A Panpsychist Hypothesis (General)

by dhw, Sunday, June 15, 2014, 21:22 (3812 days ago) @ David Turell
edited by dhw, Sunday, August 10, 2014, 20:44

dhw: ... 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).-DAVID: Potential intelligence as a proposition requires a total redefinition of what is meant by 'intelligence'. -If energy is first cause, then energy is potentially everything that exists, including intelligence. Baby plants, insects, animals and humans are filled with potential intelligence, but it requires experience to develop it, and even in the human world this depends largely on matter. Your concept of God is of a being that has already fulfilled the potential of energy intelligence, because if this universe is the beginning, he already knew what to do with matter before he'd even experienced it!
 
DAVID: 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.-I'm not going to define intelligence, but I'm happy to list some of its attributes: the ability to process perceptions, understand and act on them, communicate, devise plans, make decisions...some of these can be accomplished by computers, which we call artificial intelligence, and by the billions of organisms around us, including the very simplest, such as bacteria. Language, thinking, consciousness - you only conceive of them in human terms. And yet you continually present us with examples that contradict this narrow view.-DAVID: Ten different attributes of plants. Not so docile:-http://io9.com/5901172/10-pieces-of-evidence-that-plants-are-smarter-than-you-think
 
QUOTE: "Though plants possess nothing even remotely like brains, they can nevertheless communicate, measure time, and even use camouflage. They may not be thinking in a way that we'd recognize, but our chlorophyll-saturated pals are certainly doing a lot more than sitting around splitting water molecules. Here are ten things plants do that look pretty damn smart - even to those of us over here in the Kingdom Animalia."-This clearly illustrates the definition of panpsychism that I quoted: there are "varying degrees in which things have inner subjective or quasi-conscious aspects, some very unlike what we experience as consciousness". You don't make these connections. You believe in evolution, and yet you prefer to imagine that with a few animal exceptions, all organisms are automata made and wound up by your God.
 
DAVID: 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.-They are not leggos falling together. Research has shown that plants, insects, animals, bacteria and cells are individual intelligences working together, perceiving, planning, communicating, making decisions. But their form of intelligence is different from ours.-DAVID: 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.-You have seized on the "somehow" which no theory can deal with. I'm offering a somehow that evolved from the interplay between energy and matter. You claim that the energy particles of your God were somehow always intelligent and conscious because... because...they just were. And Mary Poppins could fly. 
 
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.-DAVID: 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.-I did not expect you to change your views. For me, all the hypotheses are fairies in dells, though one must be closer to the truth than the others. But which one? I'm not going to challenge you on quantum theory. Nor would I challenge Stephen Hawking or his fellow atheist physicists. You and I both know that his opinion is no more and no less scientifically based than your own. There is no consensus. Only faith.