H
Hume
Guest
I knew it. It’s a conspiracy.
- Status
B
buffalo
Guest
How much do you know about them?
M
Maximus_Power
Guest
Show me a group of followers who suffered great persecution because they believed they had witnessed a ressurected Aristotle, or Atilla the Hun.
H
Hume
Guest
If historical suffering is how we measure the truthfulness of a god-claim, then the true god is either some native American deity or it’s the Jewish god - sans the rest of the trinity.Hume:
Show me a group of followers who suffered great persecution because they believed they had witnessed a ressurected Aristotle, or Atilla the Hun.
R
rossum
Guest
He was clear that he treats the earth as 10,000 years old at most. That means he is ridiculously wrong and deserves to be laughed out of any scientific gathering.
Since he holds that absurd premise then his logic is based on a false premise and can be ignored. Good logic does not start with a false premise, which is shown to be wrong by astronomy, cosmology, physics, geology, archaeology, palaeontology etc. Your source is not just arguing against evolution here, he is arguing against a massive amount of science.
R
rossum
Guest
It doesn’t matter which one we pick. In either case a 10,000 or 6,000 year old earth is shown to be false.
M
Maximus_Power
Guest
I’m sorry. I thought we were talking about individuals being deities based on historical evidence. Nobody believes the entirety of the Native American population to be a God. Do you see the difference?
What’s funny about this though is that the Christians would still have anyone else beat for suffering. Especially today.
R
rossum
Guest
You have Adam’s body to show us? Noah’s? There are a great many missing bodies.
B
buffalo
Guest
Since you know so little take it to another thread. I can see just in a few posts why you are agnostic. Our education system has failed you. Ask your college for your money back.
B
buffalo
Guest
Really? You are going to pretend you do not know the significance of my question. Don’t play along with him. If he rejects Jesus he should be aware. You are not helping.
M
Maximus_Power
Guest
We have a genetic Adam and Eve.
Not that Adam and Eve and Noah were ever more than just creatures I should say
R
rossum
Guest
Your question was an obvious gotcha. We do not have Zoroaster’s body. Does that mean that Zoroaster rose from the dead?
You can deduce very little from the fact that we do not have someone’s body.
B
buffalo
Guest
Nope…
T
Trifleton
Guest
I might’ve said non-replication vs replication instead, but let’s bracket off the discussion of reproduction.
I think you’re incorrect about consciousness and rationality. First, they are not just matters of degree. While we may say that some animals are “more” conscious than others (e.g. some have vision, others lack vision and only have hearing, etc), consciousness per se (like rationality) is a Boolean value of either 1 or 0. Either something is conscious or unconscious. There is no in-between. Either a creature is a subject with first-person, qualitative properties, or not. It is this transition from unconscious to conscious which I think cannot be explained naturally.
Evolution doesn’t even concern itself with that. At best, evolution could tell us that a conscious creature has a survival advantage over an unconscious one (though even this is controversial), but this doesn’t help one bit with the ontological problem of explaining the origin of consciousness. Evolutionary theory is useless here, since it concerns itself only with the mutations (and the inheritance of, and advantages) of biological bodies. We have something called the “Hard Problem of Consciousness” in philosophy of mind, and the problem is precisely that consciousness cannot be reduced to any set of physical facts.
We could know all facts about physics, chemistry and biology (indeed we could describe all of those with perfect accuracy and even mathematize all the physical relations involved) and this wouldn’t predict or explain any conscious facts. It doesn’t tell us why there is this “inner movie” of consciousness in addition to the “biological machines” whose operations we can more or less reduce to physics. There is, in other words, no logical supervenience between conscious facts and physical facts, and as such consciousness is not physical.
The idea that a conscious subject, a qualitative feeling and experience of the world, first-person properties, could emerge from unconscious, “deaf, dumb and blind” third-person properties is as bad as magic.
(1/2)
I think you’re incorrect about consciousness and rationality. First, they are not just matters of degree. While we may say that some animals are “more” conscious than others (e.g. some have vision, others lack vision and only have hearing, etc), consciousness per se (like rationality) is a Boolean value of either 1 or 0. Either something is conscious or unconscious. There is no in-between. Either a creature is a subject with first-person, qualitative properties, or not. It is this transition from unconscious to conscious which I think cannot be explained naturally.
Evolution doesn’t even concern itself with that. At best, evolution could tell us that a conscious creature has a survival advantage over an unconscious one (though even this is controversial), but this doesn’t help one bit with the ontological problem of explaining the origin of consciousness. Evolutionary theory is useless here, since it concerns itself only with the mutations (and the inheritance of, and advantages) of biological bodies. We have something called the “Hard Problem of Consciousness” in philosophy of mind, and the problem is precisely that consciousness cannot be reduced to any set of physical facts.
We could know all facts about physics, chemistry and biology (indeed we could describe all of those with perfect accuracy and even mathematize all the physical relations involved) and this wouldn’t predict or explain any conscious facts. It doesn’t tell us why there is this “inner movie” of consciousness in addition to the “biological machines” whose operations we can more or less reduce to physics. There is, in other words, no logical supervenience between conscious facts and physical facts, and as such consciousness is not physical.
The idea that a conscious subject, a qualitative feeling and experience of the world, first-person properties, could emerge from unconscious, “deaf, dumb and blind” third-person properties is as bad as magic.
(1/2)
T
Trifleton
Guest
Reason is another problem, one which I think is even worse. It is also not a matter of degree per se. Either a creature is rational or not. By “rational” I mean the capacity of thinking of determinate and universal concepts, as well as reasoning with them and producing other thoughts by virtue of propositional content and in accordance with the laws of logic.
Concepts are entirely abstract, universal and semantically determinate, and unextended (your idea of a triangle applies equally to any possible triangles, universally; is entirely abstract and has nothing to do with size, color etc., while a material representation of a triangle has to have a certain size, color, etc.; is semantically determinate, it is the concept of a triangle, not, say, a trilateral, whereas a material representation is indeterminate between triangularity and trilaterality as well as other potential concepts). By contrast, potential material loci such as the brain, brain states, or physical events are concrete, particular, extended and semantically indeterminate. The idea that a purely physical object or subject could store concepts or interact with them is completely nonsensical. Besides, when reasoning, our thoughts are not guided just by laws of physics; our thoughts cause other thoughts by virtue of propositional content and in accordance with logical laws, not physical laws. So, again, that kind of abstract thinking which we call “reason” transcends matter and cannot be reduced to physical and biological facts.
Any emergence of the rational from the non-rational makes no sense and would be even worse than magic. Same as the idea that consciousness could emerge from non-consciousness. So I am convinced these must have been produced by a pre-existing source of consciousness and reason, ultimately, God.
I can’t keep up with long discussions here, but I recommend the following reading list, at least:
“The Soul” by J. P. Moreland;
“The Conscious Mind” by David Chalmers;
“Kripke, Ross and the Immaterial Aspects of Thought” by Edward Feser (Feser also has talks on youtube about the immateriality of mind);
“The Immortal in You” by Michael Augros.
(2/2)
Concepts are entirely abstract, universal and semantically determinate, and unextended (your idea of a triangle applies equally to any possible triangles, universally; is entirely abstract and has nothing to do with size, color etc., while a material representation of a triangle has to have a certain size, color, etc.; is semantically determinate, it is the concept of a triangle, not, say, a trilateral, whereas a material representation is indeterminate between triangularity and trilaterality as well as other potential concepts). By contrast, potential material loci such as the brain, brain states, or physical events are concrete, particular, extended and semantically indeterminate. The idea that a purely physical object or subject could store concepts or interact with them is completely nonsensical. Besides, when reasoning, our thoughts are not guided just by laws of physics; our thoughts cause other thoughts by virtue of propositional content and in accordance with logical laws, not physical laws. So, again, that kind of abstract thinking which we call “reason” transcends matter and cannot be reduced to physical and biological facts.
Any emergence of the rational from the non-rational makes no sense and would be even worse than magic. Same as the idea that consciousness could emerge from non-consciousness. So I am convinced these must have been produced by a pre-existing source of consciousness and reason, ultimately, God.
I can’t keep up with long discussions here, but I recommend the following reading list, at least:
“The Soul” by J. P. Moreland;
“The Conscious Mind” by David Chalmers;
“Kripke, Ross and the Immaterial Aspects of Thought” by Edward Feser (Feser also has talks on youtube about the immateriality of mind);
“The Immortal in You” by Michael Augros.
(2/2)
F
Freddy
Guest
So at what exact point does a foetus become conscious?
T
Trifleton
Guest
I have no idea, and I don’t think it has any relevance for the hard problem of consciousness. What is even more important is the ontological power or capacity for conscious experience, whether or not one exercises it. And the Hard Problem is about the radical ontological mismatch between private, qualitative first-person properties and public third-person properties, and how the first cannot emerge from the second.
B
buffalo
Guest
I submit at conception and ensoulment. However, the body is not yet able to express its consciousness.
F
Freddy
Guest
You’re right. But I didn’t ask anything about the specifics of where consciousness exists or why it exists etc. I was asking when it turns on.
You said that it’s either ON or OFF. I think we can accept that you are conscious right now, but you weren’t when you were a blastocyst. So if consciousness switches on at some point then give me an indiation of when that happens in human development. I’ve read quite a lot about consciousness but I have never read or heard about anyone suggesting what you are. It’ll be interesting to read about it and it will support your claim.
If that’s too difficult, then look at human evolution. Go back far enough along our line of descent and you’ll reach a point where whatever that organism was, we could agree it wasn’t conscious. At what point along that evolutionary path did it turn ON. Again, I have never heard of anyone suggesting that there was a point, but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t one. Can you tell me when it was?
And I may be wrong but I think you suggested that humans were rational but other animals weren’t. Which means, according to your suggestion, Man didn’t gradually evolve from an earlier animal but became Man in one generation. Someone’s mum wasn’t rational but her son was? Is this your proposal?
And if it turns out that you are going to tell me that we started with a literal Adam then I think all bets are off. We’re talking science not theological interpretations of scripture.
Last edited:
F
Freddy
Guest
I didn’t expect to have to define consciousness…but here goes: an awareness of and an ability to respond to one’s environment.Freddy:
I submit at conception and ensoulment. However, the body is not yet able to express its consciousness.
So in your opinion a blastocyst is conscious but is not able to ‘express it’s consciousness’. Just like the wooden Buddah my tablet is propped up against right now.
Thanks for your (name removed by moderator)ut, Buff.
- Status