Consciousness; an article touting universal consciousness (Introduction)

by dhw, Tuesday, June 19, 2018, 12:58 (2131 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: No mention of God but supports a theory of universal consciousness as an explanation of the presence of consciousness and the 'combination problem':
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/could-multiple-personality-disorder-e...

QUOTE: "constitutive panpsychism has a critical problem of its own: there is arguably no coherent, non-magical way in which lower-level subjective points of view—such as those of subatomic particles or neurons in the brain, if they have these points of view—could combine to form higher-level subjective points of view, such as yours and ours. This is called the combination problem and it appears just as insoluble as the hard problem of consciousness.
"The obvious way around the combination problem is to posit that, although consciousness is indeed fundamental in nature, it isn’t fragmented like matter.”

DAVID’s comment: This wild theory thinks we are all associated to a universal consciousness and dissociated at the same time! But it mirrors some of my thinking.

I think all of us would agree that there is no satisfactory explanation of consciousness, and every attempt comes up with its own problems. However, even if we can’t explain it, we have lots of examples in the world of insects and microorganisms that show how fragmented (i.e. individual) consciousnesses DO combine to create higher levels of intelligence. My favourite example, of course, is ants, which create cities and lifestyles of enormous complexity entailing the combination of multiple skills. If we accept that even single-celled organisms are intelligent, there is no way we can know for sure that they are NOT capable of combining and producing levels of intelligence/consciousness that extend to that of high-level subjectivity. I find this theory considerably less “wild” than the one presented here.