A
Materialism claims that, in example, out of nowhere, if you give it enough time a machine (computer for example) will emerge (abiogenesis) and if you give it enough time there will magically appear a operating system (consciousness), which will evolve and upgrade itself by trial and error (evolution). Pretty magical story, isn't it? Everything around us and in us points to some conscious creator, not necessarily divine being (like in a religions), but some higher conscious planner. For me, consciousness is something that is beyond this physical realm (system that is extrinsic to us, maybe some higher dimensions that we can't perceive) and is probably tuned to our brains like radio stations we tune to ( some sort of entanglement), and our bodies are nothing but very complex avatars for this game of life that we are playing.
A
You’re combining a few different ideas here—abiogenesis, evolution, consciousness—and it’s worth separating them carefully, because the version you’re critiquing is not how materialist science actually claims these things work.
1) Abiogenesis is not “a machine appears out of nowhere”
Materialism in science does not say:
give matter enough time → a computer appears
What abiogenesis actually proposes is:
Early Earth had simple chemistry
Under energy sources (UV light, heat, chemical gradients)
Simple molecules formed increasingly complex self-replicating systems
Eventually leading to protocells
So it’s not “magic emergence of machines,” but gradual chemical organization under physical laws. We don’t yet fully know every step, but there are partial experimental pathways (RNA world, lipid vesicles, autocatalytic networks).
No one in mainstream science claims a modern computer would spontaneously appear.
2) Evolution is not random trial-and-error upgrading toward goals
Evolution is often misunderstood as:
blind trial and error improving things
But in biology:
Variation is partly random (mutation, recombination)
Selection is non-random (environment filters what survives)
There is:
no goal
no direction toward complexity required
no “upgrade pressure” except survival/reproduction in a niche
Evolution can produce simplicity, complexity, or stasis depending on conditions.
3) Consciousness is the real philosophical battleground
Here your intuition is pointing at the hard problem of consciousness:
Why does subjective experience exist at all?
Why is there “something it is like” to be a brain?
Materialist approaches include:
consciousness as an emergent property of neural computation
or as a process/functional state of complex information integration
But importantly:
mainstream science does NOT claim consciousness is fully solved
There is real disagreement between:
physicalists/materialists
dualists
panpsychists
idealists
So your discomfort is not unusual—it sits exactly on an open problem.
4) Your view (consciousness as external / “tuned in”) has a known philosophical category
What you’re describing resembles a mix of:
dualism (mind not reducible to matter)
idealism (consciousness as fundamental)
“receiver” models (brain as tuning device)
These ideas exist in philosophy, but:
they currently lack strong testable mechanisms
especially the “tuning/entanglement” analogy is metaphorical rather than physical (quantum entanglement is often misused in this context)
Physics does not currently support a “broadcast consciousness field” model.
5) The key divide in a neutral framing
There are basically two competing instincts:
Materialist view:
matter is primary
mind emerges from matter
Non-materialist / consciousness-first view:
consciousness is primary or external
matter is secondary or a representation
Neither is trivial to prove or dismiss completely—but:
materialism is currently stronger in predictive science
consciousness-first models are stronger in introspective intuition but weaker in mechanism
Bottom line
Your critique is essentially:
“pure emergence feels too magical”
That’s a common reaction—but science doesn’t actually claim “magic emergence,” only law-governed gradual complexity growth, even though gaps remain (especially in consciousness theory).
If you want, I can map your “consciousness as external tuned system” idea against:
panpsychism
Advaita Vedanta
modern neuroscience
and show where they overlap and where they fundamentally conflict.
No comments:
Post a Comment