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| ▲ | cogman10 18 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | What's to explain? The brain is a complex structure that does weird stuff. Consciousness is simply an emergent property of that complexity. | | |
| ▲ | vacuity 17 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | It's blatantly untrue to conclude that when we are largely ignorant of the detailed workings of the brain and of the universe at large, and ultimately unscientific, using Popper's falsifiability principle. | |
| ▲ | eboynyc32 17 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I guess you figured it out. Go pick up your Nobel prize. |
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| ▲ | red-iron-pine 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | all life is merely an orderly decay of energy states; I am simply a "strange loop" within that set chemical reactions. god doesn't make my brain work, biochemistry does, and imbibing certain chemicals impacts that in obvious ways, e.g. alcohol, lithium, or diazepam just because I cannot see or understand my unconsciousness does not mean it isn't just another chemical process, in the same way that I do not have conscious control of how my body produces white blood cells or bile. | |
| ▲ | ben_w 17 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Are you conflating "unconsciousness" with "higher power" here? | | |
| ▲ | vacuity 17 hours ago | parent [-] | | If we want the highest level of rigor, claims such as "the unconscious is/isn't influenced by a higher power" aren't falsifiable. Anything that you aren't aware of can't be explained by you. Others can examine your mental state, but your perception of others is itself a part of your mental state. It's solipsism, in a sense. By definition, a higher power that transcends our ability to comprehend can't be verified or denied in existence. It is ultimately a matter of faith, or another axiomatic belief, in how you ascribe labels to that which you can't scientifically explain. So it could be that a "prophetic dream" you experienced one night is truly a sign from a higher power. Or it could be garbled nonsense from electrochemical reactions. You are not allowed to know. If you received authoritative evidence one way, you'd have to verify that the evidence stems from reality, and from there it's a recursive loop. | | |
| ▲ | lores 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | But considering a higher power as even a plausible hypothesis is purely due to historical reasons. Alien mind control, Illuminati mind control, living in a simulation, or humans being the fruiting body of Gaia would be impatiently dismissed despite requiring fewer assumptions than an all-powerful entity. Why should that idea even be entertained, rigorously speaking? | | |
| ▲ | vacuity 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | It's difficult to speak of rigor for any of these hypotheses, but anyways. If we take "higher power" to roughly mean that there is some driving force, whether personal or impersonal, that inherently defines and imposes order and fate, I can see how it is compelling. It's simpler than introducing a third party like aliens or the Illuminati, and early humans had much less reason to feel they weren't just another part of the natural ecosystem. They were struggling against natural forces, and when interesting and terrifying things happened, they thought of these as supernatural forces, not having developed theories of, say, lightning or disease. |
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| ▲ | ben_w 17 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Yeah, that works. There's someone I know who picked up religion as an adult, and what everyone else sees as his subconscious, he himself thinks is literally the world of god. Münchhausen trilemma makes it impossible to argue that point either way. |
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