Supposing that there is an uncreated Being, called Brahma, outside the universe, but who created the universe — my question would be whether or not this Being was conscious or a conscious Person. It seems that He would have to be at least conscious because He created conscious Beings. Do you think it possible that a Being which is not conscious, could create things which are conscious and self aware?
Can you explore this further? I get as far as the omnipotent efficient set of rational laws or instructions that can bring the universe into being and maintain it, but I’m not sure that it necessarily follows that such a ‘being’ must be either ‘conscious’ or a ‘person’, just because I am conscious and a person.
I don’t think so.
Unless you subscribe to the idea that God created literally everything then the answer is obviously that you don’t need consciousness as a requirement to create something that is in itself conscious. You are either a Creationist or you are not. If not, then natural processes lead to consciousness. And we have examples from one end of the spectrum (life without consciousness) to us at the other end. At every stage it is a matter of degree.Hugh_Farey:
I don’t think so.
I think that there is something wrong with the copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. The QM model is very good, and the results are quite accurate but I think that the uncertainty principle should be thought of as a statement about standard deviations when you take into account a large number of particles.
Why is it obvious? Are you not simply assuming that metaphysical naturalism is true? It is not at all obvious that intellect can be essentially reduced to matter. If you are a materialist by ideology you have to believe that. In fact the idea that the intellect is made of matter and is acting for purposeful ends is a claim that doesn’t really make any rational sense given metaphysical naturalism. intentionality and blind physical processes simply don’t make sense as as a causal relationship if we reduce intentionality to matter. It’s only because you are a materialist that you are forced to reduce it to matter regardless of whether it makes rational sense or not.
Intellect? You are moving the goalposts.Bradskii:
Why is it obvious? Are you not simply assuming that metaphysical naturalism is true? It is not at all obvious that intellect can be essentially reduced to matter. If you are a materialist by ideology you have to believe that. In fact the idea that the intellect is made of matter and is acting for purposeful ends is a claim that doesn’t really make any rational sense given metaphysical naturalism. intentionality and blind physical processes simply don’t make sense as as a causal relationship if we reduce intentionality to matter. It’s only because you are a materialist that you are forced to reduce it to matter regardless of whether it makes rational sense or not.
Self awareness, regardless of whether its shared by other beings, makes no sense when reduced to components that are essentially not self-aware.There is nothing about a process in itself that makes sense of self awareness. If clocks were self aware, a materialist view would be akin to reducing self awareness to the process of cogs-wheels moving each-other, which naturally appears to be an absurd explanation for what consciousness is; because while one may have produced a functional explanation of an apparent emergence of consciousness in relation to the cog-wheels, one has not produced any knowledge about the actual nature of consciousness and of course it’s absurd to think that cog-wheels and how they are moving is essentially consciousness itself because we experience consciousness as something entirely different. There is no explanatory value.there. The problem is there really is no difference when a materialist reduces self awareness to the nature of physical processes in the brain.
So God adds a lot of ‘something else’ to us and a little less to apes and a little less to dogs and a little less to birds and not much to reptiles and very little to mice and hardly any to fish and next to nothing to insects and…well, it’s a funny old system isn’t it.Bradskii:
Self awareness, regardless of whether its shared by other beings, makes no sense when reduced to components that are essentially not self-aware.There is nothing about a process in itself that makes sense of self awareness. If clocks were self aware, a materialist view would be akin to reducing self awareness to the process of cogs-wheels moving each-other resulting in self-awareness which naturally appears to be an absurd explanation; because while one may have produced a functional explanation of emergence, one has not produced any knowledge about the actual nature of consciousness and of course it’s absurd to think that cog-wheels and how they are moving is essentially consciousness itself. The problem is there really is no difference when a materialist reduces self awareness to the nature of physical processes in the brain.
At most, all that can be made sense of is that there is a relationship between physical processes and self-awareness. But the view that “matter” is self-aware, as opposed to a dualistic view involving matter + self-awareness, is an assumption that leads to a brute fact. It makes better sense to think that something has been added to matter, that something else that we cannot measure is working in conjunction with physical processes, rather than the idea that physical processes are somehow thinking…
Really? Even octopii are incredibly intelligent. And you’ve obviously never had a dog. The list of intelligent creatures that exhibit self awareness is monstrously long.
You keep bringing it back to this. But what you don’t understand is that materialism rises or falls by itself. Your position seemed to be that if Christianity is wrong, then materialism is right, and that’s simply not true. Even if there were no God as conceived of in Christianity it would not mean that everything can be reduced to or explained in materialistic terms. Materialism is not a reasonable philosophical position. It has no explanatory value for a lot of the things that we experience.
I think this is pertinent. I think most scientists consider that consciousness, self-awareness and what we might call conscience are all emergent properties from a gradually increasing complexity of neuronal interaction. As you say, natural processes lead to consciousness, and I don’t need the successive gradual addition of little bits of it to increasingly conscious animals by an intermediate God.
It’s not that I keep ‘bringing this up’. I am simply restating your position. Which is: ‘there is consciousness, therefore whatever created the universe must be (and not ‘must have been’) conscious’.Bradskii:
You keep bringing it back to this. But what you don’t understand is that materialism rises or falls by itself. Your position seemed to be that if Christianity is wrong, then materialism is right, and that’s simply not true. Even if there were no God as conceived of in Christianity it would not mean that everything can be reduced to or explained in materialistic terms. Materialism is not a reasonable philosophical position. It has no explanatory value for a lot of the things that we experience.
There is nothing there with which I have any argument.Bradskii:
I think this is pertinent. I think most scientists consider that consciousness, self-awareness and what we might call conscience are all emergent properties from a gradually increasing complexity of neuronal interaction. As you say, natural processes lead to consciousness, and I don’t need the successive gradual addition of little bits of it to increasingly conscious animals by an intermediate God.
However, we have established, I hope, that these ‘natural processes’ are in at least some sense external to the material universe, having been in place, as it were, before the big bang. And here we must drift away from physics into metaphysics. Can we derive anything of the nature of the ‘natural processes’ from an overview of their achievements? One can envisage sets of ‘natural processes’ which did not lead to consciousness; so what can we say about ours?
And can we derive anything of the nature of the ‘natural processes’ from prediction, however speculative, of the future? After all, there is a sense in which we have begun to take control of the ‘natural processes’ which previously controlled creation utterly. It’s a feeble kind of control that does not yet extend beyond the atmosphere of a tiny dot in the middle of nowhere, but what might our successors to the debate be saying about it in a thousand years time? What will they be saying about ‘natural processes’ of which products of those ‘natural processes’ are completely in control?
Frankly I’ve no idea.
Uh? This straw man you mention is YOUR argument. Consciousness exists, therefore the creator must be (and again, not ‘must have been’) conscious.