A Panpsychist Hypothesis (General)

by David Turell , Saturday, June 14, 2014, 15:37 (3604 days ago) @ dhw

dhw: In short, the God hypothesis proposes a single mind that has somehow always had intelligence, awareness and knowledge (of what?) or somehow evolved these attributes in time to deliberately create our universe and everything in it. My panpsychist variation begins with potentially intelligent energy being transformed into ever changing matter, experience of which somehow led to the dawning of countless individualized forms and degrees of intelligence (though the same process might have occurred innumerable times before our universe).-Potential intelligence as a proposition requires a total redefinition of what is meant by 'intelligence'. Intelligent thought requires a language with which to think. Intelligence plans and designs. You want it invented out of thin air. Intelligence is inexorably wrapped up with consciousness. So far you have everything backwards from my analysis of reality. A bunch of leggos falling together just because they are arranged to get connected. Where is the child to actually do it. That is what your theory lacks, the actor.-> dhw: The controlling force is not chance, because all these intelligences guide themselves and cooperate with one another to create complexity.-You admit the individual cell or single-celled animal is extremely complex. And you reject chance. The cells just invented their own complexity and conjured up their own intelligence because it was potentially there? And Mary Poppins could fly. All at the same level of pipe dream.- 
> dhw: Finally, let me stress again that this is not a profession of belief. I'm only offering an alternative to faith in a nebulous God, and faith in chance, while also looking for a way to encompass those areas of intelligence that materialism has so far failed to explain.-Good try. No more believeable than fairies in the dell. A better starting point is the approach of the quantum theorists who believe that an intelligence actually interacts with quantum particles as in John Wheeler's proposed second choice experiments which have now been done. I'll stick with my idea that God is the intelligence present in the quantum layer of reality. And note that the initial particles that emerge from energy to from matter are quantum paticles.