Q: “Curt, would it be fair to label you a materialist?”– I tend to interpret ph

–Q: “Curt, would it be fair to label you a materialist?”–

I tend to interpret philosophical terms a pseudoscientific, and only slightly better than supernatural. That said our ancestors (philosophers) didn’t understand neuroscience.

So, when you say ‘materialism’ I know what that means. But it’s also a confusion between the existence of nouns (states) and verbs (processes).

Consciousness, imagination, and even qualia are terribly simple but philosophers lacked the knowledge to comprehend them.

Today we know how the brain works – pretty completely. And with AI currently demonstrating how simple associations produce emergent complexity, we’ve proved that yes, the world is governed by a very simple set of laws, and that our human experience is ‘material’ in the sense that we have legs (state), but we can run with them (process). Human experience consists of processes, almost all of which is simply the effect of a vast hierarchy of fragmentary memory.

Does that eliminate the spiritual (instinct and intuition), or does that eliminate the mythological (cognitive and emotional)? Well, not really. It only eliminates the pretense that such concepts have any form of existence other than in the collective of human minds. And that it turns out that’s enough. If gods and such are emergent from our collective minds, that would carry more viability than gods brought us into being and hold dominion over the universe, despite the obvious evidence to the contrary – especially given the long list of dead gods.

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