Problems with this section (Agnosticism)

by Frank Paris , Tuesday, October 27, 2009, 01:21 (5505 days ago) @ dhw

All right. To tell you the truth, so far I have only read the first short paragraph of your long reply. But that is enough to keep me busy for a half hour or so! I'll get to the rest of your post as I feel I have the time and energy.-You write, "Matt has discussed process theology with us, but it will be extremely helpful if you can make certain ideas a little clearer than they are at the moment. For me, two of the great (interconnected) mysteries are the origin of life and the source of consciousness, and I'd be grateful if you could give us your slant on these."-Funny how I seem to have answers for all this stuff! Comes from thinking about it intensely for forty years! Of course not everyone will agree they're good answers, but here goes on this one.-First, the "process theology" I "subscribe" to is my own vision of it. It has certainly been colored by my exposure to Griffin et all, but for what it's worth, I basically have my own inspiration with which Griffin and his precursors have struck a chord and provided vocabulary. This may sound pretentious, but I can't help that. Take what I say for what you think it's worth.-As for the origin of consciousness, Griffin has an answer, stemming from Whitehead, that I think is unassailable. Experience "goes all the way down" to the fundamental particles. In the fundamental particles, it is just "minimally there." It is manifest for example when one particle encounters another and there is a mutual reaction or transformation. They are "experiencing" each other. Problems only arise when you assume that experience suddenly emerges at some level of complexity from no precursors. Whitehead I believe has proved this. (Corollary: dark matter has less experience than, say, electrons, because it hardly reacts with anything.)-Organisms can build up only because of experience. Eventually, the experience becomes more and more sophisticated until consciousness begins to emerge. Hence the "origin" of consciousness. In Whitehead's and Griffin's thought, the origin of consciousness is not at all "mysterious." It is perfectly natural and not at all "miraculous."-The origin of life is basically the same thing. Life is just "metabolism" and "reproduction" with slight errors, in the face of competition. Metabolism, as Kauffman has made a career out of expounding, is just something perfectly natural that happens in a "soup" of chemical reactions. The possibility is there and so occasionally it happens.-I don't know whether you find any of that satisfactory, but I find it perfectly satisfying. Now I have to go take a rest.