Defeat of Atheism Through The Trap Of Neural Predeterminism

PART TWO OF DEFEAT OF ATHEISM THROUGH THE TRAP OF GODLESS DEATH: Defeat Of Atheism Through The Trap of Neural Predeterminism

In Part One it is revealed that godless death–cessation of existence of consciousness at death–does not exist in a vacuum: if consciousness can cease to exist at death the reverse is true when it comes to how consciousness comes to exist: consciousness is something that first does not exist, then magically comes into existence independent of formation using the substance of anything existing while the consciousness was non-existent. If consciousness is something that does not exist prior to its being experienced in the moment in which it is experienced and ceases to exist when it is no longer experienced, for those believing the brain creates consciousness, consciousness must be created ex nihilo, the opposite of godless death.

If consciousness is created ex nihilo by the brain, conscious experience in the form of visual perception (the primary and principle form of so-called representation of the external world) cannot logically derive its appearance from purportedly existing objects and events in the external world (that visual perception is said to experientially imitate), as visual perception and every object and event that is visually perceived does not “come from” or travel from their external “doppelgangers” as visual perceptions are magically conjured from non-existence. If visual perceptions are conjured from non-existence, external objects and events, if they exist, cannot logically have anything to do with the appearance and behavior of visually perceived objects and events as visually perceived objects and events did not gain their nature from external objects and events but were conjured “willy nilly” into existence from non-existence.

The brain does not consult external objects for information about the nature of visually perceived objects as the brain simply creates visual perceptions “out of thin air” through the magic of creation ex nihilo. Any resemblance visual perceptions may have with external objects and events, therefore, is entirely coincidental (for those believing the brain creates consciousness or that there exists mind-independent, not-consciousness composed objects and events imagined as foundational doppelgangers of the content of visual perception).

Long-story-from-Part-1-short, godless death negatively indicates that every experience a person has or shall have from birth to death does not derive from the external world… but from non-existence: external objects and events cannot provide information about or impart any of their qualities and properties to conscious experience as conscious experiences do not exist prior to the brain magically conjuring them ex nihilo, and as such there can be no communication between external objects and non-existent consciousness, which only suddenly appears outside the input and influence of the external world when the brain immediately conjures it from non-existence without using the material of the external world to create consciousness (as the substance of consciousness is not contained in the external world and must be magically produced from non-existence).

As conscious experiences do not exist prior to being immediately and instantaneously experienced, they cannot originate or gain information from external objects in order to acquire the nature of external objects.

NEURAL PREDETERMINISM

But enough of the brain’s power of creation ex nihilo. The concept the brain creates consciousness and is responsible for every experience a person shall have from birth to death in itself further and more fantastically erodes the logic of belief the brain creates consciousness when one considers an amazing phenomena that goes hand in hand with the belief consciousness owes it’s existence to the brain in the form of consciousness owing its existence to NCCs (Neural Correlates of Consciousness):

What does it mean to be a neural correlate of consciousness? At first glance, the answer might seem to be so obvious that the question is hardly worth asking. An NCC is just a neural state that directly correlates with a conscious state, or which directly generates consciousness, or something like that. One has a simple image: when your NCC is active, perhaps, your consciousness turns on, and in a corresponding way. But a moment’s reflection suggests that the idea is not completely straightforward, and that the concept needs some clarification.

As a first pass, we can use the definition of a neural correlate of consciousness given in the program of the ASSC conference. This says a neural correlate of consciousness is a “specific system in the brain whose activity correlates directly with states of conscious experience”. This yields something like the following:

A neural system N is an NCC if the state of N correlates directly with states of consciousness.

(My interjection:A neural system N is an NCC if it is electrochemically capable of sustaining a state of N that correlates directly with a particular conscious experience in the chain of experiences a person shall have from birth to death” as Chalmers reveals below in his statement regarding NCCs and particular content of consciousness).

The first option is that the states in question are just those of being conscious and of not being conscious. The corresponding notion of an NCC will be that of a neural system whose state directly correlates with whether a subject is conscious or not. If the NCC is in a particular state, the subject will be conscious. If the NCC is not in that state, the subject will not be conscious.

This is perhaps the idea that first comes to mind when we think about an NCC. We might think about it as the “neural correlate of creature consciousness”, where creature consciousness is the property a creature has when it is conscious, and lacks when it is not conscious.

A related idea is that of the neural correlate of what we might call the background state of consciousness. A background state is an overall state of consciousness such as being awake, being asleep, dreaming, being under hypnosis, and so on. Exactly what counts as a background state is not entirely clear, as one can divide things up in a number of ways, and with coarser or finer grains, but presumably the class will include a range of normal and of “altered” states.

We can think of this as a slightly more fine-grained version of the previous idea. Creature consciousness is the most coarse-grained background state of consciousness: it is just the state of being conscious. Background states will usually be more fine-grained than this, but they still will not be defined in terms of specific contents or modalities.

A neural correlate of the background state of consciousness, then, will be a neural system N such that the state of N directly correlates with whether a subject is awake, dreaming, under hypnosis, and so on. If N is in state 1, the subject is awake; if N is in state 2, the subject is dreaming; if N is in state 3, the subject is under hypnosis; and so on.

There is much more to consciousness than the mere state of being conscious, or the background state of consciousness. Arguably the most interesting states of consciousness are specific states of consciousness: the fine-grained states of subjective experience that one is in at any given time. Such states might include the experience of a particular visual image, of a particular sound pattern, of a detailed stream of conscious thought, and so on. A detailed visual experience, for example, might include the experience of certain shapes and colors in one’s environment, of specific arrangements of objects, of various relative distances and depths, and so on.

Specific states like these are most often individuated by their content. Most conscious states seem to have some sort of specific representational content, representing the world as being one way or another. Much of the specific nature of a visual experience, for example, can be characterized in terms of content. A visual experience typically represents the world as containing various shapes and colors, as containing certain objects standing in certain spatial relations, and so on. If the experience is veridical, the world will be the way the experience represents it as being. If the experience is an illusion or is otherwise misleading, the world will be other than the experience represents it as being. But either way, it seems that visual experiences typically have detailed representational content. The same goes for experiences in other sensory modalities, and arguably for many or most nonsensory experiences as well.

Much of the most interesting work on NCCs is concerned with states like these. This is work on the neural correlates of the contents of consciousness. Much work on the neural correlates of visual consciousness has this character, for example. This work is not concerned merely with the neural states that determine that one has visual consciousness; it is concerned with the neural states that determine the specific contents of visual consciousness.

-David J. Chalmers, What Is A Neural Correlate of Consciousness?

THE AMAZING CONCEPT OF NEURAL PREDETERMISM

NCCs are vitally important for comprehension of Neural Predeterminism as NCCs are the “heart and soul” of the brain’s creation of consciousness in terms of NCCs being the structure behind the function of the brain (for those believing the brain creates consciousness): every experience a person shall have from birth to death, if conscious experience cannot exist unless it is created by a synaptically-connected team of two or more neurons in the cerebrum:

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.

  • Slyvia S. Mader, Inquiry Into Life, (pg. 317); Fourth Edition.
    Wm.C.Brown Publishers, Dubuque, Iowa 1976,1979,1982,1985

: owes its existence to a specific NCC, assembled within the cerebrum prior to the existence of a not-yet-existing conscious experience (as it is illogical to suppose the “cart comes before the horse” in the sense of a conscious experience existing prior to the NCC that creates it), that can electrochemically sustain a state of N that corresponds to the existence of any conscious experience “fated” to appear in the chain of an individual’s experiences from birth to death.

The conceptual fact that:

  1. There exists in the brain NCCs that before the fact are luckily capable of attaining electrochemical states of N that correlate directly with every conscious experience a person shall have from birth to death

  2. The conceptual fact that a conscious experience does not exist unless there luckily exists an NCC in the cerebrum that luckily has the ability to create that conscious experience (alone of any other possible consciousness experience the NCC could or might have had the ability to create)

: generates the amazing concept of Neural Predeterminism. Neural Predeterminism–defined and described in what follows–is perhaps…more than the brain’s creation ex nihilo of consciousness (which is just the magical process that pops out the conscious experience that is the “Everlasting Gobstopper” at the end of the “Willy Wonka assembly line” of the Process of Perception)…the most damning evidence of the irrationality of the belief the brain creates consciousness.


NEURAL PREDETERMINISM AND THE BRAIN’S ABILITY TO “FORTUNE TELL” THE FUTURE

Conscious experience as it actually appears and demonstrates itself to exist occurs in the form of a stream or litany of differing experiences connected in a chain extending from birth to (godless) death. The chain is measured according to a linguistic and visual system depicting Time: the measurement of change that marks the duration of experience (as existence only appears in the form of someone and what that person experiences).

Measurement of duration of experience from birth to death is linguistic (in the form of terms such as “nanosecond”, “millisecond”, “second”, “minute”, “hour”, “day”, etc.) or visual (in the form of symbols seen on a manual or digital clock), and marks the duration of conscious experience. Duration of conscious experience is determined by sensory, mental, and emotional difference—no matter how slight—between a particular experience and its immediate successor in the chain of experience from birth to death.

Measurement of time in the interest of Neural Predeterminism is the use of linguistic units of time in concert with belief that conscious experiences are brought into existence from previous non-existence by NCCs. If conscious experiences are brought into existence by NCCs, every experience one shall have in the future requires—before the fact—the lucky existence of every NCC that luckily has the power to conjure every future experience one shall have residing presently in the brain waiting to form one’s future!

That is, Neural Predeterminism is the concept the brain contains NCCs that “know” the future prior to the future’s existence (shapes of the external world and psychological experiences that do not yet exist). This neural “fortune telling” is necessary in order for the brain to create the unknown experiences that shall occur in the next second or at any point following “now”.

If there are no NCC’s available in one’s brain luckily having the ability to form the experience one shall have in the next second, regardless of its content, the experience cannot occur. The same “before the fact future preparedness” applies for the experience one shall have five minutes from now, ten minutes from now, etc.

For example, consider an experience one shall have ten minutes in the unknown future, like the experience of someone unexpectedly pulling up to one’s house for a visit.

In the belief that brains create conscious experience, the unexpected visitor that pulls up to one’s house ten minutes in the future can only be experienced if the brain–long before the visit occurs–contains an NCC capable of forming one’s experience of the not-yet-occurred event!


Neural Predeterminism is a head-scratching "hanging chad” generally overlooked by believers that the brain creates consciousness. When one mentions Neural Predeterminism, believers in brain-created consciousness usually express “I-didn’t-think-of-that” shock, innocent confusion needing elucidation, or “knee jerk” skepticism at the phenomenon. Skeptics must realize, however, that one automatically invokes NP when one holds the concept the brain forms conscious experience of the past, present, and future.

This is hugely important: the experience of the future, which is simply an experience that is experienced after a previous experience, indicates that in order for one to be able to experience the experience that follows another experience there must be an NCC in one’s brain that, of every other experience the NCC could or might have had the power to create in lieu of the experience one in fact comes to experience, happens by the most arbitrary chance to have the ability to—and one may suspect has only the ability to create–the future experience one actually experiences.

NEURAL PREDETERMINISM AND VISION

The irrationality of Neural Predeterminism is chiefly found in the brain’s purported creation of visual perception. Visual perception, alone of every other modality or form of consciousness, is the principle form of representation of the external world (for those believing the external world contains non-consciousness composed doppelgangers of the content of visual perception).

In the belief that not-consciousness composed objects and events in the external world are doppelgangers of the content of visual perception, in Neural Predeterminism the brain forms and contains NCCs having the ability to form future visual perceptions of future states of the external world the external world has yet to assume. That is, the brain “knows” what the external world will be like long before the external world is able to assume the predicted form.

How is this possible, when visual experience of a future state of the external world does not derive from the external world but is arbitrarily created ex nihilo, without (in the absence of gods) the brain even knowing it exists, much less knowing the external world exists or that it (the brain) “must” create visual experiences that mimic the “appearance” (given the external world cannot be experienced as it is not a person or the experience of a person, and is in common atheistic rhetoric composed of something that is not consciousness) of the external world ?

Why should that which is created ex nihilo appropriately match, in “appearance”, states of the external world that have yet to occur?

The power of neurons to “predict” the future and “predict” it accurately (if the world one experiences in the future is veridical to the future assumed by the external world) must be coincidental–or to quote Hume from another context, “entirely arbitrary”–given that conscious experiences are created ex nihilo and as such have nothing to do with the nature of objects and events in the external world.


THE CONCEPT OF “JOHNNY-ON-THE-SPOT” NCC FORMATION (FOR FUN)

Another good example of the neural “fortune telling” of Neural Predeterminism is present in the case of a sudden, unexpected knock at one’s front door surprising one a minute into the future.

One’s brain must, before the fact, “know” there will be a knock at the door (by being able to, before the fact, form an NCC capable of forming, long before the knock at the door occurs, experience of the knock at the door that shall occur at that precise moment in the chain of experiences from birth to death) that will surprise one in one minute, prior to the external world forming the person that knocks and the event of the knock itself. Of every other experience that might occur a minute into the future, the brain happens to contain only that NCC capable of forming experience of only that experience that is the only experience that will be veridical to the shape the external world will assume in 60 seconds.

“Actual future creating” neurons making up “actual future creating” NCCs are not plausibly imagined to form in the brain seconds, minutes, or even hours prior to an about-to-occur external world and consciously experienced event. Are there people that believe in “Johnny-On-The-Spot” NCC formation that believe that, in the second or even milliseconds between the passing of one experience and the immediate emergence of the next, the NCC responsible for the immediately-arising, about-to-occur conscious experience that shall occur in one second following the current experience exists as pre-neuron flotsam and jetsam that must be formed in nanoseconds before it can form the new experience that is about to occur in one second???

Probably not.

But what if there were someone who believed in “Johnny-On-The-Spot” NCC Formation? The individual would have to believe that in the seconds or even milliseconds (picoseconds?) between the passing of one experience and the onset of the next–as the individual denies the pre-existence of an NCC sitting in the brain since birth (according to the rubric the brain contains all the neurons it will have from birth and that new neurogenesis does not occur at least in the part of the brain that actively creates conscious experiences)—the NCC responsible for the incoming next experience is formed between the passing of the old experience and before the immediate existence of the new.

Such an amazing belief would require that when an experience one has “now” begins to fade or cease to exist to be replaced by a new experience that shall occur within one second (to simplify units of time in the measurement of space between experiences), every neuron belonging to the NCC responsible for the existence of the soon-to-arrive experience would have to form by collective neurogenesis at a speed in which all participatory neurons are formed from a state in which they were previously pre-neural matter…and they need to assimilate into a fully functional NCC in less than a second.

Add to this within the “Flashtime” (for those acquainted with the CW television series The Flash and his use of “Flashtime” in the 4th Season, 15th episode entitled: Enter Flashtime) the NCC responsible for the existence of an experience about to occur in one second forms, the NCC must squeeze in the formation of synaptic connections between neurons and cause resting potentials between neurons that fluctuate to action potentials that propagate down the lengths of the collective myelin sheaths and Nodes of Ranvier in participatory neurons that magically begins to conjure from non-existence the incoming experience before the second elapses.

A physical resistance problem also complicates things: each neuron making up the NCC about to form the imminent in-a-second-arriving experience, if one believes each neuron that must be formed from scratch happened not to be in non-neural matter proximity, must race against the clock to have the matter making up each neuron ooze toward each other in narrow intra-cerebral space as the matter that is to be used to form neurons in less than one second must ooze around uninvolved, already-formed neurons and biological matter to form neurons and synaptic connectivity in the “Flashtime” of less than one second.

(Note: Even if Johnny-On-The-Spot NCC Formation invoked pre-formed but disconnected neurons lying “out of the way” of neural circuits already formed and involved in consciousness-formation, 100 billion neurons crammed together to form a 3 pound object in a skull makes extremely restrictive space for disconnected neurons, say, the disconnected neurons that are the only neurons that can form the soon-to-appear-in-a-second conscious experience…

[in the absence of gods, the brain can’t know or care about this or know or care that it must use these neurons as they are the only ones that can create the experience that mimics the state the external world will assume in one second]

…the disparate neurons that are the only engineers of accurate-external-world-mimicry-of-the-state-the-external-world-will-assume-in-the-next-second must squeeze around billions of space-impeding neurons in order to reach each other and form the synaptic connections enabling creation of the need-to-exist-in-a-second experience in the nick of time).


It’s safe to assume that, in the belief the brain creates consciousness, NCCs responsible for a particular conscious experience are not formed between the passing of one experience and the emergence of the next. This means neurons forming the NCCs forming every conscious experience from birth to death–if not formed at a minimum time greater than the neurogenesis, collective synaptic connection, and collective functioning of each neuron in a consciousness-creating NCC–are historically established at birth, and wait from birth for their “cue” to form conscious experience of that which one shall experience at the age of 40; age of 60; age of 80, etc. That is, the neurally predetermined fate and length of existence one shall have from birth to death is set in stone in the form of the particular NCCs and the particular experiences each NCC is capable of conjuring from non-existence, formed and residing in one’s brain from birth.

For example, consider again a surprise knock at the door occurring one minute from “now”:

The knock on the door will occur in 60 seconds, thus it may be safely assumed that the NCC responsible for experience of the knock at the door takes longer than 60 seconds to form (as opposed to Johnny-On-The-Spot NCC Formation in which the NCC can form in less than 60 seconds).

Given that, in general, all neurons one shall have in the brain were formed at birth, it is more likely that every neuron responsible for every experience one shall have from birth to death is present in the brain at birth, and it may be that every NCC responsible for every experience one shall have from birth to death is synaptically connected at birth. If not, NCCs are at least formed at whatever time it takes for each neuron in the NCC to form, connect to every other neuron in the NCC, and assume the electrochemical state of Chalmer’s “N” where the NCC is primed and ready to conjure a particular experience “in the nick of time”.

CONCLUSION

Long story short Neural Predeterminism, in terms of experience including and external to mimicry of the external world, intimates that the brain has predestined one’s fate from birth to death: every experience one shall have from birth to death is already “set in stone” in the form of NCCs having the ability to magically conjure from non-existence everything one shall experience from birth to death. One’s eightieth birthday, for example, and everything one will experience on the day one turns eighty is already mapped out while one is currently two years old. If one is fated to die at the age of nine at, say, 3:25pm on the 20th of December, one’s brain only contains NCCs having power to magically conjure consciousness from non-existence from one’s birth to that date and time.

In the end, there are a lot of nasty logic-consequences seeping out the edges of belief the brain creates consciousness. Neural Predeterminism is arguably worse than creation ex nihilo of consciousness as it is, effectively, a neural and godless form of the Christian God’s omniscience. The Christian God has an excuse: he’s conscious. The brain in an atmosphere of the absence of gods and thus absence of overarching consciousness that controls and determines the nature of subordinate consciousness has no excuse: the idea of an unconscious brain and unconscious world somehow causing the existence of consciousness is an arbitrary idea that certainly did not think things through in it’s desperate (it seems to me) bid to deny that consciousness might indeed be eternal, and might indeed have always existed in the form of eternal persons. Fictionally imagining non-consciousness: something that is not/is other than subjective experience and then going so far as to use it to derive the opposite of itself (subjective experience) is a mistake, as the “derivation” in itself automatically opposes rationality and logic.

Are deniers of the existence of eternal consciousness and eternal persons so prejudiced against eternal consciousness and persons they are willing to ignore or worse, support, the nonsense of creation ex nihilo and Neural Predeterminism (Neural Predeterminism as the “daughter” of the brain’s ex nihilo creation of consciousness)? Are deniers of eternal consciousness and personhood so blind that one cannot see the lack of rationality in the idea that things can come into and go out of existence and worse, can be made to come into existence and go out of existence by the movement of pre-existing things smaller than the period at the bottom of this question mark?

Looking at things directly and honestly, it is apparent we’re only experiences composed of first-person subjective experience, that experience a litany or stream of different experiences that for the time being exist in the range of “then” and “now”. The common imaginary world atheists have imagined and, to an extent admittedly less than religion, imposes upon the world is based, at its core, upon the magic of creation ex nihilo and the existence of something or things composed of something that existence does not and has never demonstrated exists. In this, atheism moves beyond the reach of logic and, quoting Hume, ‘beyond the reach of our faculties’ when it goes so far as to believe that things that do not exist can be caused to come into existence, things that exist can cease to exist (as opposed to being transformed), and the future can be prepared for and represented using things that do not exist. With the brain’s creation ex nihilo of consciousness and Neural Predeterminism we have indeed ‘got into fairy land, long ere we have reached the last stages of our theory’.

Better, perhaps, to abandon these things. Based upon the invariable evidence that existence has always appeared in the form of a subjectively experiencing person and the things the person experiences, which upon further introspection one finds are composed only of the subjective experience of the person and must be composed of the subjective experience of that person in order to be experienced—it may be accurately inferred that the only thing that exists is subjective experience, the only thing that has ever existed is subjective experience, and the only logical structure and form of existence is eternal, content-of-consciousness transitioning personhood.

END PART TWO