>>/dep/309323>>>/dep/309323i originally wrote this as a reply to the (image attached) but it ended up being way too long. im also wasn't writing it specifically in response to that anon.it was meant as a broader response to materialist-nihilist arguments in general. since it's not really suitable for /dep/ i figured itd be better to open a separate thread and argue it here.the fact that something has no "meaning" when you don't even know what "meaning" actually is, and can't even consider that the very idea that something has to be meaningful could itself just be an evolutionary behavioral pattern translated into thought (not wanting to waste energy on pointless effort, the evolutionary energy conservation mechanism) completely flies over your head. you don't even stop to consider whether your very search for "meaning" is itself meaningful.
the reality of the fact that you're existing and experiencing something right now isn't erased just because it's "meaningless" the reality of your current experience has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that it'll eventually end or it's "meaningless".
you latch onto nihilist bullshit and with zero logic, go "we came from nothing and when we die we'll become nothing again" (we are material bodies) yet you don't even have the cognitive capacity to question the "we came from nothing" part.
you know you exist right now. you're here. you exist. if you believe that after death you'll become "nothing" again, while completely ignoring the fact that you're a being that supposedly came from "non-existence" and you can accept nothingness as the foundation of everything while failing to realize that you're literally a being capable of conceiving, contemplating and interpreting the very idea of nothingness, then you've already failed the most basic test of logic.
the first thing you should be questioning is the fact that you "exist" right now.
in other words, your materialist nihilism contradicts itself by its very own existence. being a being that claims everything is "nothing" throws materialism / nihilism straight into the trash.
because, under your own framework, everything must ultimately reduce to processes occurring in the brain.
according to your reductive materialism, when we die consciousness ceases to exist. in other words, consciousness comes from non-existence and returns to non-existence. but this creates a contradiction. if consciousness can emerge from absolute non-existence through nothing more than the passage of time and material interactions, then what you call "non-existence" cannot actually be non-existence. absolute nothingness has no properties, no laws, no potential, and no capacity to produce anything. if consciousness genuinely exists, then it cannot have emerged from absolute nothingness; it must have originated from "being" rather than non-being.
arguments claiming that consciousness is merely an illusion run into the same problem. calling consciousness an illusion is itself an act of consciousness. even an illusion must be experienced by a subject. the experience may misrepresent reality, but the existence of experience itself cannot be dsmissed without self-contradiction.
this leads to another problem. a purely material universe only exists as a material universe if there is something that can, in principle, experience or observe it. if there is no conscious subject whatsoever, in what sense does this "material universe" exist as an experienced reality rather than as an unexperienced abstraction? the moment you try to answer that question, you are forced beyond reductive materialism.
in other words, reductive materialism attempts to explain consciousness entirely from matter, yet consciousness is the very condition that makes the existence of the material world knowable or experienceable in the first place. that is why reducing consciousness to a temporary by-product of matter ultimately undermines its own explanatory framework.
if you're going to argue that the material universe can exist independently of any conscious observer, then you've already created a distinction between the material world and consciousness. at that point, consciousness can no longer be fully reduced to matter. you are effectively treating them as fundamentally different domains, much like the distinction between the physical and the spiritual found in many religious traditions.
the alternative is even more problematic: to claim that without a conscious subject there is no material universe at all. that conclusion is idiotic.
now suppose consciousness is merely an illusion, as reductive materialism often claims. an illusion is still an experience. even if every conscious state misrepresents reality, the existence of experience itself cannot be denied. the question is not whether consciousness is accurate, but why "experience" exists at all.
if consciousness is nothing more than a phenomenon produced by matter through time and physical interactions, then experience itself still remains fundamentally different from matter. you can say that experience is generated by matter, but that does not make experience identical to matter. matter consists of particles interacting according to physical laws. experience, by contrast, is the fact that there is something it is like to exist, to perceive, to observe, and to be aware.
this difference cannot simply be dismissed by pointing to a sufficiently complex brain. increasing the complexity of matter explains increasingly complex interactions between particles; it does not, by itself, explain why those interactions should become subjective experience.
experience is therefore not another material object alongside atoms or molecules. it is a fundamentally different kind of phenomenon. in the same way that the laws of physics are real despite not existing as physical objects that can be "touched" or observed directly, experience / consciousness is also real despite not being reducible to matter itself.
the material world follows physical laws, but those laws are not themselves pieces of matter. likewise, a conscious being may possess a material brain, yet the existence of subjective experience cannot simply be identified with the atoms composing that brain. the atoms interact; they do not, by virtue of being atoms alone, explain why there is an experiencing subject.
for that reason, reducing consciousness to matter does not solve the problem, it merely renames it. if subjective experience is a genuine feature of reality, then it cannot be fully explained as nothing more than matter interacting with itself. consciousness must ultimately originate from something beyond the purely material description of the universe.
the material universe doesn't require a conscious observer to exist in the first place. that's not what im arguing.
the contradiction is in your own framework. if the material universe can exist entirely independently of consciousness, then consciousness cannot simply be reduced to matter within that universe. youre claiming that, at one point, there was nothing but unconscious matter, and through nothing more than physical interactions, time, and motion, subjective experience somehow emerged.
that's exactly the part that isn't explained.
matter interacting with matter may explain increasingly complex physical systems, but complexity alone doesn't explain why those interactions should suddenly become experience. more importantly, where is the threshold? you're assuming that something fundamentally non-conscious can eventually produce consciousness without ever explaining how that ontological leap is possible.
if everything is ultimately nothing but matter, then there must be some point at which matter supposedly becomes experience. what determines that point?
does a single cell have subjective experience, or is it merely reacting to stimuli? do only humans possess consciousness? what about other animals? if they don't, are they simply interacting with the world like atoms, without any "experience" whatsoever?
if your answer is that only sufficiently developed brains generate consciousness, then what exactly defines that threshold? at what point does a collection of unconscious atoms stop being mere matter and become a conscious subject? what level of complexity is required, and why that level rather than another? what about someone with severe cognitive impairment? are they experiencing less consciousness, or none at all? where is the objective line?
on the other hand, if you argue that every living organism possesses some form of subjective experience even something as simple as a single cell then complexity clearly isn't the explanation. in that case, consciousness cannot simply be the result of sufficiently complex matter, because even the simplest living systems would already possess it.
either way, reductive materialism runs into the same problem. it never explains why matter should become experience; it merely assumes that it does.
theres another implication materialists usually ignore. if you insist that sufficiently organized matter can eventually give rise to consciousness something capable of experiencing, observing, and interpreting reality, then yo uve already accepted that purely material processes can produce something that transcends the properties of the matter itself.
if that's possible, then there is no logical basis for dismissing the possibility of a reality beyond the material universe, or even a transcendent intelligence. if matter can, over time, give rise to subjective experience, then the existence of a being whose consciousness vastly exceeds ours cannot simply be ruled out on materialist grounds.
once you accept that matter can produce a fundamentally different category of reality such as consciousness, you've already abandoned the claim that only matter, as matter, is all that can exist.