Neuroscience, the Person and God (by Philip Clayton)

[Alex]

Neuroscience, the Person and God: An Emergentist Account
by Philip Clayton
http://commonsenseatheism.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/Clayton-Neuroscience-the-person-and-god.pdf

This is a good article dealing with the conflict between science and religion.  Philip Clayton is an expert in this field.  The article is easy to read, comprehensive, and Christian-friendly.

19
"The view to be defended here, emergentist supervenience, holds that brains, social context, and mental properties exist; which means (if I am right) that the correct explanatory ontology has to introduce at least three levels of "really existing properties."

19
"...supervenience grants the dependence of mental phenomena on physical phenomena while at the same time denying the reducibility of the mental to the physical."

34
"...there is something in the case of qualia—an essentially first-person aspect—that makes them irreducible to the third-person scientific perspective. This aspect, which philosophers knew (and all human subjects know?) as consciousness or self-awareness, represents perhaps the single strongest argument on behalf of mental qualities as genuinely emergent in the sense defended in this paper. If Edelman is right, qualia cannot be exhaustively explained by neuroscience because they are the precondition for there being any scientific explanations in the first place."

[Alex]

Alex's comment:

The "subjective experience" (qualia) of a self-conscious robot (possible in the near future) is fully reducible to computer functions.  Why the subjective experience (qualia) of a self-conscious living organism (a molecular and neuronal robot) is irreducible to molecular and neuronal functions?  

Subjective experience includes, say, vision.  The subjective experience of blurred distant vision of a myopic is reducible to an elongated eyeball or a thin lens.  Other parts of subjective experience have been shown to be reducible to brain structures such as the subjective experience of a patient with split corpus callosum, and the subjective experiences of other patients with injuries and lesions in various parts of their brains.  In fact, it is these reported alternations in subjective experiences which prompts us to think that subjective experience can be reduced to brain structures and neuronal functions.