A Panpsychist Hypothesis (General)

by dhw, Tuesday, June 17, 2014, 21:12 (3810 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw; I...agree that codes are developed by intelligence, but although information requires intelligence, intelligence also requires information if it is to function. Your first cause is intelligence in the form of pure energy.-DAVID: But to follow my reasoning, you must envision that first cause as not a blank DVD with no information on board, but a DVD (intelligent energy)loaded with all the informaton needed to get the universe and life started-dhw: This leaves us with the question of how intelligence without information might come into being. -DAVID: Not my concept from the beginning, but my fault when I said there had to be information, I didn't make it clear that it had to exist within the universal intelligence. It was so obvious to me but not to you, and so I assumed it was understood. Babies are born with a potential intelligence to be developed, but it is developed by gaining information and learning how to use that information. I don't view the universal intelligence as a baby form.-But you are offering us the seemingly illogical premise that your first cause pure energy already had the information necessary to create the materials of universe and life before it had even experienced its own transformation into matter. However, you have in recent posts acknowledged two possible scenarios which you preferred to dismiss earlier: 1) that your pure energy God may have experimented, and 2) that he may have created universes prior to this one. That at least would get you out of the impossible dream of a DVD loaded with information before the information exists. But of course if you agree that your God had to learn as he went along, you will find yourself in the difficult position of acknowledging that his intelligence is not unlike our own: potential rather than actual, until it gains information and learns how to use it. And once you agree to that, you could find yourself on the slippery slope to my panpsychist hypothesis. Ah, Heaven forbid!