Why atheism is irrational

[pocaracas]

Both these guys are phylosophers.. none of them understand how the biological brain gives rise to awareness, or consciousness.... hence, jump the gun to some sort of non-corporeal consciousness external to the actual brain...

Add time, mix... some more time.... oh damn, the brain has been doing it all, all this time!
Philosophers can't understand that we can't yet understand mega-complex systems.... but maybe one day we will... Even if we don't, so what? It doesn't prove anything. only that it's not proven yet!
Until then, I keep as most likely the fact that consciousness arises in the brain, out of millions and millions of neuron interactions.... too many to count, each too small to measure... yet.
Why do I think this is the most likely case? well, I find nothing, except wishful thinking, suggesting that human or animal consciousness is independent from the physical human or animal brain.
Of course, I don't study neural activity, nor anything of the sort... but it seems those who do also posit this scenario as most likely.
http://brain.oxfordjournals.org/content/106/3/623.short
http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/c...1889.short
http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/im...1/art00008

So there's my mini-google search and reading skillz for you to read.
Enjoy

LOL

With all due respect, you're full of crap.

There's no way you can conclude that they don't know as much as there is to know. By definition, philosophers of mind MUST have a working grasp of contemporary conclusions in neuroscientific research. The only thing they don't do is the dirty work of the studies themselves.

LOL
Ever since my early years, I've regarded philosophers as crackpots.
People who earn their lives just thinking about something...
Of course, each and every one of them is subject to their personal biases, which renders their neutrality a bit into question.
And Sam Harris isn't immune to it!
What to do?....
democracy!
poop

Both Thomas Nagel and David Chalmers are in fact atheists. Even Sam Harris (whose name you may not recognize, in all fairness) agrees with Chalmers on the easy and hard problems of consciousness. (http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/the-m...ousness-ii).

It's one thing to say "I'm not familiar with this stuff. I'm going to be an agnostic."

But to deny something so well established as the problem of consciousness is like trying to deny evolution. It makes you look like a crackpot. Seriously, do some reading before you respond.

If you believe philosophy is the work of the "religious devils" or whatever, then at least read Sam Harris, who is, by the way, a neuroscientist.

PS- Your first source does not deal with the qualitative mental states of consciousness but brain states. Brain states are not the same as mental states.
Same with the second. Neural correlates of consciousness refers to brain states.
The third one looks VERY interesting. It risks being an appeal to quantum woo, but I think I want to look at it.

With all due respect, you fail to understand complex systems.
Philosophers can fail too.

You say these two are atheists... well, I remember hearing this guy say something about god, like if it's obvious it exists... (~3:20)




The other guy is indeed an atheist, but, as many atheists, thinks that our brain and our personality are two separate entities.
I see it as personality arising from the brain structure and mechanics. In a very complex and very difficult to accurately ascertain way.
I wish we could build a machine that transfers a person's personality into another body... It would be great.
But I don't think it's possible to have any mental processes without the brain.
AND my guess is that "brain states" == "mental states", we just can't measure either very well, can we? Until such measurements are indeed available, this is an unsubstantiated claim, although in tune with the rest of reality and all the evidence available where neurological damage leads to personality alterations.
You may want to start learning about simpler systems. The brain is far too complex. Look into artificial neural networks. See how many "neurons" are required to perform a simple operation. See how new information can be continuously incorporated into the network. See how an extrapolation of such "simple" ANNs to the millions of neurons can generate a system capable of amazing operations.
Think that what we call consciousness can be nothing more than a bunch of such operations, in parallel.
The human brain can thus easily be seen as a fully deterministic biological machine, which is in continuous change, not only due to the constant torrent of input data (aka senses), but also due to the information that it generates (aka, thinking).

And those two philosophers fail to realize this detail... the brain is a machine. The product of the inner workings of this machine is our consciousness. There are many levels of abstraction layers between the individual neurons and the happy emotion, but there's no where else that emotion can come from.

Look at how Harris puts his case:

But couldn’t a mature neuroscience nevertheless offer a proper explanation of human consciousness in terms of its underlying brain processes? We have reasons to believe that reductions of this sort are neither possible nor conceptually coherent. Nothing about a brain, studied at any scale (spatial or temporal), even suggests that it might harbor consciousness. Nothing about human behavior, or language, or culture, demonstrates that these products are mediated by subjectivity. We simply know that they are—a fact that we appreciate in ourselves directly and in others by analogy. - See more at: http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/the-m...CkRHe.dpuf

I'm very well aware that this hasn't yet been studied as it should.
Not from the neuroscientist's perspective... but perhaps from the computer model perspective we can get there?...http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_consciousness
Even your pal Chalmers has pitched in here... [surprisingly] I wonder what's going on in that mind of his to claim one thing and it's opposite...