Consciousness: not explained by panpsychism (General)

by dhw, Monday, October 29, 2018, 12:07 (1998 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: 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.”

dhw: 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.

DAVID: No one knows how consciousness appears. We now now know it feels to be a human (thank you, Thomas Nagel) according to dhw: his cell committees vote.

I’m surprised you didn’t know how it feels to be human before you read Thomas Nagel. You have already agreed that cell communities have to cooperate, whether preprogrammed 3.8 billion years ago, divinely dabbled, or endowed with their own intelligence. Since nobody knows how consciousness appears, I’m afraid your God theory is every bit as dubious as any other. (See my final comment.)

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

dhw: 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?

DAVID: I think in everything that can be conscious with its brain.

So your panentheistic God, who is inside and outside everything, is outside bacteria and all plant life and all the stars and planets. Or do you mean he’s inside them but hasn’t brought his consciousness with him?

dhw: 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).

DAVID: Formless energy /matter in this concept is given the property of complexifying all by itself with some sort of imagined self-contained mechanism.

Yes, the concept is as difficult to conceive as formless energy (God) simply endowed for ever with some sort of sourceless imagined self-contained non-material mechanism for consciousness.