Religion, the vagueness of consciousness and seeing things when you're blind.

Ian has been reading. Dangerous, but sometimes it can't be helped. So we have a chat. First about religion and belief and then about consciousness and awareness.

First up - Tanya Luhrmann's take on religion in her book How God Becomes Real. I met her when I chaired last year's Holberg debate. Her take is that to simply say, 'people who believe in a god are mistaken or stupid' does nothing to help undertand why people believe, nor why many of them say it helps them to believe . She wants to understand religious belief not dismiss it. I'm not a believer but I found her work to be insightful and fascinating. Her point is that "...the puzzle or religion is not the problem of false belief, but the question of how gods and spirits become and remain real to people and what this real-making does for humans."

Next we look briefly at 'Vagueness and the Evolution of Consciousness' by Michael Tye. It's slim little book but don't let that fool you. It might look like a puddle but in fact it's a well. One of those rare science/philsophy books where an academic deep-thinker says, 'I have been wrong all these years and here's why.' Basically he began as a staunch supporter of the view that consciousness comes from witing togeher ordinary non-conscious stuff in a clever way. He now thinks this is unworkable and shows why. Leaving him to join the growing number of pan(proto)psychist people who think consciousness has to be a fundamental property of matter.

And this leads us to a discussion about how there can be a difference between what your mind/brain can 'know' and what you become 'consiously' aware of. It's a fact that your mind registers, and sometimes even 'knows', a whole lot more than you do. We are all in some respects the Ronald Reagans of our own brain - just the fellow who gets handed the memos and reads them out for the public. He takes the credit but does none of the work.

I jest but blind sight experiements among many others show how the brain/mind contains far more than we are consiouesly aware of. Which raises questions about the self and its role.

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