I never said it was the desire, Bill; you are scrambling the logic of what I am saying in order to stay in your shell.

However, if you approach what I said from "all thought is local material phenomena" of course your assumption proves itself.

The day you show me how understanding in the full and lively sense that we all experience daily can be produced by molecules, I'll buy you a keg and a bag of chips.

I did not posit universal consciousness; I said consciousness. It might be individual consciousness multiplied by the number of conscious viewpoints in the current space-time continuum, for all I know. I think we both agree, at least, that consciousness does exist.

Use a wireless phone, if you like that metaphor better -- if you are having a conversation, and then fuse a couple of the leads, the conversation will garble. But that won't prove it was the communicating to you. With no wires, if you only believed in solid connections you'd have to believe it was the phone. The idea of a source outside the immediately apparent material system would be ridiculous, wouldn't it?

A