AN INVINCIBLE ARGUMENT FOR THE AFTERLIFE (THIS IS IT!!!)--PART ONE

ABSOLUTELY INVINCIBLE, UNDEFEATABLE ARGUMENT FOR THE EXISTENCE OF THE AFTERLIFE!



(Atheists, Run To Mama!)

By Jay M. Brewer

The non-existence of God
and gods is merely the non-existence of external world dwelling, non-brain-created persons responsible for the form, behavior, and fate of the natural world.

Godless myth, then, regarding the origin and nature of the universe holds there are no persons not requiring brains for consciousness and the external world (the realm that exists outside all human, animal, and insect consciousness) contains only mind-independent objects and events.  Beyond the borders of Earth lie only the entities and operations of astronomy, formed in the early universe by aggregations of fundamental particles.
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For example, consider the calculation by astronomer Fred Hoyle, often referred to by creationists, that the odds against DNA assembling by chance are 1040,000 to one (Hoyle, 1981). This is true, but highly misleading. DNA did not assemble purely by chance. It assembled by a combination of chance and the laws of physics.

(Criticism: Stenger is splitting hairs. Surely Hoyle implied that physical laws factor in chance's formation of DNA.  Hoyle's ultimate meaning is that prior to the existence of DNA the laws of physics, such as they are, guaranteed the possibility rather than inevitability of DNA.  DNA might not have formed if things went another way: thus DNA assembled by chance)

Without the laws of physics as we know them, life on earth as we know it would not have evolved in the short span of six billion years. The nuclear force was needed to bind protons and neutrons in the nuclei of atoms; electromagnetism was needed to keep atoms and molecules together; and gravity was needed to keep the resulting ingredients for life stuck to the surface of the earth.

These forces must have been in operation within seconds of the start of the big bang, 10-15 billion years ago, to allow for the formation of protons and neutrons out of quarks and their storage in stable hydrogen and deuterium atoms. Free neutrons disintegrate in minutes. To be able to hang around for billions of years so that they could later join with protons in making chemical elements in stars, neutrons had to be bound in deuterons and other light nuclei where energetics prevented their decay.

Gravity was needed to gather atoms together into stars and to compress stellar cores, raising the core temperatures to tens of millions of degrees. These high temperatures made nuclear reactions possible, and over billions of years the elements of the chemical periodic table were synthesized as the by-product.

When the nuclear fuel in the more massive, faster-burning stars was spent, the laws of physics called for them to explode as supernovae, sending into space the elements manufactured in their cores. In space, gravity could gather these elements into planets circling the smaller, longer-lived stars. Finally, after about ten billion years, the carbon, oxygen, nitrogen and other elements on a small planet attached to a small, stable star could begin the process of evolution toward the complex structures we call life.

-Victor J. Stenger, Humans, Cockroaches, and the Laws of Physics

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That deaf, dumb and blind kid
sure plays a mean pinball…!

-Elton John, Pinball Wizard


The irony, however, is that Big Bang cosmogony, every fact of astronomy, geography, and biology, and every physical law observed in everyday experience or assumed to exist in the atomic and subatomic realm are figments of human imagination: manifestations of the percept.

The Percept And The Distal Object

Let's face it: a godless universe and the brain's ability to generate consciousness are upon observation only ideas within the human mind.  Vital to any argument against a godless universe and the brain's ability to create consciousness, therefore, is acknowledgment that any entity other than consciousness itself is apparently fictional, as existence does not appear or manifest in any form save that of a person and that which the person experiences.

Given that consciousness is the only form of existence that "shows up", and does so only in the form of a person and that person's sensory perceptions, emotions, and ideas--any concept or entity entailed as something other than a person and that which the person experiences appears, within existence, as a figment of the person's imagination.  

It happens, however, that the person believes in the independent, objective existence of the imaginary entity or state of affairs despite the fact they may not exist.

(They may not exist because the only thing for which there is direct evidence of existence is a person and that which the person privately experiences.  Everything else may or may not exist, despite the fact one wholeheartedly believes in their existence.)

Crucial, then, to argument against a godless world and the ability of the brain to create consciousness is the existence of the percept--as opposed to the fiction of the distal object in the Process of Perception:

The process of perception begins with an object in the real world, termed the distal stimulus or distal object. By means of light, sound or another physical process, the object stimulates the body's sensory organs. These sensory organs transform the input energy into neural activity—a process called transduction. This raw pattern of neural activity is called the proximal stimulus.  These neural signals are transmitted to the brain and processed.  The resulting mental re-creation of the distal stimulus is the percept.



An example would be a shoe. The shoe itself is the distal stimulus. When light from the shoe enters a person's eye and stimulates the retina, that stimulation is the proximal stimulus.  The image of the shoe reconstructed by the brain of the person is the percept. Another example would be a telephone ringing. The ringing of the telephone is the distal stimulus. The sound stimulating a person's auditory receptors is the proximal stimulus, and the brain's interpretation of this as the ringing of a telephone is the percept. The different kinds of sensation such as warmth, sound, and taste are called sensory modalities.

-Wikipedia, Perception

Science scoffs at the seeming irrationality of religious belief due to science’s reliance upon sensory perception as opposed to religion’s reliance upon imagination supported by faith.  The facts and discoveries of science are readily observed and lawfully reproducible: the existence of gravity is established by releasing a pencil, repeatedly, from the hand to invariably observe it fall to the floor.  The laws of biology are observable upon demand, informing the processes and decisions of medical procedure.

Sensory experience, however, is believed to have external, invisible sources that themselves, rather than sensory perception, establish the objective truth of scientific knowledge.  Sensory perception is merely the human side of knowledge.  The facts and discoveries of biology, physiology, physics, geology, and so on mean nothing if they're only aspects of a non-embodied consciousness without an external, mind-independent foundation: science ultimately relies for its truth upon the existence of mind-independent objects and events in the external world, the distal objects of the Process of Perception.

That is, godless belief regarding the natural world vitally depends upon the existence of mind-independent, external world-dwelling doppelgangers of the content of visual perception, the substance of which purportedly existed for eternity prior to the existence of brains and exists for eternity following the extinction of consciousness.

It is the life support system of godless belief (unless an atheist wishes to breathe in philosphical space without aid in the manner of atheistic Phenomenalist Ernst Mach).

Without mind-independent, external world-dwelling doppelgangers of the content of visual perception and the brain’s ability to channel forces from these doppelgangers to produce a sensory replica of their shape, form, and behavior--a human being (as the most relevant example of conscious being) is in actuality either a construct of John Stuart Mill and Ernst Mach's Phenomenalism or a floating non-embodied mind.  



Unless one is a dualist of a very strong variety, beliefs must be reflected in the functioning of a system – perhaps not in behavior, but at least in some process.  

If...change in cognitive contents were not mirrored in a change in functional organization (of the brain), cognition would float free of internal functioning like a disembodied mind.

-David J. Chalmers, Absent Qualia, Fading Qualia, Dancing Qualia

This non-embodied mind, without distal objects in the external world to form the model or template that visual perception imitates or represents, experiences only a 'simulated' or invented reality in which the non-embodied consciousness visually, proprioceptively, and exteroceptively experiences itself as existing "within" a 'body' that obeys “laws of biology”.  The non-embodied consciousness experiences itself surrounded by an environment that obeys “laws of physics”.

However, there are no laws of biology or physics in mind-independent form in the external world: “physical laws” and the “physical world” are only constructs protruding from the mind of the non-embodied mind or spirit, an invisible, intangible consciousness that is the true form of the human being.

Flip the philosophical coin, then, to stare at both sides.  

There is Option B, in which humans are non-embodied minds experiencing an arbitrary, invented (albeit logically constructed and lawfully predictable) world that exists only in and as part of the person's mind.  This is what exists if there are no distal objects or mind-independent doppelgangers of the content of visual perception.  

Or there is Option A: that there are mind-independent objects and events in the external world that are represented and mimicked in brain-generated consciousness, and brain-generated consciousness comes into and goes out of existence.

The salient point is that there is no evidence of the existence of mind-independent doppelgangers of the content of visual perception, as they are entailed as things outside persons and that which the persons experience, and a person can only experience itself and that which it experiences at the current moment.

Given the above, one may argue that dogged insistence upon the existence of distal objects arises not from evidence or proof of their existence (this is impossible, given that existence only appears and manifests in the form of percepts), but incredulity at the notion that only consciousness exists.

But in the end, despite the strongest arguments and protestations of the materialistic atheist, distal versions of the natural world, mind-independent doppelgangers of the content of visual perception are, like God, supported only by faith:

It still remains a scandal to philosophy and to human reason in general
that the existence of things outside us (from which we derive the whole
material of knowledge, even for our inner sense) must be accepted merely
on faith, and that if anyone thinks good to doubt their existence, we are
unable to counter his doubts by any satisfactory proof.

-Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason

(Note: For anyone questioning the use of the term: ‘doppelganger’, the term describes objects and events in the external world that are, in godless myth, formed by atoms that do not depend upon the brain in order to exist, and that would happily continue to exist despite a hypothetical universal absence of consciousness.

Doppelgangers are the external sources of the shape, form, and behavior of visually perceived objects and events—the ‘things outside us from which we derive the whole material of knowledge, even for our inner sense’ [Kant].)
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The godless position is powerfully stated by secular philosopher Bertrand Russell in A Free Man’s Worship, 1903:

That Man is the product of causes that had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve individual life beyond the grave; that all the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins — all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand.

That’s well and good, Mr. Russell, but the objective truth that:

(i) man is the product of causes that had no prevision; that his growth, hopes, fears, loves, and beliefs are but the accidental collocation of atoms;

(ii) no intensity of thought and feeling can preserve individual life beyond the grave;

(iii) we are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system

—vitally depends upon the existence of mind-independent doppelgangers of atoms, the solar system, and the absence of consciousness in the external world—things that leave no trace of existence in nature (as nature only appears in the form of a person and that which the person experiences), and whose existence is only supported by faith.
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To defeat godless mythology, then, one need only remember the most elementary fact about the nature of existence: that it appears only in the form of a person and that which the person experiences, and provide argument demonstrating the inherent implausibility in belief that:

1. The brain has the ability to create consciousness.  External world-dwelling doppelgangers of brains are believed to somehow have the ability to bring consciousness into existence from non-existence by no other means than moving electrons from point A to B along the biological material of neurons.

2. Consciousness is the only thing in the whole of existence that can come into and go out of existence.  All other things are eternal, as everything other than consciousness is made up of energy that, according to the First Law of Thermodynamics ‘is neither created nor destroyed but merely changes form’.

3. There are mind-independent, external world dwelling doppelgangers of the content of visual perception that transmit forces upon external world doppelgangers of the body and brain to induce the brain to produce visual representatives of the external objects and events.

4. Direct Realism exists.  Direct Realism is the view that the objects and events of perception are direct observations into the external world.
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I. Defeat of Godless Mythology via Argument Against The Brain’s Ability To Create Consciousness



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“Those are synapses, electric impulses in the brain that carry all the messages.  They determine everything a person says, does or thinks form the moment of birth...to the moment of death.”

-Dr. Edwin Jenner, The Walking Dead-Season 1 Episode 6: TS-19

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If nothing else remember this: consciousness cannot be mistaken for the brain. In spite of every complex definition of consciousness, consciousness is simply someone experiencing and that which someone experiences.  This is something completely different from and cannot be confused for a baseball glove shaped clump of neurons in a skull.  If neurons do not magically fade or wink out of existence in response to someone no longer experiencing a previous experience or no longer experiencing due to death (according to godless myth regarding the fate of consciousness at death) brains and experiences cannot be one and the same.

-Author

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Oh, what a strange magic
Oh, it's such a strange magic
Gotta strange magic
Yeah I gotta strange magic

-Electric Light Orchestra, Strange Magic


Godless myth regarding the existence of consciousness holds that if there are no brain-independent persons, consciousness did not exist before brains, the only objects known to form consciousness.

...it seems equally counterintuitive that a mass of 10^{11} appropriately organized neurons should give rise to consciousness, and yet it happens.

-David J. Chalmers, Absent Qualia, Fading Qualia, Dancing Qualia

If one wishes to contest the belief that brains create consciousness, one need only argue against the magic of Creation ex nihilo, Mind-Independent Externalism (that states that there are mind-independent objects and events in the external world that are the source of the nature of sensory perception and all material knowledge) and Direct Realism (that states that when one perceives objects and events, one directly observes objects and events as they appear in the External World).

The simplest thing to understand in regard to the belief that the physical brain is responsible for consciousness is that it is held that no consciousness can float free of the brain like a disembodied or non-embodied mind: every conscious experience a person shall have from birth to death must be accounted for as caused by some neural circuit in the brain.

David J. Chalmers simplifies the neural side of the equation:

What does it mean to be a neural correlate of consciousness? At first glance, the answer might seem to be so obvious that the question is hardly worth asking. An NCC is just a neural state that directly correlates with a conscious state, or which directly generates consciousness, or something like that. One has a simple image: when your NCC is active, perhaps, your consciousness turns on, and in a corresponding way. But a moment's reflection suggests that the idea is not completely straightforward, and that the concept needs some clarification.

As a first pass, we can use the definition of a neural correlate of consciousness given in the program of the ASSC conference. This says a neural correlate of consciousness is a "specific system in the brain whose activity correlates directly with states of conscious experience". This yields something like the following:

A neural system N is an NCC if the state of N correlates directly with states of consciousness.

The first option is that the states in question are just those of being conscious and of not being conscious. The corresponding notion of an NCC will be that of a neural system whose state directly correlates with whether a subject is conscious or not. If the NCC is in a particular state, the subject will be conscious. If the NCC is not in that state, the subject will not be conscious.

This is perhaps the idea that first comes to mind when we think about an NCC. We might think about it as the "neural correlate of creature consciousness", where creature consciousness is the property a creature has when it is conscious, and lacks when it is not conscious.

A related idea is that of the neural correlate of what we might call the background state of consciousness. A background state is an overall state of consciousness such as being awake, being asleep, dreaming, being under hypnosis, and so on. Exactly what counts as a background state is not entirely clear, as one can divide things up in a number of ways, and with coarser or finer grains, but presumably the class will include a range of normal and of "altered" states.

We can think of this as a slightly more fine-grained version of the previous idea. Creature consciousness is the most coarse-grained background state of consciousness: it is just the state of being conscious. Background states will usually be more fine-grained than this, but they still will not be defined in terms of specific contents or modalities.

A neural correlate of the background state of consciousness, then, will be a neural system N such that the state of N directly correlates with whether a subject is awake, dreaming, under hypnosis, and so on. If N is in state 1, the subject is awake; if N is in state 2, the subject is dreaming; if N is in state 3, the subject is under hypnosis; and so on.

There is much more to consciousness than the mere state of being conscious, or the background state of consciousness. Arguably the most interesting states of consciousness are specific states of consciousness: the fine-grained states of subjective experience that one is in at any given time. Such states might include the experience of a particular visual image, of a particular sound pattern, of a detailed stream of conscious thought, and so on. A detailed visual experience, for example, might include the experience of certain shapes and colors in one's environment, of specific arrangements of objects, of various relative distances and depths, and so on.

-David J. Chalmers, What Is A Neural Correlate of Consciousness?

Imagine that! If every conscious experience a person shall have from birth to death requires the pre-existence and functional capacity an NCC, taking the logic to the extreme there is an NCC residing in the brain prepared, before the fact, to create a possible future involving the most outrageous, perverse, and traumatic experience.

At the beginning of a traumatic day, a person goes about it happy and at peace, unaware that blind, unknowing mind-independent objects in the external world and blind, unknowing NCCs accidentally wait in the wings to bring about a future state involving visceral rage, horror, and pain at the unexpected death of loved ones.



Amazingly, according to this logic, each neural circuit corresponding to each experience happens to possess or immediately gain in the nick of time the neural ability to successfully form each experience prior to the appearance of the experience.  Just think: there is a neural circuit sleeping (inactive as of yet) in one’s brain prepared to form one’s experience of and reaction to one’s own death!

(Imagine the NCCs waiting silently in the brains of every person in the 9-11 attacks, as they rose in the morning, shaved, showered, ate breakfast, and strode suitcase in hand toward their plane or hopped in the car to drive toward the World Trade Center for another day's work.)

This ability of the brain to form future experiences and form experiential or mental representations (percepts) of states of the external world that have not yet occurred (Question: How are brains neurally wired that they “know”, before the external world itself, what the external world is about to form?  The brain must have this ability in order to keep up with the real-time evolution of the external world: the brain can’t be allowed to say to the external world: “Sorry, that one got by me: you failed to grant me neural circuits capable of predicting and creating a sensory replica of what you’re doing now”) is here called: Neural Predeterminism.

Neural Predeterminism

Taking the logic that brains create consciousness and that an NCC is necessary for any conscious experience to exist, one can conclude that the brain has the power to predetermine every future event.  Provided the brain does not encounter a future involving either non-fatal consciousness-incapacitating dysfunction (coma) or destruction (death), the brain possesses NCCs that by chance, happen to have the ability to form the experience of every possible future that could occur or be chosen from birth to death.

For example, suppose an individual instantiates the thought: "God does not exist!" on the individual's fortieth birthday, during a moment of reflective catharsis on a morning stroll on the beach.



If the brain is responsible for consciousness, the relevant NCC responsible for the thought "God does not exist!" happened to reside in the individual's brain before the day, time, and event in question.  The NCC was "ready to rock and roll" in this individual from birth, some time before, or in the nick of time before the act as neurons formed and set up connections and necessary chemical voltages for action potentials, etc. seconds before the fateful thought.

(Although the idea of NCCs forming "in the nick of time" seconds before an experience is included here for amusement, it is logically unlikely that neurons, neural connections, and intra-neural chemical capacity for action potentials can form [given the speed and immediacy of new experience] in seconds, minutes, or even hours prior to an experience.)

The salient point is that if brains create consciousness and every conscious experience from birth to death requires the pre-existence of a neural circuit that “just so happens” to have the ability to create that particular lifetime of experiences, persons are NEURALLY PREDETERMINED.   One’s entire destiny in terms of the unknown experience that shall occur 5 minutes from now, 10 minutes from now, 20 years from now are neurally represented and symbolized in the brain before the fact.  If neural circuits are not set before the fact to give rise to a possible future, no particular experience occurring in the future, even five minutes in the future, could exist.

Unfortunately, denial and “debunking” of Neural Predeterminism involves only use of the “Nuh-uh”: groundless, blanket denial of its existence.  When one invokes the “Nuh-uh”, one is simply denying the existence of something without providing convincing  argument for why it doesn’t or shouldn’t exist.  For example, Russell’s statement in A Free Man’s Worship above is nothing but an eloquent “Nuh-uh”.

(Note: When it comes to the nature of things and the goings-on in the external world, denials of existence can only lie impotently upon the bed of the “Nuh-uh”.  To disprove the existence of something, that something should appear to consensus reality in the form of public sensory perception of the object or person: if the thing does not appear to consensus reality and continually fails to do so, it may be logically inferred it does not exist.

When it comes to things and events in the external world, however, one cannot expect something in the external world to appear or manifest to sensory perception, particularly if the thing is entailed to be something that is not or does not consist of subjective experience like, say, mind-independent doppelgangers of the content of visual perception.)

To defeat Neural Predeterminism, one need only provide convincing argument against the general ability of the brain to create conscious experience, which effectively tosses NP through guilt by association alongside it into the falls of implausibility.

Argument Against The Ability Of The Brain To Create Consciousness



For the person boldly and confidently insisting that consciousness can only exist if and when there are brains, when considering how neurons, which are specialized cells, could produce something that is neither a cell nor any biological material but ephemeral experience, one wonders if the person has truly thought things through.  If one believes subjective experience did not exist prior to brains and ceases to exist at death, one is effectively saying that consciousness—subjective experience—is something that comes into and goes out of existence.

Following Chalmers (in a different context), if there is not some pre-existent material out of which to make conscious experience, the relationship between NCCs and the types of conscious experience that NCCs “just so happen” to be able to make operates ‘by the most arbitrary and capricious of rules’ as there is no logical or predictable relation between an electrified gathering of cells and the subjective experience of the city of London.

If consciousness comes into and goes out of existence and neurons create consciousness, it is a ‘no brainer’ that one confidently stating this can only mean that the brain is capable of the magic of causing something that does not exist to come into existence, without sacrificing or using any of the atoms making up the neural circuits purportedly responsible for the existence of consciousness.

Why are atoms making up every consciousness-creating neural circuit in the brain not used in the creation of consciousness?

Physical particles making up each neuron of the brain consists of an eternal substance called energy: consciousness, meanwhile, if it does not exist prior to the function of a neural circuit (if it existed prior to the function of its creative neural circuit it would be non-embodied consciousness) must be magically conjured from non-existence.

It seems to go a step beyond logic to suppose that something that exists can make contact with something that does not exist and induce the non-existent entity to come into existence.  How can something that exists communicate with or exert a manipulating force against something that does not exist?

In the face of the inherently irremediable dynamical inscrutability of divine causation, the resort to God as creator, ontological observer of matter, or intevener in the course of nature is precisely a deus ex machine that lacks a vital feature of causal explanations in the sciences. The Book of Genesis tells us about the divine word-magic of creating photons by saying "Let there be light." But we aren't even told whether God said it in Hebrew or Aramaic. I, for one, draw a complete explanatory blank when I am told that God created photons.

This purported explanation contrasts sharply with, say, the story of the formation of two photons by conversion of the rest-mass of a colliding electron-positron pair. Thus, so far as divine causation goes, we are being told, to all intents and purposes, that an intrinsically elusive, mysterious agency X inscrutably produces the effect. And the appeal to the supposed divine attributes of omnipotence, omniscience and omnibenevolence merely baptizes this cardinal explanatory lacuna.

Even for those cases of causation which involve conscious agents or fashioners, the premise does not assert that they ever create anything out of nothing; instead, conscious fashioners merely TRANSFORM PREVIOUSLY EXISTING MATERIALS FROM ONE STATE TO ANOTHER; the baker creates a cake out of flour, milk, butter, etc., and the parents who produce an offspring do so from a sperm, an ovum, and from the food supplied by the mother's body, which in turn comes from the soil, solar energy, etc. Similarly, when a person dies, he or she ceases to exist as a person. But the dead body does not lapse into nothingness, since the materials of the body continue in other forms of matter or energy. In other words, all sorts of organization wholes (e.g., biological organisms) do cease to exist only as such when they disintegrate and their parts are scattered. But their parts continue in some form.

-Adolf Grunbaum, The Pseudo-Problem of Creation in Physical Cosmology

It is interesting to note that Grunbaum states that in death one ‘ceases to exist as a person’ before going on to state that the body continues to exist eternally in some form.  But why is consciousness unfairly exempt from being eternal in Grunbaum’s push to demonstrate the incoherence of creation ex nihilo?  If in Grunbaum's objection to creation ex nihilo consciousness strangely remains the only thing that can come into and go out of existence, there is a double standard in which the brain, as opposed to God, is excused for its use of creation ex nihilo.
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Criticism of The Brain’s Ability to Create Consciousness Ex Nihilo

“There's something happenin’ here.
What it is ain't exactly clear…”

-Buffalo Springfield , For What It's Worth

It is generally taken for granted that the cerebral cortex, alone of every object in the universe, possesses the power to bring something that previously did not exist into existence without use or manipulation of pre-existent material substance.
 
When it comes to the notion of creation ex nihilo regardless of reference to God or the Brain, there is no meaning to the statement that something in existence caused something that did not exist to come into existence.  Without the use of something already in existence to create something, we are simply being told that something that did not exist comes into existence in response—though it does not exist while responding--to an action or movement of something in existence.  There is no molding of some material already in existence into a new shape or configuration.

Further, why should that which comes into existence be the particular entity that comes into existence, as opposed to any other entity that might have existed in its place?  Why should the function of a neural circuit summon an inner conscious experience as opposed to Popeye the Sailor, Quezacoatl, or an interdimensional portal?   What ensures that only consciousness as opposed to Popeye, Quezacoatl, or interdimensional portals pop into existence in response to neural firing?  Given that neurons are entailed to magically conjure things that do not exist, the emergence of anything other than consciousness is equally likely.

At the end of the day, every criticism Grunbaum lobbies at God in terms of the latter's ability to create things ex nihilo applies equally to the Brain, the 'god' of consciousness.  No one observes consciousness being created by the brain, there are only the correlations and co-variances between brain states and conscious states in medical and neuroscientific context:

Memory is one of our major mental activities.  It is an established fact that long-term memory is a function of many parts of the cerebral cortex, especially of the temporal, parietal, and occipital lobes.  Findings made by Dr. Wilder Penfield, a noted Canadian neurosurgeon, first gave evidence of this in the 1920s.  He electrically stimulated the temporal lobes of epileptic patients undergoing brain surgery.  They responded, much to his surprise, by recalling in the most minute detail songs and events from their past.

-Thibodeau, Gary A.: Anatomy and Physiology (pg. 330); Times Mirror/Mosby College Publishing  St. Louis-Toronto-Santa Clara  1987

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A paper published recently in the journal Nature (vol. 391, page 650, 1998) called “Electric Current Stimulates Laughter” has provided a bit more information about how the brain is involved with laughter.  The paper discussed the case of a 16 yr. old girl named “A.K.” who was having surgery to control seizures due to epilepsy.  During surgery, the doctors electrically stimulated A.K.’s cerebral cortex to map her brain.  Mapping of the brain is done to determine the function of different brain areas and to make sure that brain tissue that will be removed does not have an important function.

The doctors found that A.K. always laughed when they stimulated a small 2cm by 2cm area on her left superior frontal gyrus (part of the frontal lobe of the brain).  This brain area is part of the supplementary motor area.  Unlike laughter that happens after brain damage, the laughter that was produced by electrical stimulation in A.K. also had a sense of “merriment or mirth”.  Also, A.K. did NOT have the type of epilepsy with gelastic seizures. Each time her brain was stimulated, A.K. laughed and said that something was funny.  The thing that she said caused her to laugh was different each time.  A.K. laughed first, then made up a story that was funny to her.  Most people first know what is funny, then they laugh.

The authors of the paper believe that the area of the brain that caused laughter in A.K. is part of a larger circuit involving several different brain areas.

-Neuroscience for Kids: Laughter And The Brain

The running joke or secret gag behind this seeming proof that the brain creates consciousness is that every electric manipulation of brain, every conscious response to that manipulation, every function of neural circuit and verbal report of experience in response to it consists only of the neuroscientist’s and patient’s subjective experience of them, as there is probably no mind-independent, external world dwelling doppelgangers of the neuroscientist, the brain, electrical manipulation of the brain, or the patient: these exist only as percepts.

That is the brain, the neuroscientist(s), the patient, manipulation of the brain, and the patient’s report of experience arising in response to neural manipulation are all subjective experiences.  The subjective experience of a person is the only thing known with certainty to exist, as existence only appears or manifests in the form of a person and that which the person experiences.  

The objective, non-experienced version of the brain, the neuroscientist, the patient, and brain manipulation may not exist as they are neither the consciousness of the neuroscientist or patient as they are believed to exist outside their consciousness.  What existence is like when there is no consciousness is unknown, for existence only manifests in the form of consciousness.

The moral of the story?

Any hope for the objective truth of the belief that brains create consciousness depend entirely upon the objective existence of mind-independent doppelgangers of brains, brain function, and the content of sensory perception in the external world—things whose existence is supported only by faith and that, for all that can be known as we are composed only of subjective experience (something they are not) may not exist.

The upshot of this is that the only hope of godless belief (in terms of the objective truth of its commonly accepted mythology) is Mind-Independent Externalism and Direct Realism.  If Mind-Independent Externalism and Direct Realism are false, everything is a product of a non-embodied mind.
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II. Defeat of Godless Mythology via Argument Against Mind-Independent Externalism

There is no logical impossibility in the supposition
that the whole of life is a dream, in which we ourselves
create all the objects that come before us. But although
this is not logically impossible, there is no reason
whatever to suppose that it is true; and it is, in fact,
a less simple hypothesis, viewed as a means of accounting
for the facts of our own life, than the common-sense
hypothesis that there really are objects independent of
us, whose action on us causes our sensations."

-Bertrand Russell, Our Knowledge of the External World

Mind-Independent Externalism

Russell's skepticism that 'the whole of life is a dream' and his conclusive assertion that 'there really are objects independent of us, whose action on us causes our sensations' seems to imply the objects are mind-independent.

The best way to argue against Mind-Independent Externalism in regard to the quasi-religious doggedness (steadfastly insisted upon with such strength that it garners it’s own “revelatory faith”) with which the belief in mind-independent objects and events in the external world and the idea that consciousness has only a brief history in the universe is held is to critically analyze a brief excerpt from Irem Steen’s paper regarding Bertrand Russell’s Our Knowledge Of The External World.
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Irem Steen, in his analysis of Bertrand Russell's Our Knowledge Of The External World, states through Russell that there are only two ways to know the existence of something: (1) through immediate acquaintance "which assures us of the existence of our thoughts, feelings, and sense-data", and: (2) principles "…according to which the existence of one thing can be inferred from that of another":

Matter is to be understood as that which physics is about. So matter must be such that the physicist can know its existence. In other words, what physical science is concerned with and makes discoveries about must be a function of the physicist’s sense-data. What could that function be? There are only two ways in which we can know the existence of something. “(1) immediate acquaintance, which assures us of the existence of our thoughts, feelings, and sense-data, and (2) general principles according to which the existence of one thing can be inferred from that of another.” (Russell 1912a, p. 80)

The bridge which relates the physicist’s sense-data to matter must correspond to one of these ways of knowing that something exists. If our knowledge of matter can be reduced to what we know by acquaintance, then matter should be understood as a logical construction out of sense-data. Otherwise, it must be by inference that we know the existence of matter. So, according to Russell, the bridge between sense-data and matter is either inference or logical construction. (Russell 1912a, pp. 84-85)

-Irem Kurstal Steen, Russell On Matter And Our Knowledge of the External World; Bertrand Russell, Our Knowledge of the External World, 1912

According to (or implied by) Russell, ‘matter’ entails the existence of mind-independent objects (the entities of astronomy in bound or chaotic form prior to/following the existence of life) and events, things that are not consciousness or subjective experience that existed for an eternity before the late-arriving brain and its generation of conscious experience.  Following Russell’s reasoning, matter can somehow be inferred to exist from something generated by the brain that in material substance or essence is something that is not that which constitutes matter or mind-independent substance.

The upshot of Russellian inference of the existence of matter or mind-independent objects in the external world is that it cannot work as one cannot use one’s consciousness to “infer” that which is not one’s consciousness.  One is only perceiving one’s consciousness and simply stating this consciousness somehow “indicates” the existence of something other than consciousness, when one’s consciousness is the only thing in appearance and the inference itself is just another manifestation of subjective experience that is then irrationally stated to indicate something other than itself.

That’s pretty much it.  Whenever one conceives of non-experience or mind-independent objects and events in the external world, one is only using one’s consciousness to imagine that which is not one’s consciousness, then in a fit of logical disconnect go on to doggedly insist that mind-independent objects exist.  Consciousness is in the way and will forever be in the way: it will forever be a veil hiding the unknown.  One can only come up with consciousness no matter the strength and fire of rumination, as one consists only of consciousness.  As far as we are concerned, it’s the only thing that exists, as it’s the only thing that appears.

Anything else is, like God or the multiverse, only a matter of faith.

In his 2003 New York Times opinion piece, "A Brief History of the Multiverse", the author and cosmologist Paul Davies offered a variety of arguments that multiverse theories are non-scientific:

For a start, how is the existence of the other universes to be tested? To be sure, all cosmologists accept that there are some regions of the universe that lie beyond the reach of our telescopes, but somewhere on the slippery slope between that and the idea that there are an infinite number of universes, credibility reaches a limit. As one slips down that slope, more and more must be accepted on faith, and less and less is open to scientific verification. Extreme multiverse explanations are therefore reminiscent of theological discussions. Indeed, invoking an infinity of unseen universes to explain the unusual features of the one we do see is just as ad hoc as invoking an unseen Creator. The multiverse theory may be dressed up in scientific language, but in essence it requires the same leap of faith.

— Paul Davies, The New York Times, "A Brief History of the Multiverse"

-Wikipedia, Multiverse

Agreed, Mr. Davies, and your statement regarding the quasi-theological proposition of the existence of the multiverse applies equally to the existence of mind-independent doppelgangers of planets, stars, galaxies, nebulae, black holes, and the telescopes used to perceive them.

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Descartes…wrote a response to skepticism about the existence of the external world. He argues that sensory perceptions come to him involuntarily, and are not willed by him. They are external to his senses, and according to Descartes, this is evidence of the existence of something outside of his mind, and thus, an external world. Descartes goes on to show that the things in the external world are material by arguing that God would not deceive him as to the ideas that are being transmitted, and that God has given him the "propensity" to believe that such ideas are caused by material things.

-Wikipedia: Rene Descartes

But what kinds of ‘material things’?

Things made of non-subjective experience?

To correct Russell’s line of reasoning and support Descartes’ deduction that the external world exists and indeed does consist of something responsible for our senses, thoughts, and emotions— one need only reason that when inferring the existence of something in the external world following the slender thread leading to the external world that is the fact of one’s own existence, it is rational to assume that whatever exists in the external world, given that consciousness exists only in the form of a particular person and that which the person experiences, had to produce the person from a substance existing in the external world that independent of the magic of creation ex nihilo or magic of essential transmutation is necessarily the same substance making up persons and that which persons experience: subjective experience.

That is, subjective experience derived from the external world if it does not magically pop into and out of existence or does not magically emerge from something that previously was not subjective experience.  If subjective experience cannot perform the aforementioned magic, it is obvious that subjective experience came from the external world.  If subjective experience came from the external world, the external world necessarily contains subjective experience in some form.

The cause of human consciousness, then, rationally consists of the same material it puts into the effect, as whatever exists in the external world that is responsible for human consciousness can only rationally use pre-existent consciousness as the substance that forms human consciousness.

As Hume states:

But still I ask; Why take these attributes for granted, or why ascribe to the cause any qualities but what actually appear in the effect? Why torture your brain to justify the course of nature upon suppositions, which, for aught you know, may be entirely imaginary, and of which there are to be found no traces in the course of nature?

-David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

In other words, diverting this statement from Hume’s argument against the existence and power of God in nature toward the supposition that non-experience has anything to do with the existence of experience, why ascribe to the cause of consciousness the existence of mind-independent objects and events, qualities other than that which ‘actually appear in the effect’ (subjective experience)?

Why not take the effect (consciousness) at face value, and logically infer that whatever the external world is or whatever exists within it, consciousness came from it, and if things do not magically come into existence from non-existence or one existence or substance does not magically transform into another, something in the external world is responsible for the existence of subjective experience and the various and sundry forms it assumes and it is more simple and transparent that this external cause, in order to rationally produce the effect, shares the nature of the effect.

There is no reason, therefore, to continue to beat the dead horse that is the existence of mind-independent objects or events or the ability of the brain, composed of mind-independent substance, to conjure consciousness, something that the brain essentially is not.  Mind-Independent Externalism, following Hume, is an entirely arbitrary invention arising fundamentally from incredulity that consciousness is the only thing that does, and perhaps can, exist.

Rather than believe that subjective experience can come into and go out of existence or that something that is not subjective experience can cease being something that is not subjective experience as it magically transforms into someone experiencing and that which the person experiences, it is more logically coherent to follow the reasoning of Hume and Descartes and state that consciousness derives from the external world, but from an external world that logically contains pre-human consciousness in some form, from which humans derive…and return upon death.

END PART ONE