A Panpsychist Hypothesis (General)

by dhw, Wednesday, June 25, 2014, 15:39 (3585 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: This is a welcome volte face since the days when you were dismissing as a "non-starter" the idea of your God experimenting,..... And this makes it possible that the intelligence of first cause energy evolved in exactly the same way as our own intelligence ... expanding its potential as it gained information. There is no "mistake" here ... just two equally weird possibilities.-DAVID: And I have brought you to accepting an eternal force which is behind the creaton of our reality. Our only difference is you want it to learn as it goes along.-Hold on! Firstly, I'm suggesting "equally weird" alternatives. I don't "want" anything. Secondly, you've already conceded that eternal energy may have learned as it went along. You wrote: "I know evolutionary processes were used for both the universe and for the development of life's variety. Therefore it is entirely possible that some information had to be developed during the evolutions..." If information had to be developed, it was not already available. Please keep this in mind for the next point.
 
DAVID: Since the Big Bang is an instant in first space-time, what source did your cause learn from, or was your first cause (FC) a very fast learner?-First, you can't have it both ways, that the Big Bang was the start of time but first cause energy existed before the Big Bang. You cannot have a before without time. Secondly, you have agreed that first cause energy might well have created other universes before this one, which would certainly have given it experience of working with matter. Thirdly, even if it didn't, the beginning of the process would have had to be your first cause "pure energy" turning its own particles into matter, in which case it had to learn at the same speed as the particles in my panpsychist hypothesis. Your alternative is that it didn't have to learn. It knew everything already (although you've admitted above that its not knowing everything is "entirely possible"). I will deal with this below. -dhw: Physician, heal thyself! While I continue to delve into the various alternatives, having faith in none of them, you have been fighting tooth and nail to preserve the religious image of an eternally conscious power magically endowed with all the information and experience necessary to build life and a universe.
DAVID: No, I have returned you to accepting an FC of energy, you without a consciousness, me with a consciousness. Now I have got to make you realize that only conscious energy learns.-I agree that only conscious energy learns, which is why I disagree when you keep insisting that organisms like ants and bacteria are mere automata, even though we know they learn. But how does energy become conscious? According to you, it's always been conscious. However, to be conscious, you must have something to be conscious of! If nothing happened, your God might just as well have been unconscious. My alternative is that first cause energy was not conscious. It only became conscious when it turned into changeable matter, so there was something for it to be conscious of. Now I have got to make you realize that consciousness that has always had information which did not exist until there was something to be conscious of is a logical impossibility.