Materialism as a religion

I think my problem is that I find it as unsatisfying to say consciousness is an intrinsic attribute of a non-material entity, which either we can't understand or is beyond our understanding in principle, as it is to say that consciousness arises from the material world in a way we don't understand.

And if the non-material entity is beyond our understanding, I'm not sure how we can be sure that it would have a greater degree of free will than a purely material entity, or that its life would necessarily be more "meaningful".

It appears that your real problem is that you can't accept the validity of the mass of empirical evidence accumulated by inquiry and research in parapsychology and related fields. Maybe that means the end of the discussion, since you apparently reject any other logical or philosophical arguments.

It appears that your real problem is that you can't accept the validity of the mass of empirical evidence accumulated by inquiry and research in parapsychology and related fields. Maybe that means the end of the discussion, since you apparently reject any other logical or philosophical arguments.

I didn't say any of that, though.

I didn't say any of that, though.

I agree that it is intellectually unsatisfying to find something incomprehensible. But I am not really surprised that some things may be fundamentally impenetrable, and I don't have much unease due to that. For me, on issues like these, empirical evidence always trumps theory.

I agree that it is intellectually unsatisfying to find something incomprehensible. But I am not really surprised that some things may be fundamentally impenetrable, and I don't have much unease due to that. For me, on issues like these, empirical evidence always trumps theory.

Me too. As far as I'm concerned, it's the prima facie empirical evidence in favour of psi that makes the subject interesting, not the philosophical arguments.

Me too. As far as I'm concerned, it's the prima facie empirical evidence in favour of psi that makes the subject interesting, not the philosophical arguments.

For me it is the other way around: I like to ponder on the why rather than the how. If there's evidence for the how, so much the better but I'm still more interested in why I'm here (or anything is).

Why single out emotions?  Take Love for example. That is entirely a chemical reaction caused mostly by oxytocin. Did you know that it is in one state responsible and necessary for a mother to be able to bond with her newborn baby?
Remember the very first time you fell in love all of the physical reactions you felt were all caused by certain chemicals created by your brain. And remember how as your love relation progressed those feelings faded to be replaced by loving feelings of contentment. Why chemicals cause certain states of mind is a mystery for sure, but why imply the answer lays with metaphysics?

Have a read of this:

Fifty psychological and psychiatric terms to avoid: a list of inaccurate, misleading, misused, ambiguous, and logically confused words and phrases

(16) Love molecule. Over 6000 websites have dubbed the hormone oxytocin the “love molecule” (e.g., Morse, 2011). Others have named it the “trust molecule” (Dvorsky, 2012), “cuddle hormone” (Griffiths, 2014), or “moral molecule” (Zak, 2013). Nevertheless, data derived from controlled studies imply that all of these appellations are woefully simplistic (Wong, 2012; Jarrett, 2015; Shen, 2015). Most evidence suggests that oxytocin renders individuals more sensitive to social information (Stix, 2014), both positive and negative. For example, although intranasal oxytocin seems to increase within-group trust, it may also increase out-group mistrust (Bethlehem et al., 2014). In addition, among individuals with high levels of trait aggressiveness, oxytocin boosts propensities toward intimate partner violence following provocation (DeWall et al., 2014). Comparable phrases applied to other neural messengers, such as the term “pleasure molecule” as a moniker for dopamine, are equally misleading (see Landau et al., 2008; Kringelbach and Berridge, 2010, for discussions).

If anything, this suggests that we still know very little about how the brain works...