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

[bennyboy]

A more blunt observation could have been made, though-- if you shoot someone through the brain, they will no longer experience qualia.

Except that in this case the painter did continue to experience qualia, just certain components of that qualia were missing. So that wouldn't be a fair observation at all. It's reminiscent of when I challenged ChadWooters argument about veridicality of experience with the example of blindness anosognosia. His response was that you can't tell much from broken brains. This is precisely wrong. You can tell a great deal about ordinary consciousness from broken brains. In this case, part of the brain is missing, and correspondingly, part of the qualia is missing. The brain damage revealed how tightly connected to brain function the experience of qualia is.

That's never been debated, at least by me. However, we are doing the maze backwards-- we already know about qualia, and we fit our narrative about why it exists into whatever framework is popular today. God is popular, God made a soul. Physicalism is popular, qualia is supervenient on matter. But if so, the definition of matter is incomplete: "Stuff that can be located in time and space, interacts with matter via the 4 fundamental forces, and can be defined as a form of energy. . . AND CAN SOMETIMES EXPERIENCE ITSELF." Not really a scientific definition, though, since you can never ever see this experience or interact with it directly. It kind of sounds like the X-tians saying "Blah blah blah Jesus blah blah blah salvation. . . What's that, you say? Bunnies and eggs? Let us tell you about Easter!"

That being said, the philosophical question of capacity isn't really about the link between brain and specific qualia. It's why ANY physical structure, under any circumstance, would experience qualia. Why does anything in the universe have this capacity for the existence of subjective experience, rather than just grinding through its mechanical processes sans esprit?

That's not so much a philosophical question as a biological and evolutionary question. Why does the brain produce qualia? Because it evolved that capacity.

That's like saying a car goes because I've developed the ability to manipulate the gas pedal. If the capacity wasn't already intrinsic to the universe, no arrangement or interaction of matter could have achieved qualia, by definition. So the question is-- why is a universe which we conceive to be essentially a mechanical one (with a bit of trickery at the finest resolutions) supportive of processing as experience, when there is supposedly no part of experience which doesn't anyway have an exact biochemical correlate? You already have a complete input-processing-output cycle-- and whether someone is truly sentient or a philosophical zombie is irrelevant to any study we can do scientifically.