Panpsychism Makes a Comeback: denied in plants II (General)

by dhw, Friday, July 05, 2019, 12:23 (1757 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: The biggest danger to objectivity is the assumption that human consciousness is the only form of consciousness. (I prefer the term “intelligence”, as it avoids confusion with human self-awareness.) If we take consciousness to be a synonym of awareness, and if our criteria for awareness include sentience, communication, decision-making, then it is clearly absurd to assume that plants and bacteria are NOT conscious.

DAVID: The absurdity is your changing the definition of consciousness to intelligence. True human consciousness implies self-awareness as part of the concept of human awareness. Non-human aware states of reality are conscious, but do not have consciousness.

I have defined consciousness as awareness, not as intelligence (which includes consciousness but includes other attributes as well), and you have fallen into the very trap which I wished to avoid! Human consciousness includes self-awareness. My point is that there are other forms and levels of consciousness/awareness. I cannot see any distinction between being conscious/aware and having consciousness/awareness. There are massive distinctions, however, between levels of consciousness/awareness.

dhw: Your own explanation for the appearance of consciousness is that your God preprogrammed or personally dabbled every single manifestation of these attributes. I wonder where these researchers think the “programmes” came from. Meanwhile, you yourself believe it to be possible that your God is plasma, or pure energy. Do plasma/pure energy have a brain? If we rid ourselves of our prejudices, and judge solely by the behaviour of plants and bacteria, there is no way we can exclude the possibility that they have their own particular, non-human form of intelligence. But that does NOT mean anthropomorphizing them.

DAVID: Apparent 'intelligence' can be automatic intelligently designed programs as Taiz notes.

Though he doesn’t say where the programmes come from. Thank you for using “can be”. My point is that apparent intelligence can be real intelligence, and many scientists believe that it is.

QUOTE (FROM “LIVER STUDY”): "Our results suggest that liver cells and sinusoids, which are the smallest blood vessels in the body, communicate with each other in both directions: The blood vessels instruct the hepatocytes and the hepatocytes send signals back to the blood vessels to establish and preserve the liquid-crystal order. This bi-directional communication is a central part of the self-organization of liver tissue."

dhw: Communication and self-organization are attributes of intelligence. As always, I propose that these processes are now automatic (until things go wrong), but the cell communities themselves would have used their perhaps God-given intelligence to set up the system in the first place.

DAVID: God gave them intelligent instructions to follow. They do not have their own innate intelligence.

Stated with absolute authority, but many scientists disagree with you.