A Panpsychist Hypothesis (General)

by dhw, Friday, June 20, 2014, 14:08 (3808 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: But any version of first cause energy is counterintuitive: 1) intelligence and information magically all present and correct without a beginning; 2) a total blank that by chance hits on a winning formula; 3) energy as a single entity of potential intelligence that magically becomes aware of itself and can experiment and learn to create universes and life; 4) energy as potential intelligence that forms particles of matter which magically become aware of themselves so that they cooperate to form universes and life. You could argue that all of these counterintuitive hypotheses belong to "the quantum level of reality", which nobody understands. One brick wall is as impenetrable as another.-DAVID: I am sorry you are having problems with my first cause. I have my concept which is, restated, God had enough intelligence and information to make a universe and get life started. He used evolutionary processes for both. I don't know why He did. Anything else is guess work.-I still find it impossible to conceive how intelligent energy could have had any information at all about the behaviour of matter before matter even existed. 
 
dhw: My point was that the possibility of experimentation in the one field denotes incomplete information, and that enhances the possibility of incomplete information in every field, from the creation of matter onwards. 
DAVID: That is your guess. Maybe He just tweaked when He felt like it, maybe only to speed a process that would have gotten to US HUMANS eventually. Actually He has all the time in the world to accomplish anything.-You have missed my point. You have acknowledged the possibility that your God might have had to experiment in order to get to us. If his knowledge in that field was incomplete, it is equally possible that his knowledge in the field of universe-creating was also incomplete. The possibility that first cause energy was a potential rather than an actual intelligence is therefore bolstered by your acceptance that your God may have had to experiment in at least one area of his activity.
 
DAVID: Never potential intelligence. "Which came first chicken or egg" type of argument. Pure energy invented its own intelligence? Illogical.-Evolved, not invented. It is indeed a chicken or egg argument. The idea that energy has always been intelligent and possessed of the information needed to make universes and life, even before the existence of matter, is no less illogical.
 
dhw: I'm not seeking to replace one illogical hypothesis with another. ....I say about the origin of the universe and life, it's all guesswork. That's why some of us find it so difficult to climb off the agnostic fence!
DAVID: You are on the fence because you don't like my logic. So you find other explanations which are totally illogical.-I have complete respect for your FAITH, but I don't like your insistence that your own illogical hypothesis (which you prefer to gently call "counterintuitive") is more logical than any other illogical hypothesis. I have said repeatedly that NONE of these hypotheses are logical, because they all come up against the brick wall of inexplicable life and consciousness. Hence agnosticism.