4 Answers

  1. I would say that there is a spirit mother. But if you look deeper, it is a question of terminology, in words.

    There is something that is (Aristotle's definition of matter) – this is what exists. And there is the one (ta, those, that) who is (in the ultimate sense of the Idea, Spirit or God in the religious sense). Hence the dance.�

    For example, you yourself are a classic synthesis of what is and who is.

    But human consciousness is used to subdividing and classifying existence. So it is more convenient for him to live, i.e. language appeared as an instrument of consciousness, somewhere it works like a scalpel, somewhere like a hammer, somewhere like an artist's brush, somewhere like a New Year's tangerine… So people started talking about the material and the spiritual.

    The famous Soviet philosopher Alexey Fyodorovich Losev wrote in his Dialectic of Myth that matter does not exist. For example, there is a table, but there is no material. Matter is an abstraction. Just like the word God. Words are abstract. It is not necessary to give abstractions more meaning than it is necessary for some business.

    The point is to learn to think abstractly without abstractions. Approximately this state was indirectly indicated and this state was spoken by the Buddha in his time, when he once remarked in a conversation with his disciple that it is more correct to say not “I am walking”, but “there is a walk”.�

    Another Soviet philosopher, Merab Mamardashvili, taught us to think a thought. In his book “How I Understand Philosophy”, he shows how this is even possible – such a seemingly difficult action for ordinary thinking, if, of course, it can be called an action at all.�

    So, the question can be restated as follows: does matter exist, does consciousness exist? Even if you go to the limit, you can ask: does existence exist?

    Here we come almost to the practice of contemplation, to the practice of Zen koans asking, “What is the nature of the Buddha?” or “what does the clap of one hand sound like?” The questions are not absurd. These questions are existential, they hit the nail on the head. To the point of who you are? Why are you here? Where are you from? Why you? To the point of meaning of everything at once.

    To the point where the word or thought appears. And a person, starting to look for answers to these questions, begins to freeze, or rather, to die. He begins to die in the truest sense of the word. Dying layer by layer, thought by thought, feeling by feeling, feeling by feeling. Scared? It's scary.�

    In the end, you find yourself in the space of thinking without thinking, you find yourself without any support, support for any tradition, for any civilization… But when you get used to it, it turns out that the version of you that was never yours simply disappears from you. For some, this happens dramatically, and Paul is born out of Saul. For others, this process is relatively smooth and Sri Aurobindo becomes known to the world. There is a freshness of thoughts, freshness of feelings, freshness of sensations. Phoenix is reborn from the ashes.

    Probably, the material with the ideal good relatives. Yes, perhaps they can live without each other, somewhere far away, beyond the seas and oceans. But they share the same blood.

  2. If there is no additional criterion, the question contains the answer-any matter. When specifying “non-causal non-material” (meaning, apparently, consciousness), or, more broadly, without causal connection with non-material-apparently not, since all matter is interconnected, and part of matter is the closest cause of consciousness.

    If we limit the “immediate causes of consciousness (qualia)”, then we are faced with a difficult problem of consciousness, at least in its scientific hypostasis. By immediate / finite causes, I mean pre-instantaneous and connected by infinitesimal increments of functions in successive instants of the cause. Like, say, an electron and its charge, it flies, and at each instant its trajectory from A to B increases infinitely little, which increases the localization of its electromagnetic and gravitational charges. What is the localization of such causation of consciousness, whether it is the brain, its parts, or the body as a whole, is not known for certain, although reasonable hypotheses are available. At the same time, the peripheral parts of the substrate of consciousness can add up to vanishingly small values, why not.

    There are also supporters of panpsychism. On the one hand, panpsychism eliminates the problem of demarcation of the material by the direct causation of consciousness, on the other hand, it introduces its own complexity, because then it is not clear how exactly the whole universe generates many consciousnesses, while their array changes due to deaths and births. Occam's scalpel, this multiplication of entities, although it would seem that a certain function (generation of qualia) is attributed to 1 substrate, the entire universe, instead of individual (organisms/nervous systems), but taking into account the ontological content of competing hypotheses, the desired function is extremely expanded, since it covers not individual fragments of matter, but its whole.

  3. It is possible to put forward and prove the thesis that matter is the only objective reality, and consciousness is its product. We can put forward the opposite, that there is only consciousness, and matter is its product. Matter, then , is simply an illusion, a void that is mistakenly perceived as something that exists on its own. It is a projection of consciousness in its absolute understanding. In principle, it is impossible to refute Solipsism. Both theses, in principle, are completely self-sufficient and can become both theories and axioms, but surely something is wrong here? They are mutually exclusive. In Castaneda, his teacher Don Juan explains something like this: there are no facts, there are only interpretations that people create for themselves to explain certain phenomena. Therefore, which of these two principles – materialism or idealism-is considered real, and which is fictional-is a purely speculative process. Everyone decides for themselves and doesn't really understand why. There can't be a one-hundred-percent argument in favor of one over the other. This is just the difference between the two perceptions. In principle, they can be recognized as both existing.

  4. In addition to dualism, there are at least 2 other versions of the number of primordial substances: monism and pluralism. According to monism, the world emerged from one substance, and according to pluralism – from several. The problem with dualism is that it is not clear what is material and what is ideal. Are radio waves ideal or material? And where the ideal from the point of view of dualism is unambiguously present – in our consciousness, it is closely intertwined with the material. Given that science has not yet proved the existence of the ideal, as well as the exact definition of this term (if we perceive consciousness as ideal, then it comes from the material), and we see matter every day, I will say that this is possible

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