[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

Originally Posted by Larry

Perhaps. The same is true for materialism, though. It is hard to see how you could ever explain consciousness arising from physical processes. Furthermore, explaining how matter arises from nothing seems equally difficult (even though this isn't technically a scientific problem, as you can only explain properties of fundamental forces of nature, not how they arise).

Scientists are working hard to explain various aspects of consciousness. There are many ideas being tested, whereas I don't really see any idealist scientists testing theories of the mental. That might be because there aren't any idealist scientists.

That's the problem. All attempts to say consciousness is the same thing as physical processes fail in my opinion, because these are clearly two different things.

It's not clear to me at all that they are two different things. Just because something is going on inside your head doesn't make it fundamentally different from everything else. It just seems that way.

Let me ask you this: Why do our brains give rise to consciousness "now" and not sometime else? According to relativity theory, there is no universal now (that is, my "now" can be someone else's past or future), so our brains shouldn't know when to be conscious.

I don't know where you got this from, but if it's true then our bodies shouldn't know when to exist, either. Just because time is different for different entities does not suddenly make it the case that things don't "know" when to exist.

~~ Paul