where does our conscious experience come from?

[hiyymer]

Yes, the brain does the processing. I have yet to hear anyone deny that. I'm asking you how a brain could possibly process anything without getting stimuli from the external world. It's the "all of it" part of "conscious experience being created in the brain" I have a problem with.

When you look at the beautiful sunset...

Yes. We look at the sunset out there. No sunset, no perception of it, no conscious experience being created in the brain. Without external stimuli there would be no conscious experience.

the image is all doctored up to serve the need of the organism to survive.

So, could we say that our conceptualisations are ultimately determined by the need of the organism to survive? And are they not therefore ultimately determined by the external stimuli of the world we live in?

The scientific evidence says that reality is rational and caused and there can be no free will; no un-caused causes. If our conscious experience is only the representation of reality that the embodied brain uses to survive, then how could consciousness be useful if it does not also place the virtual reality show in relationship to it's own organism's life intentionality. In his book "Self Comes to Mind", Antonio Damasio argues that the experience of self is inherent to consciousness. When we engage objects in the world and attend to them, and leave our more extended "biographical self" for the moment, we are experiencing the "core self" that an animal without a big brain would experience. We perceive that there is a willful protagonist in the picture dealing with those objects. What "exists" is that the organism is using that conscious representation with its willful protagonist in order to respond as a fully caused mechanism. Agency with its free will is an invention of the brain that makes it possible to respond to its own life intentionality and the life intentionality of external organisms and forces in physical reality. Whenever we experience agency there exists an actual physical life intentionality arising out the mechanism of the life forms themselves in an unfathomably complex causal web; "will" without a "will-er". Our experience and the "our" in our experience is ultimately determined by the needs of the organism to survive.

That is why I find the question of God's existence to be of little relevance. If the life intentionality has meaning beyond the willful organisms themselves, then the brain will assign agency to it in order to understand and predict what cannot be and never will be understood in the face of its sheer complexity. To deny the relevance of God is to deny the nature of our experience; that there is more to it than the self protagonist and it is beyond the control of the self protagonist. I have joked that I get up in the morning and say "Thank you Brain", because I don't have a transparently real God so I can't say, "Thank you God". But it is clear to me that I have a protector and arbiter of my motivations and my life intention that is not "me". It is also nothing like the creator God of the religionists. How could life create itself?

[camoguard]

You're mixing different levels of observation. Seeing from your own five senses is enough to accomplish many tasks and we have sense based languages. But as we investigate reality we find that the underpinnings are counterintuitive. Both looking at things from your experience and looking at light as if it were simply a bunch of wavelengths are true especially when you separate your topics better. Shooting a bow and arrow doesn't involve a discussion on quantum physics. Principles of aim and practice will go along way.

And life did kind of create itself but basically it did that by being a chemical reaction that lead to another and that derivative state is one we classically redefine as life. We learned about it after the fact by being alive which is another example of our language feeling backwards to you since we have to experience life even before we understand the properties that allow it.

[mistermack]

I would point the person towards anybody who has lost a loved one to Alzheimer's.
The brain gradually "dies" and the "soul" gradually disappears at the same rate.
When the brain is mostly gone, the essence of the person is gone too, and all that is left is a vacant shell.
Brain = soul in my book.