THE DEFEAT OF ATHEISM THROUGH DEMONSTRATION OF THE IRRATIONALITY OF ATHEISTIC BELIEF AS REVEALED BY GODLESS DEATH
By Jay Marcus Brewer
Austin, Texas
Atheist belief in the nature of death, here termed “godless death” and defined by Karen Gervais in her book, Defining Death—
“The individual’s essence consists in the possession of a conscious, yet not necessarily continuous, mental life; if all mental life ceases, the person ceases to exist; when the person ceases to exist, the person has died. Upper brain death destroys all capacity for a conscious mental life, and it is therefore the death of the person.”
-Gervais, Karen. (1986). Defining Death. New Haven: Yale University Press.
—ironically provides the perfect logic-tool revealing an untenable irrationality in the atheist’s belief regarding the manner in which consciousness exists and the biological mechanism the atheist believes gives rise to, provides the content of, and maintains the existence of consciousness. Consciousness, further, will be shown to have an irrational and untenable relationship with probably non-existent mind-independent doppelgangers of person-experienced objects and events purportedly existing in the external world, external objects that will be shown to have no logical causal and creative relation to experienced objects, and may exist only as figments of the imagination whose objective existence is, and can only be, supported by faith.
It remains a scandal to philosophy and to human reason in general that the existence of things outside us (from which we derive the whole material of knowledge, even for our inner sense) must be accepted merely on faith, and that if anyone thinks good to doubt their existence, we are unable to counter his doubts by any satisfactory proof.
-Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason
Purportedly existing external world doppelgangers of the content of visual perception exist are suspected of being only figments of the imagination as they do not appear in any form save that of a person’s imagining of them (as they are conceptually described as things that are not and outlive the consciousness of the person imagining them). Moreover, it shall be revealed that purportedly existing non-person external objects have nothing logically to do with the existence and qualities of consciousness, as existence only manifests in the form of the consciousness of a person and that which the person experiences. Consciousness, therefore, can only perceive and know (with certainty) its own existence, and cannot perceive the existence of things that are not and that are outside one’s consciousness.
Row, row, row
your boat
gently down the stream
merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily
life is but a dream
That is, objects, bodies of other persons, environments, and events experienced by a person, through the logic revealed by Death (i.e. godless death as a logic-tool despite the author’s denial of godless death) are revealed to be objects that have no external, mind-independent counterparts in the external world (thus no underlying external physical structure or foundation) as objects, bodies of other persons, environments and events experienced by a person can only be and exist within the consciousness of a person only as constructs composed only of the subjective experience of the person, such that what we believe to be “the real world” or “the world” is in actuality an “out of the blue” fabricated reality (a reality that has no real external world basis or foundation) existing only within rather than outside a person’s consciousness and composed only of the person’s subjective experience.
Following demonstration of the irrationality of atheistic belief in that nature of reality a hypothesis is proposed in which it is possible (it is one in the number of logically possible worlds) that we exist in a Judeo-Christian reality in which existence just consists of minds: that is, reality just consists of a limited population of non-embodied conscious minds governed by a single overarching Mind. Worlds, in this particular hypothesis, are and cannot be physical places in a physical space but are and can only be constructs composed of a person’s subjective experience that exist only within the person’s consciousness. The only “external world”, the only foundation outside the minds of the population is the internal space of the inner mind of the Judeo-Christian God.
SECTION I:
Godless death, the name given to the nature of death according to atheists, is the irreversible cessation of existence of consciousness in response to irreversible cessation of the function of the brain. Despite the author’s religious belief and denial of godless death, godless death is the perfect logic-tool that reveals the inherent irrationality of important components of an atheist’s belief regarding the nature of reality:
1. External Causality of Consciousness-Content
The belief that external objects and events can impart their appearance and behavior to experienced objects and events, in the belief that external objects and events are the source of the appearance and behavior of experienced objects if not the existence of experienced objects and events.
External world doppelgangers of the content of visual perception (i.e. a chair existing outside the brain and body of one having perception of the chair, perception a creation and emanation from the brain, if brain’s create perception of external objects) are not responsible for the existence of the brain-created consciousness-composed counterparts given the negative consequence of the belief in godless death, the cessation of existence of consciousness. If consciousness ceases to exist at death, the “creation” of conscious experience is the reverse of godless death: creation ex nihilo or creation of the things that previously did not exist without use of the material substance of anything in existence (if something does not exist then is made to exist, the material used to create the entity does not exist but comes into existence from non-existence in the form of the magically created entity).
If the brain creates consciousness ex nihilo (“proof” of the brain’s creation of consciousness ex nihilo being belief in Death-Before-Life or the state of the non-existence of a person and a person’s perception of the world prior to birth and formation of the brain and the transitory, non-permanent appearance of different conscious experiences from birth to death), external doppelgangers of the content of visual perception certainly are not the causes of their consciousness-composed counterparts as their consciousness-composed counterparts are not things that originate from the external objects but from non-existence.
2. Direct Realism
The belief that observance of experienced objects and events are not experience of experience-composed doppelgangers of external objects and events, but direct observances of external objects and events in the external world.
Godless death, again, reveals that the opposite condition of cessation of existence of consciousness, the inscrutable process of causing something that did not exist to come into existence, reveals that so-called “direct perception of the external world” is something that must be conjured from non-existence, and as such is certainly not “direct perception of the external world”.
“Perception of the external world”, then, can only rationally be a “hologram” of a certain type of reality composed of consciousness that emanates from the brain and as such cannot be “direct perception of objects and events in the external world” as the “hologram” is not one and the same as the external objects themselves. Death also provides evidence that, given the self and one’s perceptions cease to exist at death, one only experiences and perceive a “hologram” of the world produced by one’s brain (for those believing the brain creates consciousness, which the Author denies); as such one cannot experience anything that is not the “hologram” or part of the “hologram” produced by the brain.
If one can only experience the “holographic” illusion of a world composed only of the consciousness produced by one’s brain (negatively proven by the conceptual nature of godless death), that which is not the conscious experience produced by a brain is necessarily incapable of being experienced and ultimately a fiction invented within the mind whose objective existence can only be supported by faith.
Mind-independent external objects and events are ultimately fictions invented in the mind believed to have objective existence outside the brain and consciousness, but given existence only appears and manifests in the form of a person and that which the person experiences, their objective existence is ultimately a matter of quasi-religious faith.
3. Externalism
The belief in the existence of non-consciousness composed, external world-dwelling doppelgangers of the content of visual perception. As existence only appears or manifests in the form of the consciousness of a person and that which the person experiences, external world-dwelling doppelgangers of the content of visual perception, given the logical and conceptual burden of being conceived and described as things that survive the consciousness of a person in the advent of godless death and as things that are, therefore, not the consciousness of a person nor those instances or qualia of consciousness that unanimously cease to exist at death, cannot appear or manifest as only the consciousness of a person appears or manifests existence, and as such external objects, etc. only exist or only appear in the form of things imagined by the thought modality of the consciousness of a person to exist outside one’s consciousness.
AN UNAMBIGUOUS DEFINITION OF CONSCIOUSNESS
Consciousness is unambiguously defined by Professor David J. Chalmers in his paper The Problem of Consciousness as experience. Upon honest observation one finds this to be true: one appears only in the form of an experience that experiences objects, environments, bodies of other persons, and events that—given these are believed to also cease to exist when one’s consciousness is believed to cease to exist at godless death—must be composed of one’s subjective experience and are not things composed of something that is other than/is not one’s subjective experience, that does not cease to exist at one’s death.
Further, the most honest form of empirical knowledge (knowledge based on direct experience) is the observation that existence only appears in the form of a person (a first-person point of view experience) and the things the person experiences. Existence does not appear, and it is safe to assume existence cannot appear, in any other form.
Upon further honest observation, existence (which appears only in the form of oneself and that which one experiences) appears and behaves in a manner in which one’s experiences, including the introspective experience of self as the subject of experience, has a beginning, middle, and end as the introspective experience of the self intermittently cease through “jump cuts” of dreamless sleep (barring the hypothesis that one does not truly sleep but experience discontinuities of experience accompanied by the somatic feeling upon “awakening” that one had “slept”), and the changing conscious experiences that are gradually replaced by future experience moving from marginal similarity to complete, unrelated difference.
A person, therefore, may fundamentally be defined as a subject of experience that experiences a chronologically ordered series of certain sensory, mental, and emotional experiences.
My identity, survival, or continuity can be understood as reducible to certain other facts; these are facts about psychological connectedness and continuity. Parfit refers to these facts as the “R-relation.” I am not something ontologically separable from the R-relation. The Reductionist claim is:
“A person’s existence just consists in the existence of a brain and body, and the occurrence of a series of interrelated physical and mental events.” (Parfit, 1984, p.211.)
-Max More, Causal Conditions For Continuity
[Author’s Note: A panpsychist denies the existence of external world dwelling, not-consciousness composed brains and bodies and physical existence itself, and would amend Parfit’s definition of personal existence to:
“A person’s existence just consists of a first-person subject of experience experiencing a series of interrelated sensory, mental, and emotional events.”]
To remove confusion and derive the definition of consciousness upon something that can be readily demonstrated to exist, consciousness can only be a person and that which the person experiences. Despite the belief that objects, environments, bodies of other persons and events that are believed to have non-person or person-absent doppelgangers in the external world, existence does not appear as experience-absent objects and events (how could anything that is not the experience of a person or is not that which is experienced by a person be experienced without a person?) but only appears in the form of a person and that which the person experiences.
An external world dwelling tree, the subject of the common riddle: “Does a tree falling in a forest make a sound if no one is around to hear it?”, given that the tree, as it exists (if it exists) outside the skull and body of an organism, certainly does not exist within the neurons of the brain purportedly responsible for the person with the brain’s experience of the tree. External objects that are not part of an individual’s body or brain obviously do not exist within the brain and “come from” the brain, as they lie outside the skull and perimeter of the person’s skin. So that’s settled. This, in itself, is conceptual proof to a reasonable person that experienced trees cannot be one and the same as trees believed to exist when no one experiences them, or when one no longer experiences trees.
-Author
It is to be remembered that the transitory nature of consciousness, in which the experience of an object and event disappears when one no longer attends to them, in itself distinguishes that objects and events experienced by a person are not objects and events in the external world. External objects in the external world, as they do not originate from the brain and do not depend upon the brain in order to exist, are unaffected by the cessation of existence of experienced objects believed to be their brain-originating, consciousness-composed doppelgangers.
Figure: In a scene from the film Star Wars: A New Hope, the robot R2D2 manifests a hologram of Princess Leia imploring the Jedi Obi Wan Kenobi for help against the Empire. The brain is believed to create conscious experience, and it is generally believed that conscious experience cannot exist without it originating from some physical process in the brain. The R2D2 robot is analogous to the brain, and the Leia-hologram is analogous to consciousness or any conscious experience from birth to death.
The real, not-a-hologram Leia is analogous to mind-independent objects in the external world believed to be not-brain-created/not-brain-dependent doppelgangers of the “hologram” of the object that is the experienced-by-a-person version of the external object generated by a brain. One can believe the Leia-hologram originates within and emanates from the R2D2 robot, but can one rationally believe Real Leia originated within and emanates from R2D2?
In the same way, one may believe (“rationally” given the magic of creation ex nihilo) that the conscious experience or perception of, say, a chair originates and emanates from a neural circuit or circuits in the brain as long as those neurons function in a way that maintains the existence of the perception of a chair, but one cannot rationally believe the “perceived” external world chair, which cannot fit within a brain without destroying it, originates and emanates from the brain. This difference between perceived chairs produced from the brain and external chairs that lie outside the body and brain, are larger than the brain and skull, and cannot rationally be held to originate from neurons, establishes that perceived/experienced objects are not the external objects they are believed to directly observe (Direct Realism) or experientially mimic (Indirect Realism).
DENIAL OF SOLIPSISM
To say that a particular person and that which that person, alone of any other person that might exist, experiences is the only manner in which existence manifests or appears is not an admittance of solipisism, the belief that only that person exists. It is one thing to say that the consciousness of a person is the only thing in infinity that exists and another to say that existence strangely exists in such a way that only the consciousness of a particular person, alone of any other person that may exist can be demonstrated (and that only to oneself).
THE TRUTH OF THE MATTER
At the end and despite all argument, reality can only be divided into a person and that which the person experiences and the fictional existence of anything that is not a person and that which persons experience. If one believes in godless death, that which is not a person and that which a person experiences—as shall be logically demonstrated in what follows—cannot logically have anything to do with the existence, appearance, and behavior of experienced objects and events as experienced objects and events hail from and return to non-existence, making it impossible (under belief in godless death) for experience to derive anything in terms of appearance and behavior from external objects and events that are ultimately fictional entities that may not exist.
SECTION II:
LOGICAL DEFEAT OF BELIEF THE BRAIN CREATES CONSCIOUSNESS, USING LOGIC-TRAP CREATED BY GODLESS DEATH
Strange magic…
Oh, such a
strange magic.
Got a…
Strange
Magic.
Got a…
Strange
Ma-ha-ha-gic
-ELO, Strange Magic (song)
Belief in godless death accidentally creates unfavorable logical consequences for belief the brain creates consciousness. Belief in godless death generates the irrationality of belief the brain creates consciousness, through the necessity for an irrational magic the brain requires to create consciousness. The magic, simply, is the polar opposite of the process of godless death: the ability of something that does not exist to come into existence independent of formation or use of the material of anything in infinity that existed while the entity was non-existent.
The causal form of this magic is Creation Ex Nihilo: the ability of an already-existing object to somehow communicate with something that does not exist and cause it to stop not-existing and come into existence. Creation ex nihilo ironically jeopardizes any relationship between consciousness and objects and events purportedly existing outside the brain in the external world; negates any rational means by which external objects can transmit their nature to experienced objects in the process of perception; and immediately falsifies Direct Realism and renders absurd any philosophy that denies eternal consciousness in the form of eternal persons.
The easiest way to see the irrationality in the belief the brain creates conscious experiences is to ask where a conscious experience is before it is created by a neural circuit or circuits in a brain. Before a neural circuit in the brain purportedly generates a conscious experience it cannot rationally be said the neural circuit is the experience, given that the experience, when it exists, exists simultaneous to and alongside the neural circuit and every high-energy, outer shell neuron of every atom making up the neural circuit (as the function of the brain depends upon the “train car jumping” of high-energy, outer shell electrons in atoms forming the myelin sheath [principally] along the length of a neural circuit).
When an experience ends, the living brain and the neural circuit purportedly responsible for the now not-experienced experience cannot logically be thought to cease to exist alongside and in response to the cessation of the experience, and it is safe to assume the outer shell electrons of each atom of each neural circuit purportedly responsible for the now-defunct experience ceased to exist alongside and in response to the cessation of the experience.
Where, then, do neurons or their atomic and sub-atomic constituents “get” the conscious experience they are irrationally believed they give rise to, given that conscious experiences, save the sensory experience of observing and handling an exposed brain, do not in the least resemble the neurons purportedly responsible for their existence, and appear then disappear in the ever-changing chain of differing experiences from birth to death?
SIMPLIFIED EXPLANATION OF BRAIN FUNCTION AND CONNECTION OF BRAIN FUNCTION TO CONSCIOUS EXPERIENCE IN THE BELIEF THE BRAIN CREATES AND SUPPORTS THE EXISTENCE OF CONSCIOUSNESS
If one believes the brain creates consciousness and consciousness cannot exist unless and until it is created by the brain, before atoms formed cells which then fortuitously combined into brains, at no point in the pre-cell/pre-brain universe did consciousness exist. In the primordial non-existence of consciousness (as cells much less brains did not exist) there were no persons and as such, no such thing as subjective experience.
Consciousness did not exist prior to the fortuitous action of electromagnetism in the binding of atoms into the first cell, the first stepping stone in the chain of electromagnetic events resulting in the fortuitous formation of the neuron leading to the fortuitous formation of the brain, a conglomerate of neurons purportedly responsible for the existence of consciousness.
BRAIN FUNCTION
The function of the brain can simply be described as two or more neurons protected from destruction by the environment by a skull transmitting electrons through the transmission of neurotransmitters from the dendrites of an anterior neuron to the axon of a posterior neuron, resulting in electron flow between neurons.
For one neuron to influence another, the two must be connected, and this is accomplished by junctions called synapses. These synaptic junctions usually connect the axon of one neuron with the dendrites of another, a typical neuron in the cortex of the human brain having about 10,000 synapses. The synapses therefore constitute an exceedingly complex wiring system that surpasses by many orders of magnitude the complexity of even the most advanced supercomputers. It is this organization of connections both within the skull and to more distant sense organs and muscles that gives the brain its amazing abilities. Indeed, it is widely believed today by neuroscientists, psychologists, and even philosophers that all of the knowledge the human brain contains–from being able to walk to the ability to perform abstract scientific and mathematical reasoning–is a function of the connections existing among the neurons.
-Gary Sziko, Without Miracles: Universal Selection Theory and the Second Darwinian Revolution
If conscious experience is created by the brain and cannot exist unless and until some function of the brain creates it, the temporary existence of a conscious experience logically coincides with the temporary function of the neural circuit or circuits that created it. If brain function entails two or more neurons in sufficient synaptic proximity transmitting electrons between them, the temporary existence of a conscious experience logically coincides with the temporary passage of electrons through a limited number of neurons located in the cerebrum, the only area of the brain believed responsible for conscious experience.
The cerebrum, which is the only area of the brain responsible for consciousness, is the largest portion of the brain in humans. The outer layer of the cerbrum, called the cortex, is gray in color and contains cell bodies and short fibers. The cerebrum is divided into halves known as the right and left cerebral hemispheres. Each half contains four types of lobes: frontal, parietal, temporal, and occipital.
The cerebrum can be mapped according to the particular functions of each of the lobes. The particular sensation produced is the prerogative of the area of the brain that is stimulated, since the nerve impulse itself always has the same nature.
- Sylvia S. Mader, Inquiry Into Life, (pg. 317); Fourth Edition.
Wm.C.Brown Publishers, Dubuque, Iowa 1976,1979,1982,1985
Given the temporary existence of a conscious experience that follows the preceding experience that is then deposed by an arising new experience, corresponding neural circuits begin the existence of an experience probably when the first neuron in the circuit transmits electrons, and the experience ceases to exist when the last neuron in the circuit no longer transmits electrons.
That is, if there is a beginning, middle, and end to the existence of a conscious experience (example: the experience of walking through the front door of one’s house to a room no longer containing vision of the front door), there is a beginning, middle, and end to the function of the neural circuit(s) responsible for its existence corresponding to the length of existence of a conscious experience.
The first neuron in a neural circuit responsible for a conscious experience begins to transmit electrons through the action potential.
THE ACTION POTENTIAL
The function of the brain is fundamentally caused by an action potential in cortical neurons:
An action potential occurs when a neuron sends information down an axon, away from the cell body. Neuroscientists use other words, such as a “spike” or an “impulse” for the action potential. The action potential is an explosion of electrical activity that is created by a depolarizing current. This means that some event (a stimulus) causes the resting potential to move toward 0 mV. When the depolarization reaches about -55 mV a neuron will fire an action potential.
This is the threshold. If the neuron does not reach this critical threshold level, then no action potential will fire. Also, when the threshold level is reached, an action potential of a fixed sized will always fire…for any given neuron, the size of the action potential is always the same. There are no big or small action potentials in one nerve cell - all action potentials are the same size. Therefore, the neuron either does not reach the threshold or a full action potential is fired - this is the “ALL OR NONE” principle.
Action potentials are caused when different ions cross the neuron membrane.
A stimulus first causes sodium channels to open. Because there are many more sodium ions on the outside, and the inside of the neuron is negative relative to the outside, sodium ions rush into the neuron. Remember, sodium has a positive charge, so the neuron becomes more positive and becomes depolarized. It takes longer for potassium channels to open. When they do open, potassium rushes out of the cell, reversing the depolarization. Also at about this time, sodium channels start to close.
This causes the action potential to go back toward -70 mV (a repolarization).
The action potential actually goes past -70 mV (a hyperpolarization) because the potassium channels stay open a bit too long. Gradually, the ion concentrations go back to resting levels and the cell returns to -70 mV.
The action potential, therefore, may be the only thing in the universe that causes and can cause the existence of consciousness (if one believes consciousness is created by the brain). An action potential begins the existence of a conscious experience, and the existence of an experience depends upon the endurance of an action potential or endurance of the number of action potentials in the circuit responsible for its existence.
The conscious experience of a conscious being is the temporary experience of temporarily appearing sensory, emotional and cognitive events that do not exist prior to the activation of an action potential in the first neuron of the neural circuit responsible for their existence, and temporarily appearing sensory, emotional and cognitive events cease to exist upon cessation of the action potential in the last neuron in the circuit(s) responsible for their existence.
THE RESTING POTENTIAL
If the existence of consciousness and any conscious experience depends upon the action potential, cessation of conscious experience short of death or dreamless unconsciousness is brought about by cessation of the action potential through the reversion of the action potential into the resting potential.
The resting potentialis the opposite of the action potential. The resting potential ensures it is not the case any neuron in the brain does not incessantly fire from neurogenesis to neural death, granting refractory periods in which all neurons “rest” (hence the term “resting potential”) between action potentials.
When a neuron is not sending a signal, it is “at rest.” When a neuron is at rest, the inside of the neuron is negative relative to the outside.
Although the concentrations of the different ions attempt to balance out on both sides of the membrane, they cannot because the cell membrane allows only some ions to pass through channels (ion channels). At rest, potassium ions (K+) can cross through the membrane easily. Also at rest, chloride ions (Cl-) and sodium ions (Na+) have a more difficult time crossing. The negatively charged protein molecules (A-) inside the neuron cannot cross the membrane. In addition to these selective ion channels, there is a pump that uses energy to move three sodium ions out of the neuron for every two potassium ions it puts in.
Finally, when all these forces balance out, and the difference in the voltage between the inside and outside of the neuron is measured, you have the resting potential. The resting membrane potential of a neuron is about -70 mV (mV=millivolt) - this means that the inside of the neuron is 70 mV less than the outside. At rest, there are relatively more sodium ions outside the neuron and more potassium ions inside that neuron.
The resting potential, therefore, precedes the beginning of every conscious experience and ends the existence of every conscious experience.
THE “RATIONALITY” OF BELIEF THE BRAIN CREATES CONSCIOUSNESS: THE DEPENDENCE OF THE PROCESS OF PERCEPTION UPON SHEER LUCK
The existence of a conscious experience is, upon honest reflection of the idea a matter of sheer luck, as given the non-existence of gods or conscious beings or intelligences responsible for the existence and abilities of the brain, experience of oneself and the world literally depends upon the chance existence of synaptically connected neurons that happen, by sheer luck, to be able to give rise to conscious experience of the particular world one happens to experience, as opposed to any other world or any other set of experiences in the chain of experiences from birth to death. It is not a matter, upon reflection, of the existence and causal interaction between mind-independent objects in the external world informing the brain of the type of conscious experiences the brain can produce (in the rubric of visual perception): mind-independent objects in the external world must depend upon the luck of the brain, before the fact, by chance having neurons and forming or having formed neuron circuits that by chance happen to have the chance ability to give rise to consciously experienced doppelgangers of external objects and events.
LOGICAL CONCLUSIONS DRAWN FROM EXPLANATION OF BRAIN FUNCTION AND CONNECTION OF BRAIN FUNCTION TO THE BEGINNING AND END OF CONSCIOUS EXPERIENCE
-
The brain is an object set in a skull composed of specialized cells called neurons (and glial cells).
-
Regardless of whether or not the brain is functioning, it remains a mass of neurons and glial cells.
-
The brain and every neuron and glial cell making up the brain are composed of physical energy that according to the 1st Law of Thermodynamics eternally exists and does not come into or go out of existence.
-
If (3) is true, the substance making up each neuron of the brain is eternal (according to the 1st Law of Thermodynamics), and cannot come into or go out of existence.
-
Consciousness, given belief in godless death, is something that comes into and goes out of existence.
-
If consciousness is something that does not exist then comes into existence and is something that exists then goes out of existence (godless death or “micro-death” of an experience that ceases to exist when replaced by a new experience) while physical energy does not come into or go out of existence, consciousness is not physical energy:
Locking the criterion of death into neocortical destruction is mistaken since, as I have argued in earlier chapters, our continuity is essentially psychological continuity and connectedness (the R-relation of Oxford philosopher Derek Parfit) and not physical continuity. We might say that we are software and not hardware; the psychological relations that are me are currently instantiated in this neocortex, but I am not essentially this neocortex nor even (more controversially) any neocortex.
-Max More, The Terminus of the Self
- In the chronological sequence of personal experience from birth to death, purportedly created or generated by the brain, neurons of the brain are and remain neurons before, during, and after the existence of an experience, and remain and are neurons before, during, and after the existence of consciousness as a whole. There is no magical cessation of existence of neurons in the brain during the existence of a conscious experience in which the neurons purportedly responsible for the existence of the experience magically transform into the subjective experience before magically reverting to physical neurons at the end of the experience.
That is, neurons do not magically cease being neurons to transform into a conscious experience, such that within the brain, a set of neurons are magically absent as they are now in the form of an ephemeral conscious experience. As such, conscious experience must be a temporarily existing addition to the universe that is not part of the brain or the substance making up the brain or any of its components, as conscious experience does not exist prior to it existing while the brain and every neuron purportedly responsible for every experience a person shall have from birth to death exists before each experience a part of the brain.
-
If the brain and every neuron in the brain exist before, during, and after the existence of any conscious experience between birth and death, any given neural circuit(s) said to be responsible for the existence of any conscious experience cannot be one and the same as the conscious experience as the neural circuit (s) exists before, during, and after the existence of the conscious experience.
-
Before the existence of a conscious experience, the neural circuit(s) responsible for the existence of the experience, from the formation of the brain at birth, do not fire in a way that causes the experience to come into existence (the experience, therefore, being non-existent for all prior eternity up to the moment the neurons fire in a way that brings it into existence). After the existence of a conscious experience, neural circuit(s) previously responsible for its existence no longer fire in a way that causes the previously existent/now-non-existent experience to return to existence, rendering it non-existent for all future eternity.
-
If (9) is true, the lifetime of a person is just a sequence of the action and resting potentials of neural circuits in the brain purportedly responsible for the existence of each experience in the chronological order of appearance of experiences from birth to death, that fire in a way that causes a particular experience in the order to come into existence, then ceases to fire in a way that continues to support the existence of the experience as the same and other circuits begin to fire in ways that give rise to experiences distinct from the experience that no longer exists.
SECTION III:
THE IRRATIONAL SECRET BEHIND BELIEF THE BRAIN CREATES CONSCIOUSNESS: THE MAGIC OF CREATION EX NIHILO!
Though the chain of arguments . . . were ever so logical, there must arise a strong suspicion, if not an absolute assurance, that it has carried us quite beyond the reach of our faculties, when it leads to conclusions so extraordinary, and so remote from common life and experience. We are got into fairy land, long ere we have reached the last steps of our theory; and there we have no reason to trust our common methods of argument, or to think that our usual analogies and probabilities have any authority. Our line is too short to fathom such abysses.
-David Hume
If one believes in the existence of external world-dwelling, something-that-is-not/is-other-than-consciousness composed objects and events, the brain and body are external world-dwelling, something-that-is-not/-is-other-than-consciousness composed objects composed of something-that-is-not/-is-other-than-consciousness substance existing prior to consciousness.
Physical objects, as they are not consciousness subject to the cessation of existence of godless death, are composed of a substance called energy that is eternal and indestructible according to the 1st Law of Thermodynamics:
Energy is neither created nor destroyed; it merely changes form
If , following Parfit above, one believes brains, bodies, and everything other than consciousness is physical (composed of energy), the substance making up external world dwelling doppelgangers of experience brains, bodies, and other objects and events is indestructible, and eternally exists. Objects and events in the external world composed of energy and matter (“bound or frozen energy”) are permutations, circumscribed shapes and forms formed from the indestructible substance.
For example, observation of the brain of a dead person reveals the brain of the person did not cease to exist in response to and upon cessation of the existence of the consciousness of the person. The brain, therefore, must be composed of something that is not consciousness, as the substance making up the brain and the atoms comprising the brain has always existed and is something that cannot come into nor go out of existence.
Consciousness, however, as a logical consequence of the atheist’s belief in the nature of death is not energy and not composed of energy, as consciousness, if it were energy or composed of energy, would by grace of the 1st Law of Thermodynamics be something that cannot come into nor go out of existence.
Therefore, in atheist belief regarding the nature of the universe, consciousness is the only entity not protected by the 1st Law of Thermodynamics, making it vulnerable to cessation of existence (for those believing death is cessation of existence of consciousness).
THE LOGICAL CONSEQUENCE OF CONSCIOUSNESS BEING THE ONLY THING IN INFINITY THAT IS NOT ENERGY
If consciousness can only exist when it is created by the brain, at the point in the history of the universe when brains did not exist consciousness did not exist. Something that does not exist, then, must come into existence without using the material substance of something already in existence, as the use of already-existing material to create something is mere transformation of something that exists, not the creation of something that does not exist.
As Adolf Grünbaum has pointed out, many familiar causes are “transformative” in character. When a person makes something, he makes it out of something. He transforms a pre-existent material into something else (the effect). The carpenter cuts the wood and fits it together so as to make a house, the potter shapes and bakes his clay so as to make a pot, and so on.
-Wes Morriston, Creation Ex Nihilo and the Big Bang
Something that does not exist then begins to exist must come into existence through the magic of something not existing that begins existence without being constructed from the material of anything in the whole of infinity that exists and precedes its existence. The process of something coming into existence from a previous moment when it did not exist, randomly having properties it does not gain from anything in infinity that exists is inscrutable: there is no true causal relationship between the magically arriving entity and anything in infinity that previously exists and as nothing that previously exists lends its substance to the newly arrived entity.
Consciousness given belief in godless death is something that magically rather than logically comes into existence and something that magically rather than logically goes out of existence.
The brain (and hypothetical brain-like computers capable of creating consciousness in lieu of the brain), given the logical fallout of belief in godless death, must use magic to create consciousness, as consciousness is something that does not exist, and as such must be magically conjured into existence as it is not something that can be formed from anything in the whole of infinity that precedes its existence. Why? Because it is believed to be something that does not exist before it exists, while everything else in infinity is believed to be composed of something that cannot come into nor go out of existence (the 1st Law of thermodynamics).
Even for those cases of causation which involve conscious agents or fashioners, the premise does not assert that they ever create anything out of nothing; instead, conscious fashioners merely TRANSFORM PREVIOUSLY EXISTING MATERIALS FROM ONE STATE TO ANOTHER; the baker creates a cake out of flour, milk, butter, etc., and the parents who produce an offspring do so from a sperm, an ovum, and from the food supplied by the mother’s body, which in turn comes from the soil, solar energy, etc. Similarly, when a person dies, he or she ceases to exist as a person. But the dead body does not lapse into nothingness, since the materials of the body continue in other forms of matter or energy. In other words, all sorts of organization wholes (e.g., biological organisms) do cease to exist only as such when they disintegrate and their parts are scattered. But their parts continue in some form.
-Adolf Grunbaum, The Pseudo-Problem of Creation in Physical Cosmology
It is odd that Grunbaum, an atheist, could not see the irony of his denial of God’s ability to create ex nihilo given common belief in the brain’s ability to create consciousness ex nihilo. Given the concept of DEATH BEFORE LIFE, when one’s consciousness did not exist before birth and Death, believed by atheists to be the cessation of one’s consciousness following cessation of function of one’s brain, there is no room to maneuver around the belief the brain possesses the magic to cause something that does not exist to come into existence and how this does not principally differ from the belief that God verbally calls non-existent things into existence. Every argument, therefore, Grunbaum uses against God’s use of creation ex nihilo equally applies to neural creation ex nihilo.
IRRATIONALITY OF THE PROCESS OF PERCEPTION GIVEN CREATION EX NIHILO OF CONSCIOUSNESS
The process of perception begins with an object in the real world, known as the distal stimulus or distal object. By means of light, sound, or another physical process, the object stimulates the body’s sensory organs. These sensory organs transform the input energy into neural activity—a process called transduction. This raw pattern of neural activity is called the proximal stimulus. These neural signals are then transmitted to the brain and processed. The resulting mental re-creation of the distal stimulus is the percept.
To explain the process of perception, an example could be an ordinary shoe. The shoe itself is the distal stimulus. When light from the shoe enters a person’s eye and stimulates the retina, that stimulation is the proximal stimulus. The image of the shoe reconstructed by the brain of the person is the percept.
-Wikipedia, Perception
In the belief that objects and environments appearing in visual perception are percepts or mental doppelgangers of objects and environments believed to exist outside the brain and body in the external world, it is unclear why something that does not exist before being called into existence (the percept) should resemble things that are not found within and do not originate within the brain (distal objects): the brain only creates and produces percepts; the brain does not and cannot create distal objects.
In the belief that purportedly existing non-conscious stimuli flowing between distal objects and percepts carry information to the brain regarding the “appearance”, “behavior”, and “spatial position” of things that consist of something other than subjective experience, it is not clear nor logically demonstrated how energy-particles should, in the billions of years the particles existed prior to the birth and formation of the brain, happen to fortuitously carry within themselves the “appearance” and “behavior” of not-yet-formed distal objects and events the subject shall experience billions of years in the future. The logical obscurity is more pronounced if one believes or defensively posits particles involved in transduction are somehow formed minutes or seconds prior to transduction from distal object to percept.
If one responds by positing that the particles did not carry the information in the distant past but incredibly discards past information (or had no prior consciousness-replicating information) to somehow gain or form relevant information in the relatively immediate future (say, following the subject’s birth) or immediate future (seconds before transduction), this is merely on-the-fly imagination created on the spot to compensate for the irrationality of the concept of information-salvage and informational immediacy (the irrationality demonstrated in what follows).
There is also the convenient luck-of-the-draw that the brain before transduction happens to contain neural circuits that happen to have the ability to form visual (as visual perception is the primary representative of external objects and events) doppelgangers of the distal objects and events that happen to surround the subject. It does not follow that distal objects can have anything to do with the existence of corresponding percepts, as percepts are not created by distal objects but by the brain (for those believing that brains create consciousness or there are distal objects).
Luck in the representation of distal objects by percepts lies in the conceptual fact that transduction is ultimately useless as, regardless of the process of transduction, the appropriate percept does not exist as it must be created by the brain ex nihilo.
Conceptual evidence of this lies in the logical fallout presented by belief in godless death: if consciousness ceases to exist at death, godless death is logically the negative condition of and negative indication that the opposite condition happens at the beginning of consciousness at birth and with every conscious experience from birth to death: the brain creates every conscious experience from birth to death ex nihilo. If percepts are created by the brain ex nihilo, their informational connection to distal objects must be illusory as the existence and qualities of the percept is derived from non-existence rather than from the distal object.
Further, distal objects cannot directly give of themselves to form their corresponding percepts, as distal objects are generally larger and denser than the skull or brain and cannot breach the skin and skull to infiltrate the brain to take part in the formation of percepts without damaging or destroying the brain, removing its ability to form percepts.
Finally, despite ex nihilo creation of percepts rendering the process of transduction illusory, it is odd to think of photons or other information-carrying atoms and sub-atomic particles transmitted from distal objects carrying within themselves tiny phenomenal “photos” (as we’re talking the transference of something that is not consciousness to representation in consciousness) of the whole or fragments of the macroscopic object from which they were emitted.
That is, photons and other distal-object-information-carrying particles are not usually or rationally envisioned to carry within them tiny images of chairs, mountains, skateboards, magazine articles, etc. or even tiny images of fragments of these objects, as the particles fly from the distal object to the target body’s peripheral and central nervous systems before mechanically and fortuitously routing to the neural circuit that…causes information-carrying particles to have no purpose within and uselessly occupy the brain as percept-forming neural circuits create distal object-corresponding percepts ex nihilo. Percepts are things that do not exist before they exist, thus consciousness-creating neural circuits do not (and indeed cannot) use distal-object-information-carrying particles (or images within the particles if these exist) to create percepts as percepts are formed without the use of pre-existing objects and material.
If one were to amazingly hold that the brain has a “superconsciousness”—introduced by economist Frederick Hayek as a consciousness belonging to the brain independent of the person-consciousness the brain creates—it is difficult if not impossible to explain how even a conscious brain having the idea of the type of person-consciousness it wants to create can communicate the idea to something that does not exist.
SECTION IV:
LOGICAL CONCLUSION DRAWN FROM THE IRRATIONAL BELIEF CONSCIOUSNESS COMES INTO AND GOES OUT OF EXISTENCE AND BELIEF THE BRAIN POSSESSES THE POWER OF CREATION EX NIHILO
Godless death entails the belief that when a person dies, the consciousness of the person ceases to exist. If godless death is true, godless death does not exist in a vacuum but is accompanied by its negative: the ability of consciousness that does not exist to come into existence. It may be accused that consciousness is believed to be something that does not exist until it is magically conjured into existence and ceases to exist when the object that magically conjures it into existence ceases to function in denial of the metaphysical possibility, perhaps unknown actuality, that consciousness is eternal and is not a creation of the brain, the brain itself an illusion of an eternally existing consciousness.
The brain is an illusion of a person’s consciousness in that the brain is actually composed of a person’s consciousness, as the brain experienced by a person in medical and criminal context is not one and the same as the purportedly existing external-world dwelling brain composed of physical energy. The illusory brain, composed of one’s subjective experience, in atheist belief in godless death ceases to exist at death while its external doppelganger is unaffected by the cessation of the brain and is composed of a substance that cannot come into nor go out of existence. Avoidance of Ayn Rand’s Stolen Concept in this example is avoided through the author’s denial of the existence of mind-independent doppelgangers of the content of visual perception and denial of creation ex nihilo, utilizing the concept of mind-independent doppelgangers of the content of visual perception and the brain’s magic of creation ex nihilo as logic tools to conceptually demonstrate that experienced objects are illusions created from, and composed of, the very subjective experience of one “perceiving” them.
At the end of the day, believers in godless (Gervaisian) death either fail to recognize the irrational magic of creation ex nihilo behind one’s belief in the nature of the world, or one is willing to accept the irrational magic if it avoids the concept, even belief, that there is no such thing as physical energy as consciousness is eternal and the only thing that exists and has ever existed.
The first Law of Thermodynamics may be replaced by The First Law of Psyche:
Consciousness is neither created nor destroyed; it merely changes form
There is no experiential evidence of the existence of something that is not consciousness, as existence only appears, and it may be safely assumed it can only appear, as consciousness in the form of a particular person and that which the person experiences. Given the nature of how existence invariably appears, it may be safely assumed that the invariantly apparent nature of existence is the only form of existence that exists, and the only form existence can assume. If true, there is no such thing as physical matter or physical objects, environments, and events, as the only thing that exists and can exist are persons and that which persons experience, that are composed only of the material substance making up the person itself: the person’s subjective experience.
END PART ONE