Can Consciousness Best Be Explained by God's Existence?

[Angrboda]

Whateverist, do you view mental objects as non-spatial? If so, how do spatial objects (such as microscopic brain processes) cause non-spatial objects to emerge (in the mind)? Any ideas? Reversely, how do non-spatial events (conscious thoughts) effect spacial events, such as physical changes (i.e. bodily health)? Or is our concept of space (to say nothing of consciousness) too incomplete to understand this phenomenon?

I view them as representational. 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.

One thing that strikes me about consciousness is how it is made up of the same "stuff" that our perceptions are made up of. We imagine a pink unicorn, and we literally "see" a unicorn inside our mind. We have thoughts in sentences, in language, that we "hear" in our mind. Our consciousness has a "location" in our head that moves with it, and our proprioceptive senses keep track of where our limbs and body are in relation to the world. We have cognitive systems for "imagining" disembodied consciousness in other beings, whether human or animal, and we imagine ourselves as disembodied "things" floating inside our heads. Antonio Damasio in his book Self Comes To Mind explains that our memory is somewhat bidirectional; it can take inputs from our senses, yet it can also take inputs from other parts of the brain to elicit a response. I suspect that consciousness, the "what it's like to be me," is something similar, that the perceptual parts of the brain, which normally process sight, sound, motion, language, and other "agents," is in consciousness receiving it's marching orders not from the outside world of sights and sounds, but is being driven from inside to create a "construct" that is made out of the same stuff as our perceptions. Why, if consciousness is some special "third stuff" that the world isn't made of, is it composed of the elements of our perceptual systems? In an experiment on hypnosis, they scanned the brain of a hypnotized subject while it was being asked to "imagine" a stimulus; they found that the part of the brain associated with hallucinations and asserting that something is real rather than imagined, was active during the hypnotic imagining. What if consciousness is nothing more than our perceptual systems being fed specific inputs from inside, rather than outside, but this "is real" switch is stuck on, to give us the 'impression' that these "imaginings" are real things going on in our head?