Is it question begging to say is fundamental?
It could be. For instance, imagine someone (years ago) wondering why and how things burn. Let's suppose that this was before there was a really good scientific account of burning. Then they might say "Conventional science has failed; we should therefore adopt my theory instead. My theory says that there is a fundamental property of things, called their flammability; things burn readily when their flammability is high. Burning consists of turning things with high flammability into things with low flammability." That would be question-begging, in relation to explaining burning, in roughly the same way as taking consciousness as fundamental is question-begging in relation to explaining consciousness.
I suppose it could in principle turn out that consciousness is fundamental. (Being question-begging is a defect in an argumentative move; the proposition(s) one asserts in the process might still be correct.) But the fact that we don't have anything close to a complete physical explanation of consciousness cannot be a good reason for thinking that consciousness is fundamental; there would have to be other reasons, if someone were to be rationally convinced that consciousness is fundamental.
(A sufficiently complete and sustained failure to find physical explanations for consciousness might be sufficient reason for provisionally taking consciousness as fundamental. But as I've already said elsewhere in this thread, that isn't in fact the epistemic situation we find ourselves in.)
Are they?
They seem to be; at any rate I've never heard any sort of explanation, starting with "consciousness as fundamental" premises, that gives any inkling of how those relationships might come about.
As for matter and space: in order to do justice to the relationships between them, physicists don't exactly take them as separate fundamental things. But that's a quibble, indeed, a sufficiently detailed theory about what consciousness does and how it relates to the other things known to science might in principle explain those intricate relationships. But it turns out that people wanting to take consciousness as fundamental never actually have such detailed theories, or proposals for how such theories might be found, or any sign of being interested in finding such theories. This is getting into territory I've already commented on elsewhere in the thread, though, so I'll leave it there.
Is it question begging to say is fundamental?
It could be.
Question beggingness is an inherent property of arguments: it shouldn;t depend on external factors.
There have been bad explanations (NB explanations aren't arguments) of the form "X is fundamental", some physicalist, some not. There have also been good ones. They can't all be bad because they are question begging: if one is question-begging, all are, but not all are bad. What makes them bad or good is other, complex factors
...But the fact that we don't have anything close to a comp
Background
I was raised in the Churches of Christ and my family is all very serious about Christianity. About 3 years ago, I started to ask some hard questions, and the answers from other Christians were very unsatisfying. I used to believe that the Bible was, you know, inspired by a loving God, but its endorsement of genocide, the abuse of slaves, and the mistreatment of women and children really started to bother me.
I set out to study these issues as much as I could. I stayed up past midnight for weeks reading what Christians have to say, and this process triggered a real crisis of faith. What started out as a search for answers on Biblical genocide led me to places like commonsenseatheism.com. I learned that the Bible has serious credibility problems on lots of issues that no one ever told me about. Wow.
My Question
Now I'm pretty sure that the God of the Bible is man-made and Jesus of Nazareth was probably a failed prophet, but I don't have good reasons to reject the supernatural all together. I'm working through the sequences, but this process is slow. I will probably struggle with this question for months, maybe longer.
Excluding the Supernatural was interesting, but it left me wanting a more thorough explanation. Where do you think I should go from here? Should I just continue reading the sequences, and re-read them until the ideas gel? I'm coming from 30 years of Sunday School level thinking. It's not like I grew up with words like "epistemology" and "epiphenomenalism". If there is no supernatural, and I can be confident about that, I will need to re-evaluate a lot of things. My worldview is up for grabs.