Perhaps I am of the sort you speak of, I feel philosophically content with the idea it’s atoms and other particles all the way down and there’s some pattern that gives rise to consciousness… and believe that everything is conscious to different degrees… perhaps this is naive? Love to hear any suggestions for reading to challenge this viewpoint if it is obviously flawed in some way
> Can you explain the pattern?
Indeed. Subjective feelings of "contentment" or "satisfaction" are irrelevant, as this is a matter of having an explanation that holds up. And materialism or naive atomism don't. They fall apart very quickly under examination. This isn't some wishy-washy speculation of some schizophrenic time cube guy who thinks we live in the Matrix. This is well understood metaphysics.
(And I urge careless readers to pay attention to the use of "naive". I am not claiming atomic theory does not tells us something about matter. Naive atomism is a kind of unsophisticated interpretation of matter as essentially just a collection of highly desiccated, ball-like things bouncing around, full stop.)
> This is not a proof, right?
There is a great deal of magical thinking that likes to pretend it is "scientific" by dressing itself in scientific jargon.
> It's as if it doesn't exist (although everyone experience the phenomena every day).
It doesn't exist to the wrong methods, just as sound doesn't exist to the eyes or color to the ears. The insane denial of consciousness is well exemplified by eliminativism. Eliminativism is what you get when a materialist doubles down and refuses to face the incoherence of his position, and proceeds to deny the very things he was supposed to explain in the first place.
> There is no room to talk about consciousness in this arrangement, so the problem is tucked away as "emergent" (other word is "illusion"). Meanwhile, there are phenomena that definitely happen (you feel conscious, don't you?) that would benefit from having an explanation, even terminology that is not poisoned.
Consciousness is one of those "the buck stops here" sorts of things.
For many phenomena, you can sort of get away with passing the buck by deferring to something else. By "getting away with", I don't mean you actually succeed in circumventing the fallacy that's being committed. I just mean there's a certain pretense of knowing that can be maintained in the face of criticism and demands for explanation. "Oh, it's really this other thing, see?" But when you hit one of these walls like consciousness or existence or knowledge, it all unravels. All the filth that's been swept out of sight is now piled up behind that last door. This is where performative contradictions surface with vigor. "I am aware that I am not conscious." "I do not exist." "No statement is true." The incoherence is often comical, so comical, in fact, that people might even refuse to believe they could possibly be guilty of committing something so silly, so it can't possibly be true!
Oh, but it is true...
>> Love to hear any suggestions for reading to challenge this viewpoint if it is obviously flawed in some way
As an intro, I might suggest Feser's "The Last Superstition" [0]. It's a book for philosophical beginners written during the height of the relatively brief but noisy New Atheist craze of Dawkins fame. The style is polemical (which is not typical of Feser's works; in fact, he didn't really want to write this book to begin with, and only wrote it to combat the obvious intellectual mediocrity of the New Atheists). Some of the polemic - a response to the polemical style of the New Atheists - might therefore feel a little dated, but perhaps not. What's good about it is that it surveys the basic philosophical errors Dawkins and co. commit and these intersect with what you seem to be interested in.
Feser has also written another beginner's guide to the "Philosophy of Mind" [1] which addresses mind questions more specifically than the first book. Both are very approachable.
He has also written two books of a more sophisticated nature on the philosophy of science [2] and on the notion of soul [3]. I would recommend these, along with his manual on metaphysics [4], to those with some more philosophical chops and interest. There are, of course, many other professional philosophers in this field who write about similar topics (Oderberg, for example, and his "Real Essentialism" [5]), but Feser is well known for his lucid style and clarity, as well as his pedagogical suitability.
Can you explain the pattern?
I mean, not "look at the Conway's Game of Life, and extrapolate from that, we are nothing but this". This is not a proof, right?
What I mean by "damn if you try" is the fact that consciousness in the current state of things is unreachable. Anything you can say about it is unfalsifiable. It's as if it doesn't exist (although everyone experience the phenomena every day).
So it's quantum that gives rises to atoms, and then quantum stops there. Above that layer, it's atoms. Then above that layer, chemistry takes the torch, and so on. If you need something about "mind", it's on the psychology layer or something, and it's built on previous ones (evolution, chemistry, etc).
There is no room to talk about consciousness in this arrangement, so the problem is tucked away as "emergent" (other word is "illusion"). Meanwhile, there are phenomena that definitely happen (you feel conscious, don't you?) that would benefit from having an explanation, even terminology that is not poisoned.