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Guttermouth's avatar

What we're really talking about here is pantheism, which was considered a reasonable view of the universe in a lot of theological traditions until materalism was judged to have won some kind of final victory on acceptable models of the universe.

If one is prepared to reject the assertion that materialism is "settled science," and has correctly and finally identified the absolute boundaries of all reality, there's plenty of room to take the principles of emergence and apply them to all kinds of systems.

This is where a lot of my personal grasp of theology comes from- I think most religious systems are describing real, genuine, emergent systems that resemble or are indeed conscious or look conscious, and then have successive overlays and adulterations of culture.

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Doctor Hammer's avatar

I really appreciate this, although less so the fact it is making me want to write an essay while I am in the middle of one... or two... or twelve?

Short version: I am annoyed about how the current discussion of consciousness and agency disdains "emergence" as a source of either or both. Emergence is specifically the creation of a whole that is more than the sum of its parts, is opaque wrt its end state from the start, often results in different end states from the same initial conditions, and produces outcomes that are no where encoded in the system.

Which sounds exactly like "its in there, somewhere, but we can't point to what it is, and probably it can't either." The whole materialist vs spiritualist divide about this strikes me as willfully obtuse. Can "spirits" not exist for things that are sufficiently complex? Are there only a fixed number of types of spirit and we know all of them? Do new spirits not get created ever?

At the same time the materialists seem hell bent on discounting any sort of spirit or agency that matters, everywhere. Can't measure it, must not be there. Perhaps more accurately "Don't want it to be there, must not be there." I can understand that as a response to "We can't eat cows! They are sentient conscious beings!" but the proper response is "That is not a sufficient justification to not eat something. Just ask a wolf." and not refusing that anything has a spirit.

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