(September 4, 2011 at 5:08 pm)Diamond-Deist Wrote: This is a very close question to my Soul thread.
Mind is definitely brain to use your phrasing.
The mind is like a virtualized platform produced by your brain which channels the electrical signals your senses receive.
There is an obvious reason for this, it is an evolutionary trait built by the need an organism has to first collect data of what is going on around it and two to respond to such actions.
The mind was developed to make maximum use of this information so we can react as quickly as possible.
Hence forth mind is no more than a survival tool.
Merely this, simply that, no more than this, obviously that. Jeez, here we have the most bewildering display. The usual atheist retort to the idea that it takes the awe out of existence is that there's no way that's true and it's an insult to even suggest the notion.
Perhaps, but when the most mysterious, yet at the same time the most familiar entity going, consciousness, is relegated to the "well, duh" heap, never mind that the camp doing the relegating has not come a centimeter closer to explaining why it even exists in the first place, one does have to wonder.
Would it be a bad time to bring up that niggling little detail about materialism being an a priori conclusion and therefore on shaky ground as far as the scientific spirit is concerned? That this small sticking point hasn't even been addressed, let alone denied is telling. But maybe that is just me.
Is there anything that cannot be explained away with the evo psych mantra of "it conferred a survival advantage"?
