Consciousness: not explained by panpsychism (General)

by dhw, Sunday, October 28, 2018, 11:34 (2000 days ago) @ David Turell

Thank you for this interesting article. For the record, I never thought for one minute that panpsychism solved the mystery of consciousness. But it can offer an alternative mystery to that of a single consciousness that creates all other consciousnesses. See below.

QUOTE: "There are problems for panpsychism, of course, perhaps the most important being the combination problem.”

This is why I like the ant analogy and the concept of emergence – namely that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. In terms of the human brain, my hypothesis is that cooperation between my intelligent cells/cell communities produces the unified “colony” of my consciousness.

QUOTE: “I agree with panpsychists that it seems as if our experiences have a private, intrinsic nature that cannot be explained by science. Rather than thinking that this is a fundamental property of all matter, I think that it is an illusion [……] Consciousness, in that sense, is not everywhere but nowhere. Perhaps this seems as strange a view as panpsychism. But thinking about consciousness can lead one to embrace strange views."

None stranger, in my view, than the claim that consciousness is an illusion.

DAVID: I do not accept panpsychism in any sense other than I think we live in the consciousness of God.

I’m not sure what “in the consciousness of God” means. You've always claimed that you are a panentheist, and your God is both inside and outside everything. This makes you a theistic panpsychist, but does it mean your God’s consciousness is in a pebble, a grain of sand, a table and chair, the sun?

My atheistic form of panpsychism, which leaves gaps every bit as large as the theistic hypothesis, would be that as energy and matter have gone on eternally forming new combinations, eventually the most rudimentary consciousness came into being, and in due course this evolved into billions of consciousnesses which themselves combined to create increasingly complex forms, perhaps culminating in our own. But at what level consciousness actually began we can have no idea, just as we can have no idea how it can have existed without a beginning (God).