Panpsychism Makes a Comeback (General)

by dhw, Friday, January 23, 2015, 15:44 (3590 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: Your final sentence is a good summary of my evolutionary hypothesis: that as the lower forms of awareness enabled cells to combine into ever more complex communities, so these cell communities themselves acquired increasing degrees of awareness.
DAVID: You state that this could have happened through 'awareness' even though what we see is molecular reactions and responses, nothing more. You are claiming to have solved one of the great mysteries of evolution, multicellularity. The great experts, like the ones you love to quote about sentience, have no answer as to how this developed.-No claim - just a hypothesis, like your own challenge to the “great experts” with your hypothesis that there is a supercolossal, eternal intelligence that planned multicellularity. As for awareness, even when studying humans, all that neuroscientists can “see” is a mass of chemical reactions. The problem is fitting what we see to what happens - i.e. how do chemical reactions explain intelligent behaviour, as in humans AND bacteria? You want to claim that humans have some special invisible faculty whereas bacteria and other organisms are merely chemistry. And yet you believe that some organisms do have that invisible faculty - i.e. you believe that animals have souls - but somehow, although they use it to feel, think, reason, make decisions etc., it's a different “kind” from ours.
 
DAVID: Here let me use an analogy for my view. Each step of evolutionary progress through early primates to apes and chimps was as if evolution stepped over a small dividing brook. To get to human consciousness, it required a flight over the Atlantic Ocean.-You don't need analogies. I am well aware of the difference in scale. But I see a clear link between apes and early humans using sticks for tools and modern humans using drills; between caves and houses; between grunts and words. In other words, I see no need for special creation, because I see human intelligence as an extension of animal intelligence, though it has evolved to such a degree that perhaps you have lost sight of its roots. -Dhw: Our own sensory and mental activities and communications are also bound up with “molecular responses to molecular stimuli”, but what we don't know is how we are able to modulate our behaviour accordingly. That is where degrees of consciousness come in, for us and for other organisms, and that is where the work of eminent researchers clashes with your preconceptions concerning the purpose and course of evolution (see my post under “Pre-preprogramming evolution”).
DAVID: Sorry, but I can't follow your line of thought. I'' try the other post.-The first part is explained above. When dealing with bacteria, you insist on disregarding the mystery of their apparently autonomous behaviour (observed by eminent researchers) and focusing purely on the chemistry. I am suggesting you do so because you cannot bear the thought that organisms might possess the means (possibly God-given) to advance evolution their own way. That goes against your vision of God as planning every step of evolution so that it would produce humans.