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A question for Materialists/Atheist/ Humanists and their allies

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  • Originally posted by Jichard View Post
    I don't buy that for one second. I explained it to you over and over and over. Roy explained it to you. I explained the difference between "physical" and "non-physical" to you. I explained what a "property" was. I explained to you how you were confusing descriptions with the properties to which those descriptions refer, as per your use/mention mistake And instead of making an honest attempt at understanding, you repeated the falsehoods, while pretending not to understand what was written. At this point, I accept that the other people on this forum were right about you. Honest discourse with you is impossible.
    Bull crap. When I asked about non-physical properties you said:

    Non-physical properties exist in the natural world. These include properties like biological properties, chemical properties, astronomical properties, and so on.

    A feature particular (or collections of particulars) can have.
    What the hell does that mean...


    seer, please don't lie to me. You don't understand those links at all. For example, you have no clue whether Prinz is giving an account of say, access consciousness, or instead the phenomenal consciousness that Chalmers focuses on. Chalmers would accept a naturalistic account of access consciousness. I do know what sort of account Prinz is offering, since I'm familiar with Prinz's work and have heard him discuss it. You are not familiar with it, given your track-record. Your track-record shows that you will misrepresent what people say (going so far as to lie about their work), if you think it suits your apologetic ends. For example, you lied about what reductivie physicalists were committed to; you committed this lie by omission when you quote-mined the link on reductive physicalism.

    So, seer, stop please pretending you understanding things. What makes your tactic even more ridiculous is that Chalmers and Harris agree with what I'm saying. They both, for example, accept that there are non-physical properties discusses at levels of description other than that used by the science of physics, and that these non-physical properties are instantiated by natural things. So when you claim that you understand what they're saying but you don't understand what I'm saying, you're lying. Pure and simple. You're lying.
    No you are lying. I understand perfectly what both Chalmers and Harris are saying in the links, And I will again quote Harris:

    The problem, however, is that no evidence for consciousness exists in the physical world.[6] Physical events are simply mute as to whether it is “like something” to be what they are. The only thing in this universe that attests to the existence of consciousness is consciousness itself; the only clue to subjectivity, as such, is subjectivity. Absolutely nothing about a brain, when surveyed as a physical system, suggests that it is a locus of experience. Were we not already brimming with consciousness ourselves, we would find no evidence of it in the physical universe—nor would we have any notion of the many experiential states that it gives rise to. The painfulness of pain, for instance, puts in an appearance only in consciousness. And no description of C-fibers or pain-avoiding behavior will bring the subjective reality into view.

    If we look for consciousness in the physical world, all we find are increasingly complex systems giving rise to increasingly complex behavior—which may or may not be attended by consciousness. The fact that the behavior of our fellow human beings persuades us that they are (more or less) conscious does not get us any closer to linking consciousness to physical events. Is a starfish conscious? A scientific account of the emergence of consciousness would answer this question. And it seems clear that we will not make any progress by drawing analogies between starfish behavior and our own. It is only in the presence of animals sufficiently like ourselves that our intuitions about (and attributions of) consciousness begin to crystallize. Is there “something that it is like” to be a cocker spaniel? Does it feel its pains and pleasures? Surely it must. How do we know? Behavior, analogy, parsimony.[7]

    Most scientists are confident that consciousness emerges from unconscious complexity. We have compelling reasons for believing this, because the only signs of consciousness we see in the universe are found in evolved organisms like ourselves. Nevertheless, this notion of emergence strikes me as nothing more than a restatement of a miracle. To say that consciousness emerged at some point in the evolution of life doesn’t give us an inkling of how it could emerge from unconscious processes, even in principle.

    http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/t...-consciousness
    See Jichard, that is not hard to understand. So do you disagree with Harris?
    Last edited by seer; 05-17-2015, 08:56 PM.
    Atheism is the cult of death, the death of hope. The universe is doomed, you are doomed, the only thing that remains is to await your execution...

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jbnueb2OI4o&t=3s

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    • Originally posted by Yttrium View Post
      A natural evolution of life, including a natural development of the brain, is not mutually exclusive with a supernatural origin of consciousness. Of course, the scientific method doesn't accept the line "we don't know how it could have happened, so God must have done it". Until we can identify and study any supernatural methods that could be involved, we will keep looking for natural answers. Science is a tool, and anyone can use it, whether religious or not.
      A natural evolution is mutually exclusive to any of the religious based assertions, a.k.a. revelation, for the origins of consciousness, and without those religious based assertions there is no reason to assume anything other than a natural evolution. Religions claim to have the answer, and their answer is not evolution.

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