RE: Can Consciousness Best Be Explained by God's Existence?
March 31, 2014 at 10:17 am
(This post was last modified: March 31, 2014 at 10:20 am by Mudhammam.)
(March 31, 2014 at 9:51 am)whateverist Wrote: Mental objects are how our perceptual-cognitive wiring registers the world around us. I don't have any theory about how that happens. But it is pretty apparent that something similar goes on in every animal no matter how small or simple. It is hard to appreciate what it would be like to be a one celled organism moving to or away from light. But I suppose that experience -minus our self awareness- would also have a 'first-person' quality. It surely is a wondrous thing just how refined this response to our environment has become through evolution + eons of time.
I agree completely. This point though:
Quote: I view them as representational.
This is what really baffles me. Where are they represented? Of course, they're represented somewhere in my brain tissue but then again, there's not like a red giraffe somewhere in my brain the moment I imagine a red giraffe. So does this fit the description of a non-spatial entity? Colin McGinn got me stuck on this train of thought because I read a paper by him this morning called Consciousness and Space. He makes this interesting comparison:
"We might be reminded at this point of the big bang. That notable occurrence can be regarded as presenting an inverse space problem. For, on received views, it was at the moment of the big bang that space itself came into existence, there being nothing spatial antecedently to that. But how does space come from non-space? What kind of 'explosion' could create space ab initio?... The brain puts into reverse, as it were, what the big bang initiated: it erases spatial dimensions rather than creating them. It undoes the work of creating space, swallowing down matter and spitting out consciousness. So, taking the very long view, the universe has gone through phases of space generation and (local) space annihilation; or at least, with respect to the latter, there have been operations on space that have generated a non-spatial being. This suggests the following heady speculation: that the origin of consciousness somehow draws upon those properties of the universe that antedate and explain the occurrence of the big bang."
