A Conscious Universe

[Chas]

What arrant nonsense.

You need matter (or energy) to create a process

INPUT -> ACTION -> OUTPUT = PROCESS

When the INPUT is electrochemical, the ACTION is electrochemical/biochemical and the OUTPUT is electrochemical/biochemical how can thought not be made up of fundamental particles?

What results from this process is nothing more than can result from this process, regardless of whether or not we understand it. If you are suggesting a 'thought process' has some magical property not possessed by the interaction of its constituent parts then you're just making things up, and if you're not then you have no point to make.

MM

You're committing the fallacy of division. Just because A is composite of B's doesn't mean the property A has, B also has. A process REQUIRES interactions, things do NOT.

It appears to me that you two are saying the same thing.

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Let me say this for now about brains and minds. In any true monism, they are by definition of identical stuff. Rhythm has stated that qualia is brain states. But that means that brain states are qualia; the '=' sign is funny that way. He insists that means that all qualia is just a material thing. However, if they are truly equivalent, then you could just as equally insist that all material is an experienced thing, since by definition qualia are what it's like to subjectively experience things. The only way to avoid this, as far as I can see this, is to deny that anyone experiences things, and that the definition of qualia is therefore irrelevant.

It seems to me that the collection of information about a "physical" universe outside the observer is intrinsically dependent on experience. If there were no experience, there could be no observation, and no ideas about what is being observed. If, however, there were no actual "physical" universe, then nothing changes: the experiences are still experiences, and it only means that the ideas we've inferred from those experiences (i.e. that there is a "real" physical universe which is more than information, math, and ideas) are wrong. There is no model possible which does not include human consciousness as a feature of reality, as no model could be created without it; but there is a model possible which does not include actual "things" that are more than the experience of ideas or information. Therefore, I think materialists at best can hope for a stalemate.

Except you would need to prove that the material universe does not exist without consciousness. You haven't.

Stalemate? Not really. The evidence supports the material existing without any consciousness.