A Panpsychist Hypothesis (General)

by David Turell , Wednesday, June 18, 2014, 22:12 (3809 days ago) @ dhw


> dhw:That is precisely my point. When you say "instruct the first particles how to create matter", you are making it sound as if the particles existed separately from God himself ... but according to you, God IS those particles of energy, because he is the first cause. Nothing else existed, and matter IS energy. So how could first cause pure energy (your God) have acquired the information to create the materials of the universe and life-God is intelligence and information from the very beginning. God is eternal. Perhaps 'instruct' was the wrong word. Let's say that God created those particles with the proper instructions to form together and to create matter. I have admitted in the past that I don't know, and cannot know, how God is constructed in a pure energy state to be both intelligence and information, but within the quantum level of reality, where I think He resides, everything is counterintuative.-> dhw: If your God experimented in order to produce humans, he clearly did not have total knowledge of what was needed.-I can only repeat that God chose evolution to create US. Evolution, as we have seen, does not follow a straight path and shows experimentation. He may have had to steer it. 
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> dhw: That is not the question here. The question is how your God acquired the information before he experienced himself as matter .....Why are you not prepared to consider the possibility of a God that had to acquire by experience the information needed to make universes and life? -That is not the way I envision God, but you are right. I don't know the limits of His power, if any, and therefore I cannot deny that He developed experience. However, to jump start a universe and early life, it appears to me He was well equipped to do that much. I admit, both the universe and life are in processes of evolution that God used. So I will partially agree with you. After the start of the universe and life He may have had to develop some experience.-> 
> dhw: As with evolution, you can dismiss the atheistic version of the hypothesis, but you are still left with an alternative version of your God: instead of the know-it-all-from-the beginning God, we have one who ... just like ourselves ... has to develop his intelligence through experience. Why is even this slope more sloppy, slimy and slippery than your own?-Since I am working backward from our current knowledge of reality, I can go just so far. I don't know why God chose an evolutionary process, but He did. I do not accept the omniscent, all-powerful God on the Bible. He appear to me to have some limits. For example, if He wanted an evil-free world, He could have made us all goody-goody automatons, but we have free-will. Perhaps He could guide our creation but not the entire outcome. Or our freedom is his choice. All of this is guesswork.