RE: What God is to the Universe is what your mind is to your body
August 19, 2016 at 5:21 am
(This post was last modified: August 19, 2016 at 5:28 am by Thumpalumpacus.)
(August 19, 2016 at 1:21 am)bennyboy Wrote: I should clarify. When I said "elements," I didn't mean things like form, color, and so on. I meant the most primitive possible spark of mind, as opposed to totally not-mind. It seems to me that mind must be binary-- either something does or doesn't have at least a tiny capacity to experience the universe. So my question isn't so much about how I see a tree as a tree, but about how a very simple system might respond to say an individual photon.
As for evidence. . . I'm strongly agnostic on this position. I don't think it is possible to know if ANY physical system, even another human being, really experiences the universe. In the case of people, I strongly believe they do, in the case of incoherent object (i.e. where the parts don't allow for an integrated flow of information), I strongly believe they do not. But in the case of say an atom or a galaxy, I haven't the foggiest idea whether they can experience anything, or how to go about determining whether they do.
I'm skeptical of mind being so binary. Given the complexity of the brain I think mind arises on many levels, from the sensory to the mulling.
If you've not read any Nicholas Humphries, you may be interested in doing so. His book The Evolution of the Mind is a really good read on the synergy between perception and analysis.
In line with that, I'm of the opinion that consciousness arises as a result of the many parts of the brain observing each other in action. It's not a single phenomenon, in my view, but rather, a ballet.
I have no doubt that other humans not only experience a Universe, but experience it in ways which I may or may not understand, but which I certainly cannot comprehend. I don't know what it's like to be you, nor you me; and we may not perceive, say, the color red the same way at all. But if you and I are in a car driving on the wrong side of the road at 3AM when a delivery-truck hits us, I'm willing to bet that both our bodies get crunchy pretty quick. Perceptions rule our mental lives, but that doesn't mean there is not an objective reality which is all too happy to pull us up by the short hairs.
