Panpsychism (Origins)

by dhw, Monday, November 04, 2024, 14:03 (13 hours, 50 minutes ago)

The repetitive discussions that David and I have been having for months now concern the possible purposes and character of a God, if it exists (we really shouldn’t talk of he or she). This is a rich subject in itself, but it makes us neglect alternatives, which on the face of it are very simple: if there is no God, the universe has no purpose and of course there is no character to be discussed. We can agree that all organisms try to survive, and that we humans have devised innumerable other purposes for ourselves, but these are not universal.

However, that is not quite the end of the atheistic alternative, which blatantly requires faith in chance combinations of matter and energy to provide all the ingredients plus the “spark” necessary for life, reproduction, evolution and consciousness. There is a third possible explanation or “first cause”, which is the theory of panpsychism. We've discussed it before, but I'm reminded of it by one of David’s schizophrenic approaches to his God, which has him asking: “Why must He have a reason?” (This is synonymous with purpose.) Another is that his God is selfless and is not human in any way. The theory of panpsychism takes on lots of different forms, but its basis is that everything (“pan” = all or everything) has some kind of mental component. This is a bit misleading, as I doubt if many panpsychists would argue that a stone has any form of mentality, but the proposal becomes less fantastic when we consider the different degrees of intelligence that are actually known to us. Even David acknowledges that single cells (e.g. bacteria) have a mental component, and a recent article concerning the behaviour of molecules within a single cell could also be construed as evidence of mental activity. We have no idea where the borderline might lie between zero and minimal, but the basic principle should not be dismissed, and it provides a third choice of first cause: instead of an all-powerful, all-knowing, sourceless, top-down mind, or the blind gropings of chance, we have primitive levels of intelligence which gradually evolve bottom-up to higher levels.

There are, of course, huge problems with this theory too, not the least of which is how rudimentary levels of intelligence could possibly create the conditions under which life can exist, let alone evolve. (Many folk do expect there to be primitive life on other planets, but evolution requires a wide variety of conditions.) Back to atheistic chance? But are these problems any less impenetrable than those posed by faith in chance as the creator of life and intelligence or in a sourceless superintelligence that has simply always been there?

This third option allows for design, but dispenses with the need for a purpose and for a single “humanized” God. One of David’s selves should welcome it as a possibility (I myself would certainly go no further than that), since it conforms to his concept of a first cause which may have no purpose, and is not human in any way - until, of course, it evolves into humans!