this post was submitted on 07 Dec 2023
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The Abrahamic religions do not have a monopoly on the concept of God. The irrationality of their particular fables, talking snakes and walking on water and all the behavioral quirks they claim God has expressed, has nothing to do with the concept itself.
Let's say I popularized the idea that electricity is really just tiny pixies dancing around, and I came up with all manner of personality traits and stories to go along with them. Let's say millions, billions of people embraced my pixie theory, and it mutated over time into schismatic alternatives with their own traits and stories. Do the ridiculous things now ascribed to electricity, so pervasively that most people picture little pixies when they hear the words, prove that electricity doesn't exist?
Yes. I just made few examples on popular concepts. And I can make similar examples for a lot of other concepts. However, to discuss this further, we need some clear definitions.
This is a form or erroneous attribution. It reminds me of the luminiferous aether of which physicists thought for a long time that it exists until it was disproven. This is a testable hypothesis. Your pixies might even be testable to a certain degree. But beyond a certain point they aren't. Therefore being in the realm of pseudoscience again.
If we observe electricity, of course elctricity exists. But if we don't know its cause, it's important to investigate it. We have to investigate cause and effect instead of just assuming that a higher power plays a role. That's our only way to gain knowledge and separate fantasy from reality.
And currently, religions with their concepts of deities reside in the realm of fantasy.
Good, you've got the gist: a ridiculous claim centered in an observable phenomenon does not invalidate that phenomenon.
Now replace electricity with consciousness, subjective experience itself. We observe consciousness, we are consciousness, of course it exists. It is important to investigate the cause, determine the nature of the phenomenon and consider seriously the possible explanations.
By a due investigation, and serious and rational consideration, what possible explanations do you find for consciousness?
"An emergent phenomenon of the way our biological hardware works" is one possible, entirely rational and most importantly sufficient answer. And even if we did not have an answer, that doesn't mean that there is not an entirely materialistic explanation for the phenomenon, even if we didn't find the answer yet.
Because we have hundreds of thousands of examples of previously unexplained phenomena being sufficiently and completely explained by purely naturalistic, materialistic causes.
On the other hand we have exactly zero previous examples of a phenomenon being sufficiently explained by anything supernatural.
Since we observe consciousness solely bound to the existence of, reliant on the configuration of and changeable through the change of physical properties of physical matter, we can conclude that it is an emergent property that has arisen like other properties emergent from biological matter through the well known, well defined and observable process of evolution.
Could there be an alternative explanation? Yes!
Is the god-hypothesis in any way an explanation for consciousness? No! In fact it would raise more questions. It is neither sufficient, nor rational. What it is, is a god-of-the-gaps argument, another turtle on the way down.
Examples?
Basically every great and complex work ant colonies are capable of is an emergent property of simple rules that are simple instinct in simple creatures, yet the interplay of lots of individuals following these simple rules begets complex behavior. This is the easiest to grasp example imho.
Flocking birds, schooling fish, hell we can write computer programs where complex behavior emerges from simple rules, Conwayβs Game of Life is the best example for how simple the rules can be and how complex the emergent systems.
But emergence is everywhere, the cells of your lungs don't breathe, but they arrange themselves in a way and are embedded in a system that can exist because lung-cells do arrange the way they do.
Life itself is an emergent property, the atoms that constitute us themselves aren't alive, they don't run, breathe or think, all of those are emergent properties from the right collection and arrangement of atoms into molecules into cells into a multicellular organism.
Thinking is no different than running, it is something that happens through the complex interplay of matter but transcends the single building blocks.
A single ant can't be a colony, a single cell can't breathe or run and a single neuron can't think, but if you bring them together in the right amount and arrangement, new properties emerge.
And most importantly, if you disturb that arrangement, if you destroy some of that constituting matter or rearrange it, the emergent properties change or vanish. That it can simply stop to emerge is imho the best prove that it is an emergent property.
Emergence is actually a considerable personal interest of mine, so this is a fun topic for me, and your position is one I used to hold. There's a basic problem with this line of thinking though.
Emergent patterns and behavior are observed, only. The emergent property isn't composed of any substance, it is a mathematical construct. That is to say, the higher order organization of ant colonies and bird flocks do not in and of themselves experience qualia. They certainly might look like it from the outside, but that's the entire point of emergence: this "substance" is an illusion, there is no subjective experience associated with the ant colony or the bird flock. Each individual has it, but the collective itself only looks like it does.
Consciousness is made of some "substance". The experience itself is made out of "I am", whatever that is. So if you're being intellectually honest, and follow the logic fully, you come to one of two conclusions :
The logical conclusion of this line of thinking is that it's more likely than not that the entire universe has an emergent consciousness.
The logical conclusion of that line of thinking is that there is a panpsychic field permeating the universe.
I'm very explicitly not saying that there's literally a giant bearded man who lives in the clouds who got into a fight with a talking snake. All of that is a combination of metaphors to explain abstract concepts to bronze age shepherds, translation errors, and bad faith actors trying to secure power for themselves.
What I am saying is that a thorough persistence in the rational exploration of the phenomenon of subjectivity leads one to a universe-spanning consciousness of one nature or another, and that attempts to describe it with human language evoke descriptions consistent with pretty much every major cultures core concept of God before the power-hungry priests started telling people that the universal consciousness will punish them for being naughty.
Personally I'm in the panpsychist camp. I don't know how much physics you've taken, but the modern view basically treats everything as the interaction of fields.