And you know what, that might just very well be true if we’re talking about some supernatural force that is indifferent to its creations, not out of malice, but because it simply is truly neutral.
But as evidence for the religious capital ‘G’ God, the one who communicates and plans every little detail because he loves us so much? What is the point of these “subtle” proofs that took thousands of years to be studied and recorded when he has shown that he can just pop up anywhere or perform miracles and whatever the fuck.
It is no coincidence that the vast majority, possibly 99%, of devout religious people do not give a shit about using math to explain god because it’s all proven in their holy books. It is no coincidence that the “empirical” evidence is, in reality, just pointing at the existence of features and concepts of math and science rather than utilizing said features and concepts to prove the existence of god. And no, philosophical musings about morality using the language of mathematical proofs does not count as utilizing math and science (literally, all the axioms in these types of "proofs" are subjective shit like "bad" and "good" and not, say, the difference between 1 and 0).
And I didn’t even want to make a post dunking on religion, but I’m irritated because YouTube recommended some dumbass video by a channel called “Reformed Zoomer” and one of the arguments is “there is an infinite range of numbers between two numbers, and if we turn those numbers into letters, then every book possible has already been written. Checkmate atheoids”. https://youtu.be/z0hxb5UVaNE?si=RpjF6S0fHiF71iH-
We can pretty conclusively prove consciousness is a brain phenomenon. We can watch fmri data and see our Brian put together thoughts. We can use magnets to change people's thoughts. Some labs are able to read people's thoughts in small ways. However, if a God of some kind made a universe they would make things work so that is what we would expect to see. We are right where we left off.
This is Brian. Here you can see him putting together some thoughts.
That's not true at all. We can prove brain activity correlates to conscious activity, but there is no direct evidence brain activity by itself wholly causes consciousness, that's still conjecture based on previously held assumptions. There's still a whole lot we don't know about how the brain works, I think it's way too early to conclusively say we're all just brain and nothing else.
Yeah. We have brain injury studies and fmri data. Consciousness maps 1:1 to brain activity. We can change the brain and have predictable changes in consciousness.
If the 🧠 was somehow working with a soul in some other level it would be detectable. There is currently no detection and no effect that requires such an explination. If it existed Haliburton would be killing people in the global south to bottle it.
However, any half way decent god would make the world like this. So this observation is of limited utility.
Which specific brain activity does it map to? Is it the the firing of neurons? Does it emerge from all of them? How many do you need to make a thought? Does anything else play a role, like the structures within cells? Or can we ignore those bits? How does memory work?
Neocortex mostly, although some supposing amount of it is related to the amygdala. Mostly, there is alot of stuff about neurotransmitters modulating that activity though. Depends on the kind of thought. They can pretty reasonably narrow down some kinds of memory to s few cm2 of brain. Everything plays a role. I could find your some neuroscience tiktoks if you like. You'd have to be a bit more specific about memory for me to give you an answer. From my understanding every concept is a patten of neural segments. Memory is your brain replaying the concepts for a specific thing or event. Which is why over time memories can get fuzzy or change. Each time it is an active process.
https://youtu.be/3Mvzp5xvEXA?si=s1Ketjj3muTZY7No
If you wanna actually get into it there is a MIT lecture series about neuroscience. I think this would cover most the stuff you are interested way better than my fuzzy explanations
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
consciousness definitely correlates to brain activity, but as we all know correlation does not imply or prove causation. at the very least, there is no specific explanation for how subjectivity is generated from physical brain processes. no one disputes that we can correlate any kind of internal experience to brain activity, but explaining exactly how that brain activity produces subjectivity instead of instinctual or non-subjective information processing is a different question.
that being said, just because we can't explain consciousness (in the sense of internal subjective experience, with our current understandings of physics and information theory) doesn't mean there is a god, or a soul, and even if it did mean those things it wouldn't necessarily be the abrahamic god or an immortal soul.
edit:
if you are interested, look at my post history, i did a much more in depth series of comments on this subject and i feel like i would end up having the same conversations over again if i continue to contribute hereactually just check out these pages on wikipedia for the kinds of things i'm talking about, especially the line 'Some philosophers of mind, like Daniel Dennett, argue that qualia do not exist. Other philosophers, as well as neuroscientists and neurologists, believe qualia exist and that the desire by some philosophers to disregard qualia is based on an erroneous interpretation of what constitutes science.[2]' on the Qualia page."there is no specific explanation for how subjectivity is generated from physical brain processes" I do not feel like the need for a special explanation to that sense is required. Why would it be diffrent than any other sense? Some types of schitzotypal conditions cause people to have thoughts with subjectivity. We can see su jetivity forming in people a few seconds before they solve riddles on fmri.
Also, no. I am not going to read what academic philosophers have to say about neuroscience. I am sure they are good at philosophy though.
Because consciousness is clearly different than all other things in its properties. It's literally the one and only thing you know ineffably before all other things, not only that but it's the only thing you can use to know all other things and so it deserves special epistemological considerations IMO.
Relegating it with such certainty to just another physical phenomenon seems like an unjustified (and probably wrong IMO) logical leap.
I am not sure that is true. Have you heard of Cotard's syndrome? Ego death? It is essentially no doffrent that proprioception. Like I said with skitzotypals. We cna see people that that have problems with that self identification. This is all fits with other observed senses. Nothing you said is not also true of any other sense
I don't really get what that has to do with my point. My point wasn't just about the subjective sense of self but about all the qualia we have. They are the only thing we know exists without any justification simply because we are there to experience them. Information about the existence of everything else other than our own qualia is inferred through observation of said qualia, that includes the whole material reality. This to me deserves special consideration that should amount to more than "well we have MRI scans and it kinda seems like it's all just the brain".
To me it's gonna take way more convincing than handwavy hypotheses, that's why I'm agnostic about the whole thing (also about God).
That she thing though. You are one good pill away from scrambling all your qualia. They can induce the feeling of God with an electromagnet. We can observe people who clearly lack that quality you are tlaking about. I am saying I don't see the justifications for treating it as a separate category of sense
Again, you're completely missing my point. It's not about how coherent the qualia feel or how well they map onto the physical world, it's the fact that they feel like something at all and that they're the only thing we can directly know no matter our current mental state. I'm talking about all and any qualia.
All people that aren't in a unconscious state or dead experience qualia in some form. It doesn't matter how coherent these qualia are or how healthy their mental state is, they still directly experience them and live their lives through them. It doesn't matter if they can get scrambled, it's still the only thing a person has in any case.
The justification is that it's the one and only category we know directly and it's the only category through which we know all others. I think that's justification enough. Also senses as we experience them are qualia too, I'm talking about those too.
You could also say what I'm missing in physicalism is a good answer to the "philosophical zombie" problem. Right now the party line is basically "well it just do be like that" which is entirely unsatisfactory to me.
I guess it is a fundamental misunderstanding between us. My understanding was that qualia had some atomic quality. That they are the parts of emotion or experience that are irreducible or inviolable.
However like atoms they have been proven to reduce able to even more fundamental and less meaningful parts. So I don't at all understand the way you mean it.
I don't know how to explain this differently but I'll try one more time.
The difference between knowing our consciousness (which includes all our senses, subjective sense of self, thoughts, feelings etc...) and knowing anything outside of it (other people, the physical world etc.) is we know the former directly and innately and we don't need any justification for explaining its existence because it just so inexplicably appears to exist to us.
All the knowledge about the other stuff is filtered through our consciousness that we experience directly and innately so that means the existence of the other stuff also hinges on the base truth of our own consciousness existing.
For this reason alone I believe it is justifiable to treat knowledge of consciousness differently than knowledge of things outside of consciousness. This is also why I'm skeptical of reductionist physicalism because despite the overwhelming importance of consciousness they relegate it as just another material thing to be studied in the same manner as rocks and metals while also kinda ignoring the fact that all data they gather and models they produce are also merely contents of a particular scientists subjective mind and also on top of that while being nowhere near a coherent mathematical account of how consciousness arises.
Basically I think scientists jumped the gun on deciding that they've figured out the metaphysics of the universe, I think there are too many gaps in our knowledge to claim such a thing with such certainty. And yes physicalism is a metaphysic like any other, if you hear a scientists say "I'm not doing metaphysics" when talking about consciousness it's the same as a lib saying "I'm not ideological" while talking about how they want to let poor people die.