Consciousness: not explained by panpsychism (General)

by dhw, Sunday, November 04, 2018, 12:44 (1990 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: The difference is the purposeful drive of first cause. Free-floating energy is just that, free of anything except its existence.

dhw: Fuzzier and fuzzier. Why is it more logical that first cause energy can possess purposeful consciousness than that first cause energy can develop purposeful consciousness?

DAVID: We cannot explain consciousness, yet it can create itself! Talk about fuzzy.

dhw: You still don’t understand the nature of agnosticism. BOTH explanations are fuzzy. That’s why I do not believe or disbelieve either. However, you believe in one of the fuzzy explanations, and dismiss the other because it’s fuzzy.

DAVID: I fully understand the nature of agnosticism. Proof is required, but as courses in logic tell us, logic can lead to conclusions which are reasonable.

Proof is impossible. Logic can lead to conclusions which individuals consider to be reasonable. This individual finds BOTH explanations to be sufficiently reasonable/unreasonable to make it impossible to believe/disbelieve either of them.

DAVID: First, research shows us just how very complex life's processes are. You have admitted they show design. Second, in human experience, complex design requires advanced thinking, which can only come from a working mind that can foresee the needs of the future the design is aimed at.

You simply refuse to recognize that life and speciation are unique phenomena which nobody can explain. Yet again: I do not accept that human birth canals, whales’ fins, spiders’ webs, weaverbirds’ nests, monarch butterflies’ migration all had to be planned before they were needed in anticipation of conditions that did not exist. I find it far more logical that they all resulted from the needs or opportunities created by changing conditions. And so, yet again, instead of your proposal that they were all preprogrammed 3.8 billion years ago or personally dabbled by your God (although apparently his purpose was to produce the body and brain of Homo sapiens), I propose that they were endowed right from the start - possibly by your God - with the intelligence to organize their own responses to those changing conditions. But of course, yet again: this remains a hypothesis because “life and speciation are unique phenomena which nobody can explain”. I believe I may have said all this before.

DAVID: Thirdly, the formless energy we find is not conscious, nor are aware of any way it can create its own consciousness. Therefore a pre-existing designing mind is required. Further logic not necessary.

Consciousness has to be designed, the formless energy we find is not conscious, and therefore there must be a form of formless energy that we are not aware of whose consciousness doesn't have to be designed but simply is. No, I’m afraid I do not find that logical. Sorry.