A Panpsychist Hypothesis (General)

by dhw, Sunday, June 22, 2014, 22:44 (3805 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID (to GK): Intelligence requires information. One cannot separate the two. When a consciousness receives information it becomes intelligent. Show me the other way around-dhw: I could not have put it better myself. Consciousness without information is only potential intelligence. If eternal energy was the first cause (i.e. nothing else existed before it), even if it was conscious, it could not have become intelligent without information. So where did the information come from, to enable it to make a universe and life? Earlier you wrote: "Pure energy invented its own intelligence? Illogical." Now apparently pure energy invented its own information, and that's how it became intelligent. Logical -DAVID: I have developed my concept of God as a universal consciousness by working backward from our knowledge of the universe and of the attribues of life. You are questioning my invention which has intellignce and information all at the same time, all eternal. And, yes, to accept that requires faith.-I've simply been trying to point out that your God hypothesis is no more logical than the alternative which you have dismissed. The only intelligence we know of (our own and that of our fellow creatures) is a potential that develops accumulatively through experience of things that already exist. And so a starting point followed by evolution of intelligence can scarcely be dismissed as less logical than no starting point and intelligence that has always been there. -dhw: 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. -DAVID: Because the inventor knows what he is creating. 
dhw: That is the same as saying he already has the information about matter before any information about matter is available. You call it counterintuitive. I call it illogical.
DAVID: Thomas Edison made his inventions by trial and error, but he used information about the material things he dealt with in moving forward. I find your point illogical.-I'm glad to see that "trial and error" is becoming more prominent in your argument, as opposed to the know-it-all version of your God. Thomas Edison had a mountain of existing information provided by countless earlier intelligences on which to base his experiments. Since your God was nothing but pure energy, there was no existing information about matter to enable him to create a universe and life. If you are now saying that he did NOT have all the information, but gradually learned from his experiences with matter, you can allow for the possibility (which is all I'm asking) that eternal energy had no information at all until it turned into matter. The two hypotheses then begin to converge.-dhw: Why is there a need for faith? why do you "need" to choose one illogical hypothesis in preference to another
DAVID: Simple: I have a conclusion that fits the known facts as I see them. That conclusion, which I reached over a number of years of reading, feels good to me, and I have faith that I am right. It is OK that you cannot do that.-A nice response.