A Christian with a question/concern

[AntiChrist]

16 hours ago, florduh said:

Actually it's just a planet that happens to currently have some living things on it. Some of those things seem to have minds.

lLoL, True. Makes me wonder if the human animal mind is all that smart, since all those other animals are not so inclined to destroy the planet they live on.

 

 

 

 

[AntiChrist]

14 hours ago, midniterider said:

 

I don't know.

Truly neither do I. (Just thinking stuff) Beats the hell out of being a mindless religious robot.

[freshstart]

19 hours ago, AntiChrist said:

There's more to life than matter and energy. Why can't a living planet have a mind?

 

There are others that have considered this same question (more or less). Some postulate that intelligent beings cannot spring forth from anything unintelligent. This would mean that the earth, or perhaps more correctly, the universe has to have some intelligence in order to produce (even over billions of years) something with intelligence.

 

Of course, there is the whole debate about what exactly "mind" is. I'm partway through a book right now titled "Am I just My Brain?" by S. Dirckx. My mom (an incorrigible right wing born-again doomsdayer) gave me the book to read so my guess is at some point the author will drop a theological bomb, but so far its an interesting read. My mom hasn't read the book yet, so maybe I'll be surprised.

 

Anyhow . . .I think your question has merit. Part of the conundrum is there is no way of knowing whether we are limited in how we can understand higher level concepts. My guess is that dogs, as a species, will never comprehend how to do algebra or bake a cake. We as humans may have limitations too, but maybe not. Maybe we'll continue to evolve into beings who eventually undertand all these vexing questions.

[◊ Weezer ◊]

21 hours ago, TheRedneckProfessor said:

Not necessarily.  An asteroid wiping out the dinosaurs would qualify as a cataclysmic event.  But there was neither purpose nor intent behind it, just natural laws such as gravity and inertia. 

 

Are you trying to tell me that God didn't make that happen because the dinosaurs were fornicating?

[TheRedneckProfessor]

51 minutes ago, Weezer said:

 

Are you trying to tell me that God didn't make that happen because the dinosaurs were fornicating?

Well, everybody knows the diplodocus was gay.

[midniterider]

On 4/11/2020 at 1:03 PM, AntiChrist said:

There's more to life than matter and energy. Why can't a living planet have a mind?

 

I think there is more to life than matter and energy. 

 

And half of humanity seems to have some idea from somewhere that thinks there is something more than matter and energy.

 

Reality is probably sentient.

[Joshpantera]

12 hours ago, freshstart said:

There are others that have considered this same question (more or less). Some postulate that intelligent beings cannot spring forth from anything unintelligent. This would mean that the earth, or perhaps more correctly, the universe has to have some intelligence in order to produce (even over billions of years) something with intelligence.

 

It doesn't have to be intelligent. It's actually not about intelligence when you dig down into the issue. Christians and others have spun it that way unnecessarily mainly due to towing along bronze aged era questions and trying to answer them from the same mindset. What the issue actually is boils down to the capacity for experience, not intelligence as we understand it.

 

People use terms like consciousness, which leads to thinking that the universe is an intelligence or that an intelligent god must exist. That completely overshoots the mark, though. And that's not where the various evidences tend to lead. The idea these days is that existence itself, or reality, has the inherent capacity for experience ingrained into the very fabric of existence. All the way down scale. Not thinking, brain oriented intelligence.

 

Experiences take place on sub atomic levels. The experience of two way energy interactions between particles, for instance. No conscious thought or mind type stuff going on there. Just interactions, which, involve low level experience which is then built upon, and built upon, and built upon as you continue moving up scale from the sub atomic realm to the macrocosm. So that awareness in primitive form and experience in primitive form underlies the whole of reality as we know it. This is then applied towards the "Hard Problem of Consciousness." 

 

This to me is as interesting as any cosmology or physics issue, because it deals with what may underlie the whole of cosmology and physics. It's all speculative. But it makes sense to me.

 

Consciousness doesn't magically appear into existence out of nowhere according to this type of reasoning. It's something that has 'built up' in the form of primitive interactions of experience and various levels of awareness which enter the animal kingdom and continue to build up further in directions like the mammalian. And our consciousness only exists because it's both inherent as fundamental level awareness and because we're mammals. If our experience is richer than most other mammals, which it seems to be, that's just because it's been 'built upon' over and over again to reach the point that our personal capacity for experience has reached at this point. 

 

No doubt it could go further. 

 

No doubt that higher and richer levels of capacity for experience could exist elsewhere.

 

But that's where the brain does fit in. Our experience is only as rich as it is in comparison to no brain or a lesser types of brain capacity, because it's serving the function of refining our capacity for experience. Into narrower abilities of focus via our specific central nervous system. If we down scale, as mentioned above, awareness and specifics about the capacity for experience downscale as well. The focus in less narrow, and less rich in depth in that way. 

 

So experience and consciousness absent a physical brain, has these problems to face.

 

The narrowing focus mechanism of a central nervous system is no longer there. The universe, as a whole, for instance, would be hard to try and describe as intelligent absent the ability to be intelligent.

 

Unless there's more to it than this. I don't know. But I do know that if you map out the capacity for experience refining into "intelligence," it requires certain specific factors like material, living cells, brain and central nervous system. 

 

Sub atomic level awareness-------------atomic level experience----------cellular level experience-----------animal experience-----------mammalian experience-----------human experience. 

 

Now what Midnite has brought up in the past is what do we know about upscale?????

 

My issue with universal mind is the absence of a mechanism for it to be "intelligent."

 

I tend to see reality or the universe as a whole going the same way as downscale. To where it's just a sea of raw awareness and capacity for experience as a whole, as the realm, where these various levels of awareness and experience are all mixed together taking place all the time. Doing their own things. Having the different experiences. But as a process, being necessarily past and future eternal. I see no situation where something like the Hindu Brahman is literal or anything like that. It would still be a metaphor for reality. And I refrain from any theistic angle attached to this exploration. Because I still see no evidence of it in what we have to look at and theorize about. So my speculation lands non-theistic by default. And naturalist by default for the same reason. 

 

[LogicalFallacy]

On 4/12/2020 at 8:03 AM, AntiChrist said:

Why can't a living planet have a mind?

 

Do we have an example of a living planet? Every example of a mind that we have thus far also includes some complicated hardware that goes along with it. There are no examples of minds existing absent a brain. So it would seem then that for a planet to have a mind it would need a brain. Do we know of any planets even capable of supporting a brain as part of their  internal structure? 

 

It's like people saying the universe has a mind. Yeah ok, if you can find either a physical 'universe brain' or examples of a mind being able to exist in the ether/force/vacuum of space etc then I'm open to the hypothesis.

[florduh]

This is starting to look like arguments for intelligent design. It is estimated that 99.9% of animal life this planet has hosted is now extinct; what intelligent, thinking planet would do that? To me it all boils down to the puddle analogy.

[Myrkhoos]

I might add the problem of definitions. What do people mean by intelligent? From what point of view? In biology intelligence is a function of certain organs or a description of certain behaviours, etc. 

     It seems to me that people equate order with intelligence. Yes the universe seems to us in a way that has patterns. This means an electron is intelligent as well as a black whole and a galaxy cluster.

[florduh]

1 hour ago, Myrkhoos said:

 It seems to me that people equate order with intelligence.

I think you hit on the problem. The entire premise of intelligent design is based upon exactly that.