RE: Panpsychism is not as crazy as it sounds.
May 15, 2014 at 11:02 pm
(This post was last modified: May 15, 2014 at 11:05 pm by Coffee Jesus.)
(May 15, 2014 at 10:06 pm)Pickup_shonuff Wrote: By random forces, we're actually talking about Darwinian selection, are we not? In which case, it makes sense that nature would select for intelligence but not necessarily consciousness (think computer).I'm talking about other contributing factors besides natural selection and random mutation. These other "random forces" could be things like geography, climate, catastrophic events like meteors or hurricanes, the elemental composition of Earth, etc.
(May 15, 2014 at 10:06 pm)Pickup_shonuff Wrote: Whether or not consciousness is a local cosmic accident via the atoms that created the first life forms, that then evolved to produce brains like ours, or something deeply embedded in the fundamental structure of the Universe that guarantees it's arrival at some point in the history of time, seems like a pretty open ended question.
I'm not talking about the probability of life, but rather the probability of consciousness given that there is life. I'm suggesting that evolution doesn't necessarily lead to consciousness (although it does necessarily lead to intelligence), but it happened to in this instance because of extraneous factors.
