I don't have any idea what "atoms are obviously capable of consciousness" means. Care to elaborate or reformulate?

I'm a bunch of atoms. I'm conscious. I assume the same is true of you.

But you are not "conscious" just because you're "a bunch of atoms" ...

What more am I?

Why am I conscious?

You are atoms & void (what) configured as an emergent, ecology-constrained, complex system (how).

I'm definitely complex.

All sorts of things are emergent, constrained, and complex. Are they all conscious?

I think I would consider myself an agnostic with regards to the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, omnibenevolent, creator of the cosmos. I used to see myself as an atheist but have thrown that away because I feel it relies on a kind of faith that it criticizes theism for holding. — darthbarracuda

I'm not too sold that the 'kind of faith' used in the rejection of Theism is the same as the faith employed by Theism. ***

I'd like to hear why it is you believe that these expressions of 'faith' are the same (if indeed they are expressions of faith).

Meow!

GREG


*** - I'm making a bit of a reference to Paul Tillich's distinction between what is and is not faith as found in his book Dynamics of Faith... as in faith as found in Theism is itself NOT an act of knowledge, whereas 'faith' found within science or theoretical inquiry as being an act of knowledge.

I sort of couple this with a notion of different world views, put forth by 'psychotick' (in the old PF days) in a much simpler manner where the two worldviews differ in that the Theistic model is a 'top down' approach to viewing reality (as in starting with the answer first, then finding the questions; thus tuning the variables to fit those questions born of the central answer assumed from the git go) and the non-Theistic model is a 'bottom up' approach to viewing reality (as in starting with the variables leading to questions searching for an answer or refinements of understanding leading toward increased clarity).

That's a different question. Now you aren't asking how your consciousness came about, but rather whether there are any other conscious states emerging from atom and void. Each proposed instance of that would have to be judged units own merits. You can't simply take that because you have conscious states that are emergent out of a complex system, that the presence of something complex and emergent also means the emergence of consciousness.

I was on the way to pointing out that we don't know the nature of either consciousness or the universe. The conversation was not able to adapt, mutate, or genetically drift into something worthwhile. Such is life.

You can't simply take that because you have conscious states that are emergent out of a complex system, that the presence of something complex and emergent also means the emergence of consciousness. — TheWillowOfDarkness

Indeed. (In American, it's "no shit") :)

But that's wrong. It's exactly the opposite: we know the nature of (your) consciousness. We know its a particular state which has emerged from other particular states. So it is in any instance where we know about an existing consciousness.

A mystery is exactly what we do not have.

Why am I conscious? — Mongrel

It is pointless to ask a question whose answer and explication necessitates and presupposes that which you put into question. "Why am I conscious?" is a proxy for "why do I exist?" - but the question puts into question your very existence - but it is precisely this very existence which the supposed answer demands. So you are bound to cause an antinomy in asking the question - you come to the limits of language.

Pascal's wager is disingenuous if doxastic involuntarism is the case. A wager is one thing, but belief is a different kettle of fish. I can quite easily choose to bet either way, but belief is not a simple matter of choice. If you want me to believe, then you'll have to convince me. I cannot simply choose to believe in something of which I am not convinced - regardless of whether or not it'd be to my advantage. I could profess belief, but that'd be disingenuous if I didn't actually believe.

Whatever exists is, by definition, temporal (begins and ends in time) and compound (composed of parts). — Wayfarer

It is if you define it that way, but why would you do so? What are numbers composed of? What is red composed of? What are quarks composed of? Or don't you think that they exist? Why not just say that God exists, but doesn't begin or end in time, and is not composed of parts? If there is something which is, but which doesn't meet those conditions, then I say that it exists nonetheless.

An additional question to provoke discussion: how convincing do you find the argument that a supposed "holy man's" (such as Jesus or Mohammad) philosophical beliefs prove their divinity? — darthbarracuda

About as convincing as the argument that Elvis is still alive.

Agnosticism is a perfectly logical and honest approach to religion. It is precisely what would be expected from a university professor or a lab technician or any other "scientist".

Christianity, both anciently and modern versions, condemn it however under the cloak of lack of faith.

If you are godless it is easy to be viewed as being without ethics as well, although many philosophers do not require any religion for themselves to be ethical. However others such as Machiavelli and Nietzsche and their followers and admirers would have a hard time with any objective ethics.

While I am not offended by agnostics, anyone professing to be atheist is offensive in that this is an untenable philosophical position. To be valid it requires proving a negative, and with such a very large universe as the one before us, filled with billions of galaxies, one would need to search every square inch of it to prove there is no god, or that god is dead. That position is simply not logical.

Falling off the other side of the horse and becoming fanatical like a Muslim extremist or an Evangelical Protestant is just as bad in my opinion. In fact in that case I would rather hang out with the atheist.

As for the existence or not of the Philosophy God, I think Aquinas has already said it all.

First Cause, Prime Mover, Purposeful Designer, Artistic Artificer -- these all speak volumes and require serious philosophical consideration.

I go to Catholic mass at Xmas and Easter every year. The rest of the year I try to keep all of Christ's commandments and Immanuel Kant's exhortations. If there is no god then the world is therefore no worse off because of me.

I have just remembered to visit this forum, after not having been here for a while. But the question you raise is very interesting. Do numbers exist? Well it depends on who you ask! It is still a vexed question with no clear answer. As for 'red' and so on - then you're in the territory of universals, and 'whether universals exist' is another question of a similar nature.

And those questions are central to this question. Why? Because a hallmark moment in Western philosophy was the declaration by John Duns Scotus of the 'univocity of being'. Prior to Scotus, the Scholastics believed that the nature of God was different in kind to that of human beings (not to mention minerals and so on.) So according to Aquinas, when it was said of God that 'He is good', this is simply an analogy to express the idea in terms understandable to the human mind. But Scotus denied this, and said that God's attributes were no different to those of other things that existed.

This, along with the rise of nominalism, really marked the beginning of the end of the 'sacramental Universe' by depicting God as, basically, another kind of being or object in the domain of objects (that being the only domain that exists). Since this time, you will notice, it is almost impossible to imagine that there are 'degrees of being' or 'degrees of reality' - to our mind, things either exist, or not, or are real, or not - and whatever exists, is what is real, and vice versa; if it exists, it must be 'out there somewhere', as people say nowadays. The idea that there are levels, gradations, or an hierarchy of Being-as-such is nowadays a taboo; there is no vertical dimension.

As regards whether quarks exist or not - I suggest 'quarks' are referred to here because now they are said to be the fundamental unit of matter, the indivisible, the uncuttable - the atom, to all intents and purposes. And the philosophical significance of the atom was precisely that it was something that didn't pass into or out of existence - it was eternal. So it provided a means to locate the 'imperishable' at the very basis of transient matter. That is the original vision of atomism; but it is no longer tenable, according to physics.

The reason all this is important, is that it reveals that the God that is denied by many forms of atheism, is not the God that theology posited in the first place. Any argument, for instance, which claims that 'science shows that a God could not exist', is based on the premise that God is somehow detectable by empirical means, or could be inferred on the basis of empirical evidence (atheists and fundamentalists make the opposite version of the same error in this regard).

(I'm studying this subject through history rather than philosophy as such. Some excellent sources on it are Taylor's A Secular Age, Gillespie's The Theological Origins of Modernity, and Brad Gregory's The Unintended Reformation (currently reading). Also David Bentley Hart's The Experience of God for a contemporary re-statement of the view of classical theology.)

Do numbers exist? Well it depends on who you ask! — Wayfarer

What do you mean by "numbers"? Obviously numerals representing amounts exist, but wouldn't an actual amount, like 4, be a descriptive term, like an adjective? If I have 4 round marbles, it makes no more sense to ask where the 4 is as it does to ask where the round is. It's not like I can have a sack full of 4s or rounds.

Exactly, so called "universals" do not exist, but they are true.

Wayfarer still treats God as an existing being, like the fundamentalist theist or atheist he admonishes, only free of the feature of existing in our realm. For him, God is still treated like an existing force, only present in some higher plane, rather than a feature of our one.

The characteristic of the eternal, of God, of the universal, is that it doesn't exist. It's not in the empirical realm. The "eternal atom," as Wayfarer talks about, cannot pass out of existence because it was never there in the first place. That which is "imperishable" is not found within existence, but in meaning and significance. It's not a basis of transient matter, but an expression of it (meaning of a state of transient matter) and outside it (eternal).

I don't know Wayfarer's position exactly, but I don't categorize God as I would the number 4. The number 4 is descriptive, where God is thought (at least in the traditional sense) to be some sort of force or being, with the ability to create and to impose his will, among other things.

If you don't believe that an entity like God can exist because he defies our understanding of reality, that would not make God like the number 4, but would make him more like Pegasus, something that we imagine but that doesn't really exist.

I was responding to the rhetorical question 'what about the existence of numbers?' What I mean by number, is number. But if I were to ask whether numbers are real in an objective sense, or are they only real in the sense of pertaining to human mental operations, then I would have quite an argument on my hands. But I don't need to declare which of those two I believe is true. All I'm saying is that whether numbers exist or not, or whether they exist in the same sense as objects, is still an unresolved question.

No, I am not saying 'God exists'. Here is an essay on the topic - reading the title one might think it's by an atheist, but actually it's by a Bishop.

But God is certainly not 'an entity', nor anything else to which a pronoun ('a', or 'the') could be affixed.

Not in our world, for sure. But both yourself and Walhon still treat God as it is something which might or might not be, a presence to "believe" in some realm higher than our own, acting as a force to define our world.

On the other hand, taken as a whole, the universe does seem to point beyond itself. Whatever could possibly undergird the existence of the universe, including your existence, Gentle Reader, is one aspect of what “god” refers to. Second, that Whatever cannot itself need the universe in order to exist itself. Third, if the Whatever is, then the universe and all that is part of it is a creation. — Walhon

Walhon is treating God as an existing being, just not of our universe. In the "beyond" (whatever there might be), there is God and the presence of this God is supposedly the force which creates our universe. Here God is a super-being zipping about, building our universe out of its nothing. All Walhon has done is placed the super being prior to our universe rather than within it. For him God exists-- just not in our universe.

The result is Walhon is all too meek about God.

Fourth, the universe has its own existence, created (if it be so) with its own terms and relations, its own reality and ways of being. It unfolds in a certain “direction” we call time, and there is some predictability to that unfolding, though we only understand it very partially.

Call this the logic of divine being. Now, this is no proof for God. But it does set up the terms within which conversation about God should take place. One of the issues raised by recent popular atheist and deist books by, among others, Stephen Hawking, Richard Dawkins and the late Christopher Hitchins is that they all seem content to disprove the existence of a Flying Spaghetti Monster. Whether or not there are super-beings zipping about, and there might be, none could ever be considered divine. — Walhon

He doesn't realise it, but here Walhon has stated "proof" of God. All the aspects of the forth point are necessary logical truths. We can't have existence without its own terms. We can't have time without direction and change. We can't have knowledge of everything because each instance of knowledge is only one small part. Divine logic is undoubtable. No "faith" in God is required. The divine logic remains true no matter how much it is denied. It cannot be subject to the question "might/or might not" for it is eternal and necessary. Anyone who understands that God is not of the empirical realm (whether of our universe or the "beyond" ) knows God is true.

'Whalon', not 'Walhon'.

Whether or not one believes in God, it is not a discussion about 'something'.

And 'meekness' goes with the territory.

Apologies, I transposed letters.

For sure, that's my problem with your argument. You still treat God as "something," as a force of the "beyond."

You say: "We don't know. We can't know. It's a mystery. We don't if God is so or not." as if God were something that might or might not be, as if God were an entity given in terms of itself.

We should know better than to make that mistake.

Well, I think your putting words into Whalon's mouth, but it is a very difficult argument, so I'll leave it at that.

It's in the section I quoted:

On the other hand, taken as a whole, the universe does seem to point beyond itself. Whatever could possibly undergird the existence of the universe, including your existence, Gentle Reader, is one aspect of what “god” refers to. Second, that Whatever cannot itself need the universe in order to exist itself. Third, if the Whatever is, then the universe and all that is part of it is a creation. — Whalon'

God is supposedly the thing which undergirds existence.

Those who say they do not believe in God often give lack of evidence for their unbelief. This is a confusion of knowledge and faith . It is also an error of logic — absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. There cannot be any empirical evidence of the existence of God, for God does not exist. — Whalon'

Here he's still treating like the presence of absence of evidence has something to do with God. Supposedly, the atheists are wrong for citing the absence of evidence for God as a reason to say God doesn't exist. Whalon is still thinking of God as an existing state here because otherwise the atheist arguments wouldn't have any bearing on the case.

Logically, the atheist's would be correct (the absence of evidence for an evidential claim - the existing God) and Whalon would agree, for they were talking about, the super being zipping around the universe is shown absent by evidence (for the world we've encountered at least). Then Whalon would go on to (correctly) point out these correctly given atheist arguments had no impact on the God he was talking about.

What we take for granted as “real” is a construct of our brain, senses and nervous system. Beyond the discoveries of gestalt psychology that show clearly that our “picture” of reality is easily distorted, there are the longer-term observations of philosophers of knowledge, the epistemologists. Perhaps the most interesting ability of our mind is to grasp that it is generated by the brain, like a magnetic field results from an electric current passing through a piece of iron. The mind is no more the brain than the field is the iron, though the one depends upon the other. Yet we can, with some effort, also fold again on our selves to catch our minds in the act of thinking. Perceiving the illusion of time passing is one example. Believing that absence of evidence is evidence of absence, or that because something happens regularly, it will always happen that way, are other patterns that we can catch our minds doing. — Whalon

This is also about empirical states. Here he talks about when we get fooled about the existing world by our brains and desires. In God, we are not talking about whether we have missed information about existing states. God is outside of such changes, illusions and surprises.

What we call god (all human languages have a word for it) is something we infer from the fact of existence. — Whalon

This is true. The problem is we tend to literalise it. We infer meaning with respect to existing states around us constantly, but we have a tendency to equivocate those infinite with states themselves.

Life is perhaps the biggest one. Power is another one. We infer the infinite meaning of are action (death, life, domination, rescue, creation) and assume it must mean an infinite existing state, particularly in the context of what we desire. Super beings who give us are lives and are immortal in one sense or another. Most often we begin by suggesting these infinite as existing because that's how we encounter the meanings-- in how we act and are acted upon by the world. Pantheons. Spirits. Magic rituals. Miracles.

Then, when someone starts paying attention to the logic of God, we tend to wind this back to a presence which is not of this world. The hidden realm which never manifests to us but nevertheless causes us and allows our existence. We get the "invisible God" who acts without acting because we still think of God in terms a presence in the world, even though we've begun to realise this doesn't make sense. We detach God from our world, but not from existence.

Eventually, we get to a point where we realise God is not of our world but, more importantly, that any world is not of God. We may infer the infinite from existence, but the infinite is never of existence, even as an "undergrid." Indeed, the infinite has nothing do to the presence of existing-- states are define solely in themselves rather than by some outside force.

Whalon is caught in between the last two understandings of God. On the one hand he realises God cannot be part of existence, but on the other he is still stuck thinking of God in terms of existence, for else "faith" (in the "God is true sense" ) would be irrelevant.

If Whalon were to fully commit to the argument God did not exist, he would be making an atheistic one. His belief would be reduced to nothing more than a tradition which gave him understanding of the infinite. While I suspect he might not be too bothered the general idea of tradition rather than existing state (the whole more than one path to the "infinite" ), it gets a bit prickly in the context of individual belief because people usually take up or hold a belief (not just theistic ones either; science promises knowledge and control of the world, atheism promises a world with out many of those abhorrent supermen running around in the sky, etc.,etc.) because of something they've been promised.

To assert all those promises were not really true (existing) takes a lot, particularly when undoes the attractiveness of the tradition-- "God will rescue you from Hell" or "God will cure your illness" is a certain type of compelling argument one cannot make by saying: "This is my tradition and my way of grasping the eternal." It basically secular in fact: "Well, this is my way but there are others you may find." "Faith" is reduced to nothing more than a finite tradition, something great, fun, soothing, exciting or wise for the individual, but nothing more profound and grandiose.

I have just remembered to visit this forum, after not having been here for a while. But the question you raise is very interesting. Do numbers exist? Well it depends on who you ask! It is still a vexed question with no clear answer. As for 'red' and so on - then you're in the territory of universals, and 'whether universals exist' is another question of a similar nature. — Wayfarer

And if I were to ask you those questions, then you must either answer that they do not exist, or you must affirm that they are compositional, or you must abandon your definition of existence. So, which is it? Do you believe that there is a God, but you don't believe that there are numbers or red? That would be odd to say the least. The latter two are as clear as day, but the former is far from it. I experience red and activities involving numbers all the time, yet this purported God is nowhere to be found. It's almost as if there is no God beyond our imagination, or as anything other than a three letter word which is sometimes used as a synonym for other uncontroversial things. So, why should I believe otherwise?

You say that you're agnostic, so I understand that you don't claim to know that there is a God, but I'm talking about belief. And, despite the complex philosophical discussions, there are compelling grounds to simply accept that there are numbers and red and blue and yellow. These things exist, and, as we can agree, God does not.

Since God is conceived as an absolutely uniquely necessary and infinite being, even the words 'being', 'infinite', 'unique' and 'necessary', whose senses come from our limited human experience, are misapplied.

So we are always going to get into trouble when attempting to talk about God in any propositional terms whatever.

God cannot be known in any ordinary sense. God must be experienced, deeply felt, and that is why mysticism is at the heart of religion, and its genuinely transformative power. The feeling and experiencing of God cannot be used to support any political position, or any particular moral imperative whatsoever, instead one's own ethics grow naturally out of it; that is why it is always a mistake to attempt to force one's own ethics on others, or to universalize moral imperatives in the way Kant tried to.

No they aren't, John. We have those words for exactly this situation: pointing out something which is not an existing state, something the passage of time has no role in defining.

Your argument is misapplying the propositional to God in this instance: supposedly God is a "mystery" and "beyond" all knowledge because there must "be" something, an ethic, a face, a voice, a thought, a meaning to God which we never pin down, so it may always be there to help us out. In the approach you are taking, God is meant to "be" something, outside out world, yet still of the realm which has profound impact upon the world. It's "magical thinking"-- Oh, how wonderful it would be if the infinite impacted upon are world: the things we loved could live forever. Our wondrous fictions (i.e. the infinite meaning of an idea) would be literal. The sea could be parted even when it was impossible. In the face of horrors of the finite world, there would always be something to fix it. Power we cannot understand always sitting by us, rescuing us from any loss and death of a finite world.

But there's a problem. There's a reason it cannot be understood in terms of our lives: it does nothing in our world, rescues no-one, does not exist in any form. The promises of the infinite is nothing but our wishful thinking. In our minds, we can mix the infinite and the finite together, to posit the latter as the former: life which never ends and, has no possibility of ending. The ultimate comfort, life even when death is obvious.

We stare down the face of Death-- "You are just impossible because life is infinite."-- and consider the end to be logically impossible.

"Do not worry, for we will see our loved ones again. It's necessary."

Transformative? No doubt. If you believe it, it removes death. Whether we are being literal or metaphorical, one has a belief which removes fear, grief and pain over the losses of the finite world. Such emotions become unnecessary because their is no problem. Death is just a illusion. We really live infinitely in God. No-one ever really dies.

It's a mirage though. In our efforts to escape our fears and pains, we've tricked ourselves into thinking we are of the infinite. Death is not an illusion. And God cannot save us for, being infinite, God has no power to define the finite.

And if I were to ask you those questions, then you must either answer that they do not exist, or you must affirm that they are compositional, or you must abandon your definition of existence. So, which is it? Do you believe that there is a God, but you don't believe that there are numbers or red? — Sapientia

It's not so simple. Do red and numbers exist for those who are blind and inummerate, respectively? I am inclined to say 'no'. Now I know the objection to that: trees falling in forest, etc. I have argued those threads up hill and down dale, and I have come to a view which most would deem idealist. This is: that the designation of 'existing' to some object is a mental act. In other words, existence is mind-dependent.

So what, you will say, do you believe the Moon stops existing when nobody is looking at it? (Einstein asked that very question, sardonically.) No, I say, that is its 'imagined non-existence'. By saying that it ceases to exist when not observed, you're conjecturing about the 'mind-independent' nature of the Moon (or whatever object of experience). You're imagining it not being there, or disappearing; but that is also an imaginative act. In that sense, existence and non-existences are both constituted by judgements.

But all experienced objects are just that: experienced. The mind constitutes them in the sense of providing a perspective, location, and attributes, which collectively constitute the existence of an object. For an object to be an object, it needs to be recognised as such by a subject (which is basically orthodox Kant.)

So in our case, as we're linguistically and numerically aware beings, our minds constitute the world according to our rational and discursive abilities - we see the world in terms of implied meanings, scientific theories, judgements, and so on. On the one hand, there are sensory objects - things which belong to the domain of name and form. Then also there are mental judgements about those objects, which are also inextricably a part of whatever it is that we say exists. The mind itself organises sensory data into categories via judgements etc; otherwise you wouldn't be able to speak or conceive of anything whatever (as per Oliver Sachs research on men mistaking their wives for hats, etc).

So in my philosophy, there are definitely wives, numbers, hats, red, and moons. But none of those things are simply or purely self-existent, i.e. existing in their own terms independently of the act of cognition (or rather the manner of their existence independent of our cognition of them is perfectly unknowable to us, which is also orthodox Kant).

Due to the influence of empiricism in popular culture, we are trained to designate the objects of sense-perception as being foundational or constitutive of reality, which is what naturalism consists of. But I am calling that into question, because, I am saying, that is also mind-dependent, in the sense that it is something which is generally a matter of conventional or inter-subjective designation, i.e. we are educated about what to think of as real, with science obviously acting as the umpire or arbiter of judgement in respect of those questions (and also obviously providing many great tools and techniques for navigating that domain.) But, it is a fact that the physical sciences themselves are unable to locate a 'terminus of explanation', an unconditional ground of being, or any kind of absolute or non-contigent reality behind it (which is why we are obliged to entertain such ideas as the many worlds, multiverse, and so on.)

I remain agnostic but in light of the above, I am sensitive to the fact that a lot of what we take for granted about the nature of things is conjectural or deeply uncertain. So I am drawn to the kind of 'way of unknowing' which you find in various schools, including Tao. God or not? Not really sure, but I am certainly mindful of the way that physicalism and naturalism tend to condition us to exclude areas of our own nature and the 'human situation' by thinking about them in that habitually empiricist kind of way.