https://iai.tv/articles/consciousness-re..._auid=2020
INTRO: The mind-matter problem still haunts us to this day. The question of how and why consciousness and the physical world interact and influence one another remains a mystery. In response to this problem, the philosopher Spinoza argued that nature is constituted by something more fundamental than either the mental or the physical: something that contains both. Philosopher Jordi Galiano-Landeira here argues that Spinoza’s philosophy is panpsychist – matter contains mind – and that integrated-information theory can help solve some of the remaining problems with panpsychism... (
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The problem with this thesis, and with IIT and panpsychism in general, is that it only physicalizes consciousness as another objective property haunting the interstices of matter--a vestige of the elan vital of yore. The assumption is that there will therefore be a neat physicalist explanation for how consciousness comes together out of its microscaled components to compose a macroscaled structured whole like matter does. As if it were but another third person substance subject to the laws of spatial extension and location and atomicity and quantification. It is not.
Consciousness is in principle nothing like yet more objective "dark inside" stuff to shape our world with. The hard problem makes that clear. Consciousness cannot in principle meld with matter because it is a non-objective and mental dimension of being subsisting all on its own. It is really more like time than like matter, if we take time to be not a physical property of the world but a metaphysical principle of reality. And no more should we expect to find consciousness as irreducible atoms floating among and binding to the atoms of matter than we should expect to find time coexisting with atoms as scintilla of some kind of physicalized stuff.
Panpsychism is only a problem is you presume matter is primary. But just like a virtual reality or the holographic principle, matter may not be fundamental. If so, mind could be more fundamental, meaning matter doesn't contain mind but matter is made of mind.
Trying to understand the nature of consciousness by studying the brain is like taking a clock apart to understand the nature of time. I believe consciousness to be a fundamental ontic substrate like matter or energy, only it isn't localizable in spacetime like such. It is everywhere and nowhere at once--the radiant horizon of all becoming.
(Feb 23, 2026 06:55 PM)Magical Realist Wrote: [ -> ]Trying to understand the nature of consciousness by studying the brain is like taking a clock apart to understand the nature of time. I believe consciousness to be a fundamental ontic substrate like matter or energy, only it isn't localizable in spacetime like such. It is everywhere and nowhere at once--the radiant horizon of all becoming.
Beautifully put.
Consciousness is a most mysterious subject. Science has been clueless as to what it is, due to its materialist dilemma.