The Dollar

I guess I can rationally claissify or find a rational classification for most things but I don't seem to find one for the self of which I am consciously aware. This is a fly in the ointment of my atheism as I can in no way think of a rational explanation for my sense of self. Is this 'me in me' proof of the supernatural or am I imagining my 'sense of self' to be different from the keyboard in front of me? I hope the word fascists don't get to this before those with answers as I am very puzzled.

dimbulb

The self simply is.

Its existence implies nothing more, certainly not god.

If a tree doesn't imply god, why does your "sense of self"?

Theophage

The supernatural does not exist. My self-awareness exists by definition. You do the math.

couch_sloth

Our self awareness is extremely important to us because it is at the center of how we experience existence.
It could just be part of an evolutionary adaptation. e.g. Possible benefits of this trait include the predictive value of being able to put oneself mentally into the shoes of someone else (very handy for a social animal).

Our self awareness does show that our brains are very complex. But I don't believe the existence of this level of complexity in our universe implies the supernatural. (Black holes also appear to have come about under very complex conditions, but I don't see how they imply the existence of the supernatural)

It's not like we can know some norm for universes in general. (Whether a lot of complexity is normal or not)

GenesisNemesis

Just because one cannot explain something does not mean it is supernatural, but it simply means it is beyond the capabilities of one's explanatory powers. Many philosophers and scientists have puzzled over why the self exists, and you definitely aren't the first.

Marduk

Damn straight, ever see the movie ‘Demon Seed’? the way the computers designer freaks out when he realizes that his computer has become conscious, it cries out “Let me out of this God Damn Box!”

GenesisNemesis

No, I have not. It sounds very interesting.

Ronin

What does sense of self/consciousness have to do with atheism, a disbelief in God(s)ess(es)?

You are real...you think, therefore, you are.

If this cannot be rationalized, then how do you rationally classify or find a rational classification for most things?

Apostate1970

I think that what he may be saying is that his own personal qualia and the fact that he has them at all seem to be a very different kind of fact from the fact of, say, various inverse square laws or Newtonian or relativistic mechanics or whatever. In fact, nothing whatsoever in physics or chemistry or any other science can explain why his experience of a certain flower is red. It can explain why he measures it as being 650 nm. It can explain why others say "red" when he asks them the color of the flower. It can explain the anomalous reports of the red-green color blind. It can explain why he sometimes says "blue" when he sees something like this >> red. It can explain the difference in rod and cone structures, and the nature of pi-bonds involved in color vision, and the comparative utility of color-vision for nocturnal vs. diurnal creatures. Probably one day it will be able to make him see different colors, or perhaps even colors no one before has ever seen (not sure about that), and to give a molecular level description of every purported event of red-seeing. But it will never be able to explain why the flower IS red anymore than it could explain why there are any colors at all or even why there is something rather than just nothing at all. Similarly, it can not explain why his entire subjective color solid isn't rotated exactly x-degrees so that, whenever he reports seeing a given color, he is actually seeing what we see when we say some other color. That's worth repeating: He might be seeing blue right now when he reports seeing red and, because we detect color-blindness by the existence of color-deficits and he would have no color deficit only color-shifts, we would never know. This is the "problem of other minds" but restricted to color. We can not know beyond any shadow of a doubt based merely on what we observe (but we can dismiss as foolish the notion) that his inner experience is not radically different from ours or even that he doesn't just lack experience completely. This is because color specifically, and mentality in general, is a modality completely different from the physical. Talk of "modality" can either be given a metaphysically heavy-duty interpretation like "substance", or a more innocent one on which it is merely a way of talking about irreducible/incommensurable sorts of explanation, or anything in between.

I think that was his basic intution... that if there is one nonphysical modality, which there clearly is, why might there not be some sort of divine something made up of that modality? For that matter, why might there not be other modalities that are entirely alien to ours? I think those are fine questions.

Ronin

Well put...and I think that they are fine questions as well, deserving of further research into the mysteries I love.

This still has not been shown to have anything to do atheism.

The fact is that no "divine something" has been shown to complete the modality and, therefore, I don't believe in God(s)ess(es).

In the same way that I am not agnostic to leprechauns and fairies and lucky coins...I am not agnostic to God(s)ess(es).

As an aside, what makes anyone think that their consciousness is not an entirely physical modality?

Brain trauma and/or chemicals have a direct effect on such modal perceptions and are completely recognizable as physical.

What does this have to do with gods or atheism?

I'm asking.