Dear Rupert
I’d appreciate your view on the materialist assertion, now made popular by Dawkins et al., that awareness is an epiphenomenon of brain processes.
With warm regards,
Kriben
Dear Kriben,
I am not very familiar with these theories, but I cannot see any evidence for this materialist assertion. It is our experience that the brain appears in awareness. Why not form theories that are in line with experience, if we need to form theories at all?
The brain is an idea or an image and, occasionally, a sensation or perception. It is our experience that all ideas, images, sensations and perceptions arise within and are made out of awareness.
Likewise, awareness is ever-present whilst the brain is intermittent. How could something that is ever-present come from something that is intermittent? Awareness would have to disappear when the brain disappears, but again that is not our experience.
Awareness is non-objective. How could something non-objective come from something objective? And from where would this brain get the awareness with which to manufacture awareness? Something cannot come from nothing.
It is our experience that everything comes from awareness, which, although nothing (not-a-thing) from the point of view of mind which believes in the real existence of ‘things’, is in fact not nothing. From its own ‘point of view’, awareness is fullness itself.
With kind regards,
Rupert
