what would make you change your beliefs?

[Knight]

AtheistPhil -

If you are knocked out for example, and you come back and return to consciousness, you remember who you are, which means that you can't have "disappeared". When you go to sleep and then wake up, you don't start again from scratch as if you were being born again, you continue as you were. So your consciousness never ceased. It was consciousness (awareness) before you went "un"conscious, and it is still consciousness, indeed the very same consciousness when you came back. If you liken the body to a computer, and your consciousness to software, then becoming unconscious refers to the computer / body 's temporary lack of software / consciousness. When it returns, it's just as it was before. That's why nothing in the body and nothing in the brain can be the source of consciousness. Otherwise, the absence of consciousness would be like the absence of any other physical aspect of the body (ie an arm). It would never come back. So it makes far more sense to assume that consciousness is independent of the physical body, and that the brain "houses" our consciousness.

When you turn off your computer, is it still on? No, and yet when you turn it back on, all of the data you had on this computer before you shut if off is still available. Why? The data is stored. The brain also stores data using neurons. There are regions of our brain, you can think of them as similar to the RAM and the hard drive...our short term memory is like RAM (random...we can access this memory temporarily, but generally it doesn't last for a long period of time). Things in our short term memory may be moved to the long term, similar to saving a document to the hard drive. Our brain has our long term memories stored, meaning when we reboot from our sleep, we still have access to this data. That doesn't mean we never turned off, but that our brain successfully stored the data.