Collective Soul applied to Pan-Psychism

[frogman234]

There are over 11 forms of Pan-psychism.

I'll post below some of the background to pan-psychism, however first i'll state the purpose of this OP. I feel to say that Collective Soul is the correct way to view our reality in terms of an assumed pan-psychic universe, is a problem because it assumes that you and i (subsets of the whole set) are equal to the universe. I feel that even if we embrace pan-psychism, that we are all sub-sets and that the whole set will always be greater than us, with us all being individually sub-sets.

Just in case you were wondering, i don't feel a subset that has its strengths in philosophizing neccesarily means that that subset has more character.

Below is some definitions on some forms of pan-psychism particularly the ones i adhere too.

_____________________

The form of Pan Psychism i adhere to is more akin to Plato's and some of the more complicated ones particularly pan-experentialism. See below for a quick definition of Pan-experentialism.

Panexperientialism
The form of panpsychism under discussion in the contemporary literature is more specifically known as panexperientialism, the view that conscious experience is present everywhere at a fundamental level.[1] Panexperientialism can be contrasted with pancognitivism, the view that thought is present everywhere at a fundamental level, a view which had some historical advocates, but has not garnered present-day academic adherents; as such contemporary panpsychists do not believe microphysical entities have complex mental states such as beliefs, desires, fears, and so forth.[1]

Panexperientialism is associated with the philosophies of, among others, Charles Hartshorne and Alfred North Whitehead, although the term itself was invented by David Ray Griffin in order to distinguish the process philosophical view from other varieties of panpsychism.[9] The ecological phenomenology developed in the writings of the American cultural ecologist and philosopher, David Abram, is often described[by whom?] as a form of panexperientialism,[50][51] as is the "poetic biology" developed by Abram's close associate, the German biologist Andreas Weber.[52]

Whitehead's metaphysics incorporated a scientific worldview similar to Einstein's theory of relativity into the development of his philosophical system. His process philosophy argues that the fundamental elements of the universe are "occasions of experience," which can together create something as complex as a human being. This experience is not consciousness;[clarification needed] there is no mind-body duality under this system, since mind is seen as a particularly developed kind of experience. Whitehead was not a subjective idealist, and while his occasions of experience (or "actual occasions") resemble Leibniz's monads, they are described as constitutively interrelated. He embraced panentheism, with God encompassing all occasions of experience and yet still transcending them. Whitehead believed that these occasions of experience are the smallest element in the universe—even smaller than subatomic particles.[citation needed] Building off Whitehead's work, process philosopher Michel Weber argues for a pancreativism.[53]

__________________________
I don't necessarily have the exact definition of the form of pan-psychism that i adhere to cemented into my head considering i will never in my life time do a scientific experiment to prove which form of pan-psychism is the correct form. I'm certainly not a animist however i don't feel that is animism is completely ridicioulous.

[Terrapin Station]

I'll consider panpsychism as soon as someone presents any sort of good reason (which is going to have to include empirical evidence) to buy panpsychism, so that it's not just a fantastical possibility.

[Gertie]

There are over 11 forms of Pan-psychism.

I'll post below some of the background to pan-psychism, however first i'll state the purpose of this OP. I feel to say that Collective Soul is the correct way to view our reality in terms of an assumed pan-psychic universe, is a problem because it assumes that you and i (subsets of the whole set) are equal to the universe. I feel that even if we embrace pan-psychism, that we are all sub-sets and that the whole set will always be greater than us, with us all being individually sub-sets.

Just in case you were wondering, i don't feel a subset that has its strengths in philosophizing neccesarily means that that subset has more character.

Below is some definitions on some forms of pan-psychism particularly the ones i adhere too.

_____________________

The form of Pan Psychism i adhere to is more akin to Plato's and some of the more complicated ones particularly pan-experentialism. See below for a quick definition of Pan-experentialism.

Panexperientialism
The form of panpsychism under discussion in the contemporary literature is more specifically known as panexperientialism, the view that conscious experience is present everywhere at a fundamental level.[1] Panexperientialism can be contrasted with pancognitivism, the view that thought is present everywhere at a fundamental level, a view which had some historical advocates, but has not garnered present-day academic adherents; as such contemporary panpsychists do not believe microphysical entities have complex mental states such as beliefs, desires, fears, and so forth.[1]

Panexperientialism is associated with the philosophies of, among others, Charles Hartshorne and Alfred North Whitehead, although the term itself was invented by David Ray Griffin in order to distinguish the process philosophical view from other varieties of panpsychism.[9] The ecological phenomenology developed in the writings of the American cultural ecologist and philosopher, David Abram, is often described[by whom?] as a form of panexperientialism,[50][51] as is the "poetic biology" developed by Abram's close associate, the German biologist Andreas Weber.[52]

Whitehead's metaphysics incorporated a scientific worldview similar to Einstein's theory of relativity into the development of his philosophical system. His process philosophy argues that the fundamental elements of the universe are "occasions of experience," which can together create something as complex as a human being. This experience is not consciousness;[clarification needed] there is no mind-body duality under this system, since mind is seen as a particularly developed kind of experience. Whitehead was not a subjective idealist, and while his occasions of experience (or "actual occasions") resemble Leibniz's monads, they are described as constitutively interrelated. He embraced panentheism, with God encompassing all occasions of experience and yet still transcending them. Whitehead believed that these occasions of experience are the smallest element in the universe—even smaller than subatomic particles.[citation needed] Building off Whitehead's work, process philosopher Michel Weber argues for a pancreativism.[53]

__________________________
I don't necessarily have the exact definition of the form of pan-psychism that i adhere to cemented into my head considering i will never in my life time do a scientific experiment to prove which form of pan-psychism is the correct form. I'm certainly not a animist however i don't feel that is animism is completely ridicioulous.

Welcome!

It's an interesting idea, my problem is how can you know? (This applies as much to materialist monism, dualism and other speculative hypotheses about the fundamental nature of reality btw).

[Steve3007]

There are over 11 forms of Pan-psychism.

Would that be 12 then?

[frogman234]

I'll consider panpsychism as soon as someone presents any sort of good reason (which is going to have to include empirical evidence) to buy panpsychism, so that it's not just a fantastical possibility.

If i don't 100% (not 99%) understand the math and also the lab results behind a scientific theory i'm right/wrong/ or indifferent taking what the scientist says on faith. Belief and faith are a gamble unless we can honestly claim we've seen the test results and 100% (not 99%) understand the math involved in trying to figure out how to formulate the a scientific theory.

How do you explain feeling and awareness? Mentioning Neurons really doesn't explain why there is feeling and awareness and alot of scientists would agree with that.

[Steve3007]

Mentioning Neurons really doesn't explain why there is feeling and awareness and alot of scientists would agree with that.

I think every sensible person would agree that mentioning neurons doesn't explain why there is feeling and awareness. It doesn't necessarily follow from that that feeling and awareness are unconnected to the behaviour of neurons.

Likewise, mentioning the physics of moving bodies doesn't explain which horse is going to win a horse-race. That doesn't mean that the movements of horses are unconnected to the laws of physics.

[Papus79]

These sorts of conversations are fraught because we're trying to take a very small selection of fragments and scraps and make due with them. At this point it's almost like trying to reconstruct a 1000 piece puzzle from three or four pieces.

I'd have to say I find the idea credible that consciousness is something fundamentally tethered to a deeper layer of the universe than space-time. I say that because we should have seen direct correlates already and the very idea that we could be struggling with anything that looks like a 'ghost in the machine' means we're missing some critical layer and it's quite likely that the layer in question isn't Baryonic matter. Even if consciousness is divisible and can be split every way from Sunday, if we're not finding direct correlates for subjectivity then we're still missing critical information. The idea that this critical information is complexity itself and that complexity in motion or dynamic equilibrium can turn the lights on doesn't make sense because you can multiply 0 by 10, by one trillion or one trillion-trillion, while I'm not a math-trivia nut I'm figuring you could multiply it by infinity and get the same result. That could be an admission of a sort of 'components' panpsychism where several different kind of ingredient to make consciousness happen are out there in nature and that it takes a lot of neuron-like structures to spin it up into what we have, even with that speculation I haven't seen anyone able to agree on what these fragments or components would be that exist latent in matter so a lot of work needs to be done there before that can even turn into falsifiable hypotheses.

Where this gets tricky in the 2010's and beyond for anyone wanting to talk about panpsychism or anything else related to consciousness coming from matter or even below matter, if increasing consensus is that space-time is not fundamental then we're just pushing some form of emergence down the stack to fundamental particles which doesn't seem to be a tenable position (ie. what complexity in one particle?) in which case you're then dropping the individual bits of consciousness as having their source below space-time and you then have the awful task of figuring out how those bits of consciousness spin-up space-time or, if space-time is a contextual fiction, how it is that it holds to such a degree that those confabulating it have so little control over the results that they turn to suicide or overdose regularly if things aren't going well.

One question to your original proposition - that a Collective Soul would stake a claim that each one of us is God (ie. brings out the Shirley MacLaine in us), that tends to actually be one of the most intuitive bridges to reductive materialism - ie. we're clearly not in said state thus Collective Soul, Jung, etc. is bologna.

You have to step back and consider the possibilities for what Spinoza's God might look like in that case. What's obvious - it's not human. Assuming it's existence for the sake of analysis - whatever it grew from isn't us, in fact it came from an origin so alien to us that anything we'd think of as it's goals are probably orthogonal to what it's doing and it's quite likely that human happiness, desires for utopian conditions, etc. likely aren't anywhere in it's list of priorities.

Someone I've really had increasing respect for lately for both his framing of the problem and the kinds of ideas he's pursuing is Donald Hoffman. At the surface level I don't think many people would argue with his claim that natural selection causes us to be tuned, very tightly, to fitness payouts and that we can't think outside the frame of our fitness landscape because if we do our genes generally die with us (ie. to carry 'more' means you're both carrying excess information upkeep and not socially conforming - both of which are deadly to the organism attempting that effort in a game where procreation is the primary thing that matters). Where he'd depart from many people's intuitions is the idea that consciousness is coming from a layer below space-time, that space-time is a 'skin' of sorts that we spin up for objects which look nothing like what they appear as to us (some Judaic parsing of the term 'virtual reality' would be needed here because in the technical sense it could be seen as that but in the layman's sense no - it's real but just scraped and optimized for getting the most leverage on the least information). The other piece I think he gets right - his primitives for consciousness assemble in a manner which strongly resembles functionalism with multiple realizability, and for the stranger edge-cases in nature that have us scratching our heads as well as some of the more controversial observations of consciousness, functionalism seems to handle the sort of holography as well as detachment of the sort where lower layers can't see the higher layers or would interpret information from higher layers as coming from mysterious sources.

The last thought about Donald Hoffman's Conscious Realism when he tries to look upward on what all of the various contracts between conscious agents creating new conscious agents means is that you may indeed have a top-level contract and when he's had to speculate on what Spinoza or Whitehead's God might be up to he's often brought up Godel's Incompleteness Theorem with the notion that such a conscious entity might be chewing through infinite mathematics to come to know something about itself or even perhaps just out of blind necessity that it made no choice over. That actually fits the sort of panentheism that plenty of NDE'ers have come away with - ie. that the frame of existence we're is something of a mathematical battering ram, one in which 'Source' lets call it is attempting to remember every minute detail and is obsessed with losing as few bits of data as possible.

Is any of that true? Who knows. I think some of it is relatively compelling from circumstantial evidence but I'd go right back to what I said at the top - our circumstantial evidence still seems like it has us trying to assemble a 1000 piece puzzle from three or four pieces. Also, if that sort of God that Hoffman and the NDE'ers were describing is what we have - then we're drill-bits, meant to be rode hard and put away wet (all of John Gray's pessimism in Straw Dogs and that of Lev Shestov in 'All Things Are Possible' applies), and it's no wonder nature's opaque to us and that we can't look backward in that case - we're not here to know any of that, it's a bit like that Collective Soul carved of billions of small pieces of itself to make them lab rats.

[Terrapin Station]

How do you explain feeling and awareness?

They're properties of brains as far as we know.

And there's particularly no reason to believe that they'd be properties of anything else.

[frogman234]

"As far as we know?"

Who is we. I know you aren't claiming scientists collectively agree on this. Many scientists think bacteria have feeling or awareness which is rejected by many atheists because it makes them feel uncomfortable.

[Gertie]

I'll consider panpsychism as soon as someone presents any sort of good reason (which is going to have to include empirical evidence) to buy panpsychism, so that it's not just a fantastical possibility.

If i don't 100% (not 99%) understand the math and also the lab results behind a scientific theory i'm right/wrong/ or indifferent taking what the scientist says on faith. Belief and faith are a gamble unless we can honestly claim we've seen the test results and 100% (not 99%) understand the math involved in trying to figure out how to formulate the a scientific theory.

How do you explain feeling and awareness? Mentioning Neurons really doesn't explain why there is feeling and awareness and alot of scientists would agree with that.

It's true that noting a correlation between neuronal processes and experiential states like feeling and awareness doesn't explain the nature of that relationship, I don't know of any scientist claiming that it does. It strongly implies there is some kind of relationship though.

You're offering one type of explanation which would encompass neural correlation but sees experiential states as being fundamental, and experiencing Subjects like humans being 'subsets' of sorts. Where-as materialist monists (who say it's all brain processes when you get down to it) offer a different one.

But they're both just hypotheses. We can 'adhere to' any hypothesis we like, for whatever reason we like. The difficulty is how do we know which, if either, are correct?

You talk about the possibility of doing an experiment to test your hypothesis here -

I don't necessarily have the exact definition of the form of pan-psychism that i adhere to cemented into my head considering i will never in my life time do a scientific experiment to prove which form of pan-psychism is the correct form.

My point is, no-one's come up with a way to test such hypotheses. Not panpsychists, materialists, dualists, nobody. So why do you adhere to your hypothesis, and why should anyone else, above other speculative possibilities?

[Papus79]

I apparently did something wrong earlier so I'll retry this at Tweet length.

I disagree that the concept of a Collective Soul sets us up for assuming that each one of us is 'the universe'. I say that because it takes no account for other factors such as how Darwinian evolution has tuned the shape and priorities of our conscious processes and would assume that whatever we came from is exactly like us. Evidence would suggest that there's either no such thing as a Collective Soul or that if there is a Collective Soul it's as much a product of the forces that made it's priorities as the planet Earth and the landscape of survival that's cultivating us has shaped us. If the forces that shaped it are different than the forces that shaped us than its way of thinking and reasoning would be quite alien to us.

[Gee]

"As far as we know?"

Who is we. I know you aren't claiming scientists collectively agree on this. Many scientists think bacteria have feeling or awareness which is rejected by many atheists because it makes them feel uncomfortable.

Hi frogman; interesting thread.

Well, I certainly can't agree with Terrapin. Most of us know that flowers will turn their little faces to the sun, which is a little irritating because we have to keep turning the plant away from the window to get the flowers to look good indoors. This strongly implies that flowers are aware of the sun, feel the rays of the sun (as they certainly can't see the sun), and this even implies that they desire the sun on them.

Unless Terrapin is trying to suggest that flowers have brains?

Gee

[Gee]

These sorts of conversations are fraught because we're trying to take a very small selection of fragments and scraps and make due with them. At this point it's almost like trying to reconstruct a 1000 piece puzzle from three or four pieces.

I'd have to say I find the idea credible that consciousness is something fundamentally tethered to a deeper layer of the universe than space-time. I say that because we should have seen direct correlates already and the very idea that we could be struggling with anything that looks like a 'ghost in the machine' means we're missing some critical layer and it's quite likely that the layer in question isn't Baryonic matter. Even if consciousness is divisible and can be split every way from Sunday, if we're not finding direct correlates for subjectivity then we're still missing critical information. The idea that this critical information is complexity itself and that complexity in motion or dynamic equilibrium can turn the lights on doesn't make sense because you can multiply 0 by 10, by one trillion or one trillion-trillion, while I'm not a math-trivia nut I'm figuring you could multiply it by infinity and get the same result. That could be an admission of a sort of 'components' panpsychism where several different kind of ingredient to make consciousness happen are out there in nature and that it takes a lot of neuron-like structures to spin it up into what we have, even with that speculation I haven't seen anyone able to agree on what these fragments or components would be that exist latent in matter so a lot of work needs to be done there before that can even turn into falsifiable hypotheses.

I agree with most of this and also agree that we don't have enough pieces of the puzzle; so maybe we should not try to get a complete picture -- just a few simple truths to use as building blocks. Consciousness is divisible as is evidenced by each of us having our own and newborns developing their own. Although I agree that consciousness is complex, I don't see complexity itself as being causal. I do think that temperature plays a role.

Where this gets tricky in the 2010's and beyond for anyone wanting to talk about panpsychism or anything else related to consciousness coming from matter or even below matter, if increasing consensus is that space-time is not fundamental then we're just pushing some form of emergence down the stack to fundamental particles which doesn't seem to be a tenable position (ie. what complexity in one particle?) in which case you're then dropping the individual bits of consciousness as having their source below space-time and you then have the awful task of figuring out how those bits of consciousness spin-up space-time or, if space-time is a contextual fiction, how it is that it holds to such a degree that those confabulating it have so little control over the results that they turn to suicide or overdose regularly if things aren't going well.

I am not sure what you are trying to say here, but I firmly believe that consciousness evolves just like everything else. It would be unreasonable to assume that consciousness, that is anything like human consciousness, actually rules or regulates the Universe. That is the "God" theory. I don't think those particles or "bits" are conscious in any way that would be recognizable.

One question to your original proposition - that a Collective Soul would stake a claim that each one of us is God (ie. brings out the Shirley MacLaine in us), that tends to actually be one of the most intuitive bridges to reductive materialism - ie. we're clearly not in said state thus Collective Soul, Jung, etc. is bologna.

Here I don't agree. First, I like Shirley MacLaine. Second, Jung's collective communal unconscious works through the unconscious and the unconscious is not quite rational, which might be why it differentiates from the rational aspect of mind -- the Ego. I believe it was Matte Blanco, who uncovered the "logic" that works the unconscious aspect of mind, and I am using the term, logic, loosely. I don't remember a lot of it, but the thought processes of the unconscious do not recognize time, which really screws up logic. Another way that the unconscious works is, if I remember correctly, "the part represents the whole" in the unconscious. So you, your consciousness, represents the whole of consciousness, or "God". This is why "God" has many faces, because he is culturally represented and interpreted in style of clothing, mannerisms, features, speech, etc. So yes, it is entirely possible that unconsciously, each of us stakes a claim on Godliness.

Blanco's work has been clinically researched and is well accepted in psychology. I think you can find him in Wiki. I will look.

You have to step back and consider the possibilities for what Spinoza's God might look like in that case. What's obvious - it's not human. Assuming it's existence for the sake of analysis - whatever it grew from isn't us, in fact it came from an origin so alien to us that anything we'd think of as it's goals are probably orthogonal to what it's doing and it's quite likely that human happiness, desires for utopian conditions, etc. likely aren't anywhere in it's list of priorities.

I have heard "Spinoza's God" many times, but have no idea of what that might be. I have not read Spinoza's work directly, but everything that I have read seems to imply that there is no "God" in Spinoza's thoughts. I like Spinoza's ideas as they are much like mine, but I see "God" as being real, causal, but not existing.

Someone I've really had increasing respect for lately for both his framing of the problem and the kinds of ideas he's pursuing is Donald Hoffman. At the surface level I don't think many people would argue with his claim that natural selection causes us to be tuned, very tightly, to fitness payouts and that we can't think outside the frame of our fitness landscape because if we do our genes generally die with us (ie. to carry 'more' means you're both carrying excess information upkeep and not socially conforming - both of which are deadly to the organism attempting that effort in a game where procreation is the primary thing that matters). Where he'd depart from many people's intuitions is the idea that consciousness is coming from a layer below space-time, that space-time is a 'skin' of sorts that we spin up for objects which look nothing like what they appear as to us (some Judaic parsing of the term 'virtual reality' would be needed here because in the technical sense it could be seen as that but in the layman's sense no - it's real but just scraped and optimized for getting the most leverage on the least information). The other piece I think he gets right - his primitives for consciousness assemble in a manner which strongly resembles functionalism with multiple realizability, and for the stranger edge-cases in nature that have us scratching our heads as well as some of the more controversial observations of consciousness, functionalism seems to handle the sort of holography as well as detachment of the sort where lower layers can't see the higher layers or would interpret information from higher layers as coming from mysterious sources.

The last thought about Donald Hoffman's Conscious Realism when he tries to look upward on what all of the various contracts between conscious agents creating new conscious agents means is that you may indeed have a top-level contract and when he's had to speculate on what Spinoza or Whitehead's God might be up to he's often brought up Godel's Incompleteness Theorem with the notion that such a conscious entity might be chewing through infinite mathematics to come to know something about itself or even perhaps just out of blind necessity that it made no choice over. That actually fits the sort of panentheism that plenty of NDE'ers have come away with - ie. that the frame of existence we're is something of a mathematical battering ram, one in which 'Source' lets call it is attempting to remember every minute detail and is obsessed with losing as few bits of data as possible.

Is any of that true? Who knows. I think some of it is relatively compelling from circumstantial evidence but I'd go right back to what I said at the top - our circumstantial evidence still seems like it has us trying to assemble a 1000 piece puzzle from three or four pieces. Also, if that sort of God that Hoffman and the NDE'ers were describing is what we have - then we're drill-bits, meant to be rode hard and put away wet (all of John Gray's pessimism in Straw Dogs and that of Lev Shestov in 'All Things Are Possible' applies), and it's no wonder nature's opaque to us and that we can't look backward in that case - we're not here to know any of that, it's a bit like that Collective Soul carved of billions of small pieces of itself to make them lab rats.

Lab-rats? Drill bits? You seem to be drawing some really depressing conclusions. It may not be quite that bad.

Gee

[Papus79]

I am not sure what you are trying to say here, but I firmly believe that consciousness evolves just like everything else. It would be unreasonable to assume that consciousness, that is anything like human consciousness, actually rules or regulates the Universe. That is the "God" theory. I don't think those particles or "bits" are conscious in any way that would be recognizable.

I didn't say it as clearly as I would have liked but essentially - if one attempts particle-bound versions of panpsychism that's what I get the sense may not translate well with the increasing understanding that space-time is emergent. I might be overrating the importance of the translation of precursors to space-time particles and objects, maybe there's a way it translates more readily than I think, but even there - those conscious particles in that instance would have that based on what they're made of or the originating content.

Here I don't agree. First, I like Shirley MacLaine. Second, Jung's collective communal unconscious works through the unconscious and the unconscious is not quite rational, which might be why it differentiates from the rational aspect of mind -- the Ego. I believe it was Matte Blanco, who uncovered the "logic" that works the unconscious aspect of mind, and I am using the term, logic, loosely. I don't remember a lot of it, but the thought processes of the unconscious do not recognize time, which really screws up logic. Another way that the unconscious works is, if I remember correctly, "the part represents the whole" in the unconscious. So you, your consciousness, represents the whole of consciousness, or "God". This is why "God" has many faces, because he is culturally represented and interpreted in style of clothing, mannerisms, features, speech, etc. So yes, it is entirely possible that unconsciously, each of us stakes a claim on Godliness.

I guess my sense is that new age falls flat, as do at least any notion that we're of a super-organism that's human-like in personality. It would be smoothing Darwinian evolution and fitness struggles likely much more than it does. I would agree that whatever it is, at least on any local level, is in something of a deep sleep and you can occasionally get hit with experiences that would suggest that there is something, in some deep or dreaming manner, reacting to us but it's not exactly fungible or something we can call at will (much more often it seems like a reaction to novelty).

Blanco's work has been clinically researched and is well accepted in psychology. I think you can find him in Wiki. I will look.

I'll have to look into him as I'm not familiar. For as many psychedelic experiences and border-states (falling asleep / waking up) it seems like subconscious territory is extremely symbolic and it could be that it doesn't connect by time but rather something like analogy or similarity gradients. I've also seen some very strange and interesting occult mathematics, the kind of thing where when you're in semi-sleep seeing it it makes perfect sense, and then you wake up and your connection with it is gone (oddly I'm the opposite with psychedelics - probably because I'm not in nearly as deep).

Something else I'm at least playing with these days, I do wonder if our subconscious minds might not be time-bound, ie. that they can draw from the future in certain ways and sort of brace for or even avoid certain kinds of impact. A few consistent experiences have suggested that to me (like more kundalini sensations in the morning when I'll be dealing with an unusual amount of stress and things like that).

I have heard "Spinoza's God" many times, but have no idea of what that might be. I have not read Spinoza's work directly, but everything that I have read seems to imply that there is no "God" in Spinoza's thoughts. I like Spinoza's ideas as they are much like mine, but I see "God" as being real, causal, but not existing.

I'm thinking I need to as well, because for a while I've heard it amount to something like either the super-organism view or the de Chardin / Whitehead process philosophy view, but I've also heard it mentioned as pure potentiality without an identity. I'm getting more at the former, as I see this system as at least animistic to some degree - just that whether or not that amount of hum stacks up to a full-on superorganism made of all things is hard to say.

Lab-rats? Drill bits? You seem to be drawing some really depressing conclusions. It may not be quite that bad.

Here's why I'd go that way, and it's considering the idea that there is a sort of alien super-sentience driving this (going back to my take on what a Collective Soul would look like in practice), it's practicing extreme extroversion and materialism with us. Most attempts to make contact with greater truths, outside of science although sadly - increasingly - there as well, run into fraud and grifts of various kinds. it's also a place where it's hard to say whether we make progress or not. If there's any sort of flow to the logic it seems to maybe best resemble Daoist ways of looking at life, purpose, etc.., and it's quite hard as well to find much rhyme or reason in things. If it's there it's not an entity that you can find communion with or find proximity to in prayer really, and if it's watching it's watching in complete silence and equanimity (and I think of various NDE'ers who've said things about 'everything seeming like it was exactly where it was supposed to be' as if when time slowed down for them in crisis mode it showed that all details of existence were perfectly under will - I really have to just hope that was their endorphins doping them). I think the strongest evidence will be, to me, if we continuously manage to keep narrowly avoiding disasters of the sort that would cause our extinction or near-extinction but even there - if there's something like this that is in charge who's to say it would look at this technological and evolutionary bottleneck, say 'Yeah, 200,000 generations wasn't a bad run for humans' and dashes either most or all life on earth.

[Gee]

I am not sure what you are trying to say here, but I firmly believe that consciousness evolves just like everything else. It would be unreasonable to assume that consciousness, that is anything like human consciousness, actually rules or regulates the Universe. That is the "God" theory. I don't think those particles or "bits" are conscious in any way that would be recognizable.

I didn't say it as clearly as I would have liked but essentially - if one attempts particle-bound versions of panpsychism that's what I get the sense may not translate well with the increasing understanding that space-time is emergent. I might be overrating the importance of the translation of precursors to space-time particles and objects, maybe there's a way it translates more readily than I think, but even there - those conscious particles in that instance would have that based on what they're made of or the originating content.

Well, if I tried to match up consciousness with particles, then panpsychism would not make any sense to me either. I think that is the wrong way to study it, but it is the way science would study it. Science has two assumptions regarding consciousness that I dispute; the first is that consciousness comes from matter (the brain, particles, etc.), the second is that if you break something down small enough, you will find consciousness. I don't see any real support for either of these assumptions.

Since I am no scientist, I did not try to find consciousness in matter. I went right to the source and asked the question, "What is consciousness?", which should really be asked more often. Most answers to that question are invalid, i.e., consciousness is the Universe, it is "God", it is the brain, etc. These do not tell us what consciousness is, they tell us where consciousness supposedly originates. A valid answer might be to say that consciousness is the mental.

Consciousness is our dreams, illusions, logic, knowledge, thoughts, emotion, reasoning, all of it. If we break it down further, we find that every mental state that we possess, whether conscious or unconscious, all derive from some combination of six basic components: knowledge, thought, memory, awareness, feeling, and/or emotion. So when considering panpsychism, I would compare it to these six basic components.

If I accept that the Universe is emergent and that consciousness is emergent, then what of the six components would have been there at the source. Only one that I can recognize and validate, and that would be knowledge. Why knowledge? Because Laws of Physics were there at the start of the Universe so that knowledge, which all of reality obeys, was there at the start. It is not likely that thought was there as that is a product of the brain. Memory could not have existed before time existed -- that is an impossibility. Likewise awareness could not have existed before time/space and probably matter, because awareness requires two separate points -- one to be aware from and one to be aware of. There is no evidence of feeling or emotion prior to life, so I would not expect them to be there.

So if we are looking for what underlays reality, we would be looking at knowledge, as Laws of Physics existed at the moment of reality, and balance as that is what the Laws are based upon. Balance is also relevant to math, so that may well explain quantum physics. Also consider that motion existed prior to reality as without motion, there is nothing to balance.

Here I don't agree. First, I like Shirley MacLaine. Second, Jung's collective communal unconscious works through the unconscious and the unconscious is not quite rational, which might be why it differentiates from the rational aspect of mind -- the Ego. I believe it was Matte Blanco, who uncovered the "logic" that works the unconscious aspect of mind, and I am using the term, logic, loosely. I don't remember a lot of it, but the thought processes of the unconscious do not recognize time, which really screws up logic. Another way that the unconscious works is, if I remember correctly, "the part represents the whole" in the unconscious. So you, your consciousness, represents the whole of consciousness, or "God". This is why "God" has many faces, because he is culturally represented and interpreted in style of clothing, mannerisms, features, speech, etc. So yes, it is entirely possible that unconsciously, each of us stakes a claim on Godliness.

I guess my sense is that new age falls flat, as do at least any notion that we're of a super-organism that's human-like in personality. It would be smoothing Darwinian evolution and fitness struggles likely much more than it does. I would agree that whatever it is, at least on any local level, is in something of a deep sleep and you can occasionally get hit with experiences that would suggest that there is something, in some deep or dreaming manner, reacting to us but it's not exactly fungible or something we can call at will (much more often it seems like a reaction to novelty).

I said I liked Shirley MacLaine; I did not say I liked New Age. But every theory or idea that considers consciousness usually has some truth and some nonsense.

Are you saying that you think a collective soul is a "super-organism that's human-like in personality"? That is the "God" concept. Although I admit that many people interpret the unconscious as "God", that does not make the unconscious "God" -- collective or otherwise. The unconscious is just that, unconscious, so it does not direct -- it does not have a will -- it is reactive. I think of it like the internet and our individual consciousnesses like our personal computers. We download information into the internet and occasionally pull information from the internet. A lot of this exchange of information happens when we sleep/dream.

What do you think "collective soul" means? What do you think "soul" means? Do you think that other species have a "soul"? Consider that Jung's collective communal unconscious does not just apply to humans, it applies to ALL species.

Blanco's work has been clinically researched and is well accepted in psychology. I think you can find him in Wiki. I will look.

I'll have to look into him as I'm not familiar. For as many psychedelic experiences and border-states (falling asleep / waking up) it seems like subconscious territory is extremely symbolic and it could be that it doesn't connect by time but rather something like analogy or similarity gradients. I've also seen some very strange and interesting occult mathematics, the kind of thing where when you're in semi-sleep seeing it it makes perfect sense, and then you wake up and your connection with it is gone (oddly I'm the opposite with psychedelics - probably because I'm not in nearly as deep).

For a start, you can look at what Wiki has: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignacio_Matte_Blanco
Whether you are talking about subconscious, pre-conscious, or unconscious, it seems there is more symbolism the deeper you go. Blanco used math and worked out five levels or stratums in the unconscious, with each level changing in the way it processes information.

I have heard "Spinoza's God" many times, but have no idea of what that might be. I have not read Spinoza's work directly, but everything that I have read seems to imply that there is no "God" in Spinoza's thoughts. I like Spinoza's ideas as they are much like mine, but I see "God" as being real, causal, but not existing.

I'm thinking I need to as well, because for a while I've heard it amount to something like either the super-organism view or the de Chardin / Whitehead process philosophy view, but I've also heard it mentioned as pure potentiality without an identity. I'm getting more at the former, as I see this system as at least animistic to some degree - just that whether or not that amount of hum stacks up to a full-on superorganism made of all things is hard to say.

I see the "God" concept as pure potential without an identity. Any persona that is recognized is either an interpretation, or it is another point on the internet (collective unconscious) where individual information is coming through. It is my opinion that this is how ESP works person to person through bonding, probably how premonition works, and Blanco found the level in the unconscious where we see/interpret angels and demons. One thing I am fairly certain of is that any persona that has an identity, either is alive now, or was alive at one point in time. This is because identity requires matter, so either it had a body which gave it identity, or it is bonded to another person/people, who give it identity -- that is one of the things that panpsychism teaches us, that identity comes from matter.

Lab-rats? Drill bits? You seem to be drawing some really depressing conclusions. It may not be quite that bad.

Here's why I'd go that way, and it's considering the idea that there is a sort of alien super-sentience driving this (going back to my take on what a Collective Soul would look like in practice), it's practicing extreme extroversion and materialism with us.

My thought is that you should do away with the "alien super-sentience" idea as it is just too depressing and has no facts to support it. Actually, it sounds kind of paranoid.

Have you considered that a collective consciousness would be us? It would be the collective consciousness of all humans -- nothing alien about it.
Gee