Panpsychism Makes a Comeback (General)

by dhw, Wednesday, February 24, 2016, 13:31 (2984 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: The idea has popped up again:
http://www.livescience.com/53791-what-is-consciousness.html?cmpid=NL_LS_weekly_2016-2-22 - QUOTE: “Under the notion of panpsychism, a kind of re-boot of ancient animistic ideas, every speck of matter has a kind of proto-consciousness. When aggregated in particular ways, all this proto-consciousness turns into a sense of inner awareness.” 
QUOTE: "Integrated information theory measures consciousness by a metric, called phi, which essentially translates to how much power over itself a being or object has.” - I like the description of panpsychism, and I like the notion of “power over itself”, which ties in with the idea that certain materials may have developed sufficient “inner awareness” to cooperate with one another. I don't believe that all materials have this power, and the theory appears to allow for the mixture of order and disorder that seems to me to characterize the history of the universe as we know it.
 
QUOTE: “The new theory implies a radical disconnect between intelligence and consciousness, Koch said. AI, which may already be intelligent enough to beat the best human player of the Go board game, may nevertheless be basically subconscious because it is not able to act upon itself.” - Artificial intelligence is just that - a copy of natural intelligence. But I don't think intelligence and consciousness (this does not mean self-awareness) can be separated. I would say that intelligence is the power that uses information, and it cannot do so unless it is conscious of the information. However, in AI the computer has been programmed to process the information - its “intelligence” AND its “consciousness” are in fact the creations of its known designer(s). And this is where it gets really interesting: with natural intelligence/consciousness, there is no known designer. But according to you, David, the intelligence/consciousness of the simplest living forms must have been designed, and so obviously the same would apply to the “intelligent/conscious” materials which first came together to make them. The alternative is that those materials developed an intelligence/ consciousness spontaneously, and that is the basis of a possible “third way” to explain the origin of life. - The obvious objection that will now be raised to the latter suggestion can also be raised to the former. How can materials possibly “become” intelligent/conscious? How can a “universal intelligence/consciousness” possibly just “be” intelligent/conscious? There is of course no answer to this, and please don't say “first cause”, which is just as likely to be unconscious as it is to be conscious. That is why I myself find all three hypotheses (the other being sheer luck) equally difficult to believe in. - David's comment: Presented just for dhw. My own theory is that there is a universal consciousness just as in Eastern religions. - Thank you for a very interesting piece. Panpsychism basically means universal consciousness, but since you constantly talk of God, your version is a single conscious being, which is not at all in keeping with many Eastern religions (e.g. Buddhism and Jainism) but is common, as you know, to all the monotheistic or “Abrahamic” religions of the west. Unless you are secretly striving to break the cycle of samsara over there on your Texan ranch, I think you are far more Westerner than Easterner!