Sheldrake's Morphogenic Field - Innovation (Evolution)

by BBella , Friday, November 11, 2016, 06:17 (2933 days ago) @ dhw

>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, why is it different?
Dhw:[..] 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.

I agree, that each of those attributes you mention probably do not have a field of their own (i could be wrong) but we do know there are different degrees/levels/ of consciousness, so possibly the attributes you mention could be in one of those levels/fields.

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.
Dhw: 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?

It would seem to me, the ghost of consciousness (an excellent metaphor or title to some great work of art/ book - fiction or non lol) may only be evidenced by it's observed presence; like, "it takes one to know one"? The lines may be blurred, but by the levels of consciousness we appear to have, we have the ability to observe many different levels of consciousness in the life around us. Certain people (shamans, medicine men, etc) say they can observe even more levels than we see.

Dhw: [...] 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.

Ok, Truce! I've got it! Information is simply a labeling device that we humans use, allowing us to categorize the different aspects of what IS so we can communicate with words, right?

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?
Dhw: 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.

How would you separate life from consciousness? If we drop both words, life and consciousness, and just observe
what IS; we see no life when a body dies. And we can only know a body is dead
when no life is observed in the body. But, some have said, that even though no life was observed in their body, they were never without life! As far as they could tell they were fully alive. So where in what we just observed can we separate life from consciousness?

Dhw: A materialist will say that consciousness dies when the body dies, and so we lose both life and consciousness.

And the materialist would be right, that when the "body dies" the body does lose life and consciousness - from the observer's standpoint. But clear evidence from people having actually experienced it (by NDE's and OBE's), from their point of view, they say they did not lose any part of life. They never stopped living. In every sense of the word.

Dhw: Those who believe in an immortal, individual soul will probably say we lose one form of life and enter another with our consciousness intact.

Probably, those who believe might express it that way. But from the accounts of those that do not just believe, but have experienced death (and came back to tell), which truly gives us the best evidence we can gain to address your comment; they would say they felt no loss of any kind; only their loved ones felt a loss of life, although their loved ones body was still fully there - physically. So, maybe we do not lose any of our form of who we are in any sense of the word when we "die". Though, maybe, we possibly add senses by moving into another level of life/consciousness?.