There are two ideas here:
1) The brain is solely responsible for consciousness and intelligence.
2) Consciousness and intelligence are a product of something non-material.
The first hypothesis is scientific. It is testable. It is falsifiable. It is reproducible. Above all, it is useful.
The second is none of these. It is not testable. It is not falsifiable. It is not reproducible and it absolutely is in no way useful. It is not science.
As an AI researcher myself, the first is useful. I want to try and create intelligence in a computer or a robot. Or consciousness. I can look at a real brain, real animals in environments, real data on how consciousness is affected by lesions, drugs etc. I can come up with hypotheses and test them out and see if they work in practise. And after all that, I can create models of consciousness or intelligence that do something in the real world. The same if I was a neuroscientist trying to find cures to a neurodegenerative disease or a psychiatrist trying to solve mental illness.
How would you even start doing any of the above if you start from the premise that something non-material produces consciousness, our identity, intelligence and who we are? You can't. It is not helpful in the slightest. You can have a belief in some kind of soul or whatever to give you personal comfort, but that's all you can do with it. It has no other relevance to reality. It is also wrong. Because if you start from that premise, you first have to explain what science already knows.
For example, why and how anesthetic works, or alcohol, or drugs, or the effect of brain damage on different parts of the brain, or neurodegenerative diseases. It is also consistent with what we understand about evolution and biology. You would have to explain away hundreds of thousands of papers in the scientific literature from many generations of scientists working across the globe. All this scientific data that is reproducible and falsifiable, tells us that materialism is the correct approach.
Furthermore, there is absolutely no reason to believe that it isn't. There is no reason to believe that the material brain is not entirely responsible for who we are and how we function.
1) The brain is solely responsible for consciousness and intelligence.
2) Consciousness and intelligence are a product of something non-material.
The first hypothesis is scientific. It is testable. It is falsifiable. It is reproducible. Above all, it is useful.
The second is none of these. It is not testable. It is not falsifiable. It is not reproducible and it absolutely is in no way useful. It is not science.
As an AI researcher myself, the first is useful. I want to try and create intelligence in a computer or a robot. Or consciousness. I can look at a real brain, real animals in environments, real data on how consciousness is affected by lesions, drugs etc. I can come up with hypotheses and test them out and see if they work in practise. And after all that, I can create models of consciousness or intelligence that do something in the real world. The same if I was a neuroscientist trying to find cures to a neurodegenerative disease or a psychiatrist trying to solve mental illness.
How would you even start doing any of the above if you start from the premise that something non-material produces consciousness, our identity, intelligence and who we are? You can't. It is not helpful in the slightest. You can have a belief in some kind of soul or whatever to give you personal comfort, but that's all you can do with it. It has no other relevance to reality. It is also wrong. Because if you start from that premise, you first have to explain what science already knows.
For example, why and how anesthetic works, or alcohol, or drugs, or the effect of brain damage on different parts of the brain, or neurodegenerative diseases. It is also consistent with what we understand about evolution and biology. You would have to explain away hundreds of thousands of papers in the scientific literature from many generations of scientists working across the globe. All this scientific data that is reproducible and falsifiable, tells us that materialism is the correct approach.
Furthermore, there is absolutely no reason to believe that it isn't. There is no reason to believe that the material brain is not entirely responsible for who we are and how we function.
