Right. Really, the debate comes down not to whether there is a first cause (temporal or ontological); we all agree there is an ontological ground of all being that is greater than ourselves. Rather, what we are really debating is whether it has thoughts and feelings.

And when we put it like that, theism starts to look silly.

Thank you for your reply. (My questions were rhetorical.)

I would agree with Einstein’s assessment of Spinoza’s ‘God’ – as the universe itself, which is of little comfort to human awareness and this perhaps explains our species’ tragic response to such brutality. See Peter Wessel Zapffe’s Four Responses To The Paradox, which I agree with. But if Block Universe theory is correct then none of it matters in the end. (Will read your links, thank you – wishing you well.)

That’s a question for theists not atheists.

Theists need to explain why a Godmind would even exist in the first place. What’s the point of it? How did that happen? Isn’t that too lucky to be plausible?

Atheists don’t need to answer that question. We already have documented that consciousness is an accidental byproduct of evolution by natural selection which is a byproduct of any complex stable system. Now that it exists, “what is it for” is simply whatever we want to use it for, now that we have it.

See:

How the New Wong-Hazen Proposal Refutes Theism

The Argument from Reason

The Argument from Consciousness

The Objective Value Cascade

For starters.

See Touch, All the Way Down: Qualia as Computational Discrimination.

“emergence in phil-mind is magic and therefore bullshit” is clearly a declaration.

Consistent with your demand that you have an immortal soul, created by the greatest of supernatural being imaginable, for a cosmically significant purpose.

That must be so, because it must.

About qualia, and all of the mystery supposedly surround it, I think only “philosophers” who see the mind as more than what the brain does are struggling.

The sensation of “red” is in response to light of a certain wavelength hinting the eye.

As long as that sensation is different from the other colors, so we can tell them apart, that’s almost all there is to say. But since we evolved with blue skies and red blood, there’s probably more built in responses in the brain, to various colors. Red is never a calming color, most probably because it’s an evolutionary sign of trouble (bleeding).

This qualia thing seems like an attempt at getting an intuitive understand how intuition works. That’s physically impossible, so it’s a futile goal. Most old school philosophers didn’t understand this I think. A “perfect” model of something needs to be more complex that that thing being modeled, so the modeling hardware can’t be part of the hardware being modeled.

Tank you for re-posting there. I have moved my reply accordingly.

Yes, I do prefer comments to be correctly placed (because I have no tool to move them).