(April 25, 2015 at 7:10 pm)AFTT47 Wrote:(April 25, 2015 at 2:05 pm)Pyrrho Wrote: I think consciousness is a process, not a thing or substance. An analogy for this is fire. Primitive people thought that fire was a thing, but the modern understanding of it is as a process, not a substance. Fire is the rapid oxidation of a material (called "fuel"). Stop the process, and you stop the fire. There isn't any nonphysical part of it, but it isn't a substance; it is a process.
I like that explanation. It's still hard to imagine how this process results in this feeling of 'I' but I still prefer this to speculation that thought or consciousness is something primal or perhaps a fundamental force of nature. We'll get if figured out but probably not in the lifetime of anyone here now.
Fire sure seemed like a substance to a lot of people over the years, too.
"A wise man ... proportions his belief to the evidence."
— David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Section X, Part I.