Does Matter Create Consciousness? Or Vice Versa?

[Mudhammam]

I can match up the timeline of events in my family and tell that my sisters, brother, and parents were conscious of things before I existed. I can determine that they and I are the same type of beings as I am, because we have the same types of bodies, similar minds, and based on trust, I know I came out of my mother as a baby. Given this, I can conclude, that just as there were events before I existed, if others are like me, they too likely have existed after the occurrence of other events. Believing otherwise is inconsistent. Thus, on the basis of similarity, and knowing that I am finite and that there was existence before me, I can consistently infer that there was existence before all consciousnesses like me (human). The rest requires additional steps, but no remarkable leaps, just common inferential reasoning from identity, similarity, and dissimilars.

(If we are deceived, we are deceived completely, and that we are deceived, is, itself a deception. This is the same logical catch-22 that all forms of radical skepticism face. They are logically incomplete philosophies.)

Its one thing to assume that a Universe, consisting entirely of matter and energy, and which may include you, your family, everyone and everything past and present, exists. It is self-refuting to deny one's own existence. At the very least then, matter and energy exists in the self. But let's say you're right (I don't doubt you are but for the sake of thought experiment) that the "objective" (outside-of-your-mind) world exists, and we infer this from our experiences. We might say (perhaps some Copanhagen/Bohr followers do) that your perception of the objective world, as much as it differs from say, mine, isn't correct or incorrect and neither is anyone else's. Rather your brain is simply a measuring instrument that IS measuring an actual objective world (which might be particles and waves, though they too are our mental computations) BUT the results you get (the thoughts, objects, perceptions) are illusions, granted they're entirely real to you. Thus, we have the fundamental disagreements between Materialists and mystics. Neither of them are "right" and yet they both are.

All that I know is that LSD alters your perception, it never helps anyone see things more clearly. It's not like you suddenly can see new things that you weren't able to, you're imagining things that don't exist.

Thus, when we take mind altering substances, we are re-programming our measuring instrument to read the same data (the matter and energy "out there") but no in way that should fundamentally change our view of the result's "validity."

By the way, I'm not saying I believe this but it is an interesting thought. Is anyone familiar with Robert Anton Wilson?