Hurmanetar really had it right up above. Atoms, sub atomic particles, waves, fields, photons etc are constantly interacting. The questions you’re really asking are,’What is chemistry?’,’What is physics?’. And there is the mystery. No answer I can give you will leave you fulfilled or satisfied so I’m not going to try. If you are more satisfied with, ‘Don’t worry about that, it’s ALL consciousness’ then good for you, but I don’t necessarily see it as ‘thinking deeper’, and doesn’t really explain anything more clearly.
I'm unclear. Do you know what physics and chemistry are and just don't want to waste your time telling us? Or
don't you know? I suspect that what you know of physics and chemistry is based on "physical" models, and those models do work to some extent, no one is denying that. Materialism as a
model of reality has a degree of explanatory power, and has enabled us to invent all sorts of useful things. As an Idealist, I can accept that with equanimity, but I never forget that it's just a model.
The problem is, that the model breaks down in important areas. Relativity and quantum mechanics are incompatible, and the model doesn't explain consciousness. There are also many areas of science where nobody really understands what is going on and so appeals are made to "consensus", as if merely having a majority of scientists agree about something makes any difference to what's actually going on.
If we set aside the mountains of evidence for common descent, including the genetic record
There is mountains of evidence for
something, but whether it's common descent is another matter. The ID people might counter that it's evidence not for common descent, but common design: no point inventing something completely
de novo when one can more economically borrow an already existing idea and modify it. We see this all the time in human designs: it's plain that a modern Ferrari shares certain basics with a Model T Ford, for example -- not least of which is an internal combustion engine, driveshaft, wheels, and so forth. But every step of the way between the model T and a Ferrari didn't evolve by accident, did it? It evolved through conscious design, along with gradual, conscious selection of designs that proved most popular or useful.
I don't know for sure whether ID has all the correct answers, but I do think it's more plausible to think that there's an intelligence of sorts in nature than that all living organisms evolved through random mutations guided by unconscious natural selection. Natural selection probably does work to some extent, at least at the micro level -- but at the macro level? That's a different ballgame.
IIRC, Bernardo thinks that natural selection works not on
random mutations, but on
non-random ones
. And, like it or not, that would explain rapid evolutionary events such as, to name but a few, the Cambrian, mammalian, avian, and angiosperm "explosions". In the absence of any intentionality in nature, materialists are reduced to having to construct just-so stories to explain evolution. These stories are so obviously ad-hoc that it continually amazes me how they can tell them and keep a straight face. Evolution happens, that's for sure, but how -- well, that's another story. Darwinism sure as heck is a major fail.
Most of what we talk about on here as ‘consciousness’, the inner monologue, the ego, appears to be a feature of the frontal cortex, when ‘bolted on’ to the more primitive brain regions.
Probably unconsciously, you used a significant word there: "
appears"
. We're back to the old correlation vs. causation argument. Sure, brain activity correlates with consciousness, but does it
cause consciousness? Or, does consciousness cause brain activity? What is a brain, any way? Is it a concrete thing, or just something that appears that way because our perceptions work the way they do?
In Idealism, we live in a world of
appearances, and they are so convincing that it's very hard to grasp that's all they might be. In materialism, we live in a world of causation, where one thing hierarchically leads to another. We have the whole schema mapped out: at the bottom of the hierarchy, we have elementary particles that exist for no reason, and were created in the Big Bang. Somehow, through completely blind process, they interacted in ways that eventually produced us.
As I already said, it's a schema that to some extent provides a useful model of reality, but at certain key points, it breaks down, and at these points, materialists have to roll out just-so stories (in biology and cosmology especially) that aren't convincing. The bigger headbangers amongst them seriously propose that consciousness doesn't actually exist just so that they don't have to deal with a phenomenon that is with them, and everyone else, 24/7. It couldn't get any more just-so.
I think it's significant that Idealists can to some extent live with materialism as a
model of reality, but materialists can't live with Idealism at all. There can be no room anywhere in their scheme of things for a role for consciousness; at best, it's an emergent phenomenon which is largely incidental and irrelevant: this despite the fact that their schema relies on their conscious consideration of nature. Not a single understanding comes to them except through consciousness. Without the thing that some of them don't think exists, there could be no understanding, however imperfect. We'd all be mindless robots and nothing we ever did would make a hoot of difference. We certainly wouldn't be heatedly discussing the matter on forums like this.