Consciousness: not explained by panpsychism (General)

by dhw, Wednesday, August 08, 2018, 09:31 (2298 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: For me spacetime presents no problem. It is timeless but our conscious experience orders events in an arrow to the future and time appears.

dhw: For me it’s the same old story wrapped up in verbiage. We don’t know the source of consciousness, and none of this disproves the possibility that “each spatiotemporal thing has a mental or ‘inner’ aspect” (dictionary definition of panpsychism). Some people equate this idea with the presence of their God in all things (top-down consciousness), while others may use the concept as the basis for a bottom-up evolution of consciousness. As for the reality of time, if you believe in the sequence of cause and effect, you can’t say spacetime is timeless, because there is a before and after. If you don’t believe in the reality of cause and effect/before and after, try the above test. And I’ll be a devil here, and tell you that I really and truly believe that even if there were no humans consciously experiencing events, there would still be causes and effects/befores and afters going on in the universe.

DAVID: The article does carry Einstein to illogical extremes, but the equations allow time in both directions. Does math always tell the whole truth? Before humans appeared there was a progression of events which upon our arrival we have studied. Time was always present as before and after.

It’s a pleasure to find that we are in agreement!