Consciousness: The Mind Messing with the Mind
&gt; It’s not the existence of this inner voice he finds mysterious. “The phenomenon to explain,” he said, “is why the brain, as a machine, insists it has this property that is nonphysical.”<p>There are plenty of real, non-physical things. Evolution is real, and non-physical, you can describe it using mathematical formulas. Math decides how the real world happens.<p>Think about, oh, say, a road. What&#x27;s the difference between a road and a random patch of asphalt? Collect the differences in your mind and those are the definition of a road. That something is a road and not just a patch of asphalt has real consequences for the world around us.<p>There is the world of ideas. Things held in the mind, in the consciousness of people have real-world effects on the physical world around us.<p>Ideas can have properties, all of these properties are themselves non-physical. You can compare ideas to each other.<p>One could place on a continuum things that are wholly physical, and things that are wholly non-physical. Road properties and evolution closer to the physical, story themes and potential political platforms closer to the non-physical. The non-physical would seem to be infinite, whereas the physical would be finite. So many, many, many more things in existence are non-physical than physical.<p>If consciousness itself were something on the same order as an idea, then it would lose none of its potency. People who argue this think they are arguing over reality, but are only debating semantics.