Top Ten (Failed) Proofs For God's Existence

And if you want to get extremely specific, it's almost impossible to pin down the origin of who invented the Scientific Method, though I believe it was Alchemists and Magicians. Nonetheless, it's also very difficult to pin down the origin of the Astrological symbols and their meanings, and yet many treat the Scientific Method as this holy grail and treat the lack of evidence of the origin of the signs as an argument against Astrology. Makes no sense.

 

The who is who history of the scientific method is of little consequence in regards to the evolution of it's structure. veracity, precision and meaning. These are reasons why it is so well respected.

 

And yet, it's not the only way to approach anything.

 

In the age of formal papers/abstracts and technological invention, it's exponentially more useful than anything magick or astrology has had to offer.

 

Depends on what is trying to be achieved.

 

Consciousness is awareness of experience--our most immediate apprehension of reality. The problem that it poses for evolution is what survival value does it have? The theory of natural selection posits that our basic purpose is to survive and reproduce. How is this better served by conscious humans than by zombies? On the other hand, the fact that we have such a faculty is important theologically, because if we didn't, we wouldn't be aware of our existence or of the "great big wonderful world we live in". Atheist and neuroscientist Sam Harris acknowledges that scientists don't understand consciousness. "The idea that brains produce consciousness is little more than an article of faith among scientists at present and there are many reasons to believe that the methods of science will be insufficient to either prove or disprove it." The End of Faith, p. 208). Harris is also impressed by research showing that much of our behavior is autonomic and that our decisions are often made before we're aware of them. So what is consciousness good for? As neuroscientists Crick and Koch asked "Why does our brain not consist simply of a series of specialized zombie systems?" Neuroscientist David Eggerman speculates that consciousness is the "CEO" of the neural network , making higher-level decisions and setting new tasks. But why would even that require subjective awareness? Philosopher-mathematican Alfred North Whitehead speculated that "proto-consciousness" exists in all matter. It might be that consciousness is simply a fortuitous by-product that just happened to emerge as our brains became bigger and more complicated. If so, the development of consciousness must be viewed as a rather fortuitous outcome of the "blind" process of evolution. Without it, no one would know that it even happened!

 

Several answers seem blatantly obvious in relation to why consciousness would be preferable over being zombies in regards to evolution. Some that come to mind are Having more developed consciousness can benefit a species in allowing it to better be aware of predators/prey. In regards to reproduction, consciousness can help mates select traits or qualities that they are seeking to make fit offspring. But these responses only consider survival value in how you have posed the question and only this aspect of consciousness you mentioned.


I really don't think that is the significant obstacle in regards to evolution addressing consciousness that McKenna is speaking to. I don't know the surrounding context of the McKenna quote but I assume he is perhaps addressing this from at least 1 of 2 different angles.

1) that there has not been a consciousness 'control center' found in the brain. So unlike, say the eye, which has thought to be a series of gradual steps to reach it's level of 'perfection' that we view it as today by evolutionary biologists, which suggests theoretically we could find all the graduated intermediates of the evolution of the eye, there is no parallel location of consciousness. I attempted to correlate, what I'll call second tier variables, such as brain size and quantity of neurons to consciousness in my previous post, but admittedly it is a bit presumptuous and a grasping effort by scientific standards.

2) The other is that When many people are talking about consciousness, they often are meaning something more complex than that definition you offered for us. I get the impression that when many people speak of consciousness, particularly coming from a mystical or religious angle, McKenna most likely the former, they often treat consciousness as having this aspect of wholly other. That there is a feeling that some if not all that constitutes their consciousness resides somewhere else besides between their ears and head to toe. I think this aspect is the true riddle of consciousness, I can't really relate to some claims people make in regards to it but I understand the sensation that my thinking mind often will seem disparate, from the rest of my cohesive person. That voice of 'I' as if some region of mind is controlling the rest of my being through some sort of interface or something.

 

The car and the music example, perhaps sometimes the arm movement example are all interesting because they pretty much all suggest that at one time or another the individual had to be conscious in the truest sense of the word to perform the activity. Meaning, all of those examples require a concerted effort in spatial awareness, as well as an intent in the performance. It seems though, that as we get gradually more adept at any of those examples, they get imprinted into our muscle memory and become "second nature." I wonder then, if it's so much that we are not conscious of those events or just that our consciousness can partition it's focal point.

 

There is likely a lot of grey area that I do not have a satisfactory response for but I will suggest there is a notable difference between "not being conscious of your finger movements in playing a complicated piece of music" as you suggest, after say years of practice and the non-conscious intrinsic blind spot we have.

As a guitarist, I'll say that Building finger muscles and the flexibility to play a guitar fluidly took awhile for me and takes awhile for many people. there are specific exercises to train those muscles and I've even done exercises with stress balls and exercises without the guitar in order to advance the flexibility of my fingers. So there is a whole lot of conscious effort that goes into being able to say solo 5 notes in one octave of a pentatonic scale effortlessly, to playing 15 notes plus bends in 3 octaves of a pentatonic scale effortlessly. But it is fascinating that once you learn to control your muscles and positioning, it comes effortlessly. This seems to be one of the kind of places where consciousness becomes difficult to define, when those skills are developed, types of memory seem to take over. Is memory a part of consciousness? If it's not constituted of it, consciousness seems to have relational accords with many other subsets of mind and thus makes it really difficult to isolate what consciousness is.

 

I don't think it's so obvious that the benefits you describe can be attributed to consciousness. At least I don't know of any research suggesting that. True, zombies of the Walking Dead variety would have trouble mastering these skills, but why can we assume that a highly intelligent zombie or android would have difficulty with them. I think the kind of consciousness that is involved when neuroscientists like Chalmers speak of it being a "hard problem of consciousness" is phenomenal awareness, subjective experience or sentience--the ability to feel, perceive, or experience subjectively. Consciousness, in this sense, refers to the introspectively accessible, phenomenal side of our mental lives--what is it like to experience a sunset or a symphony,or to contemplate the nature of consciousness. Physicist Erwin Schrodinger commented:"The sensation of color cannot be accounted for by the physicist's objective picture of light-waves. Could the physiologist account for it, if he had fuller knowledge than he has of the processes in the retina and the nervous processes set up by them in the optical nerve bundles and in the brain? I do not think so." Scientific research on the subject necessarily involves making inferences from objective behavior or reports from subjects about what they're experiencing, but it is not the particular experiences themselves but the general experience of being "awake and aware" that constitutes consciousness. Brain research indicates that the bulk of our behavior results from autonomic processes and from the "unconscious" factors uncovered by psychoanalysis. (see David Eagleman, Incognito).

Neuroscientists often test for consciousness by seeing whether an animal recognizes it's image in a mirror as itself instead of another. Some gorillas, chimps, orangutans, orcas, dolphins, elephants and magpies can do this, as can humans over one year old (more or less). I remember a fascinating experience at the orangutan exhibit at the Whichita zoo, when and obviously bored adolescent orang left the adults and began an extended game of monkey see, monkey do with a human kid on the other side of the glass. It ended when they both began licking the glass and their parents pulled them away. I suspect that orang was experiencing subjective phenomenal awareness of the activity, and perhaps he realized that the kid on the other side was experiencing the same thing, although I couldn't prove it.(neuroscientists would be skeptical). Primate researchers would say he was exhibiting a primitive form of ToM (theory of mind), or recognition that he, at least, had a separate mind. But only humans exhibit an extended ToM--the ability of two individuals to realize that a third individual has a mind). Add to this Rizzolatti's research on "mirror neurons" which can fire not only during the subject's actions but also when (s)he observes actions of others and we have some basis for understanding that consciousness might have evolutionary advantages for social species. But we have to make inferences. Steven Pinker remarked: "A robot that could recognize itself in a mirror would not be much more difficult to build than a robot that could recognize anything all". Presumably we wouldn't infer that the robot had subjective phenomenal awareness.

 

Well standing on the shoulders of the people you have mentioned, you have now compounded what consciousness is. We have gotten far away from your simplistic definition in the previous post and I specifically mentioned my response was within that narrow of window you were talking about. But now you are getting into stuff like qualia, which much like the previous questions I posed in regards to memory, is qualia a synonymous phenomena with consciousness?

It seems like any discussion of consciousness has this in built, for lack of a better phrase, bait and switch aspect to it where there is really no way to address consciousness comprehensively, which is what I think the crux of that Terence McKenna quote relies on.

 

I agree that discussions of consciousness often have a "bait and switch" aspect. Stephen Pinker remarks that "Consciousness is typically defined as "buildingan internalmodelof the world that contains the self, reflecting back on ones moods and understandings" and other kinds of navel-gazing that have nothing to do with consciousness. as it is commonly understood: being alive and awake and aware. It is always tempting to solve Chalmers' "hard problem" by making it an easy problem that leaves out sentient phenomenal awareness. Even the efforts to operationalize consciousness as ToM has this problem. As for Mckenna, correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't he gain his insights about consciousness from a career as an etheobotanst, shaman, and "psychonaut", ingesting large quantities of mind altering substances? Wasn't he the one who said said that the psilocybin mushroom is the megaphone used by an alien, Intergalactic Other to communicate with mankind? And didn't he consider his most intense and rewarding experiences to be the seizures from the brain tumor that took his life. These may serve as strong credentials to some on this forum, but I'm not one of them. Maybe he had one trip too many, in my admittedly uninformed opinion.

You say I stand on the shoulders of others. I could stand on broader ones: we haven't mentioned Daniel Dennett's Consciousness Explained or Michio Kaku's The Future of the Mind--both rich and intriguing books which are quite enlightening but not really about consciousness as we've defined it. Pinker thinks consciousness may be one of those problems the human mind isn't equipped to solve: "We cannot see ultraviolet light. We cannot mentally rotate an object in the fourth dimension. And perhaps we cannot solve conundrums like free will and sentience."

I think that's too pessimistic. I'm a believer in evolution, not because it's necessarily "true" in an absolute sense, but because it's the only scientific theory in town, integrates extensive available evidence from a wide variety of disciplines, and without it we might as well believe anything. The main rival, "Scientific Creationism" , is not real science at all but only an extended critique of Darwinism without any effort to generate new research-based knowledge beyond Genesis. I feel the same way about consciousness. Unlike neuroscientist and atheist Sam Harris, who isn't convinced that brains cause consciousness or that consciousness ceases when we die, I suspect that brains do cause consciousness, and that mine will cease completely when I die. Both consciousness and evolution figure prominently in my faith. Evolutionist and agnostic Stephen Jay Gould has convinced me that if my ancestor Pikaia hadn't survived the Burgess extinction we wouldn't be having this conversation, since intelligent, conscious life never would have evolved. Gould thinks it's a fluke, but I think it's an extraordinary one, because without intelligent, conscious life asking questions that Pinker thinks are insolvable for beings at our pay grade, no one would know what a magnificent cosmos we're living in.

 

all "proofs" are "failed", for or against anything. there is only more or less real evidence.

why should i, or anyone, take the word of another human, which every printed word on this earth is, for something no human has ever known or ever will?

i have no argument with any god,

and no use, for any human, using what they pretend to know about it, as an excuse, to screw everything up for everyone else.

i can observer that there is always more to everything then what we see when we look at it,

i can observe no reason to assume anything needs to be infallible.

whatever gods exist, requre no human proofs, nor human knowledge either.

there is no problem with gods. the problem, is with what humans claim to know about them,
and with what they use this "knowledge", as excuses for.

whatever gods exist, it is KNOWLEDGE OF THEM which does not.

no knowledge of the will of any god exists among humans.

 

There’s a revolution going on in science.
A genuine paradigm shift. While mainstream science remains materialist, a substantial number of scientists are supporting and developing a paradigm based on the primacy of consciousness.Dr. Amit Goswami, Ph.D, a pioneer of this revolutionary new perspective within science shares with us his vision of the unlimited potential of consciousness as the ground of all being, and how this revelation can actually help us to live better. The Quantum Activist tells the story of a man who challenges us to rethink our very notions of existence and reality, with a force and scope not felt since Einstein. This film bridges the gap between God and Science. The work of Goswami, with stunning precision and without straying from the rigors of quantum mechanics, reveals the overarching unity inherent in the worlds major religions and mystical traditions.

www.quantumactivist.com

 

Of course, we need to be aware that Dr. Goswami's background is Hindu, and that this "new perspective" corresponds with ancient Hindu philosophy. What he has done is to reinterpret tenets of Hinduism in the lingo of quantum mechanics. He starts with the anomalies and paradoxes of quantum physics: the uncertainty principle,nonlocality, discontinuity, tangled hierarchy, etc., and invokes the concept of "quantum consciousness" to explain them. Only unlike prevailing New Age approaches emphasizing that we create reality, he adds the feature that "we" , as separate, individually conscious entities, are ourselves illusions created by the One. This is metaphysics, not strictly speaking "science", because none of it is falsifiable. Monistic idealism is worth considering--but as philosophy or metaphysics. Goswami addresses the paradox that, if consciousness is singular and unitive, we seem to experience it as individual. The answer he gives is the Hindu one: our sense of individual consciousness is an illusion. He posits a pervasive consciousness field and maintains that physical reality is an illusion created by our minds--or rather by the collapse of wave functions by the consciousness field in a manner that we interpret as our own doing. Maybe so. For a skeptical view, see Victor Stenger, Quantum Gods. See also http://www.csicop.or...tum_quackery/

 

For an additional critique of Goswami, see Sobottka http://faculty.virginia.edu/consciousness/new_page_11.htm

 

Hindu lingo aside, what are your thoughts on the EEG experiments that were done?