As a programmer, I pose the question to fedoras: is a computer self-conscious because its programming had a boolean variable named isConscious that returns true? So then, why are human brains conscious of themselves if they're nothing but electrical impulses? Why do we experience things like sleepiness, hunger, thirst, etc. in a very highly integrated way if we're just meat robots with electrical impulses?
>but billions of neurons!
So if I wrote a piece of software with billions of variables, is the computer now conscious because it had billions of variables? Obviously, the inductive answer is no, it is not. If adding a simple boolean variable was not enough to make a computer program conscious, then it also follows that adding a second variable won't either. Inductively, we see that this is not how consciousness is endowed. If humans had no soul, you shouldn't even have a sense of consciousness. There would be no "you" - just a meat robot masquerading as a living thing. In the same way, we also don't experience pantheistic consciousness: you are not all humans at once. Can you even remember anything from before you were born? Obviously not - you were in a state of non-existence. In the same way, if atheism held true, consciousness wouldn't exist; you would be as you were before you were born: non-existing. There may be a body with your genetic code, with your name, with your memories, but it would be a robot autonomously acting out its programming. It would not really be aware that it was hungry, that it was tired, that it was thirsty. These would just be electrical impulses that drive state-based programming in the same way that a computer simply, mindlessly executes the statement:
if (hungry) {
this.FindFood();
}
Obviously, the computer does not actually experience a sense of being hungry; this is just a human abstraction for the electrical impulses that would pass through the computer circuits to drive further changes in circuit pathways. It is incredibly obvious that humans experience something more than this.
Computer science points to God.