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by amatecha 989 days ago
Yeah I’m not sure why someone would argue that consciousness isn’t physical. Take a conscious person and knock them hard in the head. Interesting, their consciousness is altered. Take drugs? Check it out, consciousness altered. People who experience head trauma have their personality permanently altered. In the course of life you will likely directly observe the effects of physical injury on a person’s consciousness, just due to how often that kind of stuff happens.
2 comments

> Yeah I’m not sure why someone would argue that consciousness isn’t physical

Reading the comments, one thing that's been unsaid is whether each person discussing is religious/spiritual or not. My guess is that if you are religious then the idea of there being another layer in the universe goes without saying, and if you are not then it's ridiculous.

It's probably a waste of time debating across that line.

For me it has very little to do with religiousness but rather calming down some rather frequent panic attacks in the middle of the night. The fact that thinking the wrong thing can erase your consciousness while thinking it, doesn't help from the group that believes thinking the wrong thing erases consciousness.
The difference is people like you mean consciousness = "consciousness as the average human experiences it", whereas others include every single potential conscious experience, including the delibitated one. From your perspective, a knocked out human isn't conscious the same way a corpse is not conscious, because he does not conform to the average human experience.

Meanwhile others think that the knocked out human and the corpse and the average human are all conscious, but they experience their respective consciousnessess aka the consciousness of an average human, knocked out human or corpse. You could say that this is just a disagreement in what the word conscious means.