Is a rock conscious?

Creationism, Evolution, and other science issues

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Is a rock conscious?

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Post by Swami »

Contrary to popular belief, I view consciousness as being a simple phenomena rather than arising from a complex system. Here are my reasons:

1. Consciousness can exist as pure awareness state (without thought, emotions, forms, etc.) which is a state I reach during meditation. You can have one without the other!
2. Simple forms of life (no complex brain needed), e.g. plants and fish, possess consciousness.
3. Experience. This goes back to point 1 and how I perceived reality while in a pure conscious state. All matter is simply a manifestation of an indivisible field of Consciousness. Read more: Using field research (Meditation) to discover Consciousness.

When Danmark asks how a rock is conscious I think that he's supposing that it could only be conscious if it has feelings, processes information from sensory receptors, etc. But again, consciousness does not have to exist with all of these things. It comes in degrees; its most basic form is pure awareness. Consciousness exists and is expressed differently between awake humans and those in vegetative state or between fish and plants or computers and rocks. It seems scientists do not know where to draw the line when it comes to where consciousness exists.

One label for my view is "panpsychism". Here's a good article explains it:
Consciousness permeates reality. Rather than being just a unique feature of human subjective experience, it’s the foundation of the universe, present in every particle and all physical matter.

This sounds like easily-dismissible bunkum, but as traditional attempts to explain consciousness continue to fail, the “panpsychist� view is increasingly being taken seriously by credible philosophers, neuroscientists, and physicists, including figures such as neuroscientist Christof Koch and physicist Roger Penrose.

The materialist viewpoint states that consciousness is derived entirely from physical matter. It’s unclear, though, exactly how this could work.

Dualism holds that consciousness is separate and distinct from physical matter

Panpsychism offers an attractive alternative solution: Consciousness is a fundamental feature of physical matter; every single particle in existence has an “unimaginably simple� form of consciousness, says Goff. These particles then come together to form more complex forms of consciousness, such as humans’ subjective experiences. This isn’t meant to imply that particles have a coherent worldview or actively think, merely that there’s some inherent subjective experience of consciousness in even the tiniest particle.
Quartz article.

Given that consciousness can exist or function in a simple form, then what proof is there to show that consciousness is limited to mammals? Why not fish, plants, computers, and other inanimate matter? Perhaps you don't know?

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Post #31

Post by Divine Insight »

Razorsedge wrote: It's not for me to verify but rather it is you that needs to verify it. I gave you an objective and accessible approach - meditation. I can not force you to use it.
Oh please. I'm 70 years old and started meditating in my early 20's. I may have potentially been meditating longer than you've been alive. And you're telling me to meditate?

Meditation is a popular activity practiced by many people for many different reasons. There are many secular benefits to meditation so it doesn't even need to be accompanied by mystical fantasies.

You make it sound like your the only one who ever heard of meditation.

Sorry Razorsedge, but there's a very good chance that I have far more experience with meditation than you do.

I know many scientists who not only practice meditation but endorse it just as much as they endorse good diet and physical health. There are many secular reasons to support and practice mediation. It's not just for people who want to practice spiritual fantasies. In fact, it's actually highly questionable whether people who do it for that reason are actually meditating. What they are more likely doing is fantasizing and calling that meditation.

This is actually true. In fact, there is a huge difference between something like transcendental meditation and say, shamanic journeying. Yet many people actually practice shamanic journeying into spiritual fantasies without even realizing that this is what they are doing and they call that experience "mediation".

In fact, many "New Age" religious media actually teach forms of spiritual shamanic journeying and call it "meditation". Especially those of Eastern traditions.

You can convince yourself that many fantasies are "real" by treating your fantasies as shamanic journeys and calling that "meditation". Especially if you are watching or reading the words of a spiritual instructors who is teaching you to think this way. It's not only easy, but also quite inviting to fall into that kind of trap.

The desire to want to believe that your favorite fantasies could be true is quiet powerful. To have a spiritual leader or community encourage you to believe in that sort of thing makes it even more difficult to see the fallacy of that delusion.

Edited to add:

By the way, I'm a strong proponent of shamanic journeying. I practice shamanic journeying quite often. It's great fun! I also claim that it can have useful benefits if done with a positive attitude and purpose.

However, I support it because I see it as a purely secular activity. Something we humans are capable of experiencing due to the fact that we do indeed have a capacity to imagine things.

However, I only support and encourage it for those who understand that it is indeed an excursion into the imagination. And only for those who can handle the experience. It can be quite dangerous for those who have difficult distinguishing between fantasy and reality. They could end up scaring themselves in serious ways. I've seen this happen to people. They could also end up causing themselves serious mental issues, which can actually become quite dangerous for both them and those around them.

So it should really only be practice by those who are already confident in the differences between fantasy and reality. If there is any question in that area it would be best seek advice from a mental health professional first.
Last edited by Divine Insight on Wed May 29, 2019 8:56 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post #32

Post by Swami »

DeMotts wrote: [Replying to Razorsedge]

Is a photon conscious? It's not matter.
Everything is conscious.
DrNoGods wrote: [Replying to post 26 by Razorsedge]
Jesus said if you tell a mountain to jump into the sea, it will. How does the mountain know to do this?


It doesn't ... no mountain has ever "jumped into the sea" by command of a human. If that were ever observed to happen then you could ask how it happened ... ie. what is the mechanism. But it has never happened, and since mountains are just rock and sand and therefore incapable of consciousness or deliberate action, it is certain that a mountain can never respond to something it is told to do by a human ... regardless of what Jesus may have said about the matter.
Jesus's statement was made to reveal the nature of reality. Experience of perceptual reality leads you to believe that all there is to a mountain is sand and rocks. But Jesus's statement shows that your description is just a mental construct (a reality based on beliefs) since he goes on to say that if you "believe" it will happen, then it will happen. So Jesus is not advocating for the removal of all mountains but rather he's speaking theoretically given his worldview. The only difference between Jesus's words in this case and the Eastern worldview is that the East goes on to describe the Ultimate reality - everything is a manifestation of consciousness.

It would be extremely inefficient for Jesus or any Eastern thinker to prove their worldview by doing something miraculous on every single thing we can think of. Just one miracle can reveal the nature of reality. I've offered you a reliable means to at least reveal how consciousness conflicts with the materialist worldview. Doing this doesn't involve moving mountains but only takes meditation. Apparently, you'd rather put your faith in the failed materialistic view that brain causes consciousness.

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Post #33

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Post #34

Post by Divine Insight »

Razorsedge wrote: [Replying to post 29 by Divine Insight]

I addressed your post here.
And in that post you say:
Experiencing in this state will lead to the realization that everything is just manifestation of a Universal consciousness.
I've reached that state of mind in mediation on many occasions. I simply disagree that this leads to the conclusion or "realization" you have suggested above.

That so-called "realization" is nothing more than the opinion of the person who is claiming that they have realized something. :roll:

In fact, weren't you just talking with DrNoGods about moving mountains via nothing more than conscious thought?

If what you claim is true, then those who have meditated and have come to the "realization" that they are a manifestation of universal consciousness should then be able to return to a normal state of consciousness, and command a mountain to jump into the sea as Jesus had claimed could be done.

But we have never seen anyone who is capable of controlling anything in the universe via nothing more than universal consciousness, much less causing an entire mountain to move via nothing more than conscious whim.

Therefore I suggest that there is absolutely no evidence to suggest that these fantasy speculations about reality hold any truth.

Nothing they have claimed has ever come to pass. It's all been nothing more than empty hot air for thousands of years. Yet for some reason you seem to think that there still might be something to it.

Why?

I experienced transcendental mediation and I saw no reason to conclude that this means that I'm universal consciousness. In fact, where is there any rational reason to jump to such an unwarranted conclusion?

If you think you are universal consciousness and that universal consciousness is the basis of all physical things, then you should be able to "magically" change physical reality via nothing more than conscious thought.

If you can't do that after having had this so-called "realization", don't you think it's time to go back and question exactly why it was that you had thought you realized this in the first place? :-k

Best answer is that your so-called "realization" was just an unwarranted illogical assumption.

Sounds like a very good answer to me. :D
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Post #35

Post by DrNoGods »

[Replying to post 30 by Razorsedge]
Apparently, you'd rather put your faith in the failed materialistic view that brain causes consciousness.


This is in no way a "failed" exercise. If science does not yet have a 100% complete explanation of something that only means it is a work in progress, and there are many examples of this (dark matter and dark energy, origin of life on earth, etc.). Claiming a god is responsible, or any other mystical explanation, is a cop-out and doesn't actually explain anything at all.

Consciousness has never been shown to NOT be an emergent property of a functioning brain. That is the most rational, and obvious (nothing without a brain has ever demonstrated consciousness) explanation, and the goal of science is to eventually understand the mechanistic details. Abandoning that approach would be a failure of science ... but you seem to think the opposite and hold to a view that consciousness is something special and magical, without any evidence to support that view other than wishful thinking.

That kind of approach would set us back many centuries where all unexplained phenomena were assigned to the action of a deity, or to magic, witches, etc. It is moving in the wrong direction.
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Post #36

Post by SkyChief »

Razorsedge wrote:
Everything is conscious.


You are delusional.

Seriously.

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Post #37

Post by bjs »

[Replying to post 34 by SkyChief]

:warning: Moderator Warning


This kind of post is completely unacceptable. The post made no effort at debate and did nothing but insult another debater.

Please review our Rules.

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Re: Is a rock conscious?

Post #38

Post by Aetixintro »

[Replying to post 1 by Razorsedge]
The Possibility to Set Up an Atom "Brain"

I've been having this secret dream to create a kind of consciousness from an atom smarter than every idiot out there!

So if one sets up this atom in a kind of detector apparatus, reading signals on all the quantum states an atom can have and set up these quantum states in correlating ways to kinds of linguistic expressions from the input of a human by means of quantum entanglement, chaos theory, electric signals from the fingertips into the apparatus or the final possibility, of telepathic interaction (telepathy/electricity by human feelings is usually what is meant by quantum entanglement, anyhow)! The idea is that eventually one might establish a kind of communication and extension by sensor operationalisation that feeds the atom all sorts of signals by webcams or the like. In this fashion one may be able to create a kind of machine "brain" by this atom (or atom cluster) and possibly also prove a kind of "monads"/envision of the early stages of consciousness in its universal form! This first part has been posted on the Philosophy Now forum, today, 22.09.2010.

This may also be seen as an extension from the Princeton University "boxes", hardware drives with processors, that have been making random "choices" or calculations in relation to a purported measurement of mass psychology, believe it or not. I don't know how they've been set up or engineered, but I know of the reports and I think I know what they have been up to. At least, you can correlate your curiosity from this programme from this renowned university.

By Terje Lea, 22.09.2010
- Source: https://whatiswritten777.blogspot.com/2 ... on-of.html

So the thought is to feed the atom with light at various frequencies and electricity at various parameters too in order to get "feedback" from it. Perhaps it turns out to be another OR gate or something. The tough part is to "decode" the thing, the decipher the feedback. But exciting, of course. "Thus proving that nature speaks at all levels of existence!"
I'm cool! :) - Stronger Religion every day! Also by "mathematical Religion", the eternal forms, God closing the door on corrupt humanity, possibly!

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Post #39

Post by Swami »

SkyChief wrote:
Razorsedge wrote:
Everything is conscious.


You are delusional.

Seriously.
I don't see why this is so far fetched because we experience everything in consciousness. The world that we know is one that is constructed by the brain and presented to our awareness. Based on these two points, I don’t think it’s to far off to conclude that everything is simply a product of consciousness.

If you think this is all delusional then here’s further support:
I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.
- Max Planck (father of quantum theory)
Finally, science traditionally seeks facts - observations - that are independent of the observer; this supposes that the observer can be separated from the observed (another aspect of the subject-object distinction). However, in confronting the hard problem we cannot separate the observer and the observed, for consciousness is observation, the subject experiencing the object. That is, experience comprises both observer and observed, the termini of the arrow of consciousness. Separating the two breaks the very connection that we aim to study.
-Dr. Bruce MacLennan
Article: http://web.eecs.utk.edu/~mclennan/ElConsc/JCS2.html

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Post #40

Post by Swami »

DrNoGods wrote: [Replying to post 30 by Razorsedge]
Apparently, you'd rather put your faith in the failed materialistic view that brain causes consciousness.


This is in no way a "failed" exercise. If science does not yet have a 100% complete explanation of something that only means it is a work in progress, and there are many examples of this (dark matter and dark energy, origin of life on earth, etc.). Claiming a god is responsible, or any other mystical explanation, is a cop-out and doesn't actually explain anything at all.

Consciousness has never been shown to NOT be an emergent property of a functioning brain. That is the most rational, and obvious (nothing without a brain has ever demonstrated consciousness) explanation, and the goal of science is to eventually understand the mechanistic details. Abandoning that approach would be a failure of science ... but you seem to think the opposite and hold to a view that consciousness is something special and magical, without any evidence to support that view other than wishful thinking.

That kind of approach would set us back many centuries where all unexplained phenomena were assigned to the action of a deity, or to magic, witches, etc. It is moving in the wrong direction.
There is no 'hard problem' of dark matter or of dark energy. There is a hard problem of consciousness and it's has been known about since the advent of the Enlightenment era and probably well before that. It was perhaps best documented at that point by Descartes. So far, no Western scientist has been able to offer a verifiable materialistic explanation for the origin and nature of consciousness.

You claim to be open to evidence that consciousness is something more than a property of the brain. I've offered the evidence. If my evidence was not enough (as I anticipated) I offered a means to verify the evidence yourself. You've declined so you don't want the truth. All of your words are posted on the World Wide Web and it is my witness.

For all hardline materialists/atheists,

I can only reiterate my stance again. I'm not interested in debate. From experience of past debates, I've learned that the best method to convince someone of my worldview is two-step. First, lead them to realize the true nature of consciousness - it's full expression. This alone will show a problem with the materialistic worldview. Second, everything else about Universal consciousness will begin to fall into place. 

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