Must confess I remain an agnostic with respect to spirit, I'm not quite prepared to embrace dialectical materialism but I find myself certainly leaning in that direction. The latest neurocognitive research definitely throws the "spiritual" aspect of mind into question. Whatever side of the argument we choose to take, we still have to carry some pretty large assumptions.

This sounds like anthropocentrism to me, and given the luck we had with geocentrism, I'm not too eager to hop on that train.

@rcandlish I am also agnostic but not in regards to spirit. I think spirit is a potentiality which emerges within certain structural arrangements of matter.

Any references for the "latest neurocognitive research " ?

@skado I don't think we have a choice, there is no view from nowhere (Nagel). We have a relationship with the world, it is a two way street, but we can only know, feel, or think it from our side. Of course we can try to understand what is meant by 'the other side' and I think we aesthetically connect with the world, but that connection is essentially constitutive of experience and thereby not conceptual.

Choo Choo

@cava
All of that is true enough as far as it goes, but I don't see any reason we cannot still conceptualize our best guess as to what would exist if humans, or life of any kind, were absent. We don't have to restrict this conceptualization to only what we can experience directly. Science, though ultimately dependent on experience, at least removes this inquiry one step away from direct experience. If we are looking for absolute confirmation, we will be waiting a long time, but there is usefulness in abstractions based on our best scientific calculations, incomplete though they may be. Seems to me, if this were not true, then science would also have no value to us at any level of investigation.

@skado I've always have been amazed by the fact that we can reduce energy, forces, and nature into general laws utilizing abstract rules and expressions. How we can manipulate the syntax of these expressions and end up with new understandings of the reality around us.

What the hell is a field? Not a “thing” for sure. Hope you're not denying the reality of fields. Your reply touches upon the difficulty of pinning down a precise definition, like the notion of a "point" in Geometry, And we all remember the day when our apparatus was a magnet, a sheet of paper and some iron filings...

The universe may well indeed be nothing more than a pan-conscious exercise, but I'd argue this scenario takes us back to Pythagoras and his belief system, not towards a Theistic Dictatorship.

@rcandlish I would absolutely not like to see any kind of dictatorship, especially not a theistic one.

I think the concept of fields was developed as a tool, and exists only in the abstract. I’m not really qualified to say for sure. There seems to be a variety of opinions. From my perspective we humans are abysmally ignorant about ultimate reality, and science, valuable as it is, gives only superficial explanations.

Seems to me there’s some confusion about what it means to exist. All our experiences are framed by conscious awareness and no one seems to know what that is, so by corollary we don’t know who or what we ourselves are.

I’m bewildered but it is a pleasant bewilderment because of the staggering implications.