"Some kind of subjective experiential awareness is obviously necessary to experience anything, including the fear of death. It is hard to imagine how autonomous automatic responses to discrete signals from a complex non-stationary environment could be as effective at protecting the organism as an always-on generalized impulse to avoid danger to its existence."

ajsrider: unfortunately the qualia problem (the problem of where the "raw feel" or the what-it-is-like-to-beness of consciousness comes from) is much harder than that. You say, "experiential awareness is obviously necessary to experience anything". Actually that is not only obvious, it is tautological.

You say it is hard to imagine discrete signals being as effective. But combining those signals is not the same thing as producing qualia. The question is what do the qualia add, if anything, over and above simply consolidating the data? How do the signals, which are essentially data, get transmuted into something more - the qualia?

If you don't start from the position that the brain is identical with conscious experience or 'mind'—and this is what it looks like you're doing

I'm not starting from an assumption of identity or anything else but the empirical evidence. The kind of fine-grained, incredibly detailed correlation of brain activity with consciousness that the brain scientists have established is striking to say the least. That doesn't rule out that the brain activity MIGHT simply be reflecting some prior causal factor but do you have any viable candidates for what that might be?

Souls used to be one candidate but that hypothesis has largely been abandoned for good reasons. Just because you have established that there "might" be other causal influences does not in any way mean that you have established that there ARE other causal influences. Until you come up with something plausible, the hypothesis that it is the brain alone is the simplest explanation.

We know that the brain is a necessary part of whatever it is that is sufficient to produce consciousness. This, I assume, is uncontroversial -- if you destroy someone's brain, you destroy their consciousness. Assuming a sensory system with some incoming data from the environment (or perhaps synthetically generated), the brain certainly seems to be all there is involved. What else is there? A flying spaghetti cerebral preamp?

Congrats on the Izzy!

In my view, Glenn deserves the award for the following four reasons:

1) the sheer logical force of his arguments

2) the meticulous attention to detail

3) the moral clarity -- not the erstaz Bush version but the real thing. I'm talking about just the right amount of appropriate emotion and indignation.

4) the comprehensiveness -- Glenn is like an elephant who never forgets, always working in the outrage of yesterday or last year into his analysis of the outrage of today.

Sorry to be such a fanboy about Glenn but he really is the best. He rarely needs any advice about how to improve a column. I learn more pound-for-pound from a Greenwald column than from almost anyone else.

Congratulations Glenn. You earned it.

Q: "Why is most everyone capable of understanding the egregious, illogical stupidity of propositions (2)-(8) -- based on the bleedingly obvious premise that one can advocate the freedom to do X for reasons other than a desire to do X -- while so many people embrace the equally illogical and stupid reasoning of proposition (1) as though it so self-evidently true that it requires no discussion?"

A: Because drugs are bad -- after all dirty hippies love drugs. There's almost nothing worse than people doing drugs. If you smoke dope, you will go insane and be a failure in life. If you smoke dope, your brain will turn into a fried egg.

"Ehrman is a true agnostic. He's sophisticated enough to realize that the realms of rationality and faith may be separate, and he's respectful of the idea of the ineffable. But he himself does not believe in it, and his practice is thoroughly rational. For some of his most brilliant religious friends, Ehrman notes in "God's Problem," "religious faith is not an intellectualizing system for explaining everything. Faith is a mystery and an experience of the divine in the world, not a solution to a set of problems." Ehrman's comment: "I respect this view deeply and some days I wish that I shared it. But I don't."

Oh god. Gary Kamiya is normally an outstanding writer who avoids the bullshit assiduously. I don't think I've seen him write about religion before. Gary: did Joan put you on this assignment? Because this whole piece reads like just the latest installment in a long and dreary line of Salon apologetics for lame ass liberal Christianity.

Personally I have more respect for the fundamentalist who goes whole hog in their belief than the wishy-washy, having-it-both-ways religionist who refuses to believe their own eyes and persists in professing belief in what they know deep down is a crock of shit.

Salon appears to be offering up Ehrman as some kind of role model for the tolerant non-believer. He's non-threatening and intellectually inconsistent in a way that allows him to deny Christian conclusions while seeming to allow that "Jesus is just alright". That's an acceptable philosophy if you are a Doobie Brother but not if you are an honest philosopher.

Kamiya/Walsh say Ehrman is "sophisticated" enough to separate the realms of faith and reason. "Sophisticated" is right -- if by that you mean that he is being a sophist in taking that view. This is just more of Steven Jay Gould's intellectually dishonest non-overlapping magisteria bunk.

Ok, Joan. We get your point. You're insecure in your liberal cafeteria Catholicism and people like Ehrman assuage your guilty intellectual conscience.

Can you give it a rest now?