVANT. You will need to study Science, not philosophy in order to understand the ontology of an emergent biological property like Consciousness.
Natural Phenomena are studied by Science, not philosophy.

I think abiogenesis is compelling because it blurs a fundamental distinction: that between life and non-life, or at least, makes it appear less fundamental. — Wayfarer

The set of hypotheses under the umbrella of Abiogenesis are our attempt to identify possible ways responsible for the emergence of biological systems from chemical ones. In my opinion it should be compelling for its epistemic value not just for being able to bring down our dogmas.

Mind/body should be examined together with the 'what is information' question..

Brain information is in the brain only.
Genetic information...I don't think it exists other than a shorthand for the people who study it and a pop culture concept.
Signal information...of the Claude Shannon type seems to reduce to physical matter only.
Physical information...such as distant galaxies, stars and planets having physical information associated with them...shorthand by practitioners but migrated to pop culture.

Dictionary definition of information is an abstract concept. Not very helpful if you are a physicalist.

I'm not trying to get too focused on information other than observing that brain information and consciousness are inseparable.

So my view is brain information is the only information that should be relevant to mind.

In my opinion it should be compelling for its epistemic value not just for being able to bring down our dogmas. — Nickolasgaspar

It's an interesting and valid area of research for sure, but not at the cost of obfuscating fundemental ontological distinctions.

We still live in a deeply superstitious, religious and foolish world and I think that's why there's so much confusion surrounding science. — Christoffer

There's also a deep and underlying fear of religion which colors a lot of what you're saying.

Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism.

It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated.

Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. The eminent Kant scholar Lewis Beck used to say that anyone who could believe in God could believe in anything. To appeal to an omnipotent deity is to allow that at any moment the regularities of nature may be ruptured, that miracles may happen. — Richard Lewontin, Review of Carl Sagan, Billions and Billions of Demons

There's also a deep and underlying fear of religion which colors a lot of what you're saying. — Wayfarer

The only fear of religion I have is when religious people force their own preferences and opinions upon the world as if they were facts and truth. Religious people tend to think that when a group operates around a consensus of facts as a scientific source for whatever they're doing -that means they're being forced by "scientists" and "experts" to think in a certain way. These people seem to think that operating on a ground of religious belief is on the same level as operating on scientific facts. And this is what's driving a lot of destructive movements today that function out of anti-intellectual conspiracy theories and whatever nonsense they cook up.

You are using that quote as some kind of idea that someone with a scientific mind is limited in their way of thinking about the world, but as I've mentioned, a truly scientific mind doesn't have that kind of inner conflict that people seem to believe they have.

Only religious minds can fool themselves into thinking the lack of religious or mystic ideas is somehow subpar or limited to the individual. But a religious mind can never have a frame of reference without having a scientific mind. They are doomed to always have these religious thoughts lurking in their minds on any topic that pops up. And those thoughts influence their ability to truly scrutinize a topic in the same way a scientific mind does. Everything starts to boil down to excuses for keeping the religious and the mystic instead of holding back emotions until something is proven.

Only the religious mind thinks the scientific mind is a depressed, emotionally empty void with a lack of wonder. In my experience, the sense of wonder while exploring scientific topics seems to be limitless, while the religious mind just surrenders to one set of ideas and then tries to keep feeding that craving for wonders by framing everything through that religious lens, only to end up being limited by locking themselves into that specific belief.

I have a paper coming out shortly in the Journal of Consciousness Exploration & Research, "The Hard Problem of Consciousness and the Fundamental Abstraction". It discusses the very point made by the OP at length. If anyone would like a preprint, let me know.

Your depiction of 'religious people' refers to a specific kind of religious mentality, most like fundamentalist or creationist Christians to whom science is threatening. But there are entire spectrums of 'religious people' who have completely different attitudes to the question.

In the 19th Century there was a kind of popular movement among English intellectuals to portray religion and science as mortal enemies. It's called 'the conflict thesis'. Most of the so-called 'new atheist' authors, and many who preach scientific materialism on the Internet, adopt that view, but it is a very blinkered view.

The sources I actually quoted in earlier in this thread were not 'religious people' at all but biologists and scientists. But those whom I quoted have believe that materialism - the view that there is no fundamental difference between the chemical and organic domains - is insufficient because it can't explain some of the basic characteristics of life, like memory, intention, homeostasis, the encoding and transmitting of genetic information via dna etc. But in your view, to question materialism is to be 'a religious person', meaning, a fundamentalist or science-denying flat earther. In fact the kind of materialism you argue for is a direct descendant of Christian monotheism, in that it allows only one kind of fundamental principle, but now it's matter (or matter-energy). The 'jealous God' dies hard.

Would you be willing to provide a synoptic overview of what you mean by ‘fundamental abstraction’? (Or will the answer be, ‘read my paper’ ;-) )

Wayfarer,
Quoting from my paper:
A conceptual space is the set of ideas onto which we normally project experience. The Fundamental Abstraction is a generally useful narrowing of mental focus which can limit our conceptual space. An inadequate conceptual space can create problematic representational artifacts, such as the pre-relativistic notion of simultaneity. While hard to see from within a tradition, representational problems can be identified by comparing diverse cultural, disciplinary and historical perspectives.
...
The human mind has limited representational resources. Eric of Auxerre (841-76) was per­haps the first to recognize that these limitations force the resort to abstract, universal con­cepts. Our working memories can only maintain 5-9 ‘chunks’ of information. Unable to apprehend the overwhelming complex­ity of nature, we employ abstrac­tions – attending to features of interest while ignoring others. Thus, natural science begins with a Fundamental Abstraction.

Knowledge is a subject-object relation, entailing a knowing subject and a known object. The initial moment of natural science is the abstraction of the object from the subject – our choice to attend to physical objects to the exclusion of inseparable subjectivity. Natural scien­tists care about what was experienced, not the act of experiencing. Thus, sci­ence is, by design and appropriately, is bereft of data and concepts on knowing subjects and their mental acts. Yet, these data and concepts are required to connect phys­ical fin­dings to awareness. Consequently, physics lacks intentional causes and effects – not because the physical and intentional are independent, but because we have abstracted their interdependence away in constructing physics.

Your depiction of 'religious people' refers to a specific kind of religious mentality, most like fundamentalist or creationist Christians to whom science is threatening. But there are entire spectrums of 'religious people' who have completely different attitudes to the question. — Wayfarer

Of course, but I didn't talk about religious people as much as "religious minds" and the difference of that towards a scientific mind. It acts as a kind of filter when making observations about a concept of reality. When the religious mind comes into contact with a concept of reality, it will always filter information against a presumption about reality. The religious person either lives with such a filter being extremely strong or measured down to extremely weak, where the extremely strong would be an extremist and the extremely weak would be a scientist who personally holds a religious belief.

But my point is that the filter is always there and whenever information occurs that challenges that filter, they will either abandon the religious/spiritual/mystic filter and change into a scientific mind or they will go onto a harder defense to defend the presumptions.

It can be obvious or it could show up as a continuous bias that taint their ability to form valid arguments or research.

A scientific mind doesn't do that. It can form other forms of biases, but the foundation of thinking doesn't have a filter because internalized ideas always come out of the information and knowledge. While both minds are susceptible to many types of bias, the religious mind tends to get stuck into a specific bias that is much more solidified and harder to break through.

In the 19th Century there was a kind of popular movement among English intellectuals to portray religion and science as mortal enemies. It's called 'the conflict thesis'. Most of the so-called 'new atheist' authors, and many who preach scientific materialism on the Internet, adopt that view, but it is a very blinkered view. — Wayfarer

And this is a strawman of what I described. I don't care about popcorn ideas. The concept I describe has more to do with the ability to have clarity of mind when challenging existential questions in opposition to a clouded mind. In essence, it's about fighting cognitive biases. The scientific method is the most effective and functioning method of reducing the risk of bias, the scientific mind is essentially acting according to similar principles when conceptualizing a topic while the religious mind, however weak in bias, still has the problem of bias.

Reducing cognitive biases is the core of a scientific mind. And reducing cognitive bias is the only way to reach any kind of objective truth or get close to any such concept. If that isn't the goal of knowledge and wisdom, then there's no point in discussing or thinking about anything since there's no point of direction anyone is moving toward in their acts of conceptualizing any kind of topic.

The sources I actually quoted in earlier in this thread were not 'religious people' at all but biologists and scientists. — Wayfarer

I know, it's not their research or points that I object to, but how those conclusions are used as an antithesis to abiogenesis when in fact they don't function as such. They're not about the process of how life began, but how evolution forms and behaves afterward. Life already needs to exist for their concepts to function, they do not describe origin.

But in your view, to question materialism is to be 'a religious person', meaning, a fundamentalist or science-denying flat earther. — Wayfarer

Once again you strawman things. You change the concept of a "religious mind" into a "religious person" and do not understand the concept I'm describing.

The basic misunderstanding you push is that their concepts disprove abiogenesis. It does not. It only describes how evolution, information, chemistry etc. behaves AFTER the origin of life or it could be that they all formed at the same time, but still does not disprove the essential concept of abiogenesis.

This antithesis against abiogenesis is something you propose through some misunderstanding of their concepts. I cannot conclude whether that is because of some kind of bias or not, but if you want to disprove abiogenesis using their concepts you need to explain why their concepts disprove abiogenesis.

In fact the kind of materialism you argue for is a direct descendant of Christian monotheism, in that it allows only one kind of fundamental principle, but now it's matter (or matter-energy). The 'jealous God' dies hard. — Wayfarer

Or you ignore what the science actually tells us, or misunderstand it and invent connections not proposed by the people you use as sources for the conclusions you make out of such self-made connections. And when I criticize this type of conjecture you strawman my arguments into being something about calling everyone who doesn't agree with the actual consensus, "flat-earthers".

I question the logic and conjecture in your conclusions based on it actually not being proposed by the people you source. It doesn't have to do with me being materialistic, it has to do with there not being enough data or evidence to counter abiogenesis and the people you source never proposing such either.

An inadequate conceptual space can create problematic representational artifacts, such as the pre-relativistic notion of simultaneity. While hard to see from within a tradition, representational problems can be identified by comparing diverse cultural, disciplinary and historical perspectives. — Dfpolis

Without knowing any other larger context, this sounds like how I described the "scientific mind" compared to the "religious mind". Do you mean that the representational artifacts act as a result of cognitive biases? I.e the inadequate conceptional space is akin to a person having a limited ability to conceptualize due to biases that lead to artifacts in reason and conclusions?

Christopher,

Yes, although the idea of conceptual spaces and subspaces is not limited to science and religion. I'd say that cognitive biases are embodied in limited conceptual spaces and that there is a feedback loop linking them. Because we conceptualize reality in a certain way, we tend to look for evidence consistent with that framework, ignoring or minimizing evidence that would undermine the framework. In the other direction, as selected evidence confirms our conceptual framework, it becomes more embedded in our neural net, and so more habitual and less reflective. The rejection of Wegner's views on continental drift exemplifies the selective use of evidence.

Representational artifacts are structures that must be constructed to bridge the gap between a limited conceptual space and reality. In pre-relativity physics, we have absolute time. In the rejection of continental drift, we have infinite forces holding the continents in place. In the representation of physicality and intentionality, we have dualism with its so-called problems (mind-body and free will). In the supposed conflict of science and religion, we have the constructs of "the scientific mind" and "the religious mind." This ignores the fact that some of the greatest scientists (e.g. Galileo, Newton and Laplace) were faithfully religious, and some deeply religious people (e.g. Bishop Robert Grosstesta, who defined the scientific method, and St. Albert the Great, the greatest botanist of the era) were excellent scientists. Even Darwin believed in God and "designed laws" of nature.

Mind/body should be examined together with the 'what is information' question..

Brain information is in the brain only.
Genetic information...I don't think it exists other than a shorthand for the people who study it and a pop culture concept.
Signal information...of the Claude Shannon type seems to reduce to physical matter only.
Physical information...such as distant galaxies, stars and planets having physical information associated with them...shorthand by practitioners but migrated to pop culture. — Mark Nyquist

To quote from my paper:

Claude Shannon, the founder of information theory, defined information as a reduction of possibility, but there are many kinds of possibility. Imagine a binary message transmitted over such a distance that it is entirely transmitted before any of it is received. As each bit is received, the number of possible messages is reduced by one half, but physical possibility is not reduced, because the signal already exists. What has changed is logical possibility. Before reception, it is logically possible for a bit to be an a or a b, but not after reception. Thus, information is a logical, not a physical property.

We may speak of physical processes that bring us closer to understanding in terms of sending and receiving ‘information,’ but not univocally, because logical possibility is not reduced until the received bit is known. What exists before then is intelligibility, not knowledge. So, it is equivocating to say that both computers and minds process ‘information.’ — Dennis F. Polis

I'm not trying to get too focused on information other than observing that brain information and consciousness are inseparable.

So my view is brain information is the only information that should be relevant to mind. — Mark Nyquist

First, I agree that the information we are conscious of is neurally encoded, and so concepts are inseparable from neural representations. Aristotle and Aquinas both recognized that rational thought is impossible without a sensory representation (their phantasm). Galen saw that brain trauma alone could lead to cognitive disease. Still, there is nothing about a neural representation that entails our consciousness of it, and we are unaware of most neural representations. So, while concepts are inseparable from representations, they are not identical. Something needs to be "done" to a representation to make us aware of it -- its intelligibility must be actualized if it is to be known. The aspect of us that does this is what Aristotle and Aquinas called the "agent intellect." Daniel Dennett represents this as a homunculus in his Cartesian Theater, but shows it cannot be physical. That is also the conclusion of Aristotle and Aquinas. It must be non-physical because physics has no intentional effects, and knowing what is represented is an intentional act. So, actually knowing neurally encoded information requires us to have an immaterial aspect, the agent intellect.

Second, if all we knew were "brain information," then external reality could not inform us, and "knowing" would be imagining. Any theory of mind worth its salt needs to show how nature can inform us. The Aristotelian-Thomistic view does. It notes that an object informing our senses is identically our senses being informed by the object. In other words, the sensed object's modification of our neural state is identically our neural representation of the sensed object. So, neural representation is shared existence. It is both the object's modification of our neural state, and our representation of the object. The same is true when we actualize the intelligibility latent in the representation. Our awareness being informed by the neural representation is identically the neural representation (and so the object) informing our awareness.

My article is now published. Polis, D. F., "The Hard Problem of Consciousness & the Fundamental Abstraction," Journal of Consciousness Exploration & Research. (14) 2, pp. 96-114. https://jcer.com/index.php/jcj/article/view/1042/1035

Congratulations for your publication! :up:

Congratulations for your publication! — javi2541997

Thank You

Because we conceptualize reality in a certain way, we tend to look for evidence consistent with that framework, ignoring or minimizing evidence that would undermine the framework. In the other direction, as selected evidence confirms our conceptual framework, it becomes more embedded in our neural net, and so more habitual and less reflective. — Dfpolis

Yes, this is essentially what I meant (in less detail), by the "scientific mind" and the "religious mind". My definitions were made based on previous discussions, so it looks more like I position it in a purely religious vs scientific matter, but essentially my point was that a religious mind has a filter based on presupposed narratives and concepts that makes it harder to reach scientific conclusions since that filter always need to be dismantled to arrive at conclusions without biases. A scientific mind is a mind that is free from such religious filters, but it could also mean anything that filters reality into a presupposed concept for the subjective mind trying to conceptualize a topic. So when you mention ignoring or minimizing evidence that would undermine that framework, that is consistent with what I mean as well in that the "filter" filters out such evidence.

This ignores the fact that some of the greatest scientists (e.g. Galileo, Newton and Laplace) were faithfully religious, and some deeply religious people (e.g. Bishop Robert Grosstesta, who defined the scientific method, and St. Albert the Great, the greatest botanist of the era) were excellent scientists. Even Darwin believed in God and "designed laws" of nature. — Dfpolis

And this is I think the consequential confusion that my somewhat poor definitions create. What I mean is more that these scientists, because of their religious beliefs, have a religious mindset, and therefore all of them have to actively fight the filter of religious belief in order for it not to undermine their own scientific and philosophical findings. For any findings and conclusions that require them to challenge their personal religious ideas, that filter creates an unnecessary strain on mental thought that a purely scientific mind would not have to go through. It almost becomes a testament to their brilliance that they were able to pierce through that filter in their mind and reach conclusions that were so fundamental to science as a whole. But I wonder where they would have arrived if their mindset were truly scientific and free from that filter. Some of our great philosophers and scientists had conclusions in which further thinking was just stopped by themselves with the argument "because God". If they didn't have the "filter", they might have kept going with their lines of thought and might have made further discoveries that we had to wait even longer for to arrive in the history of science.

What I mean is more that these scientists, because of their religious beliefs, have a religious mindset, and therefore all of them have to actively fight the filter of religious belief in order for it not to undermine their own scientific and philosophical findings. — Christoffer

This misunderstands the "religious mindset." Recent scholarship has shown that the medieval church, not merely tolerated, but actively encouraged, scientific inquiry. (E.g. James Hannam, The Genesis of Science: How the Christian Middle Ages Launched the Scientific Revolution (2011).) The rationale, the doctrine of the "Two Books," was that God not only reveals Himself in Scripture, but also in the Book of Nature. Thus, the medieval religious mind was convinced that a true understanding of nature inevitably led to a deeper understanding of God. This tradition continues in Catholic circles. For example, early on the dominant interpretation of Genesis was literal. (Exceptions included such notables as Sts. Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas.) However, late 19th c. geology convinced theologians that a literal interpretation was wrong, as the actual age of the earth was too great. Consequently, the dominant Catholic interpretation of Genesis became non-literal to better conform to scientific findings.

Darwin did not think it necessary to reject God to do science, but instead followed a line of thought advanced by Suarez, viz. that science deals with "secondary causes." The idea is that God is the ultimate cause, continually keeping everything in existence, but that what is kept in being has real causal efficacy, namely, secondary causality. (Look at the quotations opposite the title page of the 1st ed. of On the Origin of Species.)

This is not to deny the existence of religious literalists. We all know of creationists and so-called "intelligent design" advocates. (ID is really unintelligent design, because it assumes that God is not smart enough to create initial states and laws of nature adequate to His ends.) Still, literal belief is not universal, and so it is not an essential characteristic of a faith commitment.

My article is now published. Polis, D. F., "The Hard Problem of Consciousness & the Fundamental Abstraction," Journal of Consciousness Exploration & Research. (14) 2, pp. 96-114. https://jcer.com/index.php/jcj/article/view/1042/1035 — Dfpolis

That's exciting! A proper paper on my favourite subject by a TPF user. If I can manage it I might start a thread on it if that's OK with you.

I might start a thread on it if that's OK with you. — bert1

Sure. Let me know.

"If introspection and consequent judgements are unreliable, then our belief that we observed what we believe we observed, as well as our belief that we reasoned correctly in analyzing our observations, are
equally unreliable – for these are judgements based on introspection "

Yes, it seems unlikely that we can ever eliminate the fact that we are actually thinking from the analysis of what thought is, doesn't it?

"Either final causality is natural or we are supernatural"

:up: