A Panpsychist Hypothesis (General)

by dhw, Saturday, June 14, 2014, 12:05 (3814 days ago)
edited by dhw, Sunday, August 10, 2014, 20:11

PART ONE-David and I appear to have reached a dead end in our discussion of his concept of God, and so I will now try to put together the various strands (sorry if this involves some repetition of past posts) in order to formulate the panpsychist hypothesis I've been promising (threatening)! It's important right from the outset to emphasize that ALL hypotheses eventually come up against the brick wall of how life and consciousness originated. This applies just as much to David's God as it does to all other theories. He wrote: "I think God is somehow organized as an intelligence." "Somehow" is the great gap here, there and everywhere.-Panpsychism is the theory that "each spatio-temporal thing has a mental or 'inner' aspect. Not minds as such, but "varying degrees in which things have inner subjective or quasi-conscious aspects, some very unlike what we experience as consciousness." (Oxford Companion to Philosophy). According to David, "God is intelligence", is "both the particles and the organizer of the particlesâ", and is "present in all that IS, living and inorganic" (BBella). This is the most extreme version of theistic panpsychism. I would like to develop a variation on it, with the proviso that I offer it as an alternative, not as a belief.
 
The first step for me is agreement with David that nothing can come from nothing, and that life and consciousness exist. Anyone who disagrees can stop reading now. I also believe that all events have a cause. On the premise that matter is formed by energy, I'm happy to accept that energy is the first cause, i.e. that energy has always been in existence. (If the energy-to-matter theory is false, it makes little difference to the hypothesis, but a great deal of difference to David's own theory.) Although clearly we cannot know of any events before the birth of our universe, it seems to me highly unlikely that eternal energy would suddenly erupt into matter-creating activity, having done nothing at all for ever and ever beforehand. This would apply whether it was intelligent or not. It also stands to reason that intelligence won't be much use unless there's something to be intelligent about, and eternal energy without events to be aware of might just as well not exist. In this respect, one might call it potential intelligence. And so a key question has to be WHEN energy became intelligent.
 
The likelihood that energy has been producing matter for ever and ever is important for my atheistic compartment, because the more universes there have been, the greater the chances of our own life-supporting universe and life itself coming into being. However, one should never lose sight of the astonishing complexity of the simplest living organism, which for all our own intelligence we humans are still only starting to unravel. This underlies the theistic argument for ID. But first we have to understand the nature of matter. I don't have the scientific background to judge the accuracy of the various theories, but I've been picking David's brains in an effort to get clarification of his own theory, and there are two important exchanges I would like to quotehw [referring to David's concept of God] : If it's true that energy creates matter, it's not unreasonable to assume that this creation takes place through intelligent quantum energy particles working together.
DAVID: Quite a jump in logic. A single particle joins with another and then another and now we have a matter particle. It doesn't require intelligence at this basic level.-This surprised and secretly pleased me, but in response to my challenge, David modified his statement laterAVID: I think God [...] has planned out all the quantum particles that drop out of the plasma and form constituents of matter. These particles have an automatic way of falling together, as they consistently do it the same way as shown by particle physics results. They are in concise families with definite ways of acting.-Since our most difficult problem is to explain the complexities of life and consciousness, I'm going to put David's first statement ("doesn't require intelligence") together with his second, concerning "an automatic way of falling together". This is what most of us would call "natural law", and if this is how matter consistently behaves when it comes into existence, there is indeed no requirement for intelligence. And so instead of intelligence preceding the creation of matter, the argument would be that it does not come into being until there is matter for it to be aware of. I've suggested in the past that the disintegration of matter may somehow have sparked the first glimmerings of awareness in the energy within, but it could have been any activity involving material changes. This is the brick wall of "somehow".