Sheldrake's Morphogenic Field - Innovation (Evolution)

by dhw, Monday, October 03, 2016, 12:28 (2971 days ago) @ BBella

Dhw: From my point of view, it is not collective information that creates (instead of “causes”) the innovation; it is the individual, conscious inventive ability of the fish. If we drop the word “cause”, I think we are in agreement. 
BBELLA: But, I still cannot envision an individual even having the ability to choose to create without having information to choose from. We ourselves made up of information from the field and within the field. This begs the question, for me, is the consciousness that chooses a part of the field or separate from it? If it is separate, where is the line drawn between information and consciousness?-What is “the field”? If you mean the collective field, or the ALL THAT IS, there is no separation. But you completely agreed when I suggested that individual organisms changed the morphic FIELDS through their own consciousness. And so on one level of discussion you have individual morphic fields, consciousnesses and pieces of information, and on another you have the collective unit of ALL THAT IS (as you say later, “All that is resides within the collective”), which by definition includes all of them.-BELLA: If there were no memory there could be no cause to make decisions.
Dhw: Agreed, but the decisions entail the organism's new use of the information. The remembered information does not innovate.
BBELLA: I'm still on the line here. If the information disappeared how could there be innovation? I am finding it more difficult than you to draw a definitive line between decision making and having information to choose from. Which innovates? They seem in cahoots to me - a symbiotic relationship. Again, is there consciousness without something to be conscious of? -I agree that you can't have x without y. I couldn't write a poem if there was no such thing as language. But that doesn't mean language writes the poem. “I” write the poem. Innovation can't take place without all the information necessary for it. But you agreed that the individual uses the information. That is the symbiosis AND the separation, but everything is part of the collective field.
 
Dhw: I do not know whether the collective field can be regarded as a single conscious being (God), or as having any consciousness at all of its own. It may simply be an ever expanding field of information that can only be accessed by individual consciousnesses.
BBELLA: Sheldrake's work/study on the collective (memory) field seems to disagree with your assessment. He has concluded, so far, even that which seems unconscious, like crystals and water, - are also able to access the collective memory field - quite quickly - according to fluidity. -This is panpsychism: that all things have some mental aspect. Maybe they do. That still gives us individuals accessing the expanding field of information, but it does not make the field of information itself conscious or inventive. We have no way of knowing the extent of consciousness, from crystals (and their individual fields and their “species'” collective field) right through to the ultimate collective field of all that IS, which some people think is God.
 
BBELLA: So, maybe all that IS, is able to access the field, because all that IS is the field, and dwells within a vibratory symbiotic relationship with itself - metaphorically, like a body.-I like the body image. All that IS is the body, the collective field, and the parts of the body are the individual fields, each doing its own thing (from large organs right down to single cells), but each in a symbiotic relationship with the others.