AccScience Publishing / BIJP / Volume 11 / Issue 1 / DOI: 10.18491/beytulhikme.1652
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RESEARCH ARTICLE

The Argument from Consciousness

Aykut Alper Yılmaz1
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1 ASBÜ, İslami İlimler Fakültesi, Felsefe ve Din Bilimleri Bölümü 06050, Ankara , Turkey
Received: 24 September 2020 | Published online: 10 February 2021
© 2021 by the Authors. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution -Noncommercial 4.0 International License (CC-by the license) ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ )
Abstract

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.
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Beytulhikme An International Journal of Philosophy, Print ISSN: 1303-8303, Published by AccScience Publishing