Sheldrake's Morphogenic Field - Innovation (Evolution)

by dhw, Wednesday, November 09, 2016, 12:54 (2934 days ago) @ BBella

Dhw: Top down control for me involves some sort of God, whereas bottom up = interacting individual forces (organic and inorganic) which may influence one another but are not influenced by every other individual force in the universe or by a single force that encompasses everything.
BBELLA: Ok, I see where you are going with that. I was thinking more like how trees have individual morphic fields but also are a part of a whole morphic field. The same with everything. All things have individual fields as well as whole fields. I'm not seeing how a whole consciousness field would be any different than a whole tree, human, spider, bird, planet, etc., field. It has individual fields and a whole field. Seems that is how it should be.

Again, I can’t separate consciousness from whatever has consciousness. I can refer to a single spider. I can’t refer to a single consciousness. I can only refer to BBella’s/a spider’s/a bird’s consciousness.

Dhw: It’s the idea of non-individualized consciousness that I can’t get my head round, as you seem to be describing below. Even David’s God (“universal consciousness”) would have his own character.
BBELLA: But every thing that IS seems to have individual fields as well as a whole morphic field. So why not consciousness? Why does the pattern of all that IS stop with consciousness? If consciousness does not have a whole field, what makes it different than every thing that IS?

As above. But let me try a different approach. Do you think beauty, love, thought, imagination have morphic fields? For me consciousness is in that sort of category: an immaterial quality, an attribute, a state that may form part of each individual field but has no independent existence of its own.

Dhw: I don’t see the individual’s morphic field as the body anyway.
BBELLA: I agree. But, the body itself has a morphic field. I've said before, I think of the morphic field as an imprinted memory field. It is not the thing itself made of matter and energy, it is an imprint of the thing. Similar to what we might think of as a ghost - an imprint of what makes a thing a thing but not the thing itself.

Yes, that’s how I see it too: the imprint of you, me, the tree, the spider, each with its own individual identity. But to follow the image, what imprint can there be of consciousness? What would be the ghost of consciousness?

Dhw: I think it’s all the information and the energy that constitute the nature of whatever is.
BBELLA: I possibly disagree. I'm thinking that all information is matter and energy is energy. Energy may possibly be the force that guides the matter to be what it is. But the morphic field, I see as an imprint (memory) that energy is guided by to continuously create what IS.

As David has pointed out, information is not matter. I see what IS as being constantly created by interaction between matter and matter, matter and energy, individual morphic fields, and individual and generic morphic fields. All of these are filled with information, but information creates nothing: it is used but doesn’t use.

Dhw: I don’t know if consciousness gives a living thing life, or consciousness depends on life.
BBELLA: If we think of life, not as consciousness, but as that which leaves a living thing when it dies, that is what I am labeling consciousness. We could call it something else - but what would that be?

I’m afraid I can’t follow this. If life is what leaves us when we die and we label it consciousness, we are equating life with consciousness. A materialist will say that consciousness dies when the body dies, and so we lose both life and consciousness. Those who believe in an immortal, individual soul will probably say we lose one form of life and enter another with our consciousness intact.