Biological complexity: how the cell proteasome works (Introduction)

by dhw, Tuesday, May 09, 2017, 12:07 (2756 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: The key issue is the unimaginable complexity of life and the requirement for a designing mind to produce it. Your panpsychist alternative is a bottom up alternative which parenthetically sneaks in the 'conscious universe' concept, every rock has consciousness, which really is a version of my thought that a universal consciousness exists, God.

dhw: Most panpsychist theories are indeed theistic. However, mine is not, and these are very different concepts. Yours is an inexplicable single, eternal mind which is the source of everything, and knows and plans everything in advance – a “person like no other person”. Mine is countless individual consciousnesses (rudimentary) that inexplicably arise in some (not necessarily all) materials which over the course of time combine their limited intelligences to create increasingly complex forms of intelligent matter – just as bacteria, ants etc. form communities whose intelligence far exceeds that of each individual. Two totally different, inexplicable forms of consciousness which, to my mind and for different reasons, are equally unbelievable.

DAVID: I'm sorry, but I cannot imagine any intelligence existing in the formation of the original rocky Earth that was created 4.5 billion years ago. The only intelligence we see is from the formation of very many complex organic molecules which then become alive through the coordination of their functions. That miracle is due to God's actions. I view anything less as impossible.

I cannot imagine intelligent chemicals either, and that is why I do not believe or disbelieve in my panpsychist hypothesis. On the other hand, I cannot imagine a sourceless, individual, eternally conscious mind, a “person like no other person”, creating and encompassing and occupying ALL THAT IS, and that is why I do not believe or disbelieve in your “God” hypothesis. You wrote on this thread: “The ‘who’ is to get around the discussion of imagining God.” You can’t imagine my bottom-up panpsychist hypothesis and so you disbelieve it. And you would prefer to get round the problem of imagining your God hypothesis because you believe it.