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Conciousness is evidence of?
Posted on: July 18, 2007 - 11:22am
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Conciousness is evidence of?
So for thousands of years, conciousness was loosely considered as evidence of a soul. Discarding dualism creates a new question. What then is conciousness evidence of?
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Since consciousness has never been observed apart from a living functioning brain, I would have to say that it is evidence of a living functioning brain.
“Philosophers have argued for centuries about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, but materialists have always known it depends on whether they are jitterbugging or dancing cheek to cheek" -- Tom Robbins
Conciousness is evidence of a highly complex and self referential system such as a brain. I suspect a certain threshold of complexity is required in order for conciousness to be a manifest property of the system. For example the system must be flexible enough to be able to refer to and model itself (note: this is but one criteria as the formal notation of mathematics can certainly be self referential - think godel- but mathemtics is not concious!).
As I showed here:
http://www.rationalresponders.com/vitalism_immaterialism_and_christian_dualism_have_long_since_been_debunked_response
Consciousness is evidence that our brain works fine. And as it is a brain process, it is the reason for which the human brain is the most complex known object (as of yet) in the universe.
You know, I agree with Descartes on almost nothing, but you gotta hand it to him...consciousness is evidence that we exist.
"Physical reality” isn’t some arbitrary demarcation. It is defined in terms of what we can systematically investigate, directly or not, by means of our senses. It is preposterous to assert that the process of systematic scientific reasoning arbitrarily excludes “non-physical explanations” because the very notion of “non-physical explanation” is contradictory.
-Me
Books about atheism
Consciousness is evidence of itself. And little else, I think.
Well I think the question is kind of loaded, not that you were planing on it or anything. I mean its kinda like asking, "What created everything?" The question assumes there was creating. If the idea of no creation is a little out there try, "Why is their existence?" It assumes there is suppose to be a why.
The best answer I can think of is evidence of aspects or complexities of the brain. Kinda like skin color is evidence of pigment or glasses are (probably) evidence of a problem with eyesight.