Consciousness: not explained by panpsychism (General)

by dhw, Wednesday, October 31, 2018, 09:37 (1997 days ago) @ David Turell

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

dhw: Your usual assumption that although as a dualist you do not believe the brain to be the source of consciousness, nothing can be conscious unless it has a brain. Anyway, God is now apparently inside and outside everything, but he is not inside bacteria or plants or stones or suns. But he is “there” for them. Where?

DAVID: God started life and evolved us from a start with bacteria. God's consciousness is within this universe as well as without.

If God exists, then of course he started life, and we agree that he would have started it with bacteria. How does that prove that organisms must have a brain to be intelligent? As for within and without, it would appear, then, that God’s consciousness is not in bacteria, plants, stones or the sun but is only in brains, and otherwise floats around wherever there is formless energy inside and outside the universe.

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.

DAVID: God is easy to recognize logically from the complexity of life.

dhw: Formless energy can’t become conscious, but formless energy can be conscious, and this is easy to recognize because life is complex. I do not follow the logic.

DAVID: The logic must be holistic, looking at every bit of evidence there is a designer. Questioning each tiny aspect of the evidence is not logical. Look at the video of the larva that decides to look like a snake when provoked and tell me it can't have been the result of a designer. Just a bit of evidence you keep denying.

We are not arguing about evidence for design, which you know perfectly well I accept – hence the whole discussion about your God’s possible invention of cellular intelligence as the designing mechanism. We are arguing, under the heading of “panpsychism”, about the origin of consciousness. There is no logic in the argument that formless energy can BE conscious but cannot BECOME conscious.