brain function alone cannot account for the simple experience of seeing, hearing, tasting, or smelling.
Well, to get information that *reflects reality*, you need the corresponding sensory organsm too, obviously - which would be the *opposite* of your position. I don’t know if you suffer from some form of derealisation, but my senses most assuredly are very much bodily sensations.
And no, we by now know quite a lot about how the brain processes information, including perception being something very modular, where brain damage in specific areas leads to the loss of specific
the nonmaterial world of the smell of lavender, the deep resonance of a cello
Er, those are very much material things.
the beauty of a sunset over an ocean, the wonder evoked by the night sky, the elegance of Euclid’s demonstration of the infinitude of prime numbers
”I assert (mental phenomenon) is supernatural, therefore there must be a supernatural soul!” Blatant petitio principii, yet so beloved by dualists.
the beauty of a sunset over an ocean, the wonder evoked by the night sky, the elegance of Euclid’s demonstration of the infinitude of prime numbers, the very world that materialism cannot explain. If only matter existed, then we would have no interior life; we would be mindless things like rocks and volcanoes.
Like every ideology—political, religious, or intellectual—materialism at some point is closed to reason, so that eminently intelligent adherents must make exceedingly idiotic pronouncements: “All of us human beings and all the objects with which we deal are essentially bundles of simple quarks and electrons;” “You’re nothing but a pack of neurons;” and “You’re a gigantic lumbering robot manipulated by genes.”
I just do not get the idea that qualia/emotions/love/whatever are emergent phenomena of brain activity neans that they are somehow not “real”.
No one can doubt we live in a bio-friendly universe.
You know that the universe consists almost entirely of endless expanses of emptiness? That only a limited portion of planets in a limted portion of systems would have conditions suitable for life to evolve? That even on the one planet we know, only the outer layers are inhabitable? Yet this is supposed to be a cosmos specifically designed for the benefit of life?
Giving up the ideology of my youth and following reason, I had no choice but to “allow a Divine Foot in the door.”
Curious that all the supposed ex-atheists used to be incredibly naive and unsophisticated in their worldview at best and far more commonly blatant strawmen that suggests they are lying for Jesus/Buddha/Ashtar…