Even without the sensory faculties, your ability to experience hunger & thirst, emotions, your hormonal operations would not be compromised and so on. — Judaka

That is a good point. Our bodies know a lot that we are not aware of. On top of that, most of our driving is done automatically. Our brains take a lot of shortcuts to reduce the amount of thinking we do. So now we have information without awareness of that information. This goes with self-talk and healing and the placebo effect. Then there are people with apparently no self-awareness. I think we are questioning our consciousness? We can perceive information without being fully aware of it and we can use our thoughts to influence our bodily functions and the direction our thoughts take.

Right now too many people behave like the church of old when it tried to be the sole authority over what we think. What fools these people are to restrict discussions to technological correctness as they know all that is important to know. — Athena

That is more of a discriminatory opinion than an absolute fact. That statement has stereotypical innuendos assuming that every Church in the world is that way.

Yes, granted there are several incidents that church promotes ignorance whether it is through good intentions or maintaining there political agendas.

I believe religion has philosophical truths, if your conscious allows you to dismiss the cultural laws and just focus on its teachings. To me, Philosophy and Religion are twin brothers with identical attributes. They just don’t get along because they seek justification to condemn one another for there convictions.

I guess my argument is we manifest our own reality. Validation is irrelevant it only becomes relevant if the witness choose to believe in the evidence.

If you choose not to believe in the evidence than validation is none existent. For validation to exist the mind must believe to be true.

Maybe Truth is just up to the mind to interpret and whatever you believe is the truth. And that is how reality is perceived.

Given, the standard definition of consciousness as awareness of something and that something being either the self or one's environment, it appears that blocking sensations eliminates the latter i.e. awareness of one's environment from the get go. As for the other component of consciousness, awareness of the self, this seems to supervene on awareness of the environment i.e. only when one's aware of the environment does one become aware of the self as that which is aware of the environment. In short, once sensations are shut down, consciousness should also vanish i.e. existence comes to an end.

Mysticism, I hear, is about a certain kind of consciousness that I'm doubtful is real. One goal of mysticism is to be conscious without being conscious of something.

I suspect this is off-topic but I have a feeling it might be relevant at some level or in some sense.


Coming to the issue that the OP brings up for discussion, I'd say there's some confusion that needs to be cleared before we can arrive at a reasonable understanding of what existence means.

The first thing to note is consensus informs us that everything detectable, sense-based or instrument-based, is immediately classified as physical. If so, there can be no such thing as detectable and non-physical. What this means is there's no hope for someone trying to demonstrate the existence of the non-physical in terms of being detectable in some way or other.

I quite agree with TheMadFool. I feel that discussion on validation of consciousness and external existence must be done from Analytical approach. After all these are the topics of Epistemology, not Mysticism or Religion. Why would they ask and debate these topics from mystical or religious grounds, when the discussions will fall back to mystical and subjective realm, which cannot be objectified or logically validated in its nature.