Qualia and Stuff

It’s not as if I believe Hegel to be right, I just think he’s closer than anybody else that I’ve come across. It would be cool if somebody could blend Hegel with Zen Buddhism. But, all of that has something to do with consciousness, or what philosophers of mind call qualia. It doesn’t really describe what lies outside of consciousness, if there is, in fact, something outside of it.

The one issue is that there could be a world independent of the way we are experiencing it, but even then, of what substance is it made? In other words, it, too, could be made of the stuff of consciousness, even if our own individual consciousness has modified it and interpreted so it would make sense to us.

Another question pertains to the origins of experience. Conventional wisdom would say that the mind is a product of the brain, so that everything we experience is happening because of this biological machine. And what stuff is it made of? Is the substance of the brain a material?

Most likely, the brain is made of the same stuff as the world that is being interpreted. This could be a physical substance, or it could be the consciousness of God. I really don’t know. Most people probably believe in physicalism, although it is not exactly clear what that means, in light of the newer insights in physics.