Sunday School

[Reg the Fronkey Farmer]

Breaking down Trump’s religion-heavy State of the Union.

Given that the Republican Party is now part of Trump Inc. it was refreshing to find an honest Christian in Mitt Romney though not all Christians would agree.

The year the religious right moved into the White House.

The Church of England has been considering gay sex in a pastoral setting. Maybe they can ask Franklin Graham for advice as he has given it much consideration too.

Everything you know about the Gospel of Paul is likely wrong.

American Atheists’ president on how the media mishandles the nonreligious.

The God Delusion is a hit in Saudi Arabia.

This weeks’ Woo: The vulgarity of alternative medicine.

Climate Crisis: Some myths about climate change.

Investigating Homo floresiensis and the myth of the ebu gogo. How did the last Neanderthals live?

12 facts about gravity and 5 myths about the Big Bang.

This article argues that consciousness cannot have evolved so listen to your inner voice when you think about that.

Understanding the complexities of misunderstanding each other.

Did the chicken come first or is it turtles all the way down?

What if we were to evolve beyond nature? Would we still find our final moment to be euphoric?

Unusual monster galaxy discovered from early universe.

The reason Intelligent Design is not scientific is because it is part of faith, not science.

Long Read: Hope is an embrace of the unknown.

This week I am reading this book: Not Born Yesterday.

We pause to remember Lina Bin Mhenni.

Some photographs taken last week.

While you are waiting for the kettle to boil…..

Coffee Break Video: The magic of kindness during the Holocaust. Atheist Debates: The Mirror Question.

[Reg the Fronkey Farmer]

Have a great week everyone!

[Simon Paynton]

Bernardo Kastrup defines consciousness like this:

phenomenal consciousness—i.e. our ability to subjectively experience the world and ourselves

Our experience of the world comes to us through our sensory inputs.  These provide us with information about our environment.  Seems like an evolved function to me.

[Strega]

Thanks Reg!

[Davis]

Nice sunday school

[PopeBeanie]

The Mirror Question: I understand that the mirror question is just an example of how people “ask the wrong question”. Meanwhile, I didn’t understand his explanation for how to ask or answer the mirror question properly. And I felt dumb. A little. But I saw an explanation I can understand in one of the comments:

Richard Feynman explained that it reverses front-to-back, something like this: There’s the left hand, touch the mirror, there’s your head, touch the mirror, there’s your right hand, touch the mirror.

So that’s not what’s backward, what’s backward is that you’re seeing the front of you instead of the back of you. If you saw the back of you, right hand, head, left hand, each touch the mirror, and if it was to the back of your head and the back of your hands, like you were standing in line behind yourself, then it would look right.

What’s reversed in a mirror is front-to-back.

[PopeBeanie]

Simon Paynton wrote:

Our experience of the world comes to us through our sensory inputs.  These provide us with information about our environment.  Seems like an evolved function to me.

He seems to be focusing on that one component of consciousness, phenomenal consciousness, ignoring roles of other components of consciousness and how they all interact with each other and probably evolved together. I don’t get his reasoning.

Like you said, sensory input is essential to survival. IMO, feeling that input and being able to process those feelings and make decisions based on them, along with being able to process “Access Consciousness” or possibly other as yet unspecified components of consciousness (e.g. language) must contribute to the overall robustness of survival.

Again (only IMO, as I’ve mentioned before), it’s the software that has significantly enhanced our consciousness, and survival. I.e. culture developed on top of the hardware (brain), which has greatly enhanced many of our present day conscious experiences, and our ability to shape our individual and group fates. And perhaps it’s the explosive or unbridled cultural-software updates our generations are subjected to– without the ability to understand or explain them rationally–that makes our own modern consciousness seem so mysterious, or ethereal (for too many of us). Our brains did NOT evolve (genetically) to handle all those updates.

[Author]

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