The brain recognizes that it did not generate this movement on its own because it notices there was no conscious reason for it. In the context of the situation, the brain can easily deduce what happened. — punos

I do not believe there is a single, literal region of the brain responsible for the conscious unity of experience because it is the unified integration of the entire brain and nervous system that gives rise to this unity. — punos

The noumenal world does exist independently — J

If you were to allow a brain surgeon to open your brain and begin poking at different areas while you were still awake and aware, you would notice that when the surgeon stimulates a specific spot in the brain, you would experience a specific memory, thought, or emotion associated with that area. This demonstrates that the material and the ideal are causally and efficaciously connected. — punos

I think the brain is an infrastructure in which information is exchanged between the conscious and subconscious minds. So, we cannot think when a certain part of our brain is damaged. — MoK

No one confuses the photo with the object, but neither is the photo the object “as it is in itself.”
— Wayfarer

It's not an hallucination or an illusion, but it does not possess the inherent reality that we accord to it.
— Wayfarer

But could you explain to me what you mean, exactly, by the bolded phrases? — Ludwig V

You are going to be accused of not getting the point, — Janus

you have to explain why the world would not appear to us "as is". — Apustimelogist

Physical Monism may be what you are getting at, but this is generally regarded as a kind of Physicalism.

>Generally described under the title 'physicalism'. In slogan form 'mind is what brain does'.

Panpsychism?

>Matter has some latent consciousness, Patterner is an advocate.

Eliminativism? As you strongly deny what you are expressing is physicalism we have to rule this out. This basically describes Mental Terms as misleading (I am sympathetic towards this approach despite its faults).


Neural Monism is a kind of physicalism too, so we have to rule this out.

>Neutral monism is not usually desribed as physicalism - it is the idea that at bottom, being or reality is neither mental nor physical but can appear as either.

Non-Reductive Physicalism would mean you have to face the Supervenience Problem.

>Correct. It's probably the majority view.

Epiphenomenalism would be another option possibly?

Usually associated with physicalism> mind is an epiphenonenon that appears in sophisticated beings.

Your list doesn't mention idealism. Bernardo Kastrup is an advocate.

David Chalmer's paper Facing up to the Problem of Consciousness was one of the origins of 'consciousness studies'. — I like sushi

• Physical facts (e.g. brain states, neurons firing)
• Phenomenal facts (e.g. the what it’s like of seeing red)

How can it be that thinking consciousness is a fundamental property of reality is not challenging the presuppositions of naturalism? — Patterner

I don't see it (consciousness) as "grafted", "inserted", or "added on", any more than properties like mass or electric charge are. — Patterner

The problem is that we are so used to thinking of things in only one way that it's difficult to consider there might be other ways. — Patterner

I don't know why you keep phrasing it as if the object is dependent on your mind when you should be talking about what you see or perceive. — Apustimelogist

This is not interesting though. — Apustimelogist

If all you're saying is that what we experience is mediated by our senses, our bodies and brains, then you are saying nothing controversial. — Janus

Don't be like Wayfarer who acts childish when he realizes he's beat. — Philosophim

The book explores how our "everyday" mind works as a device for selecting just a few parts of the outside reality that are important for our survival. We don't experience the world as it is, but as a virtual reality – a small, limited system that evolved to keep us safe and ensure our survival. This system, though essential for getting us safely across a busy street, is insufficient for understanding and solving the challenges of the modern world. But we are also endowed with a quiescent "second network" of cognition that, when activated, can dissolve or break through the barriers of ordinary consciousness. We all experience this activation to some degree, when we suddenly see a solution to a problem or have an intuitive or creative insight – when we connect to a larger whole beyond the self. By combining ancient teachings with modern science, we have a new psychology of spiritual experience – the knowledge to explore how this second network can be developed and stabilized. ...they emphasize the need to reflect on and explicate, both individually and collectively, the functional value of virtues such as generosity, humility and gratitude, and of service. These attitudes and activities shift brain function away from the self and toward an expanded consciousness – an experience of the world's greater interconnectedness and unity and an understanding of one's place in it. — God 4.0 - in the Nature of Higher Consciousness and the Experience called God, Robert Ornstein, Sally M. Ornstein

The whole thread may have been given too much credit. It's fairly hard to salvage a thread that begins that way. — Leontiskos

One has to examine
what this means in practice in the way a culture conducts itself, treats expressions of otherness i. one’s family and community, avoids war and other violent acts which define the boundaries of ‘interconnectedness’. — Joshs

it doesn't affect the strength of my argument. — Sam26

For NDEs, with 200-300 million reports…. — Sam26

When astronomers observe distant galaxies, when biologists examine cellular structures, and when physicists read instrument displays, all involve sensory experience. The suggestion that our senses are "the worst data-taking devices" would collapse the empirical foundation of science itself. — Sam26

Subjective vs. Objective Elements

NDE testimony includes objective elements (verifiable details like surgical procedures) and subjective elements (e.g., feelings of love, encounters with deceased relatives). Corroborated objective elements, such as a child's verified ER observations, lend credibility to subjective reports, suggesting genuine experiences. Cultural variations affect interpretation (e.g., light as Jesus or ancestors), but core phenomena remain consistent, indicating universal features of consciousness. — Sam26

Open questions persist, such as the timing of experiences or the mechanisms of survival, but these do not negate the robust evidence for consciousness persistence. — Sam26

without a human body for internal reference, the simulation may be lacking substance. A metal frame robot may come closer to emulating humanity, but it's the frailties of flesh that human social groups have in common — Gnomon

“Man, like every living being, is concerned about many things... But man, in contrast to other living beings, has spiritual concerns — cognitive, aesthetic, social, political. They are expressed in every human endeavor, from language and tools to philosophy and religion. Among these concerns is one which transcends all others: it is the concern about the ultimate.”
— Paul Tillich, The Dynamics of Faith (1957)

We commonly explain occurrences by saying one thing happened because of — due to the cause of — something else. But we can invoke very different sorts of causes in this way. For example, there is the because of physical law (The ball rolled down the hill because of gravity) and the because of reason (He laughed at me because I made a mistake). The former hinges upon the kind of necessity we commonly associate with physical causation; the latter has to do with what makes sense within a context of meaning. — Steve Talbott, What do Organisms Mean?

And within that mathematical description, affirmed by decades of data from particle colliders and powerful telescopes, there is nothing that even hints at the inner experiences those particles somehow generate. How can a collection of mindless, thoughtless, emotionless particles come together and yield inner sensations of color or sound, of elation or wonder, of confusion or surprise? — Patterner

Naturalism states that everything that concretely exists is entirely natural; nothing supernatural or otherwise non-natural exists. Given that we know that conscious experience exists, we must as naturalists suppose that it’s wholly natural. And given that we’re specifically materialist or physicalist naturalists (as almost all naturalists are), we must take it that conscious experience is wholly material or physical. — Galen Strawson

Strawson is among many within the analytic community who have been unable to make the leap to a post-Nietzschean way of construing objectivity, causality and subjectivity. They don’t see that the problem is their reliance on an inadequate formulation of the physical, and an inadequate biological model. As a result, Strawson finds subjective experience to be so qualitatively alien with respect to his understanding of the non-experientially physical that he has no choice but to create a new category of the physical to make room for it. — Joshs

In contrast to the outlook of naturalism, Husserl believed all knowledge, all science, all rationality depended on conscious acts, acts which cannot be properly understood from within the natural outlook at all. Consciousness should not be viewed naturalistically as part of the world at all, since consciousness is precisely the reason why there was a world there for us in the first place. For Husserl it is not that consciousness creates the world in any ontological sense—this would be a subjective idealism, itself a consequence of a certain naturalising tendency whereby consciousness is cause and the world its effect—but rather that the world is opened up, made meaningful, or disclosed through consciousness. The world is inconceivable apart from consciousness. — Routledge Introduction to Phenomenology, ed. Dermot Moran, p144

Not all souls are self-aware — punos

Consider animals that do not recognize themselves in a mirror. — punos

Later, bending of light around large masses, and gravitational redshift were verifications, but neither of these had been done at time of GR publishing. — noAxioms

Over a period of seven to eight years, almost all the cells in your body have been replaced, — punos

even within physics, especially when the thermodynamics of non-equilibrium processes is involved, many phenomena are strongly emergent in the sense that they aren't intelligible merely in light of, or deducible from, the laws that govern their smaller components. — Pierre-Normand