Evolved from mineral deposits

 

Credit: mountainamoeba

Some crazy reflections about all and everything...

Imagine if we could prove conclusively that human consciousness can be explained solely by material processes. Indeed, that everything in (this) universe could be explained like that. Would that disprove God? Not really, since God could have created the present universe as a purely materialist mechanism. It might not be "justified" to believe in his existence, sure, but he could still be real. 

Imagine if you would meet a very intelligent robot on a meadow. His intelligence is a sheer product of his metallic circuitry. Yet, you know that the robot was constructed ("created") by Dr Frankenstein in a robot plant. We could imagine that the robot denies the existence of Frankenstein, claiming to have evolved from some nearby mineral deposit by a process of blind evolution...

This is of course a silly example, since we (or the poor robot) aren´t justified to believe in a non-material Creator, if there is literally *nothing* that points in such a direction (although I suppose it´s a scenario that might make some of us "unjustifiably" paranoid!). 

However, I would argue that there is *always* something that points in a non-material direction, a window into a non-material existence beyond mere mechanism. Yes, that something would be consciousness. There simply isn´t any way in which consciousness can be "reduced" to or "explained" by matter. This doesn´t so much make the hypothesis "unfalsifiable", as it makes it *impossible to disprove* and therefore obviously true. 

Materialism is scarcely even coherent. You simply can´t derive, say, meaning from non-meaning. Or Meaning from non-meaning. Or quality from quantity. One tactic a materialist could use would be to somehow deny the qualitative nature of experience, but that´s impossible, since humans wouldn´t have meaningful experiences at all without this qualitative aspect, indeed, the only way to "deny" it is through the qualitative consciousness itself! It would be like a seeing person claiming he is blind, justifying it by saying that he can see his blindness...

The other tactic is to simply postulate that matter can do whatever: it actually *can* take forms that are living, conscious, loving, hating, and so on. No mystery here! However, there already is a name for a worldview in which "matter" has all these properties, but that name aint "materialism". I think it´s called "panpsychism"...and panpsychism is just the respectable name for pantheism. 

So materialism is either patently absurd or pantheist. Maybe this should tell us something...