Frustrated Mess: Regarding pinching me...this is a stimuli that you would use to elicit a response that would demonstrate, in your opinion, evidence of consciousness, even though it might very well be nothing of the kind (the automaton argument again). Another kind of stimuli would, I assume, be language, but this still falls prey to the automaton option. Clearly, assuming that you have consciousness, there is no way that you could determine that I have consciousness. Unless we are willing to make a leap of faith on this matter, our solipsism is inescapable.
Now, imagine that we were to pinch or speak to an entity that we cannot hurt and that doesn't communicate through an understandable language, but whose behaviour still seems governed by the same mathematical regularities underlying our own, and who shares with us the same causal body from which our minds and consciousnesses have arisen. Whether or not we attribute consciousness and mind to this entity depends upon the same leap of faith that we use in our discussions with one another. When we're talking about the cosmos itself (rather than, for example, and earthquake), that is, when we're talking about the entirety of our causal body, I can see no reason for not granting it the same courtesy that I grant you when I assume that you aren't an automaton.
As for another one of your points, I'm not sure that human beings are the apex of evolution. I think it's altogether possible that our minds are part of a greater mind of such subtlety that we can't comprehend it, and that our own sentience is simply a localized expression of a much larger phenomenon. I also think it's possible that there are forms of organic life in the universe that are more neurologically sophisticated than we are...with the provision that their increased sophistication would still have required all of the pre-requisites that I outlined in my previous post (second generation stars, billions of years of evolution, etc).
Despite these possibilities, the fact remains that, as far as we know, our brains are the most complex objects in the universe. Even so, the brain seems to be an expression of mathematical regularities that, while not omnipresent, are certainly widespread enough within the universe as to suggest an underlying identity between the brain and the rest of existence, and to strongly suggest that mind and consciousness exist outside of the confines of our skulls.
Anyway, I'd like to thank you for something. Throughout this discussion you've been very respectful, while a number of other posters have resorted to name-calling, the blithe dismissal of my arguments by quoting Monty Python skits and referring to my arguments (and the arguments of physicists, philosophy professors, and neurologists) as "adolescent pseudo-philosophy", and--my favourite--the blanket condemnation of religion as being an expression of mental illness while simultaneously exalting atheists as paragons of rational impartiality. In doing so, I believe they've demonstrated that atheism can be a kind of exclusionary religiosity, a religiosity designed to reinforce one's own sense of metaphysical certainty and ideological superiority by means of the demonization of an out-group, and that leads to attempts to silence members of that out-group by attacking them on a personal level. I don't believe that atheism has to degenerate into such a debased religiosity--Noam Chomsky's and Albert Camus' atheism comes to mind as examples of honestly enlightened forms of atheism--but I think that, like all forms of religiosity, atheism is susceptible to such degeneration.
And unionist...do you really think it's possible to discuss metaphysics--which is what we inevitably have to address when we're talking about God--without bringing in metaphysical arguments? Or does it bother you when people expose and challenge the metaphysical assumptions that the positions of polemicists like Harris and Dawkins depend upon, but that they're loathe to admit?
[ 17 July 2007: Message edited by: Michael Nenonen ]