THE ARGUMENT FROM CONSCIOUSNESS: A CRITICAL EXAMINATION

Download

10448836 - MA - Mehmet Özketen.pdf

Date

2022-2-21

Author

Özketen, Mehmet

Metadata

Show full item record

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Item Usage Stats

920
views

908
downloads

This thesis is devoted to critically examining the Argument from Consciousness. The Argument from Consciousness takes consciousness as its datum to arrive at the conclusion that there is a god. Accordingly, one of the premises of the argument draws either on the very existence of consciousness or the correlations between the mental and physical states. There are some different versions of the argument that have been proposed by different philosophers. These different versions of the argument are classified into two in the thesis. Accordingly, while the versions that deny a naturalist explanation of consciousness are classified into the first type, the versions that allow a naturalist explanation of consciousness are classified into the second type. Although the versions of the argument in the second type are stronger than the ones in the first type, both types of the argument have serious liabilities. Hence, in the thesis it is argued that the Argument from Consciousness is not a satisfactory justification for the belief that there exists a god.

Subject Keywords

god, consciousness, naturalism, theism, atheism

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/96077

Collections

Graduate School of Social Sciences, Thesis

Suggestions

OpenMETU
Core

An integrative explanation of action Benı, Majıd Davoody (Elsevier BV, 2020-12-01) The Predictive Processing Theory (PP) and its foundational Free Energy Principle (FEP) provide a unifying theoretical groundwork that subsumes theories of perception, cognition, and action. Recently Colin Klein (2018) contends that PP-FEP cannot explain adaptive action with the same force that they deal with perceptions. In his answer to the objection, Clark (2020) points out that FEP explains action, desire and motivation on the basis of minimisation of energy. I argue that this answer begs the question of...
THE CONCEPT OF AKRASIA IN ANCIENT GREEK PHILOSOPHY: PLATO, ARISTOTLE, AND THE STOICS Akkökler Karatekeli, Büşra; Turan, Şeref Halil; Department of Philosophy (2022-9) This thesis investigates the concept of akrasia, with particular attention given to its sundry interpretations in the philosophies of Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics. In this inquiry, I argue that these philosophers agree on the lack of knowledge of the akratic person, while they differentiate from each other as to what this missing knowledge is. Irrespective of their rejection or acknowledgement of akrasia due to their conceptions of the soul, I argue that Plato, Aristotle and the Stoics share the common ...
A naturalistic account of mental representation Aytekin, Tevfik; Sayan, Erdinç; Department of Cognitive Sciences (2007) My thesis is an attempt to develop a naturalistic account of mental representation based on the notion of causation. The thesis consists of two main parts. The first part (chapters II and III) develops an understanding of naturalization. According to my proposal, naturalization is a two-step process: in the first step a set of conditions is specified which are thought to be the essential aspects of the notion under study and in the second step a naturalistic system is proposed which is claimed to satisfy th...
THE ONTOLOGY OF CAPITAL: ON THE SHARED METHODOLOGICAL LIMITS OF MODERNIZATION THEORY AND ITS CRITICS Mücen, Barış (2018-06-01) This article argues that critical scholarship in historical studies has not overcome the methodological limits of modernization theory for failing to question the ontological principles that construct its object of analysis. I call these principles the ontology of capital and explicate them through Bourdieu's conceptualization of the field and capital. I argue that this ontology is established according to a distribution model in which social entities come into the analysis with the amount and value of the ...
The Code Model of Biosemiotics and the Fate of the Structuralist Theory of Mental Representation Davoody Benı, Majıd (2017-04-01) In this paper I am advocating a structuralist theory of mental representation. For a structuralist theory of mental representation to be defended satisfactorily, the naturalistic and causal constraints have to be satisfied first. The more intractable of the two, i.e., the naturalistic constraint, indicates that to account for the mental representation, we should not invoke "a full-blown interpreting mind". So, the aim of the paper is to show how the naturalistic and causal constraints could be satisfied. It...

Citation Formats

M. Özketen, “THE ARGUMENT FROM CONSCIOUSNESS: A CRITICAL EXAMINATION,” M.A. - Master of Arts, Middle East Technical University, 2022.