Quote Originally Posted by really View Post
You already got my point before, but now you're just talking about extraneous facts. You said "Yes, I only know of existence. Of course, I have absolutely no reason whatsoever to believe in anything beyond existence." You know of your senses, regardless of whether they're correct or not, and yet this is purely subjective and not provable, detectable or a product of material. Knowing of existence is not interpreting existence, it goes beyond appearances and the body/mind, therefore it is a spiritual concern. You don't need to look for consciousness because all of this experiential phenomena is happening within it.
Maybe I'm just being dense, but I still don't know what you're getting at. I use senses to collect information about the world I perceive to inhabit. Those are the only tools at my disposal. No amount of spiritual enlightenment will change that. So it may be subjective. Maybe you don't exist. That's fine. My senses tell me otherwise. And seeing how they're the only means I have to collect information around me, why should I distrust them? Certainly they may be flawed, but I don't exactly have an alternative. There are beings in my little world that have senses the same as mine, and can help me confirm that in the world I perceive to inhabit, when I'm looking at a building, it's actually there. It might not be, but I don't have a reason to believe otherwise.

As I understand them, Near-Death experiences reveal a presence or an awareness that one's consciousness (or life) is not subject to time or space, hence consciousness is known as indestructible. It is impossible for something experiential such as this, to be a product of material and chemicals, since experience is obviously beyond all the describable and restricted properties that material entails; two completely different qualities and categorize. The nature of experience and revelation is obviously a spiritual matter and not a matter of mathematics or chemistry.
Look, I got the link, and I can tell you I'm not going to sit through an hour and a half of youtube videos. So, if you'd like a level playing field to argue on, perhaps you could help elaborate on how NDE's prove consciousness is not subject to time nor space. And what do you mean here by "experience?" I experience the wind. I experience tastes, sensations, thoughts, feelings. In other words, I experience reality as interpreted by the brain. This is very much a matter of chemistry and mathematics, as you put it. Much research is taking place to try and understand conscious thought and its source. THAT is how you observe the world and draw conclusions about it. Not by observing some little-known phenomenon and trying to explain it in some way that makes sense to you.

Where did I say consciousness is an outside entity?
When you said it's eternal, and cannot be created nor destroyed. Ergo, if humans are not gifted with naturally conscious thought, there is an outside entity that somehow bestows it upon us. You can call that a soul or some imperceptible universal force or whatever you want. The bottom line is: unless humans can have conscious thought all by their lonesome, there is something outside the human body and the human mind that gives us consciousness.

Speaking of variables, my "solution" seems to be the most plausible. Because after all, if you see that you can only know of life, consequently there is no possibility of death. There are no big variables here; life is a constant. Perhaps the only variable that is relevant is the gradient or level of consciousness in the given individual.
Your body stops working. You're dead. That variable is still there. And now you still have the outside entity problem. The solution with the fewest variables is the one we already know happens: evolution. If we accept that conscious thought has been selected through evolution, as evidence suggests, then there is no outside entity. There is no eternal conscious thing that has been waiting around specifically for humans to evolve. Consciousness becomes a regular bodily process. When the body stops working, so does it. Kind of like pulling the plug on a computer. The computer is still physically there, but there's no power to run it. The power didn't just vanish into thin air, either. It stopped flowing to the computer.

Also, see the above link for "shreds" of evidence, it may be relevant. Doesn't quantum physics count?
Quantum physics! Another relatively new frontier. Again, you're taking relatively vague or ill-known concepts and trying to make consciousness fit within them. Unexplained events are exactly that: unexplained. There are things in this world we do not know. Mankind has been deceived before. People thought the world was flat. It appeared flat enough. But as our understanding grew, we found it was round. And also not in the center of the universe.