What If The "Hard Problem" Is A Hard Fact, A Mystery To Be Engaged And Not A Problem To Be Solved?

CERTAINLY THE MOST interesting form of consciousness to most of us is human consciousness,  since by "us" I mean whatever human beings there are who go to the bother of thinking about consciousness to start with.  Though, perhaps, any non-humans reading this are properly more interested in the consciousness of their own kind in the same way. And you could be forgiven for concentrating on your own consciousness, your own individual consciousness.  That is the only consciousness that any of us has direct access to in our own conscious experience, the only consciousness of which we can have any direct knowledge of, the consciousness by which we have any access to any information of any kind, external of or internal to our own bodies,  something which the eliminative positivists, eliminative materialists don't want any of us to remember because their hatred of religion and God is their first priority.   The denial of the significance of which or even reality of which, which, when pressed to think about it, the materialist fundamentalist will come to in the end.  It seems.  That is the message of that quote from the hack philosopher, promoter of atheist materialism, Daniel Dennett in one of my posts from last week.  

That's what my consciousness has come to conclude after reading and hearing materialists for much of my adolescent and adult life.  

For completeness, since I've come out of the closet as someone who takes the methods of science seriously enough that I credit the rigorous, controlled research into parapsychology for supporting that claim with a more than century long program of some the most rigorous science ever conducted, it would seem that we have some access to other consciousnesses on something other than an obvious physical basis or in the direct, visual or audio or tactile information.  Which is interesting in the same way that our own direct experience of our own consciousness is properly interesting to us.  Though not to the exclusion to being very interested in the lives and experiences of other, living beings.

I've also concluded, considering the consequences of the elimination or severe demotion of consciousness and free thought for the professional, literary and philosophical activities of such materialists that a rather ultimate form of hypocrisy is involved in their public statements of their first priority.  That is an inevitable a consequence of their ideological orientation as is their denial of how they actually live their lives under their dogmas and slogans.  Their atheism, what I conclude is their driving force, the materialism which seems to be a consequence of their hatred for religion and God, and the scientism which is both a professional advantage and a convenient slogan, lead to them setting up those make-shift gods that I've come to conclude atheists almost inevitably use to replace the God of revelation.  The ancient atomists also set up gods to replace the gods of their ambient cultures.  I've come up with a partial henothisitic pantheon* of such surrogate gods, science, probability mathematics, "random chance," "trial and error," natural selection, "genes." etc.  One such god which governed that intellectual muddle and scientific scandal, CSICOP and to an extent the entirety of such organized "skepticism." is "public relations," though that's more of a religion than the god it serves.  Atheism, itself, would seem to be the idol they are ready to serve and sacrifice everything to, including their own minds - or at least those of everyone else - to.  The entirety of human culture has to go in the face of that.  As I mentioned Nietzsche understood that to be a logical consequence of scientistic materialistic atheism.   Though most atheists don't think all that hard about the logical ends of their claims.  For many of most famous figures, Sagan, Randi, Shermer, Degrasse Tyson, Nye, etc. their god would seem to be fame gained from show biz and a lucrative side line in making money.  Vulgar materialism, the religion of money and stuff, Mammonism, is the most present and widespread form of that religious devotion and the would-be intellectual materialists aren't immune from its attractions in large numbers.

The atheist-materialists of more intellectual rigor, and they tend to be professional philosophers far more than scientists, resort to the muddle that materialists have made in dealing with what they make into their "hard problem" of consciousness have resorted to panpsychism. Panpsychism, the idea that non-living material has consciousness, inevitably forces questions that science and philosophy will have as hard a time with as it encounters when it is faced with the fact of human or animal consciousness.  Where do atoms, subatomic particles, crystals, etc. keep their consciousness?  Where is it?  How does it combine to form larger units of consciousness in larger objects?  And, keeping in mind that if we don't have direct access to the consciousness of any person but our individual self, pretending we can have adequate access to the consciousness of even our nearest and dearest non-verbal pets among animals to make hard and fast assertions about it seems to be fooling mostly ourselves. Scientists have been fooling their readers on such matters since Descartes.  And the monstrous consequences started pretty much with his sadistic dissection experiment on his wife's poor dog.  Given that what would be the even more exotic and inaccessible "consciousness" of subatomic particles, atoms, molecules, crystals up to the largest aggregates of non-living matter makes saying anything about that entirely a matter of faith, its literary scriptures, Just-so stories and a materialist scripture that turns such lore into dogma.   When science or philosophy can't access something for study, belief in it will be exactly that, dogmatic statements.  Evolutionary psychology in its fifty years of existence is a good example of such scripture, that of the eliminative materialists is also one, though less readable if far more laughable.  Much of it would be a better satire on the decadence of atheist-materialist-scientism than it is science or philosophizing.  

I doubt that even if its there we will never be able to imagine what such "consciousness" is like, though imagining it as being like our own experienced consciousness would seem to be a rather ultimate form of that universally committed sin of the ethologists, "anthropomorphism."  Charges of "anthropomorphism" were very popular among academics and would-be smarties of my youth, so finding it practiced among them is just another of their hypocrisies.   That imaginary act of imposing our idea of ourselves onto other entities is understandable if silly as alleged science.  I don't think it's possible to escape anthropomorphism in imaginative thinking because we happen to all be People, antropos because whenever we think about the things the accusation is made in regard to we haven't got any alternative but to think of those things in human terms.  Science puts everything in human terms, whether in words or mathematical expressions.  And it is impossible to know the relationship of human experience to what would have to be the conscious experience of non-living beings.  Short of them articulating or demonstrating that to us and us accurately understanding what they're telling us, we've likely got little to no chance of getting close.  We won't even know how close or far we are from that.

On top of that comes the most interesting and important question we might pose about such non-living being consciousness, something already mentioned above.  How does that consciousness relate to our own consciousness?   Is our consciousness composed of the consciousness of our constituent atoms and molecules and the subatomic molecules those are composed of and the larger physical structures, aqueous, crystalline. lipid, etc. and how do those billions and trillions of consciousnesses produce our unitary experience of our own, one consciousness? Is our consciousness supposed to be some kind of amalgam of all of those bits of consciousness?   That's a bigger problem than imagining the eukaryotic cell as being an amalgamation of other organisms to make an integrated cell, at least we can discern those organelles and find out their likely origin.  "Out of many one" is a rather huge leap of faith in the United States as a country, one which the founding documents of the country and the law would rather prove to be something the founders and framers didn't really believe in, themselves.  And that's nothing compared to the problem that such panpsychism, materialist or non-materialist, faces in trying to come up with anything more coherent than the absurdities that old-line materialists come up with trying to shoe-horn our own experience of consciousness, of our freedom of thought and will into their ideology,

An ideology that can't be made to work, not even when you call it "physicalism" or "natualism."  

The problem of how does consciousness interact with matter as defined by science or by materialist ideological definition or where does it reside?  How DOES matter have the property of consciousness, whatever that means?   Consciousness is an active state, it would seem to require memory in order for it to exist in time.   Considering the difficulty of theorizing then "finding" the Higg's boson and its role in the standard model of modern physics, doing the same for consciousness which is even less definable than the physics definition of "mass" when consciousness evades much prodding and definition, doesn't seem to move the issue towards anything like progress, certainly not a definite conclusion.  I think all the materialists are doing is restating what for materialism is the "hard problem" of consciousness, moving it to where it cannot be reliably known to exist.   I think in doing that they mimic Francis Crick when he proposed to solve the insoluble problem of the origin of living organisms on Earth through a materialist program of moving on that problem by saying maybe some extra-terrestrial intelligence seeded the early Earth with life - leaving aside the problem of where that imagined intelligent life  came from as well as whatever the earliest of organism on Earth came from.  Crick's problem he left his disciples with is a problem for materialism and atheism it's just a variant of the atheist question of "who created the Creator?"  That's not a problem for the Jewish monotheistic tradition which holds that God is uncreated, but it is an inevitable problem for materialism and one which is, in Bertrand Russell's mocking phrase, "Turtles all the way down."  

Maybe Crick would leave that that to the ETs to solve.   You'd have to be a hell of a lot stupider than Crick was reputed to be to not understand the problems with such a solution, though desperation can make you say some pretty stupid things.  Look at the rest of the stuff materialists come up with.  

I have no objection to the idea that matter may have some form of consciousness, I have no objection to panpsychism that faces the problems that come with the proposal.  I especially have no problem with it if materialists proposing it admit that their indefinable, un-studyable, and unknowable solution will never produce anything like a scientific or even a philosophical resolution of the problem they've made of consciousness.  I don't think Western philosophy which has fixated on such things for more than 2500 years can come up with anything like a final answer about that.  And if that's true of the philosophical realm, then science is an even less aptly applied method to solving the problem, something scientists, themselves have made a problem because it can't be made consistent with their ideology.  And it cannot be credibly denied by fiat because it is the very thing which they've come up with all of that, philosophy to science, to atheist-materialist-fundamentalist ideology.  Their very ideology is dependent on the thing it cannot be squared with and those of us who reject their ideology have every right to point that out.  

That's not a problem for religion except perhaps to the extent that human notions and limited understanding such as categories of omniscience and omnipotence are imposed on God.  Walter Breuggemann has repeatedly noted that the old trio of attributes to God as found in his blue covered childhood catechism, Omniscience, omnipotence and omnipresence are not found in the Hebrew religious tradition and are imported into Christianity from Greek pagan philosophy.  I believe it was also imported into late medieval and early modern Jewish philosophy, as well.  While I suspect God is all knowing and all powerful and imminent I reject any notion that any human conception of that is what God is limited to or by.  God as presented in the Moses story cannot be encompassed by human minds.  There is a reason that when Moses asked who he was to tell the Children of Israel what God had sent him he was to tell them God was "I Am."  Not a proper noun, a pronoun and verb.  From the attempt to rigidly fix God to such categories comes the impositions of eternal damnation and predestination which is the cost of doing that.  In some of the more radical forms of that a similar denial of free will is sometimes a consequence of that unnecessary forcing of Jewish and Christian scripture into Greek pagan philosophical postures.  The idea that God is a living presence instead of an object is a source of freedom unavailable to materialism or a religion of material gods.  Eliminative materialism, eliminative positivism, is a road to enslavement.   

* They raise up any one of those gods to stand in for God, especially as the Creator as their arguments need them to, only to be put lower on the altar of atheist materialist scientism when the necessity arises.  And it inevitably does, none of the atheists material gods is capable of maintaining or explaining it all, which makes the monism of their ideology somewhat atheologically problematic, as well.