Far out cosmology (Introduction)

by dhw, Wednesday, January 29, 2014, 14:29 (3739 days ago) @ David Turell

Dhw: The design we know may come from within the materials themselves, and whatever degree of awareness is necessary for each design may have evolved within individual collections of matter. This is the form of panpsychism that attributes mental aspects to all spatio-temporal things.-DAVID: To which I continue to raise the same issue: where did the information come from to allow this supposed mechanism. Information is organized knowledge. It has to have a source you can point to, but you can't as an agnostic.-You cannot point to a source either, other than a "supposed" power so nebulous that it has no meaning. You call it God, and say it is hidden, beyond our understanding, unknown, unknowable, has always been there, should not be loaded with human attributes, and belief in it requires an act of blind faith! This is why my post continues: "Theists hide behind the cop-out argument that their God's consciousness was always there so they don't have to explain it. Atheists rely on the cop-out argument that it evolved by way of random chance starting things off. The third possibility is the cop-out panpsychist hypothesis outlined above." They are ALL cop-outs.-Dhw: (to BBella) Thank you for these very illuminating observations. I can only nod approvingly at the sound of so many nails being hit on their heads! The plain fact is that none of us know the origin of consciousness, whether consciousness exists independently of those forms we are familiar with, or the extent to which our own consciousness imposes or influences the patterns we observe. -DAVID: I'll remind both of you that our human consciousness affects every quantum experiment we try.-That is what we mean by "the extent to which our consciousness...influences the patterns we observe." BBella's brilliantly balanced summary of the various alternatives leaves open all the questions you so resolutely seek to close by your faith in a single, eternal, unchanging, universal consciousness. Your belief is understandable, but no more so than a belief in countless separate consciousnesses or the lucky break inevitably occurring in Leslie's "vastly many, very varied universes". I can still see no reason why one cop-out should be given precedence over the others.