What's This Thing Called Consciousness? (page 4)

frankiespeakin

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXew3bylKFM

Thanks for posting that Ray Kurzweil video, frankiespeakin, for to argue against our current models of how the brain operates (and from which consciousness is an emergent property of living matter, alone), without offering a BETTER model to replace it, simply out of one's personal wants and needs? THAT strikes me as the absolute pinnacle of hubris, which can only result from the greatest, most brazen source of arrogance of all: ignorance of what actually IS known. We're talking Taliban-level ignorance and hubris, those who proudly burn secular books for their dangerous thoughts within, committed and excused in the name of some deity.

It's not that science HATES the idea of conscious souls that can survive death and live on into an after-life: hey, it's a great idea (and someone should invent and patent a device to make it a reality; they'd make themselves a BILLIONAIRE)! It's just that there's ZERO evidence to believe it actually IS possible. And to the contrary, there's a long-standing history of ancient beliefs in the soul (Hebrew, nephesh) or spirit (Greek, spire) going back thousands of years that can survive death, but that doesn't make it true (and instead only constitutes an appeal to tradition from antiquity, with resistance to giving up the fantasy coming from social inertia).

Adam