An awesome book that does a great job logically explaining how consciousness may be fundamental is "Biocentrism" by Robert Lanza
What model does dualism provide and how can I use it to make predictions about how consciousness is embodied in physical beings. Why is it useful to presuppose the existence of a complete separate substance to explain consciousness.
To be brief dualism is woo woo.
>I think everyone intuitively knows that consciousness can't come from material things, but we convince ourselves otherwise.
Ok, I'll make a sweeping unsupported statement too. Dualists have limited imagination and flawed understanding of the nature of information and computation as well as a penchant for magical thinking.
The reason why so many westerners believe in materialism today is because scientism has poisoned their minds and they cannot understand the difference between science and philosophy, and they aren't aware of the hidden metaphysical assumptions upon which their worldview rests. However among philosophy departments, there are probably much less materialists today than there were 50 years ago.
Personally I think people should ignore the entire materialist/dualist debate, and go read Wittgenstein instead (or Peter Hacker).
Also it mostly a wrong idea that flat earth was a popular theory. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_the_flat_Earth
And what is more magical thinking than the idea that consciousness can come from a ball of matter? To me, that is much more the crazier idea
Discoveries of completely unknown fundamental laws of physics that have a significant in-your-face and obvious impact on our everyday lives are playing a decreasing role in science (depending on where you draw the line, one might even argue that the last such discovery was made by Newton).
What you call crazy has become increasingly normal :)
I think it's quite funny that the so-called hard problem of consciousness has been with us for millennia, yet so few of us tackle it in the right way, instead choosing to wait for others to give us all the answers or (at worst) endlessly chewing and regurgitating the same useless conjectures and pontifications.
Geeks and math nerds (and anyone who is seriously interested in tackling consciousness) need to be doing more psychedelic drugs, I feel, and looking INWARDS, but how often does that happen?
Drugs are the easy way there. There are other ways, but require dedication and commitment and possibly utter disregard for material concerns and "consensus reality". As the ancient wise ones said regarding mysticism (direct experiential knowledge), one needs to know, will, dare and keep silent.
The answers are here, the consciousness problem has been solved more than 2000 years ago, across cultures and civilizations. As Aleister Crowley once said, "By doing certain things certain results will follow."
Yet very few feel the need to do anything these days.
Some people try to rescue dualism by saying the brain is a kind of radio talking to an outside consciousness, but we were never able to detect the signals, so I wouldn't trust that theory too much.
You certainly destroy the process of light creation in that bulb, which is the proper analogy with the consciousness of a single mind. No one is claiming that messing with a single brain affects consciousness itself, only the consciousness of that brain.
Still, even this does not refute any of the scientific facts so far determined. What has been measured and deduced correctly, must be correct. Everything we know about neuroscience must be true. It's just the last step that seems very, very problematic.
Subjective personal experience is a side effect of an long running information process located inside a meat computer. Why is occurs and what is "really is" are scientific questions that are incompatible with materialism.
Presupposing a second substance is magical thinking.
Reducing the complexities of the brain to "a ball of meat" is absurd. That's like saying it's magical thinking to suggest that a fragment of silicon can predict the weather.
Further, there isn't any reason to believe that consciousness is any more profound or fundamentally distinct from any other physical phenomenon in the universe, especially because consciousness is a prerequisite to the consideration of its own nature; such reasoning is akin to thinking that the universe must have been carefully designed because it's so perfectly tuned to the temperament of complex life, when there's literally no other possibility if life actually exists to wonder about why it's here.
Your reasoning just seems like an appeal to emotion. You might feel like consciousness is profound (a vague description without a clear meaning), but you haven't offered any reasoning as to why this is the case.
Some of Max Tegmark's writing as well as Lawrence Krauss' have describe gravity as the "cost" or the thing that is balanced by the expansion of space.
The expansion of space having been driven by another as yet undescribed field.
All things are physical. Consciousness is a side effect of information processing. Seems like we just have fundamentally different assumptions about what can be a valid belief.
I don't just disagree with you. I think your belief about consciousness isn't even well formed. I don't even think there could exist evidence to support a belief like "consciousness creates matter".
Over time we will find new ways to explain it so that it makes sense. But my guess is that it will be aided mostly be technology.
Confusing intuition with the truth there.