Along the way,
Of course it’s self-evident that materiality is prior to consciousness. Unless you think you can rationally explain consciousness without materiality? Go ahead and give it a try. I’ll wait.
Haven’t you ever heard the adage: “It’s better to remain silent and be thought the fool than to open one’s mouth and remove all doubt”? There are occasions when the wisdom of such is self-evident. If you asked me my opinion of the latest fashions, I’d employ this adage as well.
I gave you a helpful suggestion if you are as serious about your solution as you are apparently about your attitude. Present it to someone who will be able to judge it in a more educated manner than can I and perhaps others here.
I’ve presented many ideas regarding my paradigm of idealism and even a philosophical proof of a creator which assumes a paradigm of material reality by way of playing devil’s advocate. Regarding the former, I’ve explained that idealism decisively resolves Zeno’s paradoxes which is what I think Parmenides and he were getting out. Regarding the latter, I don’t need to understand the intricacies of relativity theory to understand its implication and thus my proof based upon it.
Sure, a proof of the creator… ok then. 
Sorry I am not trying to be a dick, but you make it not very easy to play nice.
And you still have not even pointed out what is wrong with my Zeno analysis and where and why you disagree, or even what your own formulation of the logical problem here and possibly solutions are… you just keep doing implicit appeal to authority and craftily refusing to say anything specific, to take a stand on any issues. But I did like your little jab at my “attitude”, it’s nice to see you aren’t completely a coward…
How can I critique your solution when I literally don’t understand it? It apparently appeals to physics beyond my ability and/or education to comprehend. I once heard an artist remark: “I get tired of people saying: ‘I don’t know anything about art but I like your work!’ I wish that just once someone would say: ‘I know a lot about art and…’” Gees!
I didn’t even use anything from physics except the idea of Planck lengths, which you said you understand…
What are you even talking about?
My argument is purely based on logic. What, you don’t understand logic? I thought you were into philosophy?
Why don’t you tell me what you don’t understand about my logical argument? What about it confuses you? Why can’t you even identify what you are confused about?
I think you are just coping out. But I hope to be proven wrong.
eaglerising:
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This is an interesting sentence. What, for example, might thought disguise itself as?
I still disagree with this.
Yes, there are times when consciousness is more or less complete and multi-leveled at least inasmuch as human consciousness can be.
But it is still fragmented at times. One needs to see it as a puzzle and fill in the pieces.
Perhaps there is a different word for what you are saying here ~ rather than consciousness.
I think that the distinction to be made here is between complete and imperfect consciousness. Can you observe the world as it is and tell me that consciousness is complete?!
Can you observe this forum of some brilliant minds and still tell me that consciousness is always complete?
Where is consciousness when both thought and emotions are ranting and raving and discombobulated?
Do you believe that we are still in the process of human evolution? If that is the case, how can consciousness be complete?
What does a silent mind have to do with what I posted above?
What comes to you - the silent mind?
You can both go to it and it also comes to you. You go to it by preparing the way to experience the silent mind. For some it might come to them on its own but even there one has learned in its own way to silent the mind through discipline, observing certain things, et cetera. A tree, for instance. Not a breeze to be felt. The tree stands in perfect silence, all leaves quiet and un-moving. A scene like that can be absorbed and experienced and we come to silence through the stillness of nature.
I can agree with this. I’m often there. A good place to “get there” is by being the agnostic, the skeptic.
Allowing ourselves to be wrong about this and that can be a good thing. Ignorance actually isn’t bliss but learning what you quoted above may be a bit of bliss.
That’s a good mantra but some just might not get it unless you explain it to them and they will see not bother to think it over.
Yes, as you and I both do with respect to our viewpoint of consciousness. Your view of consciousness as always being whole and complete would seem to be set in stone. Considering that philosophers have not come to a perfect definition of what it is, there is a lot about consciousness which we ought to simply “hold as a possibility” like theories are.
I have a long way to go but for me the way of the agnostic is the better one.
Also, observe how You do think and what it is which brings You (universally speaking) to your beliefs and particular thoughts. My way will bring one to your way.
Also, I do not believe in throwing the baby out with the bathwater. It is also important to be more fully conscious of what we choose to think about.
Arcturus Descending – You have a curious mind. I am sure you will be able to answer your own questions. Furthermore, I would feel bad if I spoiled your opportunity to experience the thrill of self-discovery.
eaglerising
Ah, if you only knew!
I have many, many questions which have gone unanswered and possibly always will.
Perhaps there are no answers to them or perhaps it is because some of those answers are so simple that we aren’t willing to see them, to embrace them.
I have a problem with Occam’s razor.
But I do see that the questions are just as important, if not more so (some of them), than the answers.
I appreciate your kindness but you needn’t worry about that. I am an ocean and I will never have my fill of me.
So, what is it really that made you back down? 
Thought is the dialogue that takes place in your head. When you are quiet, free of distractions, and focus your attention on thought, you will become aware of something observing thought. This simple exercise allows you to experience consciousness, which is capable of understanding thought. I would like to hear from those who have experienced this and what they discovered,
I’m fairly new here so I don’t know most of the people who post here regularly as yet. This sounds very much like Zen. Are you someone who appreciates this Eastern metaphysical philosophy or its like? Do you believe in idealism as opposed to material realism? Thank you.
Consciousness is a complex system of sensation and response that exists because natural selection selected for organisms whose genetics happened to code for a slightly better way of sensing and responding to the world around them. The pressure of survival or death forced organisms’ genetic code to become more complex and to code for better organic-cellular systems over time, systems that were capable of receiving information from the environment as a stimuli and then converting that stimuli into an internal reflex and reaction on the part of the organism, so that the organism could learn to coordinate its actions with its sensations.
This is all that consciousness is, namely a very complex version of this same system that is able to use its own sensation and response as a new category of stimuli as such, to generate a meta-level representation of the world around it wherein this meta level is actually a model of the organism itself, to itself, so that the organism is no longer only coordinating its actions with the information it gets from the environment via its senses but is also coordinating its actions with the information it gets from itself via its ‘inner senses’. Sensations began to sense itself as the neurology got more and more complex and subtle; responsiveness began to respond to itself as the circuits of instinct and reaction going on inside the organism got sophisticated and elongated enough in time that it was possible for these circuits to form new connections internal to those processes themselves, so that the process could be sensed in part and in stages from its beginning in a sensation to its termination in a response or an action. A whole ‘inner world’ of feelings and psychological sensations, and eventually also ideas, grew up in the human mind and as the human mind.
There is nothing mystical, magical, or difficult about it. It is basically just a material process following simple logical rules that are easy for us to understand, and easy for us to understand why such processes and rules evolved over time. It’s sort of like changing a flat tire on your car: it’s very easy to do and takes only a few minutes, but you need to have the right tools otherwise you simply cannot do it. Understanding what consciousness is is just like this analogy. You need to have the right “tools” (rational understanding, intellectual honesty and objectivity, knowledge and concepts (such as knowledge about evolution, for example), etc.) but once you do it is quite easy to see what/why/how consciousness is. Without those tools you will be stuck believing in nonsensical ideas like consciousness is mysterious, mystical, unknowable, divine, universal, etc etc blah blah blah.
The “consciousness” part is the action of the material processes. Sort of like how the kick is part of the material process of your leg moving in space to impact a ball. Your thoughts and feelings are like the “kick” of your brain and body. A kick doesn’t exist as material, it is the action that is literally the expression of underlying material situations… so too for your consciousness. But that is only formal, the actual contents of your consciousness are not only material situations but also immaterial ones, because your consciousness can actually sense and respond to immaterial conditions, like to facts as such. That’s very rare, since most animals don’t do that or do it only very minimally. It’s how you are able to understand something like what is photosynthesis for example and how does it work and why does it exist, which is something no other animal but humans are able to know. It’s also why we have symbolic language with grammar and vocabulary (logic) capable of abstraction and representation, objectification of reality as such.
Why should I privilege reason over phenomenology?
None of us have a single recollection of materiality existing prior to consciousness. None of us have any recollection of anything existing prior to consciousness. It’s a phenomenological truth that consciousness is prior to materiality.
Jesus christ, you’re really going to conflate your own memory with ontology? Wow… a new low.
Exactly! You are echoing what I asked previously: “What is the (metaphorical) arena where everything takes place without which nothing could be attested to exist?”
I am not denying the primacy of materiality over consciousness within the framework of scientific rationality, I am only allowing for the primacy of consciousness to exist within the framework of phenomenology.
You yourself stated that there is no ultimate beginning or ultimate end. Why then do we have to put either subjectivity or objectivity at the “beginning” of the other? Why can’t the “something” that always has existed be both subjective AND objective?
In other words, from one side of the cosmic coin everything begins with matter and from the other side of the coin, everything begins with consciousness. Together, they are that “something” that has always existed.
The arena of Mind and Mirror (Subject and Object as one integral unity).
You both seem, at least to me, unable to separate existence from the subjective experiencing of existence. A rock out in space does not require any “subjectivity”, any experiencing, in order for that rock to exist and to be what which it is. Most of the universe is like this, just non-conscious non-subjective and non-experiencing ‘dead matter’.
Matter is simply trapped energy. A particle is a little region of space that has a quantity of energy trapped or stored within it. These are what elementary particles are. When you get to the elements you have these elementary particles grouping together in different ways, producing interesting physical properties such as electromagnetism, things that create chemical bonds. The universe is in the vast vast majority of cases almost entirely made out of the simplest elements.
So what is “consciousness”, or “subjectivity”? What is “experiencing”? Experience comes from having a subjectivity which means to have a perspective from which interpretations usher actively. A rock ‘has a perspective’ because it is a certain thing that is different from things around it, and forces will tend to affect the rock differently than they will affect things near the rock but which are different from the rock, and yet the rock does not have an active perspective, it is not experiencing anything. Forces acting upon the rock do not remain stuck in the rock, they do not trigger dynamics within the rock that go on to change and determine what the rock is and how it acts. That is what happens when forces are exerted upon living things: the force triggers changes in the internal dynamics of the living thing, changes which are categorically different than the force itself, and those changes cascade and process in their own complex causal structures and end up changing the organism itself and its actions.
(And Don, for these purposes here I will agree to use your definition of sentience, namely “has feelings”. Rocks are not sentient because they do not have feelings, and we know this because they lack the structures that we know are what produce what we call feelings. We must also say that sentience is close to, but not required for, experience – it is possible for something to be having an experience but not having any feelings, although that is not typically how we experience.)
If subjectivity is having an active perspective capable of being changed by what is changing around us, and capable of changing us, then this is what it means to have an experience. Therefore this is the basis of what is called phenomenology in philosophy. Since phenomenology is the study of experience, you can’t have phenomenology unless something is experiencing and unless those experiences actually mean something.
Ontology is superior to (prior to, more fundamental than) phenomenology in the sense that phenomenology arises from ontology; phenomenology is a derivation of ontology. Ontology describes what is, phenomenology describes what is experience.
So when you conflate memory (an integral aspect of what it means to experience) with ontology, as I said you are doing and which is what you do when you posit phenomenology in a vacuum (without a corresponding and more fundamental ontological structure), you actually make it impossible to even do phenomenology at all, let alone ontology, because you have cut experience off from what experience actually is, namely a derivation of the ontological.
Edit: Don, just to let you know, you did inspire me to take a look at Dennett. I have found a couple of interesting things in one of his books so far, I will try to work them in here at some point if it seems relevant. I have to say that so far at least he is probably the best (most rational and accurate) contemporary academic philosopher that I know of.