WEIRD CHRISTIANITY Issue 2 : THE PSYCHIC CHAOS!

Philosophy Forums Religion and Spirituality
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[size=200]DISCLAIMER[/size]

[size=150]Secular (godless) mythology of the world[/size] [b]and how it works holds that no gods exist, and the only reality or eternal thing is a non-conscious substance that in a certain configuration inexplicably gains the power of creation ex nihilo, the power to make that which is unreal a reality and create something that previously did not exist and is something other than the creating entity. Secular mythology (so far) holds that the only thing in the universe that comes into and goes out of existence (given the first law of thermodynamics)is consciousness, which by the simplest definition is subjective experience.

If consciousness is something that goes out of existence upon death, and if experience can radically change if forces impinge upon the brain in such a way as to disrupt or alter it’s “normal function”, the substance making up the external world is obviously that which conscious is not , or at least if the external world is somehow conscious or made up of consciousness, it is not the consciousness generated by brains–as brain-generated consciousness comes into and goes out of existence. We cannot perceive the external world, as it is that which is not our experience; that which is not experience is not within experience, as it is something that perception itself is not.

Thus, if the external world is not one’s consciousness (secular mythology in regard to the nature of death establishes this), then one’s consciousness and the external world are obviously two different and ontologically unrelated things, particularly if one (the external world) can exist without the other, and if there was a time when one (the external world) existed before there were such things as brains.

It is the contention of Weird Christianity that the true external world, the true background of our existence, is the mind of the Judeo-Christian God. The mental substance making up the uncharted regions of the unconscious mind of God himself, it is contended, comprises our consciousness. If this is true, then we are indeed the children of God, with the unconscious part of God forming conscious, smaller minds within itself that exist in their own private, personal, subjective dimensions and are similar in mental content to the Father in essence (mentality) only.

Then again, this could all be wrong, and we live under the rule of another Deity or other deities. Or there are, after all, no deities at all and we are random phantoms formed by accident within an external world consisting of consciousness in non-organismic or personal form (John Stuart-Mill and Ernst Mach’s phenomenalism). Or perhaps the non-mental does exist, and forms non-conscious analogs to the content of our visual perception (with the output of neurons of the occipital lobe and external world-cars, external world-skies, external world-brains connected only by random chance).

However, If one believes in the non-mental rather than gods one still walks, as the Bible states, “by faith rather than sight”. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander and we are all, in the end, hypocrites for criticizing one’s use of faith when the “faithless”, inadvertently, uses that same faith for a different god. Make no mistake: a god, by definition, is an entity holding power over an aspect of reality or reality itself. The godless, by majority vote, holds that our consciousness does not magically spring, on it’s own, into existence: it is a creation of something other than itself, something capable of surviving the absolute absence of any and all organismic or brain-generated consciousness.

This creator of consciousness, even in the mythology of the godless, is nevertheless a “god”: it is simply a god without consciousness. If one accepts the definition above, god exists: we are simply divided about whether or not this god is Conscious.

And so, without further ado…[/b]

*That’s right folks! Last-Thursday-ism! A skeptical variation of the Omphalos Hypothesis! Read about it here:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Thurs … rmulations

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You do know that still means energy and mass can change forms, right? Which is not to say that consciousness is necessarily energy, but if it is, it can and will be measured. In either case (consciousness is or is not energy), when it comes into existence or goes out of existence, nothing is being created nor destroyed.

Straw man, much? Correct, consciousness does not magically spring into existence. Incorrect that a human brain can survive without consciousness…at least not for long. It can certainly exist without consciousness, though.

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Anthem:

[b]Ahh, the minefield that is semantics. When referring to matter and energy and the first law of thermodynamics, we’re generally talking about that which is not consciousness, which is subjective experience. The first law of thermo assumes there is this stuff that existed before there was such a thing as subjective experience. This stuff, according to the law, is “neither created nor destroyed”. This means that the stuff has always existed and will always exist. (x)

But…I suppose you could interpret “neither created nor destroyed” means that something can come into and go out of existence, but it does so without some pre-existing entity causing it to come into existence (creation) or forcing it out of existence (destruction).(y)

Either way, if consciousness (subjective experience) is tied at all to the brain and does not randomly come into existence on it’s own, then it is obviously created by the brain or caused to exist by the brain. The typical mythology of how the brain creates consciousness implies (or straightforwardly holds) that there is a direct creative route from neurons to experience: there is no middle man (the unconscious mind) for waking memory, and if an experience is not currently experienced…it doesn’t exist.

According to the mythology then (at least when it comes to working memory) neural circuit x, compelled by the accidental actions of the environment upon the body and brain, performs a function (a local electric current flow from one neuron in circuit x to the next according to how each neuron in the circuit is synaptically connected), and this function somehow causes a previously nonexistence experience to suddenly exist and be felt (or thought, or seen, etc.). Thus you can bet your bottom dollar that when it comes to consciousness, something is being created rather than randomly popping into existence unaided.[/b]

[b]Straw man, no. That which is “something other” than consciousness is the non-mental. Remember, the brains we perceive in medical or neuroscientific contexts are phenomenal brains not non-mental brains, as we cannot perceive the non-mental external world (if it exists). Secular mythology concerning the nature of death (the cessation of the existence of consciousness) demands, by definition, that there are two distinct existences at play, not one: thus there are phenomenal brains and non-mental ones. The non-mental brains are responsible for the existence of consciousness.

But the straw man is an illusion. I said nothing of the function of the brain upon cessation of consciousness, because according to the mythology the cessation of consciousness is caused by cessation of brain function. This is the implied condition behind the hypothetical loss of consciousness. Thus I state not that a human brain can survive (continue to function forever) in the absence of consciousness; I state that non-mentality can forever exist after consciousness or without consciousness altogether.

J.[/b]

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The problem is you’re thinking of consciousness as a thing, like the field surrounding an electromagnet. When you turn off the juice, the field will subside.

I don’t happen to think that’s the case, but if it is, we’ll find the caloric debt some day.

Rather, you should think of consciousness more like…hmm…let’s say a game. Everybody good with poker?

To play poker as it is traditionally understood, you need a few things: table, cards, chairs, chips, money, people, and rules.

The table, cards, chairs, and chips are easy. Gather them all and put them together. Is this poker? No.

Alright, sit the people down. Is this poker? No.

Set the rules down on the table. Is this poker? No.

Allow each person to interpret the rules, put up a stake of money for which they receive the same value in chips, receive a hand, and execute game play as described by the rules and as accepted by the other people seated at the same table. Is this poker? More or less, yes.

Has poker always existed? No. Does it exist? Yes. Does this imply creation ex nihilo? No. It is the result of the interactions of everything that makes it up. Until all those interactions are happening at the same time, a poker game does not exist. Likewise, unless a brain is interacting with its body and with itself, consciousness does not exist there, though the concept still does.

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Anthem:

But once again you’re equating subjective experience (consciousness) with the non-mental (non-mental fields surrounding non-mental electromagnets). The “caloric debt” that usually turns up (or not) in conservation of energy matters is itself a matter of the non-mental at work, with the ‘virtual reality’ representation of that non-mentality “indicating” the external world reflection of scientific experience. Equating consciousness with the physical is standard operating procedure in escaping the ontological distance between the two. But they are two distinct existences: subjective experience is subjective experience, and it is nothing but. The physical (if the physical exists) is that which is not subjective experience.

[b]But the analogy between poker, what it takes to make up a game of poker, and secular mythology concerning how the brain comes up with consciousness fails. What you have described with the poker analogy is simply a case of strong emergence, which in the end, is another fancy term for creation ex nihilo. A poker game, like a house, car, etc. does not exist in the sense that it is not assembled into the object in question, but the disparate parts making up the object exist beforehand and have always existed through all past time in some form.

When it comes to consciousness, unless one embraces Chalmer’s panprotopsychism or panpsychism in general, there is nothing pre-existing out of which consciousness is made. It’s in the same boat as Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny until (according to the mythology) neurons conduct electricity. But what causes something that does not exist to come into existence? How does something make something that does not exist exist? The brain is the only object in the secular universe that has this power, as everything else in the universe operates or creates objects through transformational causation (the creation of new objects by assemblage of pre-existent objects). Nevertheless, secular mythology (commonly) holds that when neurons conduct electricity, something that does not exist (subjective experience) magically comes into existence.

J.[/b]

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You didn’t listen to a word I just said, did you?

The rules of poker have not existed for all past time, and a poker game isn’t just a collection of items thrown at a table. The game of poker requires sending and receiving messages within the confines of a set of rules; it’s a type of active communication.

Consciousness is the same: active communication between different neurons.

The game of poker is ‘created’ by all the things that make it up, but you can’t grab me a cupful of it out of the air above a game. Likewise, you can’t grab a cupful of consciousness from the space around (between?) my ears. This is not a problem.

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Anthem:

[b]I’ve read what you posted above, but with the second post you clarified things. But you’re still wrong. You’re resorting to Type-A Materialism (the view that consciousness is the physical, or that, following Daniel Dennett, the only thing that needs explaining in the mind/body “problem” are just the neurons and their function).

You’re equating consciousness to communication between different neurons, as in: consciousness=the active communication between different neurons. But we must remember that communicating neurons, according to the secular mythology, are non-mental—and the non-mental is that which is not consciousness (subjective experience). We’re talking about two distinct existences, with one believed to magically create the other.

J.[/b]

[b]Sure, the game of poker qua the game of poker is a concept (the concept in manifestation or practice is the things that make it up: players, tables, chairs, and the sending and receiving of messages between players within a strict set of rules), thus it is not a material thing, like a flung baseball, which can be grabbed out of the air.

Consciousness, too, is not a material object, like a baseball or a liquid one can obtain a cup of, but it is more than just a concept and it is something that is not neurons that actively (i.e. electrochemically) communicate: consciousness is experience. [/b]

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Calling consciousness something new doesn’t magically make you right.

experience - 5. Philosophy. the totality of the cognitions given by perception; all that is perceived, understood, and remembered.

So what?

Perception: sensory organs

Understood: communication between different centers of our brains

Remembered: stored away to be recalled later

There’s nothing mystical about it.

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Anthem:

[b]Calling experience something other than “experience” doesn’t magically transform experience into non-experience, nor does it equate non-experience (the physical) with experience. We only experience: perception is nothing over and above the experience of perception (save when we relegate it to an abstract concept, but even then there is the experience of thinking of perception as a concept without practiced example): when one visually perceives, one experiences visual perception, when one uses auditory perception, one experiences sounds, when one thinks, one experiences a particular thought, etc.

Understanding and remembering are not things independent of experience. There is only the experience of understanding something, or the experience of remembering something.

That, of course, is if you’re talking about conscious beings. If you’re talking about non-living things or things that (presumably) have no conscious of their own but are nevertheless alive (i.e. neurons, then such experience-terms alter their semantics to mean a particular physical activity. For example:[/b]

[b]1. Sensory organs (according to the secular mythology of the nature of the physical) are non-mental: that is, they exist even if consciousness does not (although they may not function, they still exist as they are until they decompose or are cryogenically preserved).

[at least by the type of cryogenics proposed by Max More in: The Terminus of the Self. GOOD paper, and Max More is an atheist philosopher, and produces an excellent dissertation of just what constitutes death and how the brain can in principle be recreated, uploaded to a computer, or cryogenically preserved. alcor.org/Library/html/TerminusOfTheSelf.html]).

We experience only ‘virtual’ sensory organs, which are phenomenal copies of external world-sensory organs.

Perception, on the other hand, can cut out upon dysfunction or destruction of the sensory organs; thus it is something that the sensory organs, essentially are not.[/b]

[b]One can make the term “understood” or “understanding” to mean: "communication between different centers of our brains–or one can state that “understanding” is an experience that arises when there is communication between different centers of the brain. But what, as an aside, does “communication” mean when it comes to the brain? Why, the particular pattern of the flow of electricity between neurons! The “function” of the brain (independent of cellular metabolism, energy pumps, potential difference variables, etc.) is nothing more than electrical flow from one neuron to the next. Function then, is the building block of communication.

It’s in the semantics. When one uses a term, is one referring to a non-mental thing, or a subjective experience? Are we taking terms that typically evoke experiences and applying them to non-mental things (i.e. “understood= communication between different centers of the brain”) in a bid to make experience non-experience, or to remove the “mysticism” of experience altogether?

When faced with the implication of the existence of subjective experience, which we cannot deny, particularly in a mythology where subjective experience did not exist for an eternity before the non-experience existing beforehand twisted itself (by sheer chance, mind you) into a machine that somehow causes the nonexistent to exist—it’s natural to attempt to escape this ontological dichotomy by somehow making experience non-experience, or by denying the existence of experience altogether (which most Type-A materialists do: but what in the world do they call what they are or what they do all the time?), or by defining experience in such a way that it becomes non-experience. These cannot work, because the secular model of the world itself invokes a mysticism in it’s mythology in regard to what happens to consciousness upon death, and how consciousness comes into existence seconds before the brain functions and seconds after it begins to function.

J.[/b]

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Why don’t you go ahead and prove that.

Sheer chance is not an issue.

Refer to my poker analogy for the nonexistent/existent ‘problem’. I mean seriously. If you’re going to equate your god with man so much, what’s so bad about man creating things including consciousness? Your god created you, so you say.

When have ‘secular mythologists’ (by which I assume you mean the entire body of credible scientifica) ever submitted that consciousness comes into existence before the brain functions or after it [ceases I think you meant] to function? Sure, there are reports of brain activity not being registered while patients report near death experiences, but there are lots of explanations for this: liars, faulty equipment, and/or brain activity is not demonstrated by electrical signals alone.

Finally, why do you think subjective experience and the non-mental are mutually exclusive?

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Anthem:

I don’t have to. It’s the most obvious implication of the secular mythology concerning the nature of death. It follows that there are phenomenal and non-mental copies of sensory organs.

I threw sheer chance in there to show what you’ve got with a godless universe: the universe is non-conscious, so it doesn’t know that it exists, that we exist, and what it is doing or why. Like a dead airplane pilot at the controls of a runaway craft.


[size=85]Movie: Transporter 2 20th Century Fox, 2005[/size]

[b]Thus, following Victor J. Stenger, everything happens by sheer random chance constricted by the laws of physics.

As for man creating consciousness (i.e. creating consciousness from a previous nonexistence of consciousness, as opposed to the process proposed in the paragraph below), how do we create it, or know that we have created it? Any consciousness that is not one’s personal consciousness is not within one’s consciousness. It exists in another dimension (i.e. the consciousness of another person is “outside” one’s own consciousness, it’s in a separate dimension). This is why a neuroscientist must rely on the verbal reports of a patient: he cannot sensorially perceive the patient’s consciousness. The existence of any consciousness we create (if it can be created ex nihilo) would be a matter of faith.

As for God creating man, according to the theogony above it’s a matter of taking one’s own consciousness, like clay, and molding it into other consciousnesses. When it comes to consciousness (taking as an example what movie and television actors do when they assume a character, the unconscious mind in psychology, and what fiction writers do when they conceive of a story), it is metaphysically possible for subdimensional consciousness (consciousness within consciousness) to exist.[/b]

[b]The body of ‘credible scientifica’ must still rely on the virtual reality presented them by their cerebral corticies (if one believes that consciousness is created by the brain). Thus they too must “walk by faith rather than by sight” when it comes to their belief in the nature and events of the world in the past.

When it comes to their submitting that “consciousness comes into existence when the brain etc. etc.”, it’s not as if (as far as I know) someone drew in a press conference or spoke as a voiceover on a Discovery Channel program to say such a thing. It’s inferred, obviously, from the belief that consciousness depends upon the brain in order to exist (and the believe that if there are no brains the physical world continues to exist but consciousness does not), as well as disbelief in an afterlife.

What else should we infer about consciousness given these?[/b]

[b]Because the non-mental is what’s left over (according to the mythology) if no consciousness, anywhere, exists. If all consciousness becomes as real as Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and the non-mental is left behind, and if it is entailed that the non-mental existed for an eternity before there were such things as brains, it’s a safe bet the two are mutually exclusive.

J.[/b]

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Again…where’s the problem?

That makes zero sense.

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Anthem:

No problem at all, except when one considers the plausibility of the future-predicting power of the brain.

[b]Makes plenty of sense:

  1. According to secular mythology, consciousness does not exist unless and until there are functioning brains (or brain-like objects functioning with the same abstract pattern as brains). No other object in the universe is believed to give rise to consciousness.

  2. The physical (the non-mental) existed before some of it formed into brains. If consciousness does not exist at this point, the physical is something that is not consciousness.

  3. If something (x) exists while something else (y) does not, (x) and (y) are mutually exclusive; i.e. they are two distinct existences in which the one (x) can exist forever without the other(y).

J.[/b]

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Please tell me you’re talking about our expectation of a rock to fall when you toss it off a bridge and not Nostradamus.

Close enough. That’s definitional so I won’t get into that argument.

Sure.

You’ve got it all backwards.

First of all, you said can exist. That doesn’t mean must exist forever without the other. So right there you just admitted that they aren’t mutually exclusive.

Second, you know how all squares are rectangles but not all rectangles are squares? Well, all consciousness as we know it depends on the physical, but the physical does not depend on consciousness. No problem there.

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Anthem:

[b]In reference to the future-predicting power of the brain, I speak not of probability and expectation but predetermination. Every experience we have, if no instance of consciousness can exist without some function of the brain, is accountable to some neural circuit (two or more neurons synaptically linked) somewhere in the cerebral cortex. Thus all future experiences exist in potential—through neural circuits (representing those experiences) pre-existing in the brain before the fact.

If you are neurally destined, so to speak, to choose to go to the movies next Tuesday, today there must pre-exist, in your brain, neural circuits responsible for “a decision to go to the movies”. As long as you suffer no accident or injury damaging those circuits (and provided you don’t meet the Grim Reaper before next Tuesday), those circuits, patiently waiting for next Tuesday, have the synaptic and electrochemical where-with-all to form the necessary connections and produce the necessary action potentials to create your decision before the fact. Thus one of the implications of psychophysicalism (the view that consciousness, in order to exist, must be created by the brain) is that although neurons (well, neurons of the occipital lobe) have the job of producing a subjective copy of the external world, all possible changes in the external world that do not involve the dysfunction or destruction of the brain exist before the fact in the form of neural circuits representing those possible experiences.[/b]

Nope. It’s just a mutual misunderstanding. For my part, I misunderstood what you meant by mutually exclusive.

You’re right. It doesn’t mean that one must exist forever without the other. But we misunderstood each other. Your interpretation of mutually exclusive (I think) implies that consciousnesst exists separately from the physical, such that they cannot occupy the same universe, which you deny. But my understanding of mutual exclusion implies a difference in essentialism: consciousness and the physical are mutually exclusive in the sense that they are not the same type of existence (Remember condition #2 above of the differences between consciousness and the physical). My statement in the last post simply holds that consciousness could have gone on forever without existence but by chance did not, due to the accidental formation of brains by a godless universe. I did not imply that consciousness and the physical cannot co-exist (although it is inconceivable how they co-exist, given the physical is everything consciousness is not).

[b]Right. That’s one of the conditions of secular mythology concerning the relation between consciousness and the physical.

J.[/b]

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Message to all ILP correspondents

[b]Weird Christianity #3 is currently in furious production. You can get a sneak preview by visiting my Myspace webpage at: myspace.com/superchristianity. Simply click “My Profile” and from the list that pops down click: “My Photos”. The first six pages can be found there. Click an individual photo and a window will open with the photo at full (legible) size.

Projected completion of WC#3 is most likely near or about Valentine’s Day.

Cheerio.

J.[/b]