Panpsychism (Evolution)

by dhw, Wednesday, December 19, 2012, 17:29 (4146 days ago) @ romansh

ROM: You did not answer my question, about the consciousness of cities.-The only answer I can give you is that family, community, city, country are collectives, and so they must be split. The people in them will be conscious to the degree of self-consciousness, the other living creatures will be less conscious, the materials of which the cities are built...hm, well, perhaps a panpsychist would allot them the lowest possible degree of consciousness. If pushed, I'd say that inorganic material has no consciousness of its own. Any apparent consciousness will be the result of association with a different form of (conscious) energy.
 
Dhw: If we can agree that consciousness exists and that there are degrees of it, we can pursue the argument with which I opened this thread, and which has barely been touched on since. Namely, that what David calls the Universal Intelligence is an infinite and eternal energy that is NOT fully aware of itself. Just as plants, insects and our fellow animals (I'll drop the cell analogy for now, since that has caused another digression) have done throughout evolution, it has constantly come up with new forms which in the course of eternity and an infinite number of combinations have led to life on Earth. -ROM: I have some sympathy for David's position though I would certainly not express it in his language of deistic/theistic dualism. -David's opinion is that the UI is fully self-aware.-ROM: I am torn between everything and nothing being conscious. I'll refer back to Dennett's nutty idea that if a philosopher's zombie can respond exactly like a human being then it can to all intents and purposes be considered conscious. How can we discern between this type of zombie and a common garden conscious human being?-Then why not acknowledge that there are degrees of consciousness? A zombie by definition ("someone who is not aware of what he/she is doing"), just like a drunkard, can be considered conscious but not to the degree of self-awareness. If a zombie's behaviour (ordinary humans aren't confined to responses) is EXACTLY like a human's, then of course we won't be able to distinguish it.
 
dhw: I'm proposing panpsychism as a theory midway between theism and atheism, dependent neither on a self-aware Father Creator nor on Chance, but on the same impersonal intelligence that has enabled life to evolve from the more rudimentary to the more complex. I'm not saying I believe it, but I don't think it's any less likely than eternal uncaused Genius or eternally floundering Chance.-ROM: That may be David's interpretation of panpsychism. [He says yes, but he believes in purposeful creation.] This is too close to Deepak Chopra's point of view for my taste. Mine would be a much colder view of consciousness.-What do you mean by "colder"? If we take the uncaused genius as maximum consciousness (= 100), and chance as no consciousness at all (= 0), and if we agree that the first cause is energy of some kind, where on the scale of consciousness would you put first cause energy?-********-Rom, I've copied and pasted your announcement about Agnostics International onto the first entry, as it'll be more prominent there. Sorry you had such trouble!