A Panpsychist Hypothesis (General)

by dhw, Sunday, June 29, 2014, 14:48 (3799 days ago) @ Balance_Maintained

DHW (to David): 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. A)We can't create universes or life or the mechanisms of evolution, and so those claims would be entirely credible. But B) 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, C)he fulfills the potential of his intelligence by gathering information and learning as he goes along.-TONY: A) We can not even conceive their complexity or elegance, much less create it ourselves.
B) Because he designed the rules that govern it, perhaps. I mean, if you were creating a car you could conceive and design it long before you implemented it.
C) Possible, no way to know.-I could not conceive and design a car without already being possessed of vast amounts of knowledge accumulated over millennia of experience, ranging from the invention of the wheel to the mechanics of locomotion. This is the point that I don't seem to be able to get across to anyone: that if the first cause was pure energy, nothing else existed. There was no matter. Even if that energy was conscious, it would have had to make matter out of itself, and if matter had never existed before, how could it know how all the different forms would behave? David's answer is that God's consciousness is different from ours, and so we shouldn't ask such anthropomorphic questions. I have every right to ask such questions, and if I come up with a speculative answer (e.g. that your God had to learn as he went along), it should be taken seriously as a logical possibility.
 
DHW:) A)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. B) 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 C) that is the curse of the agnostic. He will insist on keeping his mind open.-TONY: A) Perhaps it was spent working out all the details before he implemented them.-Or perhaps he experimented with other universes and even other forms of life, for ever and ever. Or perhaps he wasn't even aware of anything until his energy happened to transmute itself into matter. We don't know, so one speculation is potentially as valid as another. (This is also my answer to David, who says God "would have to know about matter before he created it or how would He invent a universe which works?")-TONY: B) Of course it is, and some of us believe there is actually a "How To" book... some believe there are several...
C) No, your curse is that you can't believe without seeing, that you demand evidence, that you have no faith; not in science, and not in god. Personally, I think I would rather believe and be wrong than not believe, whether I was right or not.-Of course I used "curse" ironically. I don't feel cursed. I am in fact blessed with a generally happy nature and have led a happy life. I have long since grown accustomed to living with my ignorance, although I opened up this website because I'm still eager to learn. It's true that the evidence I've heard from both sides still fails to convince me, but even this has proved to be a source of enjoyment and education, because people like David and yourself have offered me marvellous and stimulating company over the years. As for belief, I don't see it as a matter of "would rather". Either you have faith or you don't. And belief or disbelief or non-belief in God is only a problem if you consider it a problem. In fact, I suspect belief causes more problems than disbelief or non-belief, but that's another subject.