Consciousness; a radically new theory. Romansh? (Introduction)

by dhw, Sunday, June 28, 2015, 14:19 (3435 days ago) @ David Turell

David My definition of panentheism is that the universal consciousness is both within and without the universe, and my consciousness is a tiny part of that UC.-Romansh: So I would take it that you think rocks, moons, chemicals etc are conscious.
Carbon dioxide molecules in the air and water molecules in the oceans are conscious.
The neurons in the brain are conscious, as are people, families, communities, cities countries and the Earth in general. -DAVID: No, I think the universal consciousness has created inanimate objects such as you have listed, but the attribute of consciousness itself is limited to those animals with brain function.This is where I differ with dhw and his panpsychism theory.-The attribution of consciousness to inanimate objects is misleading, since it can imply human-type awareness. The description of panpsychism that I like asserts that “each spatio-temporal thing has a mental or ‘inner' aspect. [...] there may be varying degrees in which things have inner subjective or quasi-conscious aspects, some very unlike what we experience as consciousness.” (Oxford Companion to Philosophy) Most panpsychists trace these forms of quasi-consciousness back to your God, who inexplicably possesses the almightiest form of consciousness. My atheistic variation would be that during an eternal process of energy/material transformation (matter is never constant, as far as we know), a few forms of matter - I am sceptical about the ‘pan' prefix - inexplicably developed a kind of quasi-consciousness. It would be totally different from ours, just as bacterial intelligence is totally different from ours, and it would have created combinations which eventually led to the first forms of life. Basically, as I mentioned in an earlier post, this would describe evolution from the bottom upwards (the rudimentary quasi-consciousness of those individual materials ultimately developing into our own self-awareness), as opposed to the top downwards (supreme consciousness coming from nowhere). I do not subscribe to this hypothesis, but simply offer it as an equally reasonable/unreasonable alternative to the inexplicable creative talents of God and chance.