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Consciousness: Redefining the Mind-Body Problem

Alex Vikoulov
5 min readDec 17, 2020

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Original article first appeared on EcstadelicNET in Top Stories section on November 16, 2019

“Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of Nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are a part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.”
​-Max Planck

The following excerpt from my book Theology of Digital Physics: Phenomenal Consciousness, The Cosmic Self & The Pantheistic Interpretation of Our Holographic Reality may be hard to swallow for some die-hard materialists. This is why I urge some of you to read it with an open mind and abstain from making hasty conclusions. Keep in mind that this excerpt is but a small sample of much larger discussion of the hard problem of consciousness covered quite extensively in my book with the “meta-analysis” of leading theories of consciousness, substantiated claims, certain proposed solutions in regards to phenomenology, future possibilities of mind-uploading and, as the title suggests, theological implications of Digital Physics.

First, we need to recognize that the physicalist approach is limited in scope and can only depict neural correlates of consciousness without identifying the causal role of biochemical processes on producing a conscious experience. This is a very old mind-body debate deeply rooted in the debate of Idealism vs. Materialism. Arguably, consciousness is not generated by the brain. You can’t get consciousness out of a piece of matter. We have discussed elsewhere the many reasons why we can be certain that this is true. Consciousness is fundamental, pre-exists our Universe and manifests in everything that we think of as real. A brain, as important as it seems, is nothing more than the way that non-local consciousness operates at an “avatar” level during a lifetime. The evidence that all of this is true is consistent and overwhelming. But mainstream science is still bound by the centuries-old “materialist dogma” and stuck with the “hard problem” of consciousness.

​If we assume that consciousness doesn’t arise from the brain activity, as some neuroscientists still presume to be true, where does it come from? Some thinkers propose that “local” consciousness arises from “non-local” quantum processes at large while consciousness is posited to be Nature’s sole ontological primitive. Besides the…

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Alex Vikoulov
Alex Vikoulov

Written by Alex Vikoulov

Futurist, Evolutionary Cyberneticist, Philosopher of Mind, Best-Selling Author, Filmmaker

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