How Consciousness Can Lead to God w/ Josh Rasmussen

Dr. Joshua Rasmussen returns to The Pat Flynn Show to share insights from his upcoming book on the nature of consciousness.

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[TheBrunarr]

1:10:39 Mental well-being affecting the health of the body makes perfect sense if the soul is the form of the body.

[Salvy]

Great stuff as always, Pat! Really enjoying this channel.

[VACatholic]

2 of my absolute favorite people. 2 comments
1. I often have an experience, during a conversation, of remembering something relevant to the conversation that the other person/people are surprised I remember. In those circumstances I never know how to answer, because the thought comes to me, and there is no conscious effort on my part to pull it forth. I'm not sure if this is related to how I've managed to memorize the prayer of consecration to St. Joseph (which has been embedded into the prayers at the end of the rosary that I say daily with a prayer group that I learned after just a few days/weeks of saying the rosary with them due to it being naturally a part of the ending prayers and therefore "easier" to remember, which seems related to me having playlists of (dozens if not hundreds) of songs growing me up causing me to associate the end of one song with the beginning of another), whereas I haven't memorized Psalm 95 in spite of praying that every morning with the Divine Office. All that to say, it's not exactly clear to me how memory works, and why I remember some things and not others, especially as I seem able to remember incredibly innocuous things in certain circumstances, and incredibly important things I've actually forgotten, and I have no idea how any of that works.
2. Fundamentally it seems like a lot of this boils down to information. Just as Josh finds it impossible that consciousness should randomly appear from random orientations of particles, I feel even more deeply that is true about information. Given the Gospel of John, not to mention Genesis, I am still shocked to see that this line of inquiry seems (relatively, compared to others, e.g., cosmological arguments) unexplored area. Perhaps this is due to "information" really only being "discovered" in the 1950s with Claude Shannon and his 9 page paper, and the implications of that still reverberating, but I really think that there is something important there that just hasn't been explicated in the proper way to really bring a deep insight into the nature of reality.

[DannyBlackstock]

Just want to clarify Dr. Rasmussen is referring to when he mentions geometrical states around 40:00 - he's using it synonymously with "physical brain states"? Second clarification, maybe I missed it... how can we recognize or define consciousness, e.g. what if the "throwing a thing against the wall" does produce consciousness, but with no way to express itself, or for us to observe it? I guess it's one of those cases where there's no evidence or effects to observe, so maybe it's not worth pondering too much? Thanks guys for this great discussion.

[TheBrunarr]

From what I understand, a main motivation of panpsychism is to posit a basis or foundation for the existence and emergence of consciousness, ie, that there is something already in or about reality that contains what is necessary to cause/account for consciousness in beings. This is very similar to the reasoning of the PPC (Principle of Proportionate Causality) such that any feature in an effect must have been precontained in the effect's total cause. I would say that this same motivation should steer one towards hylomorphism as opposed to panpsychism, since positing form is much more elegant than positing ubiquitous consciousness (plus hylomorphism belongs to a broader systematic metaphysics which is defensible in itself). In terms of the PPC, what panpsychism is going to do is going to appeal to formal containment for the explanation while the hylomorphist is going to appeal to eminent containment.

[thephilosophicalagnostic]

brain activity takes place in many many levels. Don't conflate them. Thoughts are not a mere few flashes of neurons. They are made up of incredibly complex multi-layered brain processes.

[AnswersInAtheism]

Well Josh me thinks you are wrong. The start of the problem is trying to consider a thought as identical to a brain state. Not a state but rather states and the word identical is not what we need here unless you think two thoughts, putatively considered the same thought, are identical. They never are.