RE: Is atheism a belief?
March 7, 2019 at 9:16 pm
(This post was last modified: March 7, 2019 at 9:22 pm by bennyboy.)
(March 7, 2019 at 9:01 pm)HappySkeptic Wrote: I think the reductionist route is the wrong one here. There is no atomic unit of consciousness. Consciousness is a process. It involves the creation of a sense of self. That 'self' experiences the input through filters of past experience, recreates the past through memory, and extrapolates the future through imagination. The structure of the brain has been evolved over hundreds of millions of years to create consciousness, so that the cells in our body can live.
The brain experiences the world. The more complexity, the richer the experience. I have no idea at what complexity level a brain needs for consciousness (i.e. is a nematode conscious?), but I expect there is a minimum, after which there are degrees. But, I do not believe that the seat of consciousness exists at some reductionist level, like quantum mechanics. It is a complex process, not a thing.
On the very slim chance that Quantum Mechanics has anything to do with consciousness (and I don't believe it does, beyond the fact that QM is the source of all physics and chemistry), QM teaches that the two most fundamental 'things' in the universe are information and events. I suggest that anything that can exist, must be possible to create from these two things.
It is one of the reasons why I don't believe in a supernatural soul. Such a 'soul' would have to be constructed of information and events to exist. Why postulate some eternal plane for it to exist on, when it can exist in the material universe?
It may very well be that there is a specific and minimal physical structure, or level of information processing, required in order to say that there's anything like consciousness; I suspect, though, that this level of truth will always be unavailable to us-- you can't really ask a single neuron, or an atom, what is experiencing.
It may even be that something unique to organic chemistry allows for it-- where silicon information processing, for whatever reason, might not. Clearly, the brain allows for experiences that a rock almost certainly does not: but pointing to the brain in general isn't sufficiently robust an explanation to resolve any philosophical questions about the essential nature of mind, unless we can establish exactly what about the brain is responsible for it.
As for QM: I'm not sure how long you've been watching this thread, but I was responding to a description of mind as information processing, and that was the starting point for this particular sub-discussion about orders of complexity. It seems to me that every energetic interchange at the QM level also carries (or perhaps IS) information. I'd therefore like to know if there was some particular kind of information processing required to say that there's some kind of primitive consciousness. Because if not, then I'd look to panpsychism at the QM level as the most likely entry point for mind in a Universe which probably doesn't much need to experience the taste of hot chocolate, beaches at sunset, or what it's like to be in love.
And just to clarify completely-- I suggested that if panpsychism is true, I would be fairly well-disposed toward the idea that the Universe is God, though such a philosophical God probably wouldn't respond to requests for increased income or to cure Aunt Ethel's kidney stones.
(March 7, 2019 at 8:54 pm)Gae Bolga Wrote: So..yes. Easy answer. You believe in mind. You don't know how it works and you have some interesting ideas, but you believe in mind. Your agnosticism is irrelevant to your belief, just as it is with gods.
Do you have some interesting god ideas? Yes. Do you know how gods are supposed to work? Not really. Do you believe in gods? No.
I don't believe in mind. I am mind and mind is me. I am the alpha and the omega, baby!
