Cell response to electric field (Introduction)

by dhw, Thursday, April 25, 2013, 14:29 (4029 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: 1) I am conscious, as you are. We are conscious because we experience it. We can infer some degree of consciousness to animals but they are not aware that they are aware, the standard to infer higher thinking than just reacting.
 
We're back to the difficulty of defining "intelligence" and consciousness. From what we know (which is horribly limited), human awareness of awareness is the highest form. Our assumption that our fellow animals have nothing like our degree of self-awareness is based on communication and observation: we have enough in common with them to attain a degree of understanding. But the less related we are to other organisms, the less able we are to "read their minds". The behaviour of bacteria is astonishingly similar in its apparent consciousness to that of ants. You may, of course, be right that they're all automatons, but I'm not convinced and we can't prove anything either way. We know that all kinds of electrical impulses take place in our own brains, but we don't know whether they are the cause or the result of thought. The same chicken-and-egg uncertainty (very inappropriate metaphor!) applies to other forms of life.-DAVID: 2) I believe consciousness is an emergent phenomenon in part, but it also is connected to a universal consciousness. Again the best explanation I can come up with from the presentations by the 'experts'.-This is where your whole scenario becomes uncomfortably murky. "In part" and "connected to" won't do for me. "Emergent" = the mind is a product of the brain (which may well be so). In that case, you can't have your immortal soul. But in NDEs, the patients retain their personal identity, their ability to think and communicate etc. This is not a "connection" ... it is their own consciousness. I'd be very surprised if your 'experts' agreed on part-emergent, part-soul. Of course I haven't read nearly as much as you on the subject, but I would have expected a much sharper divide, with physicalists going for emergentism, and religious believers for the 'spirit', 'soul', or what I prefer to call 'intelligent energy'.
 
DAVID: And, of course, I have faith in my conclusions. I know that your proposal of intelligent energy engenders no faith on your part, just another 'angels on the head of the pin' rumination. Anything to avoid the proposition that only chance or design can explain our reality. There is no third way.-Yes, it's very important for me that you should keep my non-belief in mind. But you should also keep in mind that this 'third way' is not a means of avoidance; it's part of the quest for what seems to me to be credible. I do find the "intelligent cell" credible (far more so than your evolutionary scenario of the human line being preplanned and preprogrammed, although new organs and Nature's innovative wonders in other species result from automated but unplanned responses to the environment). However, the idea that non-conscious energy "awakens" within matter and then guides materials to form the "intelligent cell" is as far beyond my credulity as chance doing the same job or first-cause energy being eternally, infinitely and inexplicably self-aware.