I don’t understand why one would assume it’s a force. It’s pretty clearly an effect and/or emergent property of a particular physical and biochemical configuration that I call “me”. Just as “weather” is the properties of wind, water, etc. in motion rather than a distinct “force”. Although I’m sure our more ignorant ancestors tended to think of it as a force. Just as us ignorant people see a force of consciousness due to not fully understanding how it works. We have much to learn.
What we DO know about consciousness is that it’s an emergent property of a sufficiently complex brain and attached sensory systems, while those systems are alive and healthy. It’s certainly wonderful to behold, but I’ve never seen any need to attach woo to it or assume things about it. It’s enough that it just “is”.
I believe we are conscious observers. I believe it is the four fundamental forces that determine all consequences. With a bit of randomness thrown in also.
But I think religious people think a soul outside of the material, gets to make decisions, and so that would be an extra force. I think the god of the bible is supposed to be able to will things to happen, or will things into existence. So perhaps there are some people that think consciousness is something extra special that can make things happen despite the four fundamental forces.
Oh definitely. It just sounded like you were asserting that yourself.
Two examples that spring immediately to mind would be the Prosperity Gospel (“name it and claim it”), or its more generic counterpart, “You create your own reality by what you give attention to and visualize” (exemplified by the book The Secret). Or in more historic / ancient terms, “As above, so below”, or arguably, Gnosticism in general. I think that the proto-orthodox were actually correct to reject excessive mysticism and esotericism, because apart from it producing counterproductive and antisocial excesses, it makes control of the sheeple more difficult, if everyone is off inventing their own weirdness. Better to have a more black and white dogma. But these threads of belief still exert influence around the not-so-small fringes of various sects.
I think the biggest flaw with the “hard problem” is the assumption that a subjective experience needs to be some extra, non-physical addition to the brain’s mechanics.
Look at it from an evolutionary perspective. A brain shouldn’t just process information like a cold, silicon computer; it needs a feedback loop that forces it to care about that information for survival. If I burn my hand, a purely physical reaction triggers a highly subjective, terrible “feeling” of pain. That intense internal perspective isn’t magic, it’s just what it feels like from the inside when an incredibly complex, biological machine is actively computing its own survival data in real-time.
We don’t need a supernatural bridge to connect the objective and the subjective. Subjectivity is just what objective data processing feels like when you happen to be the one doing the processing.