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Comment by derleth | Hacker News Reader

> Most of them start out by discussing the dogma of science, which is roughly as follows:

They aren't dogma. They can be refuted with sufficient evidence. The failure of the religious to provide such evidence means they haven't yet been refuted. (It also says nasty things about the religious, but propriety forbids me from being more specific.)

> there is good reason to believe that many (or all) of them are wrong

What reasons? Be precise enough and you get a Nobel Prize and eternal adulation.

> they actually look a lot like the four noble truths of buddhism

Only to someone who totally misunderstands both science and Buddhism.

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"They can be refuted with sufficient evidence."

Except for that they can't, because everyone who believes in science just says that the reason they believe that science will be able to explain everything is that it has explained everything so far. This is just begging the question, and it's clear that no matter how much evidence there is that there are some things that science can't explain these will just be written off by those who have 'faith' in science. You can go over to r/science or r/atheism and find literally thousands of examples of this.

>What reasons? Be precise enough and you get a Nobel Prize and eternal adulation.

The obvious one would be that there is absolutely nothing to suggest that consciousness is material in nature. But again, the true believers refute this by listing all the other things that we didn't understand until science came up with some explanation, and saying that therefor science will most likely also be able to explain consciousness one day.

> This is just begging the question, and it's clear that no matter how much evidence there is that there are some things that science can't explain these will just be written off by those who have 'faith' in science.

You don't have any examples of this in this post, though.

> there is absolutely nothing to suggest that consciousness is material in nature

Wrong. The existence of psychoactive drugs and the effectiveness of fMRI scans disproves this statement.

EDITED TO ADD: What evidence would make you change your mind about this statement in particular?

The question in philosophy is "how does consciousness arise from the physical?" While you can claim it's due to some complex interaction in our brains, and while we have significant evidence that this is the case, I don't think that answers the question. Philosophers want to know the mechanism which produces the experience. Arguing that consciousness (or experience) is physical is a tough thing to do from first principles because of our own intuitive sense of it.

For example, how is it that the electrical signals in our brains produce "us" while electrical signals in other things don't produce conscious things? How are they different? What would it take to make a circuit "conscious"?

I can't give you good definitions for consciousness or experience and I can't even say that the question(s) make(s) sense. I'm just trying to give you give you a picture of what some people think.

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