If beauty doesn't require God, why should morality? (Bite me Dr. Craig.)

[Whateverist]

Strange. You wouldn't feel uncomfortable asking "Why does the universe exist, rather than not?" would you?

I'd probably have to recluse myself since my preexisting experience of the universe might tend to prejudice my decision. That, and I'm a champion of common sense and plain talk.

The existence of mind is strange because the academic context we are mainly working in is a purely physical model. You often get stuff like "qualia is just the experience of brain chemistry," and the person saying it actually believes he's giving an answer. Fine-- what exactly about brain chemistry, or about lobe X, or about a single neuron, causes qualia to exist rather than not to? Anyone who thinks it's less than a complete mystery is, in my opinion, acting more on dogma than on curiosity.

But that would be like someone pounding the table as they insist the table is far from solid since its actual particles are few and widely spaced. In the same way, whatever we find out in the lab about how what happens in the brain maps to reports of first person reports of subjective states .. none of that can ever be subjective experience itself. The experience of consciousness is no more dismissible as brain chemistry than the solidity of the table is on account of small particle physics. I think this may be your point.

What I don't understand is why you think organic chemistry cannot account for consciousness just as well as it does for digestion. What we know about consciousness directly can never be falsified because we are that. But I see no reason consciousness cannot have a perfectly natural place in the world. In the same way, humanity is special to us because we are that, even though humanity is one of many mammalian species that has evolved right along with every other creature in existence .. quite naturally.