Consciousness: not explained by panpsychism (General)

by David Turell , Monday, October 29, 2018, 17:05 (2215 days ago) @ dhw

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.

dhw: 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.)

You don't understand the reference to Nagel. Brains give the sense of how to feel oneself.

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

dhw; 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?

Brainless organisms cannot have consciousness or be conscious, but God is there for them. Otherwise how does He design evolutionary advances?

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.

dhw: 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.

God is easy to recognize logically from the complexity of life