This is why religion persists. If a kind of personal spirituality fills the void left by leaving faith based religious view points I am totally fine with it. I think lots of people in modern times have this kind of spirituality and much less of blind religious faith. It makes sense to me why because many religions are being shown to be wrong about many things and rational people see through it because we know so much more now.
I guess I should say I am rather anti religious and I think the world would be better off without it. But its not that I don't not like religious people I have many friends family and co workers who are very religious. I just don't like the irrationality and sheer blood shed caused by religion. Also its just simply not true most of the time which bothers me from a moral honesty perspective.
A world without religion I think would require some kind of personal sense of meaning for people to not be depressed and unhappy and feel like life is pointless. If that importance and meaning comes from something that is called spiritual I am ok with that even if it turned out not to be true. As long as it didn't become another religion...
I wouldn't say your dogmatic just deeply confused about how science works. I tried offering you explanations for things that you clearly were missing the point about but you never replied or even acknowledged anything being said (and it took a while to write). But you just kept repeating the same phrases over and over again. Debating in that way is a waste of peoples time and that can create frustration (thats only reason some peoples responses toward you have been more hostile then normal plus the whole cancer thing is a touchy subject). Although I choose to ignore it now...
Are you MOP again?? :d :d :d Thats a joke and if your not MOP you won't get it but others will :d :d :d
Sorry to pick out your phrases Saidin
but you summed it up nicely and briefly the point where I begin to diverge from more spiritual mindsets. We've discussed this many times before so I am mainly replying to everyone else who agreed with you 
What I am specifically diverging from is this universal consciousness type reasoning. Maybe later I can explain why but first lets get into it (again
)Consciousness certainly is the big :?: when spiritual issues get brought up and the meaning of life etc. I am not going to claim that science understands how consciousness comes about because it doesn't. What science has shown us however is that aspects of the state of our brain functioning are involved in creating some of our conscious experiences. We know there is a connection.
People with brain injury are proof of this, people with mental illness are proof of this, psychedelic drugs are proof of this connection. There could be more to consciousness then our brain activity don't get me wrong I simply don't know. We can speculate about what that might be too and people should I think because it creates hypothesis that can be ruled out or proved correct. But what I think I know is that there must be a connection. There is no other acceptable and meaningful explanation for the data.
I think it works something like this...Consciousness is an emergent property of organized matter. I am sure that matter could take a form anatomically and biochemically different and still be conscious if the conditions are right. If we meet another intelligent species from another planet they will probably be different physiologically. But none of the individual parts are conscious. If we cut out neurons and throw them into a nutrient medium and do experiments on them they aren't conscious. They are responding the way they always do chemically (except that the environment has changed and this can give incorrect results but this is only one method people use to study this stuff). But my point is that no individual cells are conscious. No atom is conscious. No plant is conscious. No fungal network is conscious.
So then what is consciousness? I hate to use a computer analogy because they are often missing some major things although AI people will say they aren't but I think they are wrong for reasons I don't know enough about thats just my opinion right now. Consciounsess is kind of like the software of the brain. It depends intimately on the hardware (matter). So then all consciousness is is matter organized temporarily in a particular way. This is why non conscious individual cells can come together to make something that is conscious. This is why a rock is not conscious. This is why an atom is not conscious. Because it doesn't have the hardware arranged properly to be conscious.
Evolutionarily we can thus explain how aspects of consciousness slowly evolved. We can explain why other animals have aspects of consciousness like us and see the differences too. I think consciousness requires a certain kind of hardware although we don't know the details about what that hardware needs to do. We do see these anatomical differences too and the evolutionary relationships among them. Its quite clear then to me the difference between an unconscious organism like a plant and a conscious organisms like a human or monkey is all in the biochemical machinery and what it evolved to do. I think we will find more and more organisms are conscious and self aware in many unique and interesting ways but they need a certain kind of hardware that organisms that are definitely unconscious don't have.
