Thursday, August 8, 2013

An addendum on consciousness, evolution and God

An addendum to my last post. If the theory in that post is correct, then all representative states depend on or are conscious mental states. Now, plausibly, some primitive organisms in our evolutionary history had representative states but not conscious mental states. If so, then it follows that their representative states were derivative from conscious mental states of something else. But presumably these organisms did not depend on more complex, conscious organisms for their mentality--when these organisms first evolved, there were no conscious organisms. So the dependence of their representative states must have been on something other than the mental states of an organism. One plausible theory is that their representative states depended for their representativeness on God's conscious mind (e.g., God consciously intended that such-and-such a mental state should represent such-and-such an environmental state).

So the theory of the preceding post is not friendly to naturalism, it looks like.

It's just a theory, though. I don't have much of an argument for it, except one based on its simplicity.

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