Matter and space are both mental models and mathematical abstractions that describe high level patterns well, but fall apart when we measure at higher resolution. The material objects and space we experience are constructs of our mind; the physical universe cannot be experienced.
After the end of Christian metaphysical dominance, our culture got rid of the supernatural, but not of Descartes two substances, because res extensa seems given, yet in the way we understand it (intuitive physics modified by Newton and Einstein), how can it produce consciousness?
The most important philosophical contribution of the 20th century are computational languages, and that they can be implemented in physics (eg in brains), and that both world model and agentic ideas (including the idea of being conscious) can be implemented in such languages.
Repairing Descartes should not reduce res cogitans to res extensa, but give res extensa its rightful status as a mental domain (the real-time world model), so that res extensa and res cogitans coexist in every mind, while a computationalized physics implements the mind.
I think that many cultures before ours have discovered that world, self and ideas are dreams of the mind, while some parent universe produces the mind. Many have also forgotten it, sometimes due to the influence of the Christian and secular dualisms of a dominant West.
This puts us into a weird position: while our shared metaphysics confuses us about how minds are producing the experience of reality, no culture before ours had the conceptual tools to explain how minds are produced. These tools are found within Artificial Intelligence.
@Plinz I've been reading bits of the Vedas and Upanishads, and they seem as if they had more sophisticated thought on the mechanics of mind than I find in current cultures, but yes, not those tools for understanding the details of its emergence
@Plinz the same goes for many texts and other remnants; I've heard you talk about Genesis, which is similar to the Creation Hymn of the Rig Veda in some ways
@Plinz I hope AI people do not become the next monks in a burning monastery
@Shoalst0ne If they stumble on the true specification of God and someone presses return the world will end
@Plinz @Shoalst0ne Only if they can't mash ctrl alt del before the "please wait" shut down sequence.