How does insisting that the "key to UFOs is consciousness" bring us any closer to an understanding?

Lately, I've been exploring and thinking about the ideological divisions within ufology, or groups interested in UFOs. Historically, these have been divided into, and can still generally be divided into, the "materialist"/"nuts and bolts", camp and the "non-materialist" camp. Of course, each of these camps can be sub-divided into smaller contingents. For example, some "materialists" might believe that UFOs are all a PsyOp perpetrated by the government or some breakaway civilization, while other "materialists" might believe that they are material craft piloted by material beings from other solar systems.

Specifically, I've been wondering about this ongoing refrain that the "key to UFOs is consciousness." This is a sentiment that I keep encountering. You can search for that combination of words on Twitter, for example, and see it repeated by various people over and over again.

And I wonder about it, because it strikes me as so broad as to be banal, even trivial, and at this point it seems to have been repeated with so little clarification that it is in danger of actually obfuscating its intended explanatory power.

Focusing upon consciousness here as an extraordinary aspect, I think, ends up reintroducing a materialist paradigm: to say that consciousness is the "key" to understanding a phenomenon is only remarkable if you understand consciousness as a thing which selectively operates, and not as a phenomenal groundwork for the cosmos. Why is it not equally true that the "key to language is consciousness", or the "key to qualia is consciousness"? You can keep going with these statements and still be offering only conceptual porridge because the terms of consciousness -- how it phenomenally operates -- have not yet been delineated (this is, as an aside, why any modern announcements of a conscious A.I. are extremely premature; you can't say something is conscious when you don't know what consciousness is).

If one espouses to be a non-materialist, then one should also be prepared to say that the key to understanding any other sort of interaction between beings is consciousness. I believe that we need a better set of conceptual parameters here if we are to understand how UFOs and ETs represent something categorically anomalous in relation to mentation.

Submitted November 19, 2022 at 11:31AM by Abrbarzan https://ift.tt/QCEP6uS