Chance, Necessity and Purpose

How the SELF Controls Its BRAIN

“…Panpsychism has even attracted modem biologists such as , Rensch (1971), and Birch (1974), because it offers such an attractive solution to the problem of the evolutionary origin of consciousness, namely that consciousness was associated with all matter in some protopsychic state and was merely developed with the increasing complexity of the brain to appear as the self-consciousness associated with the human brain. Such philosophers as Spinoza and Leibniz espoused various forms of panpsychism.…”

“…Shapere (1974) makes this point in his strong criticisms of the panpsychist hypothesis of Rensch (1974) and Birch (1974), in which it was proposed that consciousness or protoconsciousness is a fundamental property of matter. Shapere (1974) makes this point in his strong criticisms of the panpsychist hypothesis of Rensch (1974) and Birch (1974), in which it was proposed that consciousness or protoconsciousness is a fundamental property of matter.…”

"A Knowledge–Based Approach to Systematization of Life Processes"

“…Only minimal knowledge-processing is anthropomorphically attributed to higher organisms even though acts of knowledge-processing, as in gene replication, etc., take place in all scales (Rowe [65]). Any representation of biological knowledge has been traditionally embedded in material flow: Species are "information reservoirs" and "packages of information" (Eldredge [122]), living systems are "dynamics units" capable of taking into account and feeling the past and future possibilities (Birch [20,123]), and genes can survive better if carried by larger organisms (Bonner [124]).…”

The Question of Animal Awareness

“…So the awareness of a complex organism ought, we feel, to be a similar resultant, and either atoms are already conscious, or else consciousness is only a misleading label for neural impulse" (Nagel, cited by Clarke 1981). "There must be something positive limiting chance, and something more than mere matter in matter, or Darwinism fails to explain life" (Hartshorne, cited by Birch 1974). Others, however, reject the idea of "panpsychism" as "cheap" and "a radical simplification" (Popper 1974), or because it is not possible to confirm this idea scientifically, and that there is no visible evidence that lower life forms are conscious, as are humans and some higher animals (Thorpe 1977).…”