Jim Muth wrote:

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To a certain extent each observer must observe his private world, although in many/most(?) cases the experience is, no doubt, similar amongst observers.

My only comment might be, 'what are the philosophical and scientific consequences of our mere indirect contact with a presumed reality?'

"Presumed reality"?? Do you really doubt the, um, reality of reality? As for answering your question, please re-read all of philosophical and scientific readings from all of human history. After you finish that you'll realize that no one else knows, either. (Or rather that the answer is **seriously** intractable. After all, you're dealing with a few bajillion input variables.... :-)

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Let me add some other [questions]: What is conscience [consciousness?] . . .

[I think, therefore I am.... I think.] (Although, I always rather liked the inverse: I am, therefore I think!)

The scientific method of addressing the question has been to assume that consciousness is a phenomenon somehow generated by the brain,

Not everyone feels this is so. The field of AI has a big division between those who feel (human-like) consciousness is merely a matter of sufficient complexity (If you build it, it will think.), while others feel that the *mind* (opposed to the brain) is much more than a big wet switchboard. (FWIW, I fall firmly into the latter category--I believe in the soul.)

...and begin searching for the mechanism. But after hundreds of years of searching, countless 'theories', and continuing claims of 'progress' and 'discoveries', we remain no closer to a definitive answer than we were when we first made the assumption.

[shrug] Perhaps that suggests the mind IS much more than the brain, although we are not technologically even *close* to actually being able to simulate the complex interconnectivity of the brain. When we ARE, it may turn out the "hard AI" folks were right, and it's just a matter of reaching that level. Consider how long humans have dreamed of, and thought about, flight compared to how long we've actually been managing it. The lack of discovery wrt the mind means little.

The problem is that consciousness is totally different from the material of the brain, the meat that is assumed to generate it. When we claim that consciousness originates in the brain, we are claiming that something can come from nothing, which is magic.

False. The brain is not "nothing". Again, IF the hard AI folks are right, consciousness is a direct consequence of the complexity of interconnections. (I recall a long ago short SF story about the world-wide phone system achieving consciousness...I believe the last line was about the phones starting to ring... everywhere at once! :-)

(There is no consciousness in ordinary matter.)

Excuse me? My brain is--as far as I know--ordinary matter. So is the brain of my dog. We both are conscious beings. What you MEAN is matter like rocks and tables; which also lack brains. A real question is: what--if anything--makes MY MIND different from the mind of my dog. (A huge difference I believe in: my dog never ponders "why?".)

I am far more comfortable picturing the brain as a kind of radio receiver that detects a universal field of consciousness and focuses it into the sub-units that we call our individual self-awarenesses.

Sounds like the plot of a Science Fiction story.... ;-) What if you wear a tin-foil hat? I take it you don't at all subscribe to the theories of hard AI?

Those who wish to do so may consider the universal field of consciousness to be their God.

Or not. Why a "universal" field of ANY kind? Why not an infinite set of little sparks glowing dimly and briefly in the deep, deep dark?

Another extremely difficult question is: What remains the same from day to day, while the contents of the mind and material of the brain constantly change?

NOTHING remains the same from day to day. NOTHING. Your location is moving at huge speeds every second (relative to the frame of the universe). Your cells are constantly changing. The atoms in your body are constantly changing. So is your mind and consciousness. But because many of these changes are slow and slight (or not directly obvious) we have the *illusion* of consistancy.

The most immediate answer would be to invoke an unchanging soul or spirit.

I, for one, surely hope MY spirit evolves in step with the rest of the universe. What's the old saying: the only thing that remains constant is change?

But science does not admit the existence of such entities, and wanting to appear at least moderately scientific, I must state that I have no idea.

You continue to make what I consider a fundamental error in thought: you think the immaterial can be illuminated by the material. How can it? Are they not completely different domains? I see a basic, bedrock "principle" of existence: yin and yang. We find "Binaryism" in so many aspects of existence great and small. It's a basic philosophical point in many cultures and religions. If you were to make a list of all the opposing pairs you could think of, I think you'd spend your life at it. Male/Female, up/down, in/out, positive/negative, left/right, east/west, north/south, Good/Evil, and so on. (Constrast this with quantity/absense: light/dark, hot/cold...) I think a very basic pair is material/immaterial. Or Knowledge/Spirit. And as with most binary pairs, there's a huge synthesis between the opposing poles, but the poles themselves are distinct. And--unlike the quantity/absense "pairs" (which aren't pairs at all), one is not the absense of the other. Science is about the material world. It has no charter in the immaterial one.

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. . . If it [consciousness] is inmaterial, how is it that it controls the body? . . .

From the scientific viewpoint the question is even more perplexing. It is assumed that the brain creates the mind that controls the body by controlling the material of the brain -- a circular argument that goes nowhere.

Which suggests, does it not, there is more than the material going on. OTOH, I'm not sure I agree with your reasoning. Hard AI (and anyone who doesn't believe in a non-material mind) *assumes* consciousness is merely a direct consequence of the complexity of interconnections that exist in a brain. And a system can give rise to higher features and aspects that, in turn, can feed back into system. Being circular doesn't necessarily mean it can't be that way. Many things are (and, indeed, circles are another fundamental aspect of reality: orbits, currents, circulatory systems, etc.).

There is also a conflict with causality. The physical universe is assumed to be a closed system. If what controls the brain and body is not physical, there is a physical effect without a physical cause, a clear violation of the principle of causality.

False reasoning. **IF** what controls the brain and body is non-material, then the universe is not, in fact, a closed system.

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. . . What is matter?

This is another puzzling question, made even more puzzling by the discoveries of quantum mechanics. Regardless of which model we use, reality at the quantum level is so alien to our intuition...

To the "everyday" intuitions of most of us, but that is based on the rather striking differences between the quantum and macro worlds. How many of us really have an "intuition" of how DNA works? Or, for that matter, a modern jet engine. Or any of a myriad *physical* things. Or inability to--as a single mind--fully apprehend something material or not, means very, very little.

...that it is beyond comprehension. By using numbers, we can create models of what goes on down there, and thereby make predictions, but we shall never achieve an intuitive image of things like atoms -- an image which would match the image we have of the physical world. We have discovered that we live in a material classic world composed of immaterial quantum building blocks.

Careful! You've been using "immaterial" to refer to things like mind and other "super-natural" phenomena, but above, you lump quantum phenomena into the same group. As far as we know so far, these phenomena are quite material. They're just a bit beyond our ken.

This is the same as discovering that we live in a house composed of the idea of a house. It is one massive puzzlement!

Because you've gotten confused about material vs. immaterial. It's less puzzling when you keep them straight. ;-) -- |_ CJSonnack <Chris@Sonnack.com> _____________| How's my programming? | |_ http://www.Sonnack.com/ ___________________| Call: 1-800-DEV-NULL | |_____________________________________________|_______________________|