Abstract
The Argument from Consciousness
The question of what consciousness still remains a mystery. Its mystery stems from the difficulty in understanding how our conscious and subjective experiences –as we experience them– can be material or be produced by material things. In order to be cleansed of this mystery, some claim that these phenomenal qualities of consciousness that are the subject of experience are not real, or at least not as they seem to us, while others insist that they must exist. But when we are told that these experiences actually exist, we find it difficult to return to the original question and understand how they came out of matter and what their relation is to matter. At this point, the defenders of the evidence of consciousness argue that the difficulty in understanding the emergence of consciousness stems from naturalistic assumptions. The reason why we find it difficult to understand the emergence of consciousness and its relation to matter is that we assume that the universe has gone through just material processes and brought about a phenomenon such as consciousness. However, in a universe created by God, a conscious being, consciousness is more likely to arise. In this paper, I will introduce some versions of the argument from consciousness and examine some of the concerns regarding these arguments.
Keywords
Consciousness, the argument from consciousness, God, theism, naturalism.
