Consciousness is what there is when there is nothing.

I’m still busy questioning the binary, however it’s happening.

So half-nothing is also half-something. Eh?

And Dan Dennett.

Yes and no. Like subjectivity and objectivity. Black and white. Yin and Yang. Nothingness and something. Ones and zeroes. Bacardi and coke. Matter and antimatter. Laurel and Hardy. Homer and Marge. Walter and Skyler. Chaos and order.

Short clip from one of the people looking into it:



A full presentation in which she repeatedly states that 'we don't know how to turn the water into wine.'



David Chalmers



You can spend a lot of time on youtube looking into what consciousness is and nobody knows outside of philosophy such as Sean Carroll calling it an emergent phenomenon in his swing at philosophy called 'The Big Picture' and simply leaving it at that.

Or you can take the word of my mother's neurologist who says that nobody knows where the decisions come from. The physicist Brian Greene has said that he would leave physics to know what consciousness is.

As I said, the discussion is all over the place.

Ive been following Ben for years. Made me realize that materialism and its opposite are not at odds, in fact. About nine minutes in.

That is kind of Sartre's view on conciousness in Being and Nothingness. Probably the most insightful single book on the subject. Also, no less convoluted than any other discussion about conciousness.

It is a kind of truism that we know close to nothing about a particular subject when our theories lack simplicity.

I am "conscious" or the penny in the corner; I am "conscious" of the Victrola playing Mendelssohn in the background; I am "conscious" of the Model T Ford going down the road.

According to our usage of being "conscious" is an "activity" and not a "thing".

The activity of being "conscious" is mediated by the senses and also thinking. Th eyes and ears are the primary mediators of this activity though all the other senses are active in this consciousness.

One look at the activity of the senses is that they are islands of the external world which have , through an evolutionary burrowing , penetrated the being of man. Goethe said it well when he said "only like can know like".

Back to the "thing" and yes there is an activity/being to which is background to this conscious activity. In esoteric work this "thing" is the "astral body" which is the undercurrent primary in the realm of human conscious activity.

I have seen the term "astral" met with disdain and so I present it sheepishly as in no way is it referred to among materialists with any type of comprehension.

The astral is in the world of the "soul" through which a man accumulates his experiences. yada,yada

You can get an inner appreciation of this body at the moment of awakening in the morning. The spirit and soul beings of a man leave the man at sleep and enter into the surrounding world as supersensible beings. We don't remember this activity for our evolution has not as of yet, developed the
higher senses to know and remember man's sleep state when he is "unconscious".

Depending upon one's disposition the entry of the astral body into the being of Man at awakening can be a powerful thunder of awakening or quietly but in any case, though the astral body was living within the supersensible, at the moment of entry of this body of man this body is overwhelmed by our daylight consciousness and we are unable to see within .

This type of thing has to be comprehended through different view points, as does anything supersensible; hopefully this one look can be a bridge to understanding.

I suspect materialists will eventually get to a point where they just say 'it doesn't exist' because it can't be explained by the cult of empiricism.

The ironic thing is that 'material' can't even be defined, because any interaction with whatever 'material' is, including something as simple as its definition, is fundamentally just the sense data of your mind.

No interaction is possible without a mind <=> all interactions are mind-dependent, including the interactions of particles in the universe, etc, ∴ Reality itself is some kind of mind.

More logical flawlessness.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Berkeley

To argue why something, including logic, exists is to use logic, right?

You don't need to be a materialist to acknowledge the problem of talking about 'conciousness' as if we know what we're talking about.
I'm ok with this belief or some similar version of it, but then you have the very serious problem which is all the evidence to suggest there were planetary interactions, for example, prior to life on earth and perhaps even prior to any life anywhere.

There are so many 'New Age' trippy things that can be done with this. For example we can compare the universe to a fetus ,the universe being very young, after all. So if I want to start a cult I'd base it on consciousness being fundamental and that it evolved to create creatures to connect to it by some mysterious means. With that we can allow for material interactions taking place w/o conscious beings to observe and thereby 'create' it.

IOW, for all we know, we are the universe's computing platform.

Too bad I don't drink as much beer as Zeno. I think all of this goes great w/ Bass Ale but, damn it, I take Metformin and can't drink enough of them w/o risking my life.

Or maybe time is not linear and it only seems from our perspective that there were physical interactions prior to life. Or maybe (see Berkley) there has always been a mind (God) even before there seemingly wasn't.
Not too much of a problem. Find a way to access God's green herb, buy a vape and enjoy yourself.

Heh, I've had an AZ MJ med card for a few years after one of my doctors said to give it try. At this moment I'm floating half-way to the ceiling.

If there were nothing, we wouldn't be having this conversation. Even if something were 1 gazillion to one against, given that we are having this conversation it was inevitable that there is something in hindsight.

Howard, get the **** off the ceiling.

Whichs leads one to conclude?

Eh, it's not Berkelian idealism that I'm getting at. The history of science is one long disproof of cause and effect being replaced by fundamental properties of the universe. It died with Newton and the final nail for physics was aether being disproven by Einstein and quantum entanglement. Looking into consciousness more and more and we will find there really is no biomechanical explanation for it. Gravity is just THERE, a part of the universe. So is consciousness.

There is no spoon.

There is no profit from tuition in simplicity. But on the other hand, brain surgery is complex. Half something and half something.

There was a thread about this very subject years ago in SMP, probably several. Something, something, something. It's better than nothing. Or so most believe.

I'll go with the philosopher Hegel on this one (paraphrasing from german):
"The existence of existence is a necessity because its opposite can't exist."

I.e. 'non-existence' cannot 'exist' because then it would be an 'existence'.

A more physical approach:
Matter/energy is not independent of spacetime (note: not "space and time" but Einsteinian spacetime). A piece of matter (or some form of energy) cannot exist without some spacetime to exist in.

Vice versa spacetime without anything existing in it makes no sense, either, because there would be nothing to delineate one piece of it against another (neither here from there nor past from future). It would have no property and thus could not be shown to exist by any means.

So from this we can formulate an argument against non-existence:

Null Hypothesis: Nonexistence is possible.

A non-existence can, by the above, have no spacetime associated with it. So it would neither have a size nor a duration. In effect any such nonexistence must be over immediately. Ergo the null-hypothesis cannot be true.

Or to put it more bluntly: "Existence" has no alternative (it is a tautology).
The idea of existence vs. non-existence is like the idea of one elephant vs. zero elephants. The former is something that can be while the latter is merely a concept.

As to why anything particular exists in any one particular form (e.g. what we call 'matter'). That's an unanswered (and possibly unanswerable) question.

There's a lot of sense in the above, as discussed here already. Only thing I'd take issue with is preceding the word - concept - with "merely a". It's not very clear at all that concepts have some lesser form of existence than matter, for example. Instead, it may be better to say that - nothingness exists in a different way to matter, energy etc. Better to say - non-existence or nothingness, as commonly understood, is impossible.

I had a concept of a sandwich for lunch. Fewer calories than a material sandwich.

I had a concept of someone having a concept of having a sandwich. I lost some brain cells.

Can’t disprove nothing because to be disproven one must be something. Else, what can you say you have disproven?