They are fictional characters, and as such they have whatever properties their creators have assigned to them in the canonical media in which they are described.
Category Archives: Origins of consciousness
Being an atheist, how can an explanation be given that a blind force has created something as “advanced” as human consciousness?
Evolution by natural selection is not a blind force, or a force of any kind. It’s a description of a process extending over billions of years, which involves millions of different forces operating in millions of different ways on millions of different individuals. Some of these forces are blind; others are directed and purposeful, and …
If you don’t believe in God, where do you think consciousness comes from?
The only thing that atheists have in common is that they lack belief in gods. Most of them don’t care where consciousness comes from. Those that do have many differing individual opinions. But in general, being rational people, atheists will tend to adopt the views put forwards by experts in the field—neuroscientists, psychologists, medical researchers …
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If humans can’t create immaterial things that don’t already exist, is that proof that God created our consciousness and it’s a soul?
Nobody can create ‘immaterial things’. ‘Immaterial’ in this context is a synonym for ‘non-existent’. Consciousness is not an object, but a (physical) process. It comes into operation in nearly all humans and some animals over a period of weeks or months, without any apparent intervention by gods. Humans cannot yet create an entity with non-biological consciousness, …
How do atheists refute the idea that atoms have sentience and awareness in the debate between Richard Dawkins and Deepak Chopra?
It’s not necessary to refute this claim, because currently it’s vacuous. It has no empirical content, it makes no testable predictions, and it has no connection with any of the findings we have from 500 years of physics, backed by billions of replicable experiments. If and when Chopra or anyone else comes up with an experiment which …
If matter is never destroyed but transformed, can “consciousness is never destroyed but merely transformed” make sense?
Consciousness is not an object or a substance, but a process. And though processes can be ‘transformed’ in various ways, doing so usually destroys the qualities that make that process what it is. For instance, the process of a car’s going forward can be transformed into its hitting a brick wall. But that puts an end to …
How do atheists explain Consciousness?
‘Atheists’ aren’t obliged to explain consciousness. That’s the job of psychologists and neuroscientists and some philosophers who are interested in the topic, and most of them are working hard and gaining substantial insights. A search on Amazon will reveal several hundred books on the topic available to those who genuinely want to learn. But it …
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