Searching for GOD...

[Shaker]

But could the blind, natural processes of biology create the amazing entity of conscious self awareness which became you?

Yes, everything tells us that that's precisely and exactly what happened.

Biology built the machine, but who installed the driver?

What are you referring to as the driver? You mean the brain?

[Alan Burns]

Yes, everything tells us that that's precisely and exactly what happened.What are you rrferring to as the driver? You mean the brain?

The brain is the central control box, complete with biological screen, keyboard microphone and speakers (and odour detection!).

[Nearly Sane]

But could the blind, natural processes of biology create the amazing entity of conscious self awareness which became you?  Biology built the machine, but who installed the driver?

Who installed your god's driver? If you say doesn't need one, then that applies to any such driver. Your position is logically contradictory being based on an assumption of a cause and effect approach which you then throw out.

[Leonard James]

The brain is the central control box, complete with biological screen, keyboard microphone and speakers (and odour detection!).

The brain receives all sensory stimuli and coordinates them into awareness.

[bluehillside Retd.]

AB,

The brain is the central control box, complete with biological screen, keyboard microphone and speakers (and odour detection!).

Why are you still posting this kind of nonsense? Seriously - why?

I've explained emergence to you, and pointed you to a book on the subject and to various advances in neuroscience that show you to be flat wrong yet still you persist with it. You decided some 40 years ago on an answer that that was largely discredited even then, and that's been well and truly demolished in the intervening decades yet you're so locked in to the mistake and so hidebound by the fear of engaging with the rebuttals that you just repeat it endlessly like a mantra.

Why on earth would you think that anyone would be persuaded by you, rather than conclude that your claims are idiotic?
   

[floo]

The brain receives all sensory stimuli and coordinates them into awareness.

Exactly.

[Alan Burns]

Who installed your god's driver? If you say doesn't need one, then that applies to any such driver. Your position is logically contradictory being based on an assumption of a cause and effect approach which you then throw out.

If there was no ultimate cause, nothing would exist.

[Shaker]

If there was no ultimate cause, nothing would exist.

Bit of a difference between "ultimate cause" and "God" though isn't there?

[Alan Burns]

AB,

Why are you still posting this kind of nonsense? Seriously - why?

I've explained emergence to you, and pointed you to a book on the subject and to various advances in neuroscience that show you to be flat wrong yet still you persist with it. You decided some 40 years ago on an answer that that was largely discredited even then, and that's been well and truly demolished in the intervening decades yet you're so locked in to the mistake and so hidebound by the fear of engaging with the rebuttals that you just repeat it endlessly like a mantra.

Why on earth would you think that anyone would be persuaded by you, rather than conclude that your claims are idiotic?
 

Emergence does not define conscious perception, and I confidently predict that it never will.  I am certain that I am not alone in this opinion.

[Alan Burns]

Bit of a difference between "ultimate cause" and "God" though isn't there?

What I am saying is that the argument of "what caused the cause" has to stop somewhere.  I believe God to be the ultimate cause without the need for "what caused God".

[Shaker]

What I am saying is that the argument of "what caused the cause" has to stop somewhere.

Not particularly - or rather, to be more precise, you can take the intellectually respectable position that these are matters about which we know absolutely nothing of any kind at all whatever, and any purported answers are merely exercises in gap-filling.

I believe God to be the ultimate cause without the need for "what caused God".

So in other words you completely arbitrarily terminate the regress with the pre-arranged answer you want.

[Alan Burns]

The brain receives all sensory stimuli and coordinates them into awareness.

As would happen inside a robot's controlling mechanism.
But the robot does not perceive, it just reacts.

Awareness has no scientific definition.

[bluehillside Retd.]

AB,

Emergence does not define conscious perception...

No-one claims that it does "define" it. What it does do though is to describe a mechanism by which very complex outcomes can come from much simpler constituent parts. There's nothing inherently different about consciousness that would exempt it from this phenomenon, so why arbitrarily do so other than because that allows you to construct a religious narrative that appeals to you?

...and I confidently predict that it never will.

   

And I predict that Laughing Boy will win the 4.30 at Kempton Park this Saturday. What possible evidential use do you think your confident prediction has, especially one that's so badly eroded already by the findings of neuroscience? You really should be aware by now that argument by assertion is (yet another) logical fallacy.

I am certain that I am not alone in this opinion.

As is an argumentum ad populum. If you want to go that way though, the great majority of people who actually study and understand the subject now think otherwise. What makes you right and them wrong?

[torridon]

As would happen inside a robot's controlling mechanism.
But the robot does not perceive, it just reacts.

Awareness has no scientific definition.

Mantra alert.

If research into consciousness is going to be such a dead end perhaps you ought to write and tell the scientists involved that they are wasting their time (and our money - The Human Brain Project alone has EU funding of over 1 billion euros).

[bluehillside Retd.]

AB,

What I am saying is that the argument of "what caused the cause" has to stop somewhere.

Why? Why could the universe not be eternally old? Why would time necessarily be linear in any case? Why would not there have been a peturbation that caused a quantum borrowing "before" time that brought the universe into being? Why not any one of the countless other possibilities that could explain the universe in addition to the mediaeval thinking that happens to take your fancy?

I believe God to be the ultimate cause without the need for "what caused God".

I'm sure you do, just as I'm sure that you think the logical error of special pleading is a legitimate rhetorical device. That you happen to believe it though says nothing whatever to why you'd think that anyone should agree with you, however much you choose to assert it.

If you genuinely would like to have your claims taken seriously rather than just laughed at you really are finally going to have to come up with an actual argument for this "true for you too" god of yours. 

[Alan Burns]

Mantra alert.

If research into consciousness is going to be such a dead end perhaps you ought to write and tell the scientists involved that they are wasting their time (and our money - The Human Brain Project alone has EU funding of over 1 billion euros).

Yes, a great deal of time, effort and money are being spent on trying to correlate conscious awareness with specific neuron activity in the brain, but correlation does not necessarily imply causation.

[Shaker]

Yes, a great deal of time, effort and money are being spent on trying to correlate conscious awareness with specific neuron activity in the brain, but correlation does not necessarily imply causation.

In the words of Henry David Thoreau, some evidence is highly suggestive, such as a trout in the milk.

[Khatru]

Your parents operated the machinery that set things in motion, but who (in the profound words of Psalm 139) knit you together in your mother's womb?

Did your deity ensure you were you by guiding that one single sperm to your mother's egg at the expense of all the other sperm?

[Alan Burns]

Although I'm not a football follower by any measure of means I've met both Kevin Keegan and John Fashanu over the years (both extremely nice chaps, I might add). It's not much of a claim to fame but it is what it is.

And my claim to fame was playing chess with Paul Rodgers (singer with Free, Bad Company, The Firm, Queen ...) and winning!  He may be a better singer than me but I can beat him at chess.   

[Alan Burns]

Did your deity ensure you were you by guiding that one single sperm to your mother's egg at the expense of all the other sperm?

However He did it I am eternally grateful. 

[Shaker]

However He did it I am eternally grateful. 

So is that a yes or a no or what?

Are you familiar with the number of sperms in a typical ejaculate and therefore the utterly random nature of the process?

[bluehillside Retd.]

Shakes,

Are you familiar with the number of sperms in a typical ejaculate and therefore the utterly random nature of the process?

I'm not sure he'd care much would he? Having invented something he calls a "soul" presumably he could just magic it into being either pre- or post- conception, and in the latter case it probably wouldn't matter much which sperm had its speedos on would it?

That's the thing when you make up shit and call it a fact - you have to keep on making up more and more stories to address the countless contradictions it gives you. 

[Shaker]

A sperm with speedos on is just the sort of image I needed to brighten a shitty day - kudos to you

[Bubbles]

When you think how many random chances had to happen to put you here, as opposed to someone else, it's mind boggling.

All it would take is a different sperm and we wouldn't be here.

 

[Dicky Underpants]

Shakes,

I'm not sure he'd care much would he? Having invented something he calls a "soul" presumably he could just magic it into being either pre- or post- conception, and in the latter case it probably wouldn't matter much which sperm had its speedos on would it?

I have this view of a heavenly gridlock of souls, just waiting for the moment of conception when a gap in the cosmos allows a soul to get zapped through into the material world, where it latches onto the next available fertilised egg. Of course, centuries back, the souls had to wait a little longer to choose their moment, which according to Aquinas, was the time of the quickening. Maybe this would have bought them a little more time than the present arrangement (declared by Pope John Paul 2nd). "I'm not going to latch on to that little bugger - look who his parents are".