Originally Posted by
Tammuz
The Materialists say that consciousness and its contents are mere effects of neural activity which is therefore the primal ontological reality and consciousness only a secondary one which has no reality in itself. Closely examined, this is an odd view of things.
Let us take musical phenomena as an analogy: according to the materialistic view, the sounds of music which enchant the listener, that is, the sounds which he/she actually HEARS, do not really exist - what exists is only the vibrations of the instruments, of the air molecules and of the tympanum, as well as the neuronal reactions in the listener´s brain. So the materialist denies the existence or reality of everything what cannot be measured by physical equipment. He denies the reality of music insofar as he raises the physical phenomena on the throne of absolute reality while that what actually matters (the hearable sounds) is degraded to mere phantoms.
So the materialists say: "The psychic exists only insofar as it is effected by physical activities". However, this argument is most reductionistic and not well considered. The point is that the transition from physical to psychic is a black-box within that argumentation. An argumentative ´black box´ is a premise that remains unproven and often unexpressed but is crucial for the thesis. As to the given issue, the materialist fails to prove or at least make plausible any explanation for the transition from material events to psychic events, or in other words, from matter to consciousness. Without that explanation, the materialistic thesis collapses.
One alternative view says that consciousness is not a mere function of matter but has an existence and reality on its own. In this view, it is completely implausible to assert that consciousness can howsoever arise out of matter. It can connect to material processes, yes, but it cannot grow out of them like a flower grows out of the ground. Anyway, the mode of connection is totally unclear. Probably we have to think of two different levels of ´materiality´ that can somehow get into contact. In Indian philosophy (e.g. Vedanta), psychic phenomena are thought to be material in a very subtle manner, let us say, billions of billions times more subtle than physical matter. In Vedanta, there are three ´bodies´ of a person: Gross Body (Sthula Sharira), Subtle Body (Sukshma Sharira) and Causal Body (Karana Sharira). The first is that sort of matter to which the materialists refer, the second is the psychic and the third is that part of a person which in most cases unconsciously participates in the cosmic spirit.
The most important argument against the materialistic view is the Qualia argument (see the Wiki article linked at the end of my article) as indicated above in the music example. To see the color Red is quite another thing than to measure the frequencies of Red. Materialists however don´t really perceive the difference. Red as a color is an experience of awareness that has nothing to do with the physically correlated light frequencies. When materialists say that the former completely stems from the latter, they commit a gross error of thought by forgetting or ignoring the´black box´ of transition, as pointed out above.