Religion plays a significant, though deleterious, role in many people's lives. Organized religion brings a sense of peace and purpose for people who are otherwise feeble, insecure, and in need of help. But for all the others who reason and try to make sense of it all, they inevitably reach the conclusion that religion is a man-made fictional arrangement to make people feel superior to their mortality. Every single religion claims to give its followers eternal life, life after death, resurrection from the dead, meeting thier ancestors and deceased loved ones, etc. when in fact none of this is true or factual. It's just one big illusion to help people avoid facing the reality of life on earth: It has no purpose, it is not guided by anything or anyone, and just as we are conceived and born by pure biological serendipity - like ALL other living beings on earth - we will die and that will be the end of it. There is no afterlife.
Regardless of when and how people discover the truth, the hard fact is that IT IS THE TRUTH.
Here are some of their insightful stories:
--------------"My youth pastor was actively advocating for the teens in his sermon to engage in actual violence against non-believers. He was talking about how TV and other distractions were taking people away from God, and he wheeled in a tub TV and bashed it to bits, shattering glass everywhere. He then instructed his believers to pick up their bats to destroy things that oppose God. He tried to make it sort of seem 'metaphorical,' but he was absolutely trying to spur a violent mob mentality. It was horrifying. Everyone around me was screaming violent threats against Muslims and other groups. I silently left. And that led me on my path to question my faith and eventually become an atheist."
--------------"My mom’s family is very religious, like the kind where you can’t sing religious songs or pray with family who aren’t the same religion as you. We grew up very poor. I started working at age 12 to help pay for my school clothes and supplies." At age 16, I got a fast-food job and was promoted to supervisor a year or so later, which came with a raise. The pastor of the church told my mom that I was sinning because the Bible says that women are subservient to men, so I shouldn’t be telling men what to do at work. I asked him to show me where it says that in the Bible, and instead, he brought me before the church and tried to shame me publicly. That was the beginning of the end of my relationship with organized religion."
--------------"I’m a bisexual man married to a woman. We were both raised very devoutly Christian — my family was at the church every Sunday morning, night, and Wednesday, or else people would say we were backslidden." I was in my 20s when I realized I was bi, but since I married a woman, I didn’t think it was that big of a deal. Still, I know that I can never tell my family I’m a member of the LGBTQ+ community because of their harsh views on the subject. My wife loves and accepts me as I am, but it hurts deeply to know that I can never share my true self with them because I know for a fact that they would choose their religious beliefs over a relationship with me, even though I 'fit' into their 'normal' view of marriage. Their bigotry in the name of religion has made me turn from religion as a whole. If a belief promotes families to turn on their children because of an identity they can’t control, then I want no part in it."
---------- "I was raised a very devout Catholic in a Middle Eastern country, went to a Jesuit school where we were inducted into a "Crusader" cult-like program for children, and lived in a very religious, though very bigoted, environment. Religion was more of a political identity than actual faith. It was all a reaction to the Muslim environment. It was not grounded in faith or in conviction. What saved me from this barbarity is my scientific education, in which I learned facts, not fictional magic from the Bronze Age. I slowly shifted from accepting the biblical garbage in which we were indoctrinated to trying to understand the world from proven facts based on serious science. Today I have no faith - faith implies the suspension of reason - and I refuse to believe anything that was not established by force of reason and experimentation. Just as children one day discover that there is no Santa Claus, adults should also drop their "adult version" of Santa Claus, the Big Zombie in the Sky. I did and I feel liberated. When asked about which "faith" I have, I say "none". "How come?" they say, "You've got to be something", to which I reply, "I am just human, and that is all the idendity I need."
--------------"I don’t know if you could call me 'devoted.' My parents are atheists, but my grandparents are Anglican, and I used to go to church with them every single Sunday. I loved it, the singing, Sunday school, helping out at church events, and even Christmas recitals. But when I was 9 or 10, I wasn’t feeling well, so I decided to stay with my grandparents for the service instead of going to Sunday school - the Rev started talking about sin and 'bad' people, which turned into how this specific group of people were savages and how it’s in their blood to steal, take drugs and 'drink their life away', and how it can be traced back to their ancestors. I was young, but figuring out he was talking about my people wasn't hard. I grew up in a very, very rich white community.
I’m Polynesian (Māori and Tahitian). I remember looking up at my grandma, and she just squeezed my hand and told me how I knew it was not true. I couldn’t believe no one said anything. I thought church was all about love and acceptance until that day. I have never felt so alone and isolated. From then on, I listened to everything he said and how everything had disgusting undertones of pure anger and hate. I’ve never been to a church since."
--------------"We were Southern Baptist. Our marriage was stressed due to careers and deployments. I called our pastor to request counseling, and he said, 'You can’t do that. Only your husband can request that'. When my husband got home from work, he was furious with me for embarrassing him by telling the pastor our problems AND that I even called the pastor at all without his permission. Never mind the fact we were both officers in the military. We were divorced within a year, and I never set foot in a church again, nor will I join any religion. We spent every spare day and night volunteering with that church. It was refreshing to live in the real world again."
--------------"It was the summer between my 7th and 8th grade year, and I was in a vacation bible study at a pretty traditional Baptist church, the first year with the older teen kids. I made friends with a lovely Muslim girl at my school during the school year. She was the oldest of three or four siblings, the only girl. She loved soccer and music and making jokes. During VBS, I remember sitting on the stairs during an outside time, speaking to the teen's teacher, and asking him about a sermon from earlier in the week. I asked him, 'What about my Muslim friend? She's a sweet girl who takes care of her family. Does that mean she would go to hell because she doesn't believe in Jesus?' Even at 13, I could tell this man did not want to tell me the answer that, technically, the hardcore Baptist Church we were a part of would require. Once I realized that Christianity was meant to be taken to heart as a black-and-white situation, I knew I couldn't continue trusting that institution with my heart."
--------------"I was raised Catholic and went to Catholic school for 13 years. It was very important to me when I was younger — there were several years where I wanted to become a nun — but I started to grow disillusioned as I got older. There was one final nail in the coffin for me, though. I had gotten married when I was very young, and the relationship was not particularly healthy. After he cheated on me for the third time, we decided to separate. Quickly after that, I met someone else that I fell deeply in love with. After struggling with this for a few weeks, I sought counseling from my parish priest, who I had known since I was a child. Two sentences in, he stopped and told me I was 'disgusting' and 'an affront to God for having an affair' and in 'a permanent state of mortal sin for a temporary feeling. I burst into tears and left the rectory.
Two weeks later, one of this guy's other local priest friends was arrested for molesting children, and the priest that had made me feel so shitty made a huge deal during his homily the following week about how we need to forgive these priests for their mistakes in the same way Jesus would forgive. The hypocrisy was astonishing — I was an affront to God for meeting a man without getting my previous marriage annulled, but the priest who molested a dozen children over 30 years was deserving of forgiveness. I haven't been back to any church since, eschewing a second church wedding to elope with the man I had 'temporary feelings' for in a barn, witnessed by cows."
--------------"I left my former faith when I was 21-22. I was one of Jehovah's Witnesses, and we had an issue of one of the church's magazines that proudly showed little pictures of all the kids who were martyred. They all died because their parents withheld blood donations. I knew about the church's anti-blood stance, but I didn't realize how many people lost their lives because of it (the church always said that with blood substitutes and talented medical treatment, people usually didn't need actual blood transfusions.) That was the last straw. I had theological concerns that I'd been struggling with for some time but had just chalked it up to a lack of faith, but I finally realized that even if the JWs were right, I couldn't live the rest of eternity with people who thought this was okay, so I left."
--------------"I was raised in a Presbyterian home. At a young age, I was molested, and when my parents found out, we moved to a new neighborhood, and they took me to counseling. The counselor read me a book that talked about how God was angry with me for letting someone touch me in 'my special places' that wasn't my husband. I got victim-shamed at seven years old. After that, I attended church out of obligation to my family. As soon as I moved out at 18, I didn't set foot in a church again unless it was for a wedding or funeral."
----------------"As a teen in a Bible study class at our family’s new church, the youth group leader was talking about how anyone who had not accepted Jesus as their Lord and Savior would go to hell upon their death. Another student asked for clarification on babies (like those stillborn or in other countries who had never even heard of Jesus), and the youth leader ranted for a while and was adamant that they would go straight to hell, too. I decided right then that I couldn’t support such a cruel god, and even though it was a few years before I quit going to church entirely, that was the moment that ruined religion for me. Unborn babies going straight to hell for the 'crime' of not living long enough to be able to accept Jesus as their Lord and Savior."
--------------""I spent my childhood with (evangelical) church being a huge part of my life because my mom had spent her entire life as extremely devout. I started emotionally separating a bit in high school before coming back to it in college and early adulthood. I even explored the idea of becoming a missionary and dedicating my life to it. However, I always believed in a firm separation of church and state and the right for anyone to choose if and how they worship, and I've always been pro-LGBTQ. In 2008, there was a ballot measure to outlaw same-sex marriage in California. One Sunday, I attended the church where I had spent most of my life and saw piles of hundreds of signs supporting the ballot measure in their lobby. I noped right out of there and didn't set foot in that church again until my parents' deaths in 2020 and 2021 because they wanted their funeral services there.
After their deaths, I was able to do a deep dive into my own mental health and start to fully explore and repair the damage the evangelical church had caused, including heavy reliance on keeping secrets because you would be judged and ostracized, which left a lot of room for all kinds of abuse to occur. I don't believe in dwelling on regrets, but if there was one thing in my life I could change, it would be the influence the evangelical church had on so much of my life. Looking back, nothing good came from it, just a lot of destruction."
--------------"My husband and I had tried for years to have a baby. A famous religious family with too many children had a TV show at the time in which they proclaimed they would take as many children as God would give them. Why give that family so many children but yet not give any to others? It made me walk away from religion completely. We eventually had two children, but I cringe every time I hear someone say children are a gift from God. It is so insulting for people struggling with infertility that do not receive the gift."
--------------"My roommate and I grew up in the same church, so I assumed we had the same experience. While we were in college, she told me that her dad was abusive, cheated on and left her mom, and gave her an STI as a result of the cheating. When her mom reached out to the church for help as she was struggling to raise three young children on her own, the church leaders blamed her and said the only way forward was to forgive him and plead to take him back. I had NO idea this type of abuse was going on behind the scenes. She told me that's why she and her entire family left the church. It opened my eyes to the disgusting hypocrisy and misogyny of the faith, and I could never go back. "
--------------"I grew up in a very religious family. I didn’t know till my 30s that it was considered evangelical, but that would explain some of the teachings when it came to women. I remember the exact moment I was done with the church. We were standing in line to speak with the pastor on Easter. We were all wearing fancy Easter clothes, and I asked the Pastor why I had to wear a hat, and my brother did not. He informed me that, as a woman, I wasn’t worthy of receiving God's blessing directly. It would have to go through the head man in the family. I then asked what would happen if my father wasn’t there to give me God's blessings. He said it would then be my brother's responsibility. I looked over at my little brother, who stuck his tongue out at me and said, 'Yeah, I’m the man.' I realized that there was no way in hell I was ever going to receive God's blessing, and this was a giant crock of shit for women. I'm out!"
---------------"I was a devout Christian until I saw evangelicals and other conservative Christians start talking about Donald Trump like he is a 'savior.' Trump is one of the most unethical, ungodly, and narcissistic politicians who have ever lived. He is a felon who was found liable for sexual abuse and is on trial for other serious crimes, but many Christians still support him, and some almost worship him. Trump has stated that he does not ask God for forgiveness because he doesn’t make many mistakes (LOL). The Trump phenomenon led me to question whether Christianity is what I always thought. It turns out that my questioning resulted in a falling away from the Christian faith."
It's very easy to assert our existence has no purpose, and we are "conceived and born by pure biological serendipity", but somewhat more difficult to argue for this. Our beliefs are very much circumscribed by the accepted beliefs of our culture and very few of us do very much independent thinking. If you were born a few centuries ago, or outside the west, your beliefs would likely be very different. .
ReplyDeleteI have to disagree with your proposition that it is difficult to argue for the purposelessness of life. The fact that we always reflect the accepted beliefs of our time and culture has no bearing on that proposition, because in every culture throughout the ages there were independent thinkers who challenged the notion of a god-driven purposeful life. I was born outside the West in a very religious environment, and most people who say they "believe" in fact do not, but do so in conformity to norms around them. They are more shocked at the social non-conformity than at the more susbtantive lack of faith.
ReplyDeleteOur "problem" as humans is the excessive development of our cerebral cortex and brain to the point that it has acquired self-consciousness. It constantly scans our environment in search of answers to questions raised by the environment. When it finds no reasonable fact or evidence for a clear answer, it makes up an answer based on imagined facts. This is how myths and religions evolved in every human culture. There is no difference between the mind, the spirit, the soul or the self: That "conscious" me is in my brain. The fact that we do not know YET how doesn't mean it is out of reach and doesn't mean we should find some other mythological or metaphysical or supernatural explanation. Some people like Donald Hoffman remain within the bounds of normative science by admitting that our perception of reality has been fashioned by evolution, and though we might not perceive reality as it is because our senses grant us access only to what makes us survive, that reality remains grounded in the material world and nowhere else. Matter precedes consciousness, not the other way around.
ReplyDeleteYou need to separate organised religions from the notion there is an ultimate purpose to our lives and the Universe and that we may survive our deaths. You still haven't advanced any arguments. And naturalism/physical faces irreconcilable difficulties. And we haven't started addressing all the very compelling evidence that we survive our deaths.
ReplyDeleteFirst you say that we "may" survive our deaths, then you bludgeon the argument with "all the very compelling evidence that we survive our deaths". You don't seem to have any certainty as to what you are saying. Could it simply be "wishful thinking" or "religious nostalgia"?
ReplyDeleteWhat word should I use other than "may"? I cannot make definitive assertions here. The evidence is compelling, the reasons are seemingly compelling. Yet, I'm sure for all of us we may feel it's a bit fanciful to imagine that at the threshold of death we will continue to exist and ascend into some other reality. There again, arguably our feelings are not a good guide to reality.
ReplyDeleteI still do not understand how "compelling evidence" does not compel you to delete "may" from your sentence, and simply say, "we survive our deaths". You are the one who does not have and does not advance what the "compelling evidence" is. There are none. Just like a light bulb which, when you turn it off continues to emit light for a fraction of a second because of residual electricity, the human brain's electric circuits continue to run for a brief moment as we die. If this is the "compelling" evidence that you are referring to (in the case of people who seemingly die then come back to tell of a white bright light...), then mine is the physical explanation for their near-death sightings.
ReplyDeleteBecause we cannot be certain of anything in this life. Our knowledge is always provisional. There are too many certain people in the world, and not enough people that exercise a bit of caution in their convictions.
ReplyDeleteAlso, often people are certain, but are certain on opposite sides of an issue. An afterlife is one. Many people are certain of an afterlife, many others are not (you being one). They can't both be right!
Yes, the light bulb analogy that people sometimes employ. Of course, we are aware of physical processes that lead to light bulbs emitting light whereas we have no such mechanism for brains and consciousness.
In science, any current "theory" is based on whether it explains all the accumulated data. Its certainty is contingent on future data fitting it retroactively. Any currently accepted explanation can be modified if new data require such modification. This is where your "caution" comes in. Of course, two opposite sides of an issue cannot both be right. What's the arbiter to settle the issue? Verifiable data. Since science is the art of the soluble as Peter Medawar said, only those issues that are amenable to testing (or that are falsifiable) can be subject to inquiry. Others, such as the notion of God or the Afterlife are beyond science and reliable verification, and must therefore remain highly suspicious, regardless of what people feel about them. Without being certain of anything, I can only rely on what is currently available to make an opinion. So far only the scientific method has given us verifiable information. Certainty therefore must always be relative until sufficient data makes it absolute.
ReplyDeleteYou must be scientifically illiterate because you seem to be unaware of those physical processes that make the brain function. I think the fact of electric circuitry (based in chemistry, like in a battery) as the basis of neural activity is beyond doubt. It doesn't take much to make the intellectual leap to imagine the brain shutting down just like a light bulb. I can only surmise that if you were to ask a neurologist or a brain expert, they will agree with the light bulb analogy. Still, we are far form understanding how it all works in the brain, but we are on our way.
Back in the mid-19th century, heredity was the subject of fantasms (e.g. the homunculus). Gregor Mendel saw mathematically that phenotypes are expressed by two elements, but he had no idea what they were. All scientists, well into the 20th century, could not comprehend the physicality of such a fundamental genetic element as a gene. Now we know, thanks to nearly another century of biochemistry and molecular biology that a gene is a physical chemical entity. We know that each gene exists in two copies inside each cell, where it resides, how it is transmitted. We can isolate it, modify it, reintegrate it into a living being, etc... I am willing to bet that consciousness is a similar entity that we cannot yet imagine or visualize. My "certainty" is based on the precedents of heredity (gene) and the basic structure of matter (atom). Why would consciousness be any different? Only someone desperately wanting it to be in the realm of the fantastic and the metaphysical would not trust science to one day explain to us that consciousness is a material object of some sort.
Verifiable data is only applicable for that which resides under the ambit of science. But consciousness, being non-physical, is not reducible to physical processes. The correlations might be mapped, though, of course.
ReplyDeleteRegardless, I see no reason why the hypothesis that consciousness survives our bodies should be highly suspect. How do you derive that conclusion? The fact that so far only the scientific method has given us verifiable information is simply not relevant. Metal detectors give us very reliable information about the presence of metal. But that says nothing about the existence of wood, rubber, plastic and whatever.
The plain fact of the matter is that consciousness escapes the ambit of science since science exclusively deals with the quantifiable/measurable aspects of reality. We have to just go by the evidence, non-scientific as it might be claimed to be. And this evidence overwhelmingly suggests we survive. Talking about any physical process, even heredity and evolution, isn't going to help as that can only help to explain the body and its function for which selves are associated (unless you presuppose some materialist type of metaphysic, but that would be the case of transparent question-begging).
It doesn't matter what you ask a neurologist. A neurologist is proficient at neurology, not philosophical issues.
Here's an argument in favor of consciousness arising from matter (the brain) rather the other way around. When a human baby is born, it has no consciousness. No self-consciousness to be precise. It takes some time ( a couple of years at least), which means that consciousness follows brain development, training and learning. Which therefore implies that only a mature brain becomes conscious of the body that carries it. If consciousness existed a priori and independently of the stage of brain development, a human baby should be born fully conscious of its existence. But since this is not the case, one must conclude that consciousness is contingent on a properly functional brain, and therefore cannot exist neither prior to the existence of the brain, nor can it survive the death of the brain.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure why you believe babies are not conscious or self-conscious. Granted, though, that there is an intricate relationship between consciousness and the brain. And a damaged brain frequently results in a damaged mind.
ReplyDeleteBut we can't conclude from this that the brain creates the mind. Consider an analogy. There is a reliable correlation between the acuity of my vision and the state of the lenses in the eyeglasses I wear. But it would be silly to suggest that the eyeglasses produce my vision. Indeed, they couldn't do as the eyeglasses clearly do not possess any type of mechanism or ability to ex nihilo create vision. It's a similar story with brains -- namely there is no conceivable mechanism within brains that could somehow produce vision.
But your eyeglasses are not an organic part of your vision. A more apt analogy would be to use your own eyes rather than your eyeglasses, in which case your argument fails because eyes (iris, retina, optic nerve, brain, etc.) do constitute a mechanism that produces vision. I find it absolutely inane to say that "there is no conceivable mechanism within brains that could somehow produce vision". Where else should look to understand vision (and all other systems by which we perceive the world)? Without the brain there would be no vision, regardless of whether we understand the mechanism. Your entire argumentation seems to try and force answers in the realm of "why" questions, which makes you offhandedly reject any attempt that will sooner or later answer "how" questions. You do not want these answers. You want to find purpose where there is none, and therefore keep discarding mechanistic answers to our questions.
ReplyDeleteEyes and the brain don't produce vision either. We also requires the external world to exist. Eyes and the brain merely *enable* us to see.
ReplyDeleteEyeglasses not being an "organic part of my vision" is wholly irrelevant. I'm pointing out the fact that just because x affects y -- indeed compromises the functioning of y -- does not entail that x somehow produces y. And this is especially so for the brain/mind relationship since there is no conceivable mechanism whereby brains could produce minds. To quote what I've said in my blog:
Consciousness is supposed to come into being as the end consequence of physical chains of causes and effects. Such causes and effects are cashed out in the form of processes that we can measure; namely particles with physical properties such as charge, momentum, spin and so on, and their interactions. But at the end of such causal chains we get a sudden abrupt change from these measurable processes to subjective experiences such as, for example, the greenness of grass, the warmth of love, the smell of roses and so on. It seems we have an unbridgeable yawning ontological chasm between the termination of such physical causal chains, and such raw experiences. There is no appropriate mechanism, or conceivable causal chain, whereby such qualitative experiences could be created
You keep repeatedly asserting that there is NO "conceivable mechanism" behind any of the issues we are still ignorant of. You are camped so firmly in your unwillingness to accept even the possibility (and in mind the inevitability) of matter explaining everything that, just like primitive humans who could not "conceive how" women got pregnant, how seeds germinated, how rain gathered and how every little detail of their lives functioned, that they resorted to invoking magic.
ReplyDeleteHow do you know that the greenness of grass or the smell of roses are impossible to measure? How can you assert that "raw experiences" are immeasurable and therefore not amenable to physics and chemistry? For all your skepticism (and cynicism) you have yet to propose an alternative explanation. Your ignorance of something does not necessarily mean its absence.
I, on the other hand, look back at human history and see how 500 years ago, it was people like you who invoked the wrath of God behind the Black Death epidemics because they could not see any "conceivable mechanism" by which the plague spreads when it turned out to be a miserable bacterium who caused it; or just like Galileo's adversaries who could not "conceivably" imagine that the earth revolves around the sun rather than the other way around. Stubborn as the Church was - like you - it took it 500 years to rehabilitate Galileo and agree with him on what science had said.
You do not seem interested in finding "conceivable mechanisms" that are derived from an objective search for knowledge; you might as well query charlatans, shamans, voodoo priests, soothsayers and diviners and yes, the supposedly more modern Christian or Muslim or Jewish or Hindu priests who assert that whatever mechanism tthere is, we are condemned to never understand it. Hence the "mysteries" and God's "mysterious ways" behind the virgin conception (whereby the Big Zombie in the Sky beamed his sublime sperm across Mary's hymen) and the virgin birth (whereby Jesus exited the birth canal WITHOUT breaking said hymen).
Unless you propose an alternative to those mechanisms you reject as "inconceivable", but which I am confident are potentially knowable given enough time for science to decipher them, I suggest you cease putting sticks in the wheels of a heretofore very successful human quest for knowledge based on universal objectivity and stop brandishing individual and therefore potentially suspicious and "inconceivable" and undefined alternatives I wouldn't know what to do with. Philosophy is the search for the truth, just like science. It ought not be a search of contortions to confound people and create obstacles to human quests. Please propose conceivable alternatives to those you denigrate as "inconceivable". Otherwise, this discussion will continue to remain sterile.
I love science, it works and has resulted in all our wonderful technological devices. However, the mistake here is to think science explains *everything*. It cannot explain consciousness, and consciousness is how we know the world in the first place. Consciousness is everything. You cannot get an endeavour (science) that operates purely from the 3rd person perspective to explain the 1st person perspective, which ultimately is the only reality we know.
ReplyDeleteWhat I said before is there's no conceivable mechanism whereby brains could produce consciousness. It's a question of logic. Think of AI. Many people think AI will eventually become conscious. But, at least in principle, we could create a computer using just pipes, pressure valves and water. Not practically of course, we would need billions of pipes! But the point is why would water flowing along pipes somehow produce or amount to raw experiences -- of hope, pain, expectation or what have you? It's the same for any physical device, including brains.
However, I'm not denying it might just be a brute fact about reality that with certain physical complexity, consciousness spontaneously arises. Something along the lines that David Chalmers suggests.
Why isn't something like greenness measurable? Well, what units could convey greenness? We can correlate a certain wavelength of light with greenness, and perhaps certain specific activity in the brain, but these correlated processes are not themselves green. Green (or any colour) per se is not something that can be conveyed by any units.
By the way, before the birth of modern science in the 17th Century, it was common for people to hold that the world teemed with supernatural causes where angels and demons, spirits, occult powers and mystical principles played a prominent role. Hence, trying to understand, predict and control reality was a fairly forlorn task. But then, certain leading figures such as Galileo, Descartes, Boyle et al, argued that if a God had created the world, wouldn't he make it so it was amenable to human reason? So this is how the mechanical philosophy was born (the idea that reality proceeded according to predictable patterns and the idea that causes have to be contiguous). The wrath of Gods, magic or whatever, no longer played any role in explanations of what happens in the world. But it was the belief in an all-powerful single God, which precipitated modern science in the first place. Now to the crucial question. Where is the mechanical explanation for how brains give rise to minds? As I've already explained, we can't have one!
Ok, your conclusion is "we can't have an explanation for how brains give rise to minds". But at least, can't your brain help you venture a wild guess, a hypothesis? Or because YOU reject an explanation a priori that you don't want others to keep searching? Or because it scares you - it shatters your god-grounded mystical magical supernatural metaphysical BS explanations you grew up with - that you just conclude that we should stop trying. You might even propose that brain research should be banned lest we discover something so revolutionary, so disturbing to our primitive millennia-long held beliefs.
ReplyDeleteJust like that barbarian philosopher at MIT once who suggested we should ban DNA research just because we don't need to know that, for instance, intelligence is hereditary, or that morality and ethics are also grounded in our evolution.
You are of that crop of thinkers who suggest we should stop thinking out of fear of our own ideas. Good luck with that. I haven't learned anything from this endless discussion other than you have no idea what conscsiousness is or how does it come about. Thanks, but I knew that all along. But at least I think we should not stop searching, while you can go on cogitating ad libitum about why we should not even try.
Yes, it's unlikely that you'll get anything out of this exchange. And I won't either, not least because your arguments are very common... nay.. universal amongst naturalists. Indeed, I have heard these arguments innumerable times before. But this is what happens on the net, people come to a debate with entrenched positions.
ReplyDeleteWhat I do find interesting is that virtually all scholars are on your side. The capacity of people -- even highly intelligent people -- to believe in a metaphysic that simply can't accommodate consciousness is astounding.
But thanks for this discussion. Incidentally, I'm currently reading a book called "All things are full of Gods" by David Bentley Hart. The arguments are presented in the form of a dialogue and he covers the same ground that we've covered, albeit vastly more of course. So far it is truly excellent. He is far more erudite and eloquent than I. although it can be a challenge to wrap your head about what he's actually saying. But I highly recommend it.
Thank you and bye.
Thank you, Ian, though your "can't be done" posture is unhelpful to say the least to those who are trying. I highly recommend Daniel Dennet's "Consciousness Explained" on this subject, but also his masterpiece on how natural selection can indeed explain everything, "Darwin's Dangerous Idea". All the best.
ReplyDelete