I appreciate your attention to detail but IMHO - just relax on the tutorials - or maybe just a link for those who do not understand the topic?
Relax on the tutorials? We have two excellent and qualified teachers posting on this thread that are writing to lay people in a comprehensible manner. What do you think that's worth to somebody not in the field who is interested and can understand what is being written?
They also show you not just what they have learned and how well they can teach, but also how to think about math and physics, and by extrapolation, all logical and empirical pursuits. They think the same way, and it's a rigorous, disciplined way of thinking. Study and emulate that if you can. And their words sit in striking contrast to the less rigorous thinkers, who want the criteria for belief to be relaxed, and whose thinking is more chaotic. As a result, their posts contain little of value.
Someone asked recently on another thread, "I have nothing against atheists, but I’m not too sure why so many choose to gather on a religious forum."
My answer was this: "This is humanism school for me. The lecture part is reading the thoughts of the other critical thinkers and scientifically literate posters. The lab is the array of types of people we encounter here and how they think. Here, we see a spectrum of religious and humanist thinkers and can get a sense of what effect religion has on believers according to the religion, and how the believers compare to the irreligious intellectually and morally - that is, what benefit or harm does the religious life confer on the faithful."
These guys are the lecture part and comparing them to others is the lab part.
the academic leaders in many fields of science are too entrenched in natural methodologies, to ever come around to ‘consciousness being the source of all existence.’ Basically due to what they consider lack of evidence… which is really only because they can’t test for it.
Did you want them to entertain that idea as a possibility or to declare it fact? If the former, any competent critical thinker will agree that that is a logically possible hypothesis, but won't go further and call it correct or alternative hypotheses incorrect. Why? Because that is how we prevent accumulating false and unfalsifiable ideas and calling them knowledge or truth or descriptions of reality. And is that important? It's one of the most important and successful ideas man has ever had. It converts useless ism like creationism, alchemy, and astrology into their scientific counterparts (cosmology, biology, chemistry, and astronomy), which have been hugely successful.
In making this argument, it seems to me you confuse personal, subjective consciousness, with universal consciousness. “We are each facets of a consciousness, experiencing life subjectively”, is a phrase I heard from a friend’s not very religious Indian father.
I think his observation goes to the heart of conversations about consciousness. There certainly have been scientists as well as philosophers and theologians who were at least willing to consider the possibility that consciousness maybe fundamental, or at least key to understanding the universe (see Bohm, Wheeler, Fuchs, Penrose from theoretical physics).
I would say the same to you as I did to Hockeycowboy. Yes, all competent critical thinkers should consider the possibility, but can one go further profitably? Despite claims to the contrary from many regarding what they call spiritual truths, my answer is no, unless by profiting one means amusing oneself speculating.
to limit our conception of reality to our experience of it, is to close the door on a universe of possibility.
I would say that our experience of reality is all that matters. Ideas that don't eventually lead to knowledge, by which I mean ideas that are demonstrably correct and which can be used to predict outcomes, are useless by definition. Speculating is a creative act, and is necessary in science and life. It's where the ideas that we test and which become knowledge when confirmed originate. But until they pass that last test, they're idle thoughts.
To the pluralist the world is populated by discrete entities, interacting through contact. To the monist, everything is connected. Once you adopt the latter as a default view of the world, all distinctions - for instance those between the object, the observer, and the act of observation - become arbitrary.
How about adopting both simultaneously? Holistic knowledge means knowledge at all scales and from all perspectives. My background is medicine. A proper understanding of a patient involves understanding a person at ever smaller scales: organism (human being) -> organ systems (cardiovascular) -> organs (hearts) -> tissues (cardiac conduction system) -> cells ( cardiac neurons) -> chemicals (neurotransmitter, ions).
But we also have to go up inscale. He is a member of a family, which is a member of a community and an ecosystem, all of which can play a role in health and disease as well.
And all of reality can be and should be considered at all scales and perspectives as well. But we live at this scale and have this individual human perspective, in which things like galaxies and quarks are largely indiscernible, and in which we can understand the concept of spacetime (monism), but experience them as fundamentally different things (a plurality). THAT's what matters to the individual. Yes, we can understand that as we walk through a room, there are spacetime considerations, but they don't project to the scale of experience.
Now go back to your words above. How arbitrary is one's understanding of space and time as independent variables. It's imposed. It's the only way I can experience reality even if I can understand it otherwise, and it's my opinion that too much emphasis is placed in the understanding such that the experiencing takes a back seat, that subjectivity is deemed a limitation to be transcended, that whatever is out there on the other side of the theater of consciousness and its fundamental nature should be more important than how its rendered in consciousness.
My world (and yours, too, I presume), is experienced as separate, interacting objects. Consciousness is experienced as separate bubbles - mine in here which I apprehend directly and immediately, and countless other separate entities whose consciousness is implied by behavior. That's what every day is like, as when I order lunch later. I will experience my wife, our waiter, and myself as discrete conscious agents, not as one. I don't deny that there is a benefit to understanding how we're connected, but that is the case because that understanding can affect experience beyond thinking that thought, such as how we feel about and treat others.
So yes to monism and pluralism both. Reality can be thought of as a single thing as well as a collection of things, but the latter (pluralistic) describes how it is experienced, and once again, that's what matters most to us. Models of objective reality are only valuable if they modify our experience of subjective reality favorably.
