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

[Angrboda]

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?

There were two parts to that answer, evolution and biology. Regardless, it's not clear how matter gives rise to experience. It's not clear how matter gives rise to the ability to count from one to ten in the way the brain does it. It's not clear how matter can read squiggles on a page. It's not clear how matter can recognize objects. If you were being consistent, every function of the mind is mysterious in this same way, so every part of the mind would have to be supported by unexplained properties of matter. Being consistent, you would have to assign all the processing that the mind does to some "special properties." You might suggest that because computers can do some of these things that you don't need a special explanation for them, but the fact is that the brain does all these things in a way which is totally unlike how a computer does them. So these other processes are no less mysterious than qualia and consciousness. Carried out consistently, you've implied that all the functions of mind cannot be explained by matter, because they're all mysterious, and must be explained some way else. Carried through, that's nothing more nor less than the positing of a soul. If you're going to posit a special explanation to account for awareness, you also have to posit a special explanation for counting, for spoken language, for written language, for facial recognition, for every thing that the brain does that we haven't mechanically explained yet — and that's basically everything. We know what parts of the brain correlate to these processes, but we don't have a mechanical explanation for how it accomplishes these things, and where doesn't explain how. You may not think of it as such, but if you require a special explanation for consciousness, you're advocating nothing less than dualism. You want to put awareness in a special box that these other features of mind don't fit into, but they all belong in the same box. There is no categorical difference between the mystery of language and the mystery of qualia. You cannot construct a category which fits the former things but which does not also fit qualia. I dare you to. But to you, qualia is somehow special. You're enamored with it in a way that you're not enamored with these other qualities of mind. It's as if you're led to say, "I can't imagine how matter can explain X, therefore X requires a special explanation," except that the only thing you're willing to put in X is consciousness. But that doesn't follow. The conclusion that a special explanation is required does not follow logically from the premise that you can't imagine how matter explains X. That's fallacious reasoning. A mere argument from incredulity. And it's an argument which, realistically, you would have to apply to all these other capacities of mind. You might delude yourself that you could "imagine" how matter can figure out where a sentence begins and ends, or what a colored blob in our visual field actually is, but you can't. We don't understand these other processes any better than consciousness. You give consciousness a special place because it's special to you. If you applied your criteria consistently, you end up with complete dualism, and that's absurd.