Consciousness as primary substance
I've spent many years of my life believing that matter (and energy) is the primary and only real substance. Recently I've been wondering if consciousness is the primary substance that the material world gloms onto or adheres to.
What are your thoughts on this and what are the implications for free will?
What are your thoughts on this and what are the implications for free will?
Comments (23)
Well, matter is a form of energy and energy might be fluctuations in the vacuum, so maybe it's the vacuum that's primary.
Quoting Noah Te Stroete
The problem with this is that human consciousness is dependent on bodies.
Quoting Noah Te Stroete
I don't know that it would change anything.
For example, re Marchesk's comments above, I don't think that either "matter is energy" or "
It has been observed that the cosmos when viewed from a sufficiently far distance is structured very similarly to the neuronal structure of brains. Perhaps some would argue that the universe itself is conscious.
Perhaps then matter is dependent on consciousness?
Only in the way that these rocks resemble an elephant when viewed from particular angles and with sufficient imagination:
It's an example of apophenia.
How could you show it isn't? Any evidence would be something acting upon a body.
Taking a dualist view of consciousness and the material world simply lands you with the unanswerable question that Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia put to Descartes: how could the two substances interact? If you add to that the fact that consciousness looks much more like something that happens in and to material brains than a substance in its own right, and the fact that when the brain dies consciousness appears to cease, the whole idea of consciousness as a substance starts to look very implausible.
As for free will, I think that's just an illusion. We feel as if we have free will, because we are often aware of more than one possible course of action, and feel that we could choose any one of them: but there's never any evidence that we are able to make any choice other than the one we actually make, and this would still be the case even if consciousness were a substance.
Good points, Herg. Perhaps neurons coelesce around consciousness? Consciousness is the glue? If so, then consciousness would be the primary substance. Yes, it appears that consciousness stops when the brain dies, but what if consiousness just disperses into the cosmos? The cosmos being conscious as well (as I intimated to Terrapin Station).
That's a tough one, Noah.
I suggest something like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%B6bius_strip
As for free will, I don't think a theoretical decision either way would matter much for the way we live. We already act both as if we do and don't have free will. Maybe a binary approach is never going to be applicable, even if an impressive argument could be made in either direction. (And do we really know what we really mean by 'free will' in the first place? I'd say look into later WIttgenstein and see if that shines a different light on the issue.)
You were saying something specifically about fractals? What were you saying about them?
I was just saying that nature tends to repeat patterns on different size scales.
And I was just saying that the patterns you're reading into things--for exmple, the idea that the universe at all resembles the neuronal structure of brains--are examples of apophenia.
Well, okay. However, if the patterns follow physical and mathematical laws as in Turing's fractals, then they aren't just in my mind as the rock formation elephant is.
Consciousness is universal, and our material brains, through the pineal gland, act as a kind of antenna to facilitate the universal consciousness. Our differences being determined by matter. Our commonality being determined by a shared universal consciousness.
I don’t see how this is falsifiable.
The vastness of space, doesn't allow complication and communication necessary for consciousness as large as a galaxy.
Should we ask "does consciousness require some form of matter? Does consciousness lie within particles?"
I heard that molecules can't hold the information necessary for consciousness, so that seems to leave dark matter and/or magnetic fields. Our thoughts perhaps are adrift in the aether, between particles...
Is substance the right word? I've wrestled with a similar idea. Consciousness is (or has seemed) to be being itself --at least from a first person perspective. It is not a thing but a space in which things can be things. It is the 'there' itself. There is a there there.
But how can we become conscious of our consciousness? Why aren't we (as consciousness) exactly what we see? Lost in pure perception, a viewing of the object that forgets itself? When I see the tree (gotta use the tree), I also know that I see the tree. I 'see' myself seeing the tree. This seems to be made possible to some degree by thought. Thought moves through time. Or is that right? Is thought itself time? Is thought itself the time that is there?
This is weird stuff, ripe for parody. But I'm not joking, just confessing that it's funny language. My question (not really my own) is whether meaning 'is' time. This only makes sense if meaning has a movement, if meaning is not frozen at an instant. One way to support this is to just ask you to reflect on your memory of reading this post. (Another question is whether this is same kind of time that the clock measures.)
In other words, materialist. At this point you’ve started to notice the primacy of mind.
One thing to understand of fundamental importance, is that the philosophical meaning of the word 'substance' is nothing like what we mean by 'substance' in other contexts. Like, adrenaline is a substance, produced by the adrenal gland; acid is a substance that burns through metal. Nothing like that.
'Substance' entered the philosophical lexicon as a Latin translation of the Greek ouisia (in Aristotle). And ousia means something nearer to 'being' or 'subject' than to what we mean by 'substance' now. In Aristotle's metaphysics, a 'substance' is 'the bearer of attributes' so more like the 'real being' of which 'accidents' (such as eye colour and height) are attributes, or accidents. And I also feel that the loss of the notion of 'being' also lost the sense in which substance is subject (or has a subjective aspect). It is not a 'that' in early philosophy, where it seems impossible to avoid thinking of substance in any other terms today.
None of the words 'substance', 'subject' or 'being' are exact translations, and indeed to really understand the subtleties would take a lot of study. But that's an important preliminary point to get.
These are some interesting thoughts, macrosoft. I will have to give it more thought myself. Thanks for contributing. :)
Thanks for the insight on "substance". Interesting stuff! :)
That’s very interesting.
I don't see how you have explained how consciousness and the material interact. You've basically made consciousness into EM energy and our brains into antennas. How is that useful for explaining consciousness as the primary substance? Dualism never seems to work. Monism is the way to go.
"Consciousness is the primary substance" is making a category mistake. It would be like a tree claiming that the primary substance is wood. Wood is just a particular arrangement of the primary substance. Consciousness is a particular arrangement of the primary substance. What is the primary substance? Information.
My last hypothesis claimed that consciousness wasn’t the primary substance but rather a substance on par with matter. How it interacts with matter is that matter is the substance that holds consciousness. Now, these are just thoughts I’ve been having that haven’t been fully developed. I’m open to all arguments, but you have mischaracterized the last hypothesis.