Quote:
Originally Posted by mszlazak  I don't doubt your consciousness experiences are real but anyone, even you, can doubt that consciousness is fundamental. That's why there are so many positions on the issue and you can understand those positions.
Anyway, sounds like you're waxing idealist, in which case the position is unfalsifiable and pratically pretty much useless.
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To say that the conscious experience is real, but that consciousness itself doesn't really have any reality (just being an epiphenomena), sounds to me like a paradox. What is having these experiences then?
An epiphenomenal consciousness is no consciousness at all.
The only way I can see how you can make all of this work, while being committed to mainstram materialism, is to postulate that some sort of awareness property is embedded in matter itself (like charge).
I do not want to put myself in any category. Being to sure of anything usually just locks one's mind to other possibilities. But I do think that there is sufficient empirical evidence to show that the materialistic paradigm, although being a useful tool, is only one perspective of something much greater. What this is though remains to be seen.
I have a question for all of you here, who seem to have embraced deterministic materialism:
Do you actually believe that what is going on on this forum, in the final analysis, is just the mindless random dance of elementary particles writing posts about psi and consciousness?