A Panpsychist Hypothesis (General)

by dhw, Thursday, June 26, 2014, 23:37 (3801 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: Now you are saying that our own consciousness is in the image of the universal consciousness ... in which case, if we reflect your God, your God must reflect us, and an anthropomorphic analysis is a perfectly reasonable one to make. -DAVID: You forget we are made in His image, not the other way around. We immitate His makeup. You are again viewing the result of my thinking with anthropomorphic objections. The UC does not need matter or events to be eternal and to contain information and intelligence through a timeless eternity, until at some juncture the UC acts to create a universe and life. And the UC is in the quantum layer of reality, not ours.-If I make something in my image, it must resemble me, and I must resemble it. Therefore we resemble your God. You specified that this image related to consciousness. Therefore there must be resemblances between God's consciousness and ours, and so it is perfectly reasonable to apply an anthropomorphic analysis to your personal interpretation of God's thinking.-dhw: I agree that only conscious energy learns, .... But how does energy become conscious? According to you, it's always been conscious. However, to be conscious, you must have something to be conscious of!
DAVID: Simply, I am allowed to develop a concept of my universal consciousness in any form with any attributes I wish. It may seem illogical to you that I arrived at this description, but that is what I have concluded. -Of course you are allowed to believe what you want. However, I am also allowed to point out that a different concept of God (not to mention of the origin of the universe and life) can be extrapolated from the not illogical premise that consciousness can only function if there is something for it to be conscious of, and that information about matter can hardly exist before matter itself exists, and that any inventor will therefore have to gather information as he goes along. Such responses as "non-starter", "a mistake", "your own invention", "illogical", "anthropomorphic" sound just a little hollow when the only criterion appears to be your right to give your God whatever attributes you wish. The panpsychist hypothesis that forms the subject of this thread may be as full of flaws as your own concept of a universal consciousness, but I'd be most surprised if your theories concerning the presence of a universal consciousness in the quantum layer of reality were regarded by your fellow quantum theorists as being more likely than the presence of multiple consciousnesses or the presence of no consciousness at all.