The claims of physicalism, functionalism, emergentism, etc are no less bold or unfalsifiable than the conjectures that I propose. I do not make any ‘claims’, I only propose a new interpretation.
When I say that consciousness is the antithesis of mechanism, I say it as a proposition based on a constellation of empirical and rational considerations that have impressed upon me over many years of examination as seeming more valid than the alternatives.
When I say that biological level experiences may require a biological level vocabulary, I am opening up a new line of reasoning that can be used to tease out a deeper understanding of what is being overlooked in the question at issue. I’m not simply claiming that consciousness must be a feature of biology - to the contrary, I suggest that all phenomena are “aesthetic” phenomena, even inorganic substances. What I propose is that aside from any presumptions about biological life being different in kind from inorganic material processes, it may instead be the case that the aesthetic phenomena are driving the realization relationship rather than the (mechanically irrelevant) substrate. The substrate becomes an expression of the experience rather than the other way around. For example, when we want to express complex ideas, we use larger words and sentences. Complex ideas can sometimes be prompted by larger vocabulary as well, but only to a conscious audience. By themselves, physical structures have no good reason to generate any sort of experience or sensation, regardless of how complex. If they did, we have no good reason to call those magical structures physical.
You simply assume the answer, as in your last two posts. It is not only a non-necessary (contingent) fact about the universe that consciousness is biological-- it isn’t even a fact at all!
How is your claim of the opposite relationship answer any less of a simple assumption? I do not claim that consciousness is biological. I propose that consciousness is an intrinsically aesthetic phenomenon which underlies all other possible phenomena, but that there is a continuum of aesthetic richness which links particular kinds of conscious experience with specific eras of material development in the history of the cosmos.
Isn’t an antithesis generated by a thesis?
Yes. I propose that the thesis is what I call the aesthetic foundation - the totality of all conscious experience. This would be the case (I reason) even if there were no biological organisms or human beings. The universe would still be made entirely of nested experiential presentations.
Let me assume you’re using the term informally, to mean “the opposite of”.
It works both ways. I am proposing that mechanism literally diverges from the thesis of consciousness. Mechanism plays the same role in dividing and multiplying conscious experience as diffraction plays in dividing clear/white/bright light into the spectrum of varying color.
Now, if consciousness is the opposite of mechanism, you must admit that no causality is present-- either among the constituent elements of consciousness or between consciousness and the biological, or inorganic, or synthetic-biological substrate which it is supposed to be related to.
To the contrary, I am proposing that all causality is due to the nature of aesthetic phenomena. The structural substrate (logical or physical) associated with any caliber of aesthetic experience is itself only an aesthetic experience in which the lower levels of experience are sort of summed and aesthetically truncated as tangible geometries.
So consciousness does nothing, affects nothing, and its underlying composition is therefore irrelevant. So you’ve negated literally everything you’ve said.
Just the opposite. I am suggesting that all phenomena are nothing but consciousness doing some things and not others, at some times and not others, affecting itself (and it’s diffracted subsets) in some ways and not others. You’re negating a strawman version of things that I never said.