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Comment by mistercow | Hacker News Reader

>It poses a real problem to (his) atheism

Theism hardly solves the problem of consciousness. It shuffles the question onto a deity without actually answering it.

To a substance, the soul, not a deity. And that, actually, is an answer.

The soul is an immaterial substance - the supernatural, unexplainable. It is, by its very nature, am unknowable question. How can that be an answer by any reasonable definition?

You should make a distinction between what exists, and can be named, and what can be known and explained. These are two distinct categories. There are things the exist and can be explained, but nothing allows us the say that there aren't things that can't be explained.

If what we known to exist and understand can't explain all observed data (our thoughts and inner experiences) than we are forced to infer the existence of something outside our understanding.

>If what we known to exist and understand can't explain all observed data (our thoughts and inner experiences) than we are forced to infer the existence of something outside our understanding.

Yes, but there is a difference between "outside our understanding" and "impossible to understand". There is simply no good reason to believe that consciousness is impossible to understand.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/iu/mysterious_answers_to_mysterious_...

Right now "the mind is the brain" theory still uses the magic of brain to explain what we observe. Everytime you hear someone saying "the brain does this or that", they act like it's a known thing and the mind is the brain and the brain has some yet unknown and unexplained properties that give rise to "this or that".

So, yeah, magic.

We can create things like brains (Bayes nets) that then react to stimuli like minds do, given all the experimental tests we can devise on "what minds are like." We might not fully understand the human mind, but that is not at all the same thing as having no idea how or why we think or observe or experience.

But in principle, the properties of the brain can be studied and tested. Maybe there are phenomena in the brain that are impossible to experiment on, but to say that this is the case definitively now is to give our imaginations far too much credit. Science is full of answers to questions that were once thought to be fundamentally unanswerable.

No, it's not an answer. It's just a name for a the thing we don't understand, and (often) an implication that that thing is unknowable. If I ask "how are we conscious", and you answer "because we have souls", you haven't given me any new information. It sounds like new information, but it doesn't change anything about the predictions I will make for how the world behaves. It doesn't constrain my view of the observable universe, so it's useless.

Edit: also, you're describing substance dualism, not theism. You can be a dualist but not a theist.

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