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Comment by theferalrobot | Hacker News Reader

>but people who suspect that's not the full story, well that's pointless to debate, they should use my framework for discussion

You can believe whatever you want, use whatever framework you want (religion, spirituality, science etc). I'm just pointing out that it is pointless to debate between the two because they fundamentally disagree about how to inquire about the world and answer questions like this. Everyone in this debate is talking past each other without acknowledging that they are starting from two very different positions and sets of definitions.

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it sounds like you put yourself in a class of people who are perfectly rational, and therefore anything that you can't think of doesn't exist, and anybody who thinks about those things is a mystic.

you are making a mistake like physicists who believed "God does not play dice with the world" at the dawn of quantum mechanics or "time is a constant, not the speed of light" at the dawn of relativity.

You have no idea where consciousness comes from, stop assuming you do, it's poor science.

(For the record, I'm sure the integral of my history of atheism is strictly greater than yours, mentioning since that seems to be the subtext of your argument.)

I think you are completely missing what I am saying and you also seem to be fallaciously appealing to skepticism (are you a global skeptic [0]?). Sure you can say ‘but there is so much we don’t know’, I’m not arguing we know everything. That is not in any way what I am saying.

I am saying it is pointless to appeal to such things. If we always appealed to skepticism science would never advance because everything would be too unknowable. We get to define what words like consciousness means, so we can intentionally define to be within the realm of scientific inquiry. Most people probably define consciousness outside of scientific realm of inquiry (notions of a soul etc) and that is fine, but at least in the first definition there can be scientific debate.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_skepticism

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