Thread: Gods Cannot Have Consciousness

Originally Posted by O'nus

There is no evidence of what? That awareness is a function of the brain? All of neuroscience shows this. Just google it. I think you are trying to distinguish something "special" of awareness compared to consciousness. If you can distinguish the two, please do.

You have my position reversed.

Yes, awareness is a simple process of gathering information from the senses. Thats what I said. Consciousness, on the other hand has no known (empirically speaking) cause or purpose and is subtly but profoundly different from awareness.

What does it even mean to be conscious? How does one recognize consciousness in other things? If a conscious being was unable to communicate with you in any way, how would you become aware of its consciousness? If something does communicate to you that it is conscious, does that necessarily mean it is true?

Consciousness, simply, is the knowledge of self. We can guess at how humans arrive at this knowledge, through awareness of the things around us, but a god embodies all things (in my view anyway) and so would seemingly have a knowledge of itself (if one can use such a term to encompass everything) through the innate knowledge of its creation. The 'birth' of reality and the god would immediately be accompanied by all knowledge of the totality of existence.

I'd like to make it clear also that this is only to argue against your assertion that consciousness requires time. I take issue with many of your other assertions as well.

For instance, much of this argument is based on your idea of 'static energy' which I don't see as a priori and must itself be justified. In my view, the statement, "what caused kinetic energy to begin? During the timeless state of static energy, an event must occur to cause motion; kinetic energy" makes no sense. How can an event occur in a timeless moment? Any causal chain of events would require a timeline, and this includes any beginning you might attempt to argue for. Even without the issue of time, how can you expect to rationalize any beginning for a causal chain? What caused the event that caused motion? What caused that and what caused that? There is no end to this line of inquiry.

I have a question. Do you believe that consciousness requires a brain? If the answer is yes, then that would be a much simpler argument against the consciousness of a god. If the answer is no, how else might the knowledge of self be contained? How else could knowledge in general be contained? I read a sci-fi book once that was based on the idea that the universe was only a storage of information; a history of sorts of the "real reality" that had preceded it. Disregarding the history aspect of it, it is still easy to imagine the universe as a compendium of all existing information. If god contains the universe, god contains all information, and with it, the knowledge if self (god's self being all information).