Panpsychism (Evolution)

by dhw, Tuesday, December 18, 2012, 21:15 (4356 days ago) @ romansh

dhw: In order to communicate, we have to accept certain commonsense premises (common sense is a philosophical category, not a made-up term). [...] I suggest to you that as far as we know, a stone is likely to be less conscious than a dog which is likely to be less conscious than a human. If you disagree, that is the end of the discussion. If you agree, we can discuss panpsychism, of which differing degrees of consciousness are a fundamental aspect.-ROMANSH: You go up the line - stone,dog, human - but why stop there? Why not continue with family, community, city, country? Does the company have a Searle like consciousness?
 -My examples were meant only to establish common agreement that there are different degrees of consciousness.
 
ROMANSH: Are there degrees of zombiehood? How could I persuade you that I am a zombie? Ultimately are we not pointing to degrees of complexity in responses in the various entities we consider? And the complexity we perceive is an artefact of the boundary we draw around that entity?-Fair enough, but I'm not trying to pinpoint the degrees or to define consciousness. 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. 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.