Why is Consciousness ...

[Gem]

Originally Posted by waechter418

....getting more and more discredited in Western civilization whose philosophers, artists, priests & poets held it, since the early Greeks, in high esteem.

I don't think that's the case as consciousness philosophy is a pretty big topic these days, and there is eve emerging quite a lot of talk about a 'science of consciousness'. David Chalmers is my favorite philosopher on this subject.

Is it because modern western sciences pay little attention to consciousness, and if so, only to try to bind it into matter?

One has to understand the historical context in which, due to the Church's persecution of who was then called 'natural philosophers', particularly Copernicus, Galileo and Descartes, 'natural philosophy' was basically forced to abandon 'matters of the soul', and even knowledge about the planets and solar system. By the time Newton came of age, natural philosophy really was relegated to only material things. The split between philosophy and science came later on, I think as late as the 19th century (not so sure about the time). After that, what once combined spiritual religion/mysticism, philosophical and scientific inquiry became 3 different and quite distinct schools of thought. However, by the 20th century QM did away with Cartesian and/or Newtonian 'clockwork physics', much to the dismay of Einstein, and a more abstract universe that encompasses both subjective and objective qualities is conceived of in both philosophy and science. The more philosophical essays of Niels Bohr speak about this in depth.

Or is it that people are increasingly captured by the material aspects of existence and thus become callous to consciousness?

What is the benefit of eliminating a concept that is accredited to have enriched Western cultures – and of course the grand civilizations of the East, who, by the way, keep its esprit since millennia well and alive.

The Eastern traditions, unlike Christiandom in the West, had no issue with the scientific/philosophical paradigm, so we find the Eastern spiritual teachings include an epistemology of the universe which is somewhat translatable or coherent with Quantum mechanics. The First Quantum physicists, such as Bohr, Heisenberg and Schrodinger, turned to the Vedas as part of their conceptions of the physics they were working on, and I think Bohr captured this sort of knowledge base best by saying:

"For a parallel to the lesson of atomic theory regarding the limited applicability of such customary idealizations, we must in fact turn to quite other branches of science, such as psychology, or even to that kind of epistemological problems with which already thinkers like Buddha and Lao Tzu have been confronted, when trying to harmonize our position as spectators and actors in the great drama of existence." (https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Niels_Bohr).