I’m not opposed to the inquiries. Instead, I’m raising doubts about the power of language to capture what even mystics agree are ineffable or transcendent matters. We’re barely able to understand the meaning of quantum mechanics, and our commonsense notion of “matter” falls apart since the relevant units are both particles and waves, or they’re something else entirely. So what does it matter whether we’re metaphysical materialists or idealists, when fundamental reality transcends are parochial conceptions? What is language doing in reference to that level? Are these theories we’re having or myths we’re spouting?

It’s the same with consciousness. If by “consciousness” you mean something apart from the commonsense feeling of being aware and alive as a relatively (not absolutely) unified self, it makes little sense to say that consciousness is the source of all nonliving things (because our kind of consciousness requires hardware which would already had to have been evolved or created). If you mean something more technical than that, we could just as well choose a different word to avoid misunderstanding and equivocation.

There may be no absolute center or dominant power in the brain’s neural processing, but we do experience ourselves as individuals. There’s a limited unity of that experience. What’s the difference, then, between calling that experience “illusory” and calling it an emergent, natural construct? That’s what I kept asking Sender Spike. If that experience is real enough, then the universe doesn’t derive from consciousness in the same sense in which our behaviour does.

What the monist would need is some meaningful overlap between the fundamental and the emergent kinds of consciousness.