A Panpsychist Hypothesis (General)

by dhw, Friday, June 27, 2014, 20:16 (3800 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: You may certainly make up any rules you wish for your concept of the UC. I see no reason why my UC cannot be entirely self-conscious without matter being present. We start at very different points in this discussion. Adler, my mentor, describes God as a'person like no other person, like no one we can conceive of or imagine. There is a vast gap between human persons and God, the person. Yes we are in His consciousness image, but each of us is a very tiny portion of what He is. This is why you and I are talking at cross-purposes. You are leaving out the enormous power in the UC, and since you are not following Adler, as I do, our discussion is worlds apart. You are trying to apply human thought to something quite different.-If I believed in God (and remember, I neither believe nor disbelieve), I would accept that he is a person like no other person, we are a tiny portion of what he is, he is enormously powerful etc. We can't create universes or life or the mechanisms of evolution, and so those claims would be entirely credible. But I still wouldn't understand how he could know all about matter before matter exists, and so I would ask myself if this might possibly indicate that like ourselves, he fulfils the potential of his intelligence by gathering information and learning as he goes along. I might even ask myself what he might have done with his self-consciousness for all of eternity before turning his energy particles into matter. I would not dismiss such questions or their possible answers as a mistake, a non-starter, illogical, anthropomorphic. And I would even think it possible that he made my consciousness in the image of his own, and that wonderful things like love, empathy, and logical thinking might be part of our shared consciousness. But of course that is the curse of the agnostic. He will insist on keeping his mind open.
 
dhw: 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.
DAVID: The quantum theorists I read don't talk about dieties.-Hardly surprising, since a glance at Wikipedia will tell you that many of the most prominent names are atheists. Of course that doesn't mean they are right, but it does suggest that quantum theory provides no more solid a basis for your beliefs than any other branch of the sciences.