Pansychism; a supporting essay (Introduction)

by dhw, Monday, September 02, 2019, 09:28 (1910 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: dhw will like this. My belief is a parallel in that I think we live in the consciousness of God.

dhw: He’s not talking about “we”, but about all materials, and I don’t understand what you mean by “in the consciousness of God”. Many panpsychists are also theists, but the question this author is raising is whether it is right to distinguish between those particles that combine to make organic beings and those particles which combine to make what we believe to be inanimate objects. The behaviour of particles in quantum physics is also “crazy”, but is believed by many to represent some kind of reality that is “more real” than the one we are familiar with. I do like the article, which I think is well argued, but I still find it difficult to believe that stones and grains of sand and drops of water have even the most rudimentary consciousness of the kind that would also be necessary for the “fundamental particles” to create life, reproduction and evolution. That is why I put it on a par with chance and God as a theory I cannot have faith in.

DAVID: To answer your question I think God created us in His mind.

Perhaps I’m being stupid, but I still don’t understand this, or “we live in the consciousness of God”. Do you mean our material existence and that of the universe are both illusions and everything is a figment of his imagination? Or do you mean he planned everything in his mind and then manipulated matter to give material form to his ideas? Or the universe is his body and contains his mind?

Purely as a matter of interest, the author of our article has clearly latched on to A.N. Whitehead’s notion that “the basic unit is an experiential event”, which he calls an “actual entity” (Oxford Companion to Philosophy) – and Whitehead was a panpsychist-panentheist and process theologian.