Mindfulness or Mindlessness?

[HappySkeptic]

A: Yes.

...then Parmenides shook Heraclitus's hand and that was the end of Western philosophy....<the end>

Except it didn't happen that way.

You cannot just brush away thousands of years of pondering the relationship between being and change with a one word answer! Expressed in text, it comes off a little arrogant even if you didn't mean it that way. (I have the same problem). Are you perhaps saying that your ontology has only one category of being for both events and matter...and into this category "things" like sensation, meaning, and value reduce. I say that because, physical reduction is very far from proven nor is it obvious enough to be properly basic.

I take Nagel's challenge from "Mind and Cosmos" seriously: "Materialism requires reductionism; therefore the failure of reductionism requires an alternative to materialism."

I gave a short answer, because I wasn't sure if I wanted to get into a physics discussion.

I haven't read Nagel, but I find that quote to simply be wrong.  Reductionism is a perfectly valid thing.  It is just the wrong tool to explain emergence.  It is a logical error, for instance, to think that because consciousness exist, a materialist must assume that the smallest particles in the universe are conscious.  That's just stupid.  Nor will knowing the properties of a particle to more decimal places get us any closer to understanding consciousness.

I am a materialist, but with modern physics knowledge, I think we can throw out most of the crap that philosophers came up with in the past.  There is only the universe, and the properties we find in it.  These include fields and particles (which are two sides of the same coin).  The fields and particles are only known through interaction events.  If events didn't occur, then nothing about these fields and particles could be known -- we could say that they might as well not exist.

In Quantum Mechanics, the two fundamental building blocks are state and events.  State is what we would call the material, but all it does is describe the probabilities for future events.  It is the memory of past events, and the driver of future ones.  The events in time map out all processes, from nuclear fusion to electrical and chemical interactions.

So, to the people who ask "how can mind come from dead matter", I say they are looking at it wrong.  Processes are emerging out of the relationships of information and events.  When information processes become re-entrant, completely new patterns can occur in reality.  The brain holds the state (wiring, memory, switching) on which a most complex re-entrant information process is occurring - one which recreates a simulacrum of the external world, and imagines itself and its future.