Post 4. Continued . . .
Universal Mind vs Universal Matter
With such contrasting yet complementary ideas in mind, I continue to validate my own existence by trying to understand how & why the current world works as it does. For example, materialists typically argue that all cases of consciousness that we know about are dependent on biological reality. Yet my exploration of the Enformationism thesis finds numerous hints that our existence may be ultimately pre-biological and immaterial. By that I mean the macro-scale wetware of Biology is dependent upon atomic-scale Physics, which in turn is grounded upon nonscalable mental Mathematics. So, my reading of cutting-edge science indicates that the quantum description of physical reality (informational, relational, mental) is akin to pre-scientific concepts of the metaphysical spirit realm, which is more Potential than Biological. Hence, on the cosmic scale, Mind seems to be more fundamental than Matter.
The August-September 2017 issue of Philosophy Now magazine explores the revival of a quaint antique worldview, Panpsychism (all is mind), as a way to come to terms with the paradoxes of Quantum Theory. For my own purposes though, I try to avoid the beguiling human-centric implications of “psyche”, and say instead that all is EnFormAction (creative energy, power to enform). Of course, Panpsychism is ridiculed by materialists, partly because proponents use the misleading anthro-morphic human-scale term “consciousness” when referring to the universal mind-like aspect of reality. Which is why I think the more-generic & less-leading term “information” is more appropriate when discussing the basic substance of both Mind & Matter. For example, at levels of low complexity, exchanges of information are merely what physicists call “energy”, which is “doing” without “knowing”. Only at higher levels of intricacy and entanglement do the conscious properties of Mind emerge from Material stuff.
One article in the philosophy magazine refers to neuro-scientist Christof Koch's “radical” theory of consciousness4. He says, “ consciousness arises within any sufficiently complex, information-processing system. All animals, from humans on down to earthworms, are conscious; even the internet could be. That’s just the way the universe works. ” The awareness of worms may sound like a New Agey notion for universal knowingness, but I don't think he means to imply that even atoms have human-like self-consciousness. Instead, as I see it, they are “aware” of their context only in the metaphorical sense that they exchange energy (information) with each other.
Nevertheless, Koch does invite confusion by invoking “feelings”. Although he espouses Giulio Tononi's mathematically-grounded Integrated Information Theory, Koch goes a bit too far, asserting that “Any system with integrated information different from zero has consciousness. Any integration feels like something”. To compound the problem, he goes on to say, “ But according to my version of panpsychism, it feels like something to be the internet . . .” However, he then seems to contradict that spooky implication by discussing John Searle's rhetorical question : “Why isn’t America conscious?” After all, there are 300 million Americans, interacting in very complicated ways. . . . While you and I are conscious as individuals, there’s no conscious Übermind that unites us in a single entity. You and I are not collectively conscious.“ Theoretically, such super-scale entities as nations & planets could possibly be sentient and god-like, but how could we humans know it, or prove it? Must we take it on faith?
Post 4 Continued . . . . . Click Next
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