Being Conscious

If we feel that mental illness robs them of the ability to choose their actions then it wouldn’t be hypocritical.

What ability to choose? It’s just chemistry… or QM.

For example, how you chose to write those words.

Nah, that’s just bodily function – chemistry or QM.

Why can’t it be a choice and the product of bodily function?

Where does the choice come from?

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" The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result."–Albert Einstein

So why do you? :laughing:

That’s okay, I won’t hold you responsible. ; - )

Especially when you are unconscious or don’t remember doing it.

“In his diary, CW wrote the same words again and again: ‘I have just become conscious for the first time’. Others exclaim, over and over, ‘I have just woken up’… imagine living life in a perpetual process of awakening that you can never remember.” ~Susan Blackmore

Because it’s not the body (or the unconscious mind) causing the action, with the conscious intention to act.

How did you determine that?

Because I know what it’s like to consciously and unconsciously act.

So it boils down to “because I say so”.

I say that, because I know the difference, and you are arguing for the sake of arguing.

Even if you claimed you couldn’t act or make choices, it wouldn’t change my experience or cause me to question the reliability of my experience.

There seems to be a gap in communication. I’m not asking you if you can act or make choices. I never claimed that you could not do those things. I can act and I can make choices. THAT’S NOT WHAT I AM ASKING!!!

You claim that if consciousness was the product of bodily functions that you would not be able to act or choose. I am asking for the evidence that backs this claim. All I am getting in return is you repeating the claim or saying “I just know it”. Do you understand why that is not an explanation or evidence for the claim?

This is the question you asked.

Materialism reduces consciousness to bodily function by reducing consciousness to an illusion that has no real interaction with the world.

I see consciousness as being dependent on the body (in this world), and yet I see it having a real interaction with the world

You might call me a soft (or fuzzy) dualist, in that I don’t think the lines or spaces can be defined where consciousness exists or originates. That part I’m open to exploring and learning, but it would be intellectual suicide to deny what I know to be true about myself, that like you, I can act and make choices.

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So why can’t consciousness be real and still be the result of bodily functions? What if Materialism is wrong?

(And we do have evidence for the existence of the supernatural. ; - )

It can, but not at all necessarily exclusively. That is why he confesses to being a dualist.
 

It is. ; - )

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