I see where you’re going with this — ‘physical’ is an ambiguous term. I would agree that my definition doesn’t hold since I can’t come up with a meaningful answer to your question.

But why do people defend physicalism if ‘physical’ is ill-defined?

I would say anything completely described by the laws of physics

Thanks for the information, I vaguely remember coming across Hempel’s Dilemma in the past but never really analyzed it.

We could. (But what good does it do?) Are you answered? — tim wood

Practically speaking, it wouldn’t necessarily do us any good at all. But I think, if it were true and we came to understand it, it would offer a broader understanding of consciousness and our place in reality. In other words, it would give us a better grasp on the fundamental nature of reality, which could benefit us by allowing us to see ourselves in a broader context of consciousness.

It does seem to largely be a semantic issue in many ways. And I liked the point you made about physics being compatible with a ‘mind-only’ ontology.

I'm not sure I followed all that mind-hopping. But the crux of the Consciousness debate hinges on whether it is simply an ongoing process generated by the body/brain, or is a substance floating out-there in the ether, or is received as a signal from some transmitting source. If it's like a radio signal, then of course any physical radio mechanism (receptive context) could tune into it. But if Self/Soul/Consciousness is unique to each person, then death of the personal body would terminate that particular process of person-oriented awareness. — Gnomon

I don’t blame you, I realized recently that the model I proposed in the OP is fairly convoluted :lol:.

If consciousness is like a radio signal and brains are radio receivers, doesn’t this posit a dualism between the physical and consciousness? Like a sort of ‘pandualism’ where there’s a non-physical/immaterial ‘field’ of consciousness that is tuned into by the brains of organisms composed of entirely non-conscious physical substance?

And yes, I do currently agree with you that if consciousness is localized to each individual, then when that person dies their awareness dies with them and they don’t ‘become’ someone else.

Yes. I mean, I believe that some form of monism is ultimately true, that is, everything is made up of fundamentally the same stuff. I don't think the universe cares for metaphysical dualisms. It seems nature prefers simplicity, meaning that there has to be something that accounts for everything in terms of constitution. — Manuel

I couldn’t agree more. Monism in some form appears to be the case.

When it comes to the case of monistic idealism in particular, I’m pretty much agnostic on it at this point. I’ve read some very interesting and convincing arguments for it and against materialism/physicalism, but we just don’t really know for sure.

But then my body is not fundamentally different from mind, if it is the same stuff in some sense. If my body is fundamentally different from my mind, I could not see how my mind could represent itself in a body. So some similarity must be assumed. — Manuel

Yes, this makes total sense to me.

Thanks for the welcome and kind comment! Much appreciated.

Also, I forgot to mention in my previous post that there is another school of Hindu thought called Kashmir Shaivism which is similar to Advaita in many ways, the main difference being that the phenomenal world is a direct manifestation of the divine energy of the one consciousness and not necessarily an illusion.

How do you know that it is a misidentification ?
How do you overcome this ?
What is moksha ( liberation) ?
What is it freedom from and to where ? — Amity

These are all great questions.

I would say, based off of my limited understanding of Advaita á la Rupert Spira, the first step is gaining the intellectual understanding and knowledge/information from the teaching that all that exists is the one consciousness. Dropping the notion that you are a ‘separate self’ follows the gaining of knowledge/information from the teaching. The prior misidentification becomes obvious when one realizes themselves as the one consciousness, under Advaita.

Spira has said that your experience of the world does not change at all upon liberation/enlightenment, you just no longer see yourself as separate from the one consciousness, which by the way is spaceless and timeless.

Addressing what moksha/liberation is, I would say it is the freedom from the suffering that believing you are a ‘separate self’ causes. The notion of a ‘separate self’ under Advaita tends to create distinctions between self and other, which leads to egoism and selfish tendencies, all of which create at least some suffering in the life of the individual who believes themselves to be separate from the one consciousness.

I will note here that I personally am not fully committed to Advaita’s metaphysical position being true, as I am currently agnostic towards monistic idealism in general. Just wanted to give you the perspective of Advaita from what I understand of it :smile:.

Thanks for the useful information about Schopenhauer and Nietzsche considering Eastern thought, I’ll definitely look into that some more. It’s also interesting that there are potential parallels between some of Kant’s ideas and Taoism.

I have the utmost respect for Advaita, but I think it’s nearly always misrepresented. (Not saying it is by Rupert Spira.) But in its original cultural context it is part of a living culture and, you might say, ‘culturally regulated’. — Wayfarer

So they’re deeply embedded in a cultural form, and trying to extract the essence and boil it down to verbal description is fraught with difficulties. — Wayfarer

I agree with these points and this analysis. It’s probably a mistake for anyone to try to isolate Advaitan philosophy from the culture in which it has been embedded for so long. You’ve also made some interesting comments on how the West has effectively commercialized much Eastern thought, though this hasn’t denigrated the core of the philosophies. Also, I do agree that Western thought has been influenced to a significant degree by Eastern thought.

Here, the experiencing self is described as different, like 'space within a container' within space itself.
So, the individual body/self is different from Brahman — Amity

I’m by no means an expert in Advaita so I could be wrong, but it says that the experiencing self seems different from Brahman, when in actuality it isn’t different. The seeming difference is the misidentification that must be overcome in order to achieve moksha (liberation).

'Western philosophy' like 'Eastern philosophy' covers so many different views or visions, that it is unlikely that there is a 'general consensus' on anything. — Amity

Fair point. And I also agree with what you said @Amity about the industry surrounding Eastern thought.

It doesn't solve the problem of how consciousness first arose, unless you accept some form of panpsychism. Which is fine. I don't personally see good evidence for panpsychism, but it's not something I can outright reject. It's unfalsifiable, though it does solve the problem of emergence in a certain way.

If you say something like, human beings can be said to represent one large mind or brain, I think there are ways to formulate that into something coherent. — Manuel

Good point, I didn’t really consider the metaphysics of consciousness in the model. I personally would go the route of monistic idealism over panpsychism, which you may have been alluding to in the latter part of the above quote.

From my perspective, this creates more questions than it solves. It forces mind to be something separate from the body, but there's no evidence that mind can exist without an accompanying body.

So to be consistent, you'd also have to entertain the view that (say) your arm is created in part, by the arms of a dead person. I can't make sense of that. — Manuel

Unless monistic idealism is true. Then body is actually just an image of mind. And your last comment conjured a pretty disturbing image in my mind that made me laugh :lol:. But you’re not wrong.

You’ve made some very good and thoughtful points here.

I don't see how that follows. Take the number of people who've been born in the 20th century alone, we're beyond 7 billion people now.

For the "replacement" to work in any coherent sense, you'd want to say something like, for every person that dies another person "takes in" or is influenced by the consciousness of the dead person. But population growth has gone up globally, this would require a single experience to subdivide into many people. — Manuel

I guess if I were to continue to defend the original model, I would say in response to your objection about population growth and the ‘replacement’ not being 1 to 1 is that it doesn’t take into account the possibility that other species possess some level of consciousness and that their consciousness might also be considered to be one of the alternative contexts of consciousness that could replace or be replaced by another. Also, there very well could be conscious (though not necessarily intelligent) life on other planets in the universe.

This doesn’t mean that the exact ratio of all conscious life throughout the universe is in a 1:1 ratio, however. It may be that the ‘replacement’ doesn’t necessarily happen instantaneously.

Also, I want to add that I don’t dogmatically defend the model I proposed, I just wanted to see whether it could be a possibility.

How would a newly born person "make up" for the experience they did not receive from the dead person? They'd need to get it from there own internal resources meaning genetics, brain activity and whatever else plays a role in consciousness. — Manuel

What I had in mind with the original model was more like this: when a conscious being dies, their consciousness entirely ceases to exist. This means that their self/identity effectively ceases to exist. But if other selves/identities still exist and new ones come into existence when that conscious being dies, the ‘self-void’ left by the dead conscious being would be ‘filled’ by one of the other existing selves or one of the new selves. Now, I have no proof or evidence that this actually happens, but it’s an interesting possibility to entertain, at least to me.

Few of the terms in philosophy are well defined. So there's no problem with your formulation. I was using my own too. :) — Manuel

Good point haha.

Thanks for responding.

I agree with what you said about someone dying not being the cause of a new experience coming into being.

But if one person’s consciousness ceases to exist while others’ continue to exist and new consciousnesses come into existence, could it be the case that the consciousness that disappeared is in a sense ‘replaced’ by one of the others?

And perhaps my use of the term ‘naturalism’ here was ill-informed.