Do you ever doubt your atheism?

[FallentoReason]

The functionality of a being's consciousness is directly proportional to the size of their brain, and the components making up that brain.
We are superior to most animals because we have developed the frontal cortex(?) which is responsible for such things as planning ahead, short term memory/working memory and other things most animals don't seem to possess.

You might want to rethink that.
Many "higher" animals (mammals and larger birds) have these functions fully formed. Not to the extent humans do, but there's no doubt they do have them.

It was implied that what I meant is we have taken the development of the frontal cortex a lot further than the rest of the animal kingdom :p

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@consciousness
"I just can't imagine how..........therefore", lol.

As far as how peculiar our faculties are - I think that maybe it's a bit of self interest spurring this one on. Plants have peculiar faculties as well, just as much so. They simply went a different way with it. We are incapable of doing what they do just as fantastically as they are incapable of doing what we do (though they may not be quite so incapable as we once imagined them to be, surprise surprise). That we think it means something in us, and nothing in them, is, frankly, beyond me. We can move around a little bit, and think about stuff - they're the masters of organic chemistry upon which our existence depends- capable of expressing what can only be called behaviors without so much as a single brain cell. They managed to figure something out that still has us, with our big, important "consciousness", scratching our heads to this day. Who's the badass here again?

Surely the species that is able to contemplate the flipping fabric of space-time will have a one up on a species whose major achievement is photosynthesis?