(September 4, 2011 at 12:50 pm)Fred Wrote: That's the big one for me, and I believe that the way it falls is going to determine more about how things shake out than any other.
If the materialists are correct, all notions of Divinity are down the tubes.
If the Consciousness folks are correct, materialism goes down the tubes.
I side with the latter camp, and my main kick against the materialists is that their a priori stance has severely impeded the study of consciousness as consciousness by maintaining it is simply an epi-phenomenon and tend to reject all evidence to the contrary out of hand, yet have absolutely no answer whatsoever as to why consciousness even exists.
Do you feel that mind is wholly reducible to brain?
Name the evidence and show how they unavoidably lead to something about the consciousness that is genuinely apart from the matter of the body and environs?