Ed Feser's Aristotelian Proof of the Existence of God

[bennyboy]

BTW, I believe this specific notion you now described above, in my experience, has been a fairly common staple explanation made by panentheists regarding consciousness/mind origins in their worldview. Are you perhaps an agnostic who is more apt to entertain notions blowing in from that realm?

Yes, I'm more friendly to panentheism/panpsychism etc. than others here, probably.

I realize you haven't said or even suggested this notion of "psychogony" as you coined it, is something that you take all that seriously, but this conversation does make one wonder how seriously you might weight this kind of thing when weighing out the possibilities in your own head.

By psychogony, I mean the fact of the existence of mind (rather than a lack of it), rather than material structures on which it supervenes, or the flow of impressions or perceptions of which it is subjectively composed. So it's a fact by definition, not even an assertion.

Isn't it far more compelling to you to listen to what neuro-science today is largely seeing in their work -- that the mind very likely merely originates with/in/from the brain itself, simply as an emergent property that arrises out of the brain functions themselves (not unlike, say the way the programs we "experience" on our computer which are an emergent property of the selective flow of electricity across various computer hardware components)?

Just curious how you tip that scale.

There's no doubt, unless we really go to a strong idealism (the brain is an illusion) or solipsism or something, that the perceptions and ideas we experience depend massively (and perhaps solely) on the function of the brain. However, I don't think there's anything about our understanding of objective matter from which we can derive the need, or even capacity, for subjective experience to exist in this universe. In other words, I'm saying that the "how" of mind is not sufficient to answer the "why" of it.