Thanks Jeremy. I've talked the book to pieces with my friend who's going through Dan's work, I'll actually be reading it for the first time in the next month or so.

Sky: You know, sometimes philosophy just means what works day to day, so I understand when people get confused when I tell them there's no such thing as free will or that their particular outlook doesn't work for some reason. I just like using words that mean what I think they do on every level and never break down. I can be satisfied saying that I'm aware that I'm aware and that works, but Alan Turing might have something to say if I ever ran into him.

Herein lies the problem, there is no definition of consciousness. It's a suitcase term, so to speak. It's just a word for a bunch of at one time related things. The things it describe have as much as common as the things in your suitcase, primarily that is that they are in your suitcase.

I should have been more clear on the higher consciousness bit. There's not really evidence for any kind of consciousness. Consciousness is an old and varied idea, presumably arising from a desire to figure out what separates us from other animals or even inanimate objects. By consciousness do we mean soul or processing capacity? An interesting anecdote I've heard is that most people who aren't around animals often or don't have pets or anything regard them as not having souls while people with pets or who work with animals daily say they definitely have a soul. The difference, I think, is that people who are around animals frequently begin to understand the extent of their intelligence. They have time to observe their decision making process and reasoning, they are able to empathize with them, and they can interpret their emotions. If monkey can love surely it has a soul right?

Consciousness, it turns out, is more of a spectrum. If you define consciousness as self-awareness then we can go back to programming metaphor and find that many programs run diagnostics on themselves. They are examining their own code in a way, but are they aware of anything at all? We end up setting a level of awareness as well as adding other requirements to get to the term consciousness. It's not a very clean way of looking at things, I had a laugh when I found that the Wikipedia article on the subject could only say what consciousness involved, not what it really was.

"Would you trade what you know now for youth and loose the person you are today?" That's interesting. How do you know you haven't already? How do you know you haven't already many times before. When you were young, you may as well have been old once and forgotten everything about it.

When scientists refer to evidence, they are only referring to testable, repeatable or measurable evidence. This is all we have, nothing else can be trusted. Anything you say without strong supporting evidence I can say the opposite of and be equally valid in my statement. If it were true that there were evidence for higher consciousness, than knowing that would be useful. This is not likely to be the case, it's a puzzle piece for the wrong puzzle. Some kind of intangible subjective not puzzle thing. And the other piece fits better. I'm losing my fondness for metaphors.

It's true that philosophy begins where science ends. In my mind there is only one philosopher I know, that being Daniel Dennet. He builds on the information discovered through neuroscience, his work remains objective even in the gray realms he deals with. Anyone else I don't know of doing the same is surely a philosopher, offering useful explanations and ensuring their ideas are compatible with what science already knows. Every other person claiming to be philosopher is not one at all, they tread where science has already reached, not where it ends. They offer unprovable explanations for questions which only exist because they can be put into words.

Determinism states that all of our decisions are based on prior events. This shouldn't be confused with fatalism, which states that we have no control over the future whatsoever. We have free will in the sense that we reason and make decisions. Basically, everything follows from the past and present, if you knew everything about the past and present you could predict the future. This is purely a thought experiment, you would have to know things that you realistically couldn't know. For the purposes of everyday life you have what we can call free will.

I've actually seen these before. O'Reilly is, like every news show, has a terribly habit of ignoring his pundits. "That's interesting, your opinion is wrong because you're on my show, now back to me."

I hate how often he listens to someones statement, ignores them, and says something entirely unrelated.

Wolpe is similarly repetitive. His responses in his debate with Christopher Hitchens are essentially the same as those with Harris. This bothered me because of how wildly different Hitchens and Harris are.

I see Elvis in all of us, personally.

I'm going to proceed under the assumption you're legitimately curious about this. If you're really interested in following this line of thought, do some reading before forming an opinion. Go get a copy of The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins and Consciousness Explained by Daniel Dennet. The Selfish Gene should give you an understanding of the workings of genes and is a good introduction to memetics. If you'd like to know more about memes I hear that The Meme Machine by Susan Blackmore is pretty good. A great deal of Dawkins work--talks, programs, and other snippits-- can be quickly found on Google Video. Here's an audio clip of his on this very subject you're discussing

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXO_T5osi4A.

Basically, we're physically determined by our genes, the unit of natural selection which is often used to describe prevalence of certain traits in individuals. Mentally we're determined by our culture and our decisions within it, and if there is such a thing as a unit of culture then it is a meme. It is important to understand that there is no one gene for being strong or weak or yellow or on fire. Genes just synthesize proteins which are akin to instructions, a body can't be made or operate with the instructions of only a single gene. To refer to genes as being "for" a trait we define genes as enough of an extent of genetic material to determine a basic trait. For more complicated things, like genes for being a mammal, we talk about gene-complexes, a collection of genes determining related traits. You can regard all of our traits as inherited, but not all of them are inherited from our genes. Many are environmental and thus memetic.

We are perfectly capable of defying our genes, we do it every time we brave our fears or have protected sex. Don't be afraid of genetic engineering, we've been doing it since we first developed farming; our food is a lot more domesticated than it once was. We have no need of our genes any longer, and everywhere they apply is vestigial. Your fixation on this programming metaphor might be somewhat wandering, but it's leading you to some fair conclusions. Can we be the program and do the programming? Depending on the extent of you metaphor there is no reason we cannot. We have programs today that can alter themselves. The means and ends are different, but the statement is approximately true. The program in this case is the genes we inherit and the memes we encounter along the way

There is no evidence for higher consciousness and it implies nothing useful about life anyway. Just because something doesn't make you feel good doesn't mean it's not true. Spiritualism can fit in every gap left by science, but remember that every gap it has ever filled in the past has been displaced by a more reasonable and testable explanation. What makes you think the gaps of today are too small to be filled by anything other than spiritualism? I don't see your belief in a higher self as helping you any more than accepting what is evident to be true would be.

What does having free will imply? What is the difference between having free will and conviently behaving as though you do? Determinism accounts for free will, just not in the way that makes you feel fuzzy inside. Basically, remember that you likely don't have free will, and for the good of all of us behave as though you do.

"I" is just a word, you can phrase the question "What is the self?" but you are begging the question in doing so.

What does life mean is a non-question. It's like asking where the center on the line forming a circle is. We ask "What does it mean?" all the time and here we've run into a point where it doesn't apply. What it be so bad if the universe really wasn't "for" anything? What would change?

I'm going to leave that as a general response to the idea of the thread, though I could go into specifics with individual posters. I don't want to seem uninvited, so I'll just say that all this waxing spiritual about science is only clouding your view of it. Still, I'm tempted to discuss the apparent origins of life if that's where this thread is heading (which it apparently has been).

I love being tracked by Google! It's very flattering to be cared about.

I use Opera on occasion when I'm dealing with lots pages and need to resize images and use hand gestures and such, but I really like Chrome. Chrome is excellent at handling web applications, so if you plan on using any of Google's other features like Documents for instance, I highly recommend it. Also loads other Java heavy sites like Facebook more quickly.

It's open source, so every improvement they make should ideally transfer into other browsers over time.

Take my opinion with a grain of salt, I'm from the internet myself.