jaej

To me, what Og has said about free will is one of the biggest points against the existence of any deity. Provided that what he has said is truth (not that I have any reason to doubt, I'm just saying). It sounds good to me, and it makes an awful lot of sense.

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Bodhitharta

It actually makes no sense. Can you explain how and why you think it makes sense?

jaej

Can you tell me why the idea of consciousness as an illusion is so far-fetched?

It makes sense because, as Og has said, the cells in our brain (neurons) can fire only in response to stimuli. I have not studied this at all, all I have is what Og said, so if you want specifics I suggest you ask him.

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Og

Ahh yes. I see what you're saying then Bod. I'll just say you're wrong then if you think that a god must follow from the existence of consicousness.

When I say an illusion, I don't mean it doesn't exist. I just mean it seems to be something that its not. It seems that we are free agents who make choices and act as conscious agents when the OBSERVABLE REALITY is that we are not.

The brain is 100 billion neurons with hundreds of trillions of adaptive connections. Stimuli impinge upon your senses. Your brain has a structure that adapts over time to your environment. The only difference between you and the leaf on a tree or a rock or a computer is a level of complexity in your construction. NOT something distinctly different.

I say that your claim for a prime consciousness is false because of this. You have a poor idea of what consciousness is. It is a different SCALE of complexity of a sensory integration system. It is NOT a different KIND of thing. So unless your idea of "god" is that he was the singularity that it seems that all of this matter had exploded out of (i.e. the hindu brahman concept of God as all things) then this "proof" holds no water.

Consciousness is not something that came into being by some divine act. Consciousness evolved as beings of higher and higher complexity evolved based on selective pressures in their environments. As the complexity increased, we began to develop high bandwidth communication abilities.

We are highly complex machines communicating with one another using vibrations in the air and reflected photons and tactile sensation.

This is why I say that consciousness is no different from something like a tornado. Both "emerge" out of the universe based on the way its constructed. Both are a pattern of particles in the universe. Both obey the laws of physics that are expressed in meteorology (tornado) or biochemistry (consciousness).

So, with a proper understanding of what consciousness is, your "proof" is reduced to the innocuous statement that god IS all things including you and me and that we are all one (atONEment).

That's the essence of the quotes in my signature and I'll certainly agree with that.

If you're claiming that God is conscious like we are conscious and because we are conscious, that's just silly. You don't know what consciousness is by that reckoning.

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The self is not a fixed entity but a dynamic process of relationships
You & I, no distinction. - Tat Tvam Asi
Become Who You Are

Og

Yes, Free Will, Self, God, I, etc all exist. But they are internally perceived as illusions. The brain is a highly complex machine consisting of a massively complex network of cells that modify and process and store information based on the structure of your brain (as laid down by your genetics and development) and the stimuli that you receive over your life time (sensory and chemical inputs).

The idea of free will and self is really a myth. We all stimulate one another in many ways. You perceive that you have a choice, but what is really happening is that signals in your brain are being compared with other signals and they are causing a complex computation to occur which has a result that causes thought and motor behavior.

Like when dialing a telephone. You stimulate the keypad and a complex series of events causes your phone call to be routed through a large network to a target. There's no sense of "choice" in the way that you describe it.

I know that it "feels/seems" that way and that's fine. You can't escape that feeling and you can't give up the idea that you are a free agent.

I often use the example of the patient undergoing brain surgery. The doctor will use a hand held stimulus device to deliver small currents to portions of the patient's brain in order to map out his position relative to a tumor. The patient will respond in ways that do not seem to be under his conscious control. He will move his hand or have emotion or memory all based on the stimulus that the doctor gives.

No one would say that this person on the operating table is acting as a free agent when his brain is stimulated by the doctor.

When the head is sewn up, consciousness continues to exist. The stimulus on the brain now is only the 10s of millions of sensory neurons delivering stimulus to the brain and the chemical state of the body. But the "self" in the body is no more in control of its actions than when the doctor was stimulating his/her brain. They are moving under response to external stimuli and the state of the brain (which has to do only with previous states, not any sense of choice).

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Vi veri veniversum vivus vici. (By the power of truth, I, while living, have conquered the universe)
The self is not a fixed entity but a dynamic process of relationships
You & I, no distinction. - Tat Tvam Asi
Become Who You Are

lauraclay

Bod, are you saying that:
If you are concious (ie you can think, perceive the world around you, have opinions, make decisions), then at one point in time there must have been the first concious being, the original, the basis from which our conciousness is derived. That because we came from this conciousness, this conciousness is all-powerful, supreme, immortal? A deity?

jaej

Even supposing that our 'consciousness' is somehow different, unique, why must it follow that there is, as you put it, a 'Prime Conscious Being'?

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The An-Jel

Simply being aware of my own self doesn't mean I am consciousness. I am aware of my own personal drives as all organisms are but if they make me a conscious being or whether they make me simply an organic machine I can not
decipher just yet. So yes pondering the question leaves a lot more questions. Just because I have a computer in my head acting in this way doesn't mean it is conscious but simply following instructions nature has placed simply because that is the way nature is.

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Bodhitharta

If it is an illusion then your question is also an illusion.

Bodhitharta

It seems You do not understand Brahman nor what Krishna was talking about when he addressed arjuna on the battlefield. If you understand then you must understand That God is a literal being. Yet, you can meet Him through the Supreme "Personality" of Godhead.