Cell Memories (Identity)

by dhw, Tuesday, October 29, 2013, 19:52 (4042 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw:If NDEs, transplant memories, and other psychic experiences relating to communication with the dead are to be trusted, we know only of individual consciousnesses, just as we do on Earth. Lots of people believe in multiple "gods". It seems that your 30 years of study have led you to the conclusion that life is the product of design, which I can understand. But why one "designer", one "god", one "consciousness"?-DAVID: You like your committee of cells that can't think. I don't think a committee can all concentrate on one plan. Look how governments work, all helter skelter. A single purposed mind does the best creating.-We have a very different view of evolution. You seem convinced that there is one plan, with humans at the end of it. I see billions of species coming and going higgledy-piggledy (the equivalent perhaps of your helter skelter), and wonderful though it is, this colossal variety and endless process of appearance and disappearance suggests precisely the opposite of your single-minded planner: all kinds of creative forces at work, some more successful than others. No matter whether I wear my theist hat (see under "Species consciousness"), my atheist hat, my either-way-panpsychist hat, I still can't see the higgledy-piggledy bush as "one plan".