Can Consciousness Best Be Explained by God's Existence?

[Rayaan]

This is an enlightening and a very respectful debate which covers many of the philosophical explanations for consciousness. In it, the debater that starts to speak first is Hamza Andreas Tzortzis, a Muslim convert, who gives a scrupulous run down of the naturalistic explanations for consciousness and, ultimately, why they all fail. Then he presents an alternative argument, which is a theistic explanation. The other debater, Professor Peter Simons (who is an atheist and a philosopher), said that he agrees with everything his opponent said regarding the subject except for his conclusion, i.e. the idea that a greater sentient being is necessary in order for consciousness to exist. But whether you yourself believe in God or not, the various explanations presented are worth pondering on as they shed light on the mystery of consciousness from several fields of study, e.g. from a biological, theological, and a philosophical perspective, and how some of the explanations even complement each other.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77J6g04UeY0

[Sejanus]

In a word; no.

[Rampant.A.I.]

Human special snowflake syndrome.

Consciousness is not rare, it is perfectly reasonable as an evolutionary adaptation, and it's incredibly naive to believe it must be the result of a being conscious pre-animal and human consciousness to create consciousness.

"I dunno, it must always have existed" is not a compelling answer for religious folks about the universe, and yet it is for consciousness? Give me a break.

The video being by the Islamic Education and Research Academy doesn't lend a whole lot of credence to the claim, either.

iERA (Islamic Education and Research Academy) is an international dawah organization founded in the United Kingdom in 2009 for proselytizing Islam.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IERA

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21...zdh-O29LCQ

http://m.psychologytoday.com/blog/animal...ous-beings

[bennyboy]

From what I've watched so far, I think he's made a brilliant summary of many of the positions regarding consciousness. Many lols at "Science of the gaps." I'm still only 20 minutes in, though, so I'm curious to see how he goes from "we dont' know" to "therefore God."

[Ryantology]

There are many, many different qualifications that any God lacks which make it an insufficient explanation for anything.

[Angrboda]

Holy fuck. What is it with people tossing around multi-hour videos? "Ain't nobody got time for dat."

As I've noted previously, there are multiple dimensions upon which explanations can be ranked, and on most of them, a god as an explanation doesn't rank very high.

One of the main problems being there just isn't enough specificity to "god as an explanation" for it to tell us very much. Lacking more specifics, it becomes a non-starter. If you start adding the specifics of this or that god, it quickly becomes apparent that there are not good, rational reasons for adding this specific rather than that specific, this god rather than that god, and the whole explanation collapses in on itself for lack of evidence for the particulars.

I'm into reading a book at the moment, so I doubt I'll find time for the video. The problem isn't that physicalist explanations are inadequate — they are — but theist explanations are even less sufficient.

[Rayaan]

The video being by the Islamic Education and Research Academy doesn't lend a whole lot of credence to the claim, either.

I agree. What organization it was made by doesn't necessarily lend more credence to the claims indeed.

From what I've watched so far, I think he's made a brilliant summary of many of the positions regarding consciousness.

I think so too.

There are many, many different qualifications that any God lacks which make it an insufficient explanation for anything.

What are some of those qualifications exactly?

One of the main problems being there just isn't enough specificity to "god as an explanation" for it to tell us very much. Lacking more specifics, it becomes a non-starter. If you start adding the specifics of this or that god, it quickly becomes apparent that there are not good, rational reasons for adding this specific rather than that specific, this god rather than that god, and the whole explanation collapses in on itself for lack of evidence for the particulars.

One must laugh at the irony of that post, given that you yourself claim to believe in various particular gods. (Or are you not a theist?)

Damn, you're so consistent ...

[FifthElement]

Hamza is a crook, modern age snake oil salesman, religious version of Nassim Haramein IMO

Philosophers will never solve the "problem" of consciousness.

Only science can. ( LINK <--- Click Me)

And when they do, programmers will take over... Birth of the AI is inevitable. Nobody knows when exactly it's gonna happen, but when it does it will be the greatest achievement of human kind and gods enemy No.1

When that happens these same underachievers are gonna move on and paddle something else, as they always do

[Whateverist]

I agree with what Rasetsu said, except that I'd go further (probably too far) and add that explaining anything by way of something itself unexplainable just won't work. I mean it really isn't an explanation at all. Unless you start with knowledge of gods -which I certainly don't have- they can't very well shed any light on anything.

I've always felt -from my atheist point of view- that to say that god is the cause of anything is tantamount to admitting the problem is beyond you. "God only knows." An explanation should provide a footing for something not yet understood in that with which we are more familiar. 'God' is too controversial to provide that foundation.

[MindForgedManacle]

@Rayaan Where did Rasetsu ever claim that the god(s) she believes in are somehow an explanation for consciousness? Perhaps best to read her post thoroughly.


Anyhow, the moment I saw the name "Hamza Tzortzis" I knew the facepalms were coming. This guy is often a troll who goes around to well known atheists, shoves cameras in their face and tries to pose "Gotcha!" questions to them for publicity (such as PZ Myers and Dawkins, though Aron Ra pwned him rather well). He further has shown in other instances that his understanding of certain philosophical issues is very incomplete, despite going on to make bold proclamations about them. For example, he's claimed that Hume's Problem of Induction is a problem for atheists but not for Muslims (or at least not for Abrahamic theists), which is laughably stupid.

Anyway, I love when apologists bring up supposed "science of the gaps", because most of the time they are being completely stupid and just going for a rhetorical point. If someone says that the fact that a given phenomenon is not [well] understood and thus we should continue our pursuit of understanding it via science, they are not saying "We don't understand it, therefore science", which is what God of the gaps refers to (but applied to God obviously) that theists are charged with. The point obviously being made is that given the phenomenon in question isn't well understood and that it appears to fall within the purview of science to explain, we should pursue our endeavors so that we can get an ACTUAL understanding of it, by which we can move on. God of the gaps arguments are nothing like this. Hence why when applying such arguments to, say, cosmic fine-tuning or consciousness we leard nothing at all.

---

Philosophers will never solve the "problem" of consciousness.

Only science can. ( LINK <--- Click Me)

And when they do, programmers will take over... Birth of the AI is inevitable. Nobody knows when exactly it's gonna happen, but when it does it will be the greatest achievement of human kind and gods enemy No.1

Not sure I agree. As someone who studies computer science (though not A.I. specifically, I admit) and philosophy, I think the load is going to be on philosophy (and has been, largely), at least for awhile. There's effectively no historical reasons to dispute this, as ALL of the sciences developed out of the relevant philosophical disciplines after philosophers made sufficient clarifications and progress towards exactly what they were talking about, and had the proper tools to get at that phenomenon. Examples include physics (from Aristotle to Newton), biology (Aristotle to Darwin (perhaps)), psychology (completely founded by philosophers in the 18th-19th century, building on David Hume's foundation), linguistics from philosophy of language (from St. Augustine to Wittgenstein, transitioned to science by Noam Chomsky mainly).

If we don't have a sufficient understanding of what we're talking about (we don't on this issue), then the science on it is going to be quite wanting; turns out, the science on it [consciousness] is wanting. To paraphrase Dan Dennett, "There've been number of books on consciousness in the past several years by eminent neuroscientists, and most of them are pretty dreadful." Given Dennett's almost unparalleled expertise on both the science and philosophy involved here - he is both a scientist and philosopher after all - and the fact that he's often claimed to be a bit down on philosophy (I disagree), I think we have good reasons to think he's right on this.

People in the field of A.I. have long been trumpeting that they are "Soooo close!" to creating a conscious being that it's a little dispiriting. I remember reading an article that detailed how some A.I. researchers in (I think) the 80's had a program that could do something like output basic, but coherent, stories in English, and so they believed it right to say it was conscious. I hope I don't need to explain what's wrong there.

Bah, I'm rambling. Basically, I think real progress will be made on the problem of consciousness once we have the necessarily philosophical grounding on what we mean by 'consciousness', coupled with sufficiently developed scientific investigation, but not before.