Sheldrake's Morphogenic Field - Innovation (Evolution)

by dhw, Monday, September 26, 2016, 12:27 (2978 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: And so to your question: "What is consciousness if there is nothing to be conscious of?" I couldn't agree more. And this is one reason why David's God is so difficult for me to believe in. If God is pure conscious energy, what did pure conscious energy have to be conscious of through the eternity of its past existence?-DAVID: Its self as ALL THAT IS.-According to you, conscious pure energy was the first cause, i.e. ALL THAT WAS was pure energy. So did God spend past eternity saying to himself, “I am pure energy”? He must have been bored silly. If we posit the idea of energy and matter as the eternal first cause, at least we have something for consciousness to be conscious of. But we also have the possibility that consciousness evolved from the interplay between energy and matter, as opposed to consciousness preceding matter.-DAVID: (under Evolution: a different view): Another essay from Andreas Wagner which explains the enormous protein landscape and how evolution seems to navigate it through large relationship networks.-https://aeon.co/essays/without-a-library-of-platonic-forms-evolution-couldn-t-work?utm_...-dhw: Thank you, David, for another interesting approach to the subject.
 
“Nature's libraries” seem to me to be very akin to Sheldrake's "morphic fields", though it is still not clear how organisms gain access to the right "book", or whether there is an almighty librarian in charge of the whole shebang.-DAVID: To assemble Protein molecules with precise function and their duplicates managed by protein genes in a simple order to allow for gradual change, when trillions of carbon based protein molecules are possible to assemble, does take an 'almighty librarian' to invent the scheme.-If consciousness evolved in individual pieces of matter (no more and no less improbable than its always having been there in the form of one pure energy librarian without any books), the library could have built itself up through the multiplication of consciousnesses.