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 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.
Again: would that apply to all "X is fundamental" arguments?
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.
That is a matter of judgment.
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.
Those would be the factors that make the posit that consciousness is fundamental (part of) a good explanation. We don't have a good dualist explanation; many think we don;t have a good physicalist explanation either.
But the point remains that dualist (or, as I prefer, intrinsicist) explanations can't written off apriori. The devil's oin the details.
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.
Don't they? What's the space-time- matter energy unification theory?
Question beggingness is an intrinsic property of arguments: it shouldn't depend on external factors.
It's an intrinsic property of arguments in contexts. Specifically, whether something is question-begging depends on what one's trying to prove.
Indeed explanations aren't arguments. The arguments we're talking about are ones of the form "Theory X is better than theory Y because it explains alleged facts F better". Merely saying "Consciousness (or whatever) is fundamental" is of course not question-begging. But if the existence, or some ...
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.