LOLOL!!! That's a great insight into Descartes, Texas Songwriter! His famous "Cogito, ergo sum" is the description of the process that led him to conclude that he had "found" that very center of himself, called the immaterial soul, which is the very foundation of immaterial consciousness, and thus of all our human knowledge. He wrote in (Meditations):
Thinking is another attribute of the soul; and here I discover what properly belongs to myself. This alone is inseparable from me. I am — I exist: this is certain; but how often? As often as I think; for perhaps it would even happen, if I should wholly cease to think, that I should at the same time altogether cease to be.In saying this, Descartes is not declaring man or his reason to be "king"; but only that the fact that he thinks is the only "objective" proof he has of his own real existence. It's a terribly profound statement. But to me, certainly not the most profound thing that Descartes ever said. That would be his decisive argument that the idea of God is the prior condition in the human mind for the mere possibility of any other idea, even that of the ego itself.
Descartes was a world-class philosopher and mathematician, the founder of analytic geometry. More importantly for our purposes, he was also a deeply religious man, one committed to the Christian understanding of divine creation — as referring not only to the original creative act, "in the beginning"; but also to God's eternal continuous creation of Nature, throughout space and time.
Truly you wrote: "Consciousness, excepting life itself, is the single most important fact about our existence." I absolutely agree. (As evidently Descartes did as well).
What is really fascinating to me is that science increasingly confirms that all life forms possess a form of consciousness. Even amoeba and bacteria have been found to display a rudimentary type of learning and remembering in replicable experiments. Indeed, one could say that consciousness is the hallmark, the sine qua non of what it means to be "alive."
Increasingly (though often reluctantly), scientists are beginning to admit that consciousness itself — like life itself when you boil it all down — is immaterial. The challenge the naturalists and materialists face is they have to show how nonliving, material objects bootstrapped themselves into life and consciousness. There is nothing in the physical laws of nature that affords any principle by which this can have been really accomplished.
In short, the hypothesis does not rest on anything rational, but only on something that is irrationally hoped for: an explanation of Life and the Universe that rules out God a priori, thus to conclude that all natural events must have wholly natural causes.
You quote Searle as saying the Darwinist (materialist, naturalist) "holds an unshakable faith that science will eventually discover a completely naturalistic explanation for consciousness." And you are certainly right to point out that this is a faith statement, not a scientific one; there's no testable evidence that could render this "unshakeable faith" true or false. Yet this faith statement is clung to so desperately that any evidence that does not conform to it will be screened out in advance, dismissed, disregarded — and ridiculed when necessary or convenient.
But as you note, this is not science, it is a faith operation. And it seems to me that it has no prospect of ever becoming "reasonable." Or rational. The problem is its correspondence to actual reality is doubtful in the first place.
Thank you oh so much for that brilliant description of how Dr. Moreland answered his little daughter with regard to the difference between machines and living organisms. It is simply brilliant!
You wrote: "Geoffrey Medell said consciousness is a mystery which seems like a radical novelty in the universe, not prefigured by the aftereffects of the Big Bang." Yep. It sure does look that way, and other scientists have acknowledged this as well. As the Kineman article referred to above put it,
The origin of perception, or the perceiver, remains an unanswered and perhaps unanswerable question. Like the epistemological limit in explaining the origin of quantum particles or the origin of the universe, not much can be said prior to a mutual causation. It is a mutual causation [i.e., "mutual" between the "intangible" abstract universe (formal cause) and the "tangible" material universe (final cause). Or to put it another way, the dynamic relation that Heraclitus and Leibniz recognized as subsisting between the "changeless" [Heraclitus — ~500 B.C. — called this Logos) and the "changing" or "changeable" (the free potentialities of the natural world).]Thank you ever so much, Texas Songwriter, for your outstanding essay/post!The results of common observation are associated with a "space-like" world and the results of abstraction with a "time-like" world, even though these acts themselves involve both aspects. Space thus appears tangible to us and time does not. With some introspection, we may come to appreciate that abstraction is time-like.
This needs to be emphasized: