Being Self-Conscious About Consciousness
Hard problem or soft option?
There’ve been a few articles popping up around the idea of consciousness -what it is, why it is, where it comes from and so forth. It feeds into the constant ongoing debates around materialism, scientism, spirituality, theism and what-have-you. All fascinating stuff, of course, full of long words like ‘metaphysical’, ‘ontological’, ‘epistomological’ and ‘supercalifragilisticexpialidocious’.
But there’s things people miss or mistake in all these ideas and arguments. At least I think there are. I’m not a clever person with a shedload of certificates and qualifications. So I have to read things, and think about things, and concentrate a lot. This gives me ideas. A lot of them, if not all of them, are daft ideas. But then it seems to me that sometimes, they’re no dafter than the ones the clever folk go on about. So here we go.
Daft Idea №.1
People talk about nature, naturalism, naturism and so on an awful lot. They seem to think that there is nature, then things that are unnatural, and other things that are supernatural. This, to me, is chopping the Universe into various bits in order to understand it. But as Gandalf told Saruman “He that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.”
