Excellent comments; keep em coming!
I’ll have to remember that word: interiority.
One of the assumptions, generally not defended but simply accepted apriori, is that experiencing (consciousness) is a byproduct of complexity (or some forms of it). But we have no proof or even the slightest evidence of this.
Exactly! It makes no sense to me that life is a function of complexity. It makes so little sense that I previously conjured a spirit to explain the missing “lifeness” because there is no way “experience” can be a result of a deterministic process of falling dominoes, and since I hadn’t yet considered that life is “interior”/inherent to the universe, a spirit was my only alternative (and a consequence of my indoctrination).
Another way to couch the issue and to ask your question is 'Why did you decide that the default is not alive, not experiencing, not conscious?
As far as I can tell, his reasoning is that to believe the default is alive is a mental illness; therefore the default cannot be alive. He calls it “reify”, which is to make something out of nothing or to make a thing within a continuum. So he says that because we have a natural tendency to reify, that god cannot exist since we must assume that we’ve reified god from nothing (I don’t know why we must assume that).
But I don’t think he’s seeing that he’s reified nonlife from life, or has cut a “thing” from a continuum and created a division that doesn’t actually exist. So the same mental illness argument applies.
Interestingly we can see a progression within science, against great internal resistance, from white men are sentient and other humans are less so, with animals as machines and no one even mentions plants. To the current scientific consensus, where animals are seen as conscious intentional being and now plant intelligence and even choice is coming in to the mainstream. The bias is being overcome. From a pantheist perspective the bias is seen as 1) less likely to be the right default and 2) problematically counterintuitive - as you have been arguing.
There are fashions in science and philosophy. One must be trendy!
Rupert Sheldrake is a wonderful scientist who has found many of these not justified (yet) defaults in mainstream science. To me it seems much more likely that interiority is universal and that the bias of humans being special is still causing tremendous unscientific resistance to now proven phenomena within science, but also to real rational evaluation of the default dead unintelligent universe with life as a rare scum on dead matter as the exception.
Yes, did we come into the world or come out of it? If we came in, then from where did we come? If we came out, then the ingredients were already here.
It’s important to point out that life could never have had a beginning or else it would have come from nonlife, or nothing, like color could somehow come from shape.
My cuo buono is: how does it serve people to have the defaults they have. I mean, why leave that type of criticism to the atheists?
How does it serve a group to see everything as machine-like, modular, and mainly dead?
So they feel justified in kicking the universe around. To have a sense of self apart from everything else. Otherwise we may have too much reverence if we saw life in everything.
I used to be that way even though I wasn’t atheist and I believed I had a spirit which set me apart from all this junk. But now I see it’s a consequence of the self/other and the more oneness you have with the universe, the less of a self you’ll feel simply because there is less other to engender self. Since people love to identify themselves, they’re going to relentlessly cling to their junkyards
Monsanto provides a great case study for that religion.
LOL yeah I see what you mean.