Originally posted by Royce
Single celled animals as well as bacteria were and are aware, conscious of their environment and respond to its changes. They probably are not self aware or conscious of self but they are aware and respond to stimuli including the proximity of danger, preditors and food. Consciousness developed at least in primitive form right along with life not as a result of billions of years of increasingly complex evolution. Numerous 'lesser' animals are self aware. I would conclude that awareness, consciousness is a characteristic of life itself if not the main characteristic. Is life itself nothing more than a reult of increasingly complex molecules? This has not been proven nor demonstrated. Is DNA, one of the most complex molecules know, alive or simply a product of life?
I don’t see how this really affects my view that that matter is primary, consciousness secondary. No material body, no immaterial consciousness. That being said, I think it is wrong to look at the two as if they are diametrically opposed and mutually exclusive. It seems clear enough they exist together.
What you might like to put as being primary may be that chicken and egg business Fliption mentioned, but to lambaste ‘materialism’ the way you are doing is useless, imo. It is also wrong to label people the way I've seen you do, because I know that until I gave my definition of it, you had no idea of what it meant to me. You are guilty of defining materialism in a way that suits you, then attempting to fit this yoke around the neck of people where it doesn’t belong, and isn’t this
exactly what you dislike others doing to you?
Materialism is myopically absurd at its very foundations. I do not call this bias. I call this reason.
Ok, I’m not going to spend a lot of time responding to this. Instead, I will let someone else do it for me so I can go make myself some breakfast. This is going to get kinda long, so I apologize up front;
“Both primitive man and the infant, in a naive anthropomorphic attitude, consider it quite plausible that every change and event is the outcome of the action of a being acting in the same way as they themselves do. They believe that animals, plants, mountains, rivers, and fountains, even stones and celestial bodies, are, like themselves, feeling, willing, and acting beings. Only at a later stage of cultural development does man renounce these animistic ideas and substitute the mechanistic world view for them. Mechanicalism proves to be so satisfactory a principle of conduct that people finally believe it capable of solving all the problems of thought and scientific research. Materialism and panphysicalism proclaim mechanicalism as the essence of all knowledge and the experimental and mathematical methods of the natural sciences as the sole scientific mode of thinking.
All changes are to be comprehended as motions subject to the laws of mechanics.
The champions of mechanicalism do not bother about the still unsolved problems of the logical and epistemological basis of the principles of causality and imperfect induction. In their eyes these principles are sound because they work. The fact that experiments in the laboratory bring about the results predicted by the theories and that machines in the factories run in the way predicted by technology proves, they say, the soundness of the methods and findings of modern natural science. Granted that science cannot give us truth--and who knows what truth really means?--at any rate it is certain that it works in leading us to success.
But it is precisely when we accept this pragmatic point of view that the emptiness of the panphysicalist dogma becomes manifest. Science, as has been pointed out above, has not succeeded in solving the problems of the mind-body relations. The panphysicalists certainly cannot contend that the procedures they recommend have ever worked in the field of interhuman relations and of the social sciences. But it is beyond doubt that the principle according to which an Ego deals with every human being as if the other were a thinking and acting being like himself has evidenced its usefulness both in mundane life and in scientific research. It cannot be denied that it works.”
-Ludwig von Mises
