[marginalium]
God without god
26 Jun 2025
God without god. Hard to explain in a marginalia. But there is this ‘hard’ problem of consciousness (not conscious access). Why do we have experiences? The pain of being slapped, the beauty of a natural vista, the feeling of hunger. None of these things seem necessary to produce behaviour. You could imagine a robot that responds to slaps without experiencing them. So we often try to explain consciousness in a material world that seems to not need it (though see the paragraph in my linked article about non-materialism).
An entirely different way to explain experiences is to say that, rather than consciousness coming from the material world, maybe the material world comes from the experientail world. Start with experiences and explain the physical, rather than starting with the physical and explaining the experiential. Since it’s literally anyone’s guess where consciousness comes from, it’s perfectly valid to consider.
If I’ve kept you so far, this is fun because she is building on the classical idealist view that, on this view, god must exist. The classic view is that, if the physical world is made of experiences, then something has to be experiencing it for it to exist when we stop—when we close our eyes, or fall asleep.
Yetter-Chappell says:
There must be something outside of us that can sustain objects when we are not perceiving them, and account for the regularity of our perceptions. But this needn’t be a god in any recognizable sense. It need not be omnibenevolent, omnipotent, or omniscient. There is no reason it must contain desires, intentions, or beliefs, or even be an agent. What’s crucial for ensuring the persistence and stability of the cake closed in my fridge is simply that there be a unified experience that encompasses all aspects of it.
In this case, it might be some kind of “tapestry” woven of innumerable experiential threads. My experiences mingled with yours and the other experiencing creatures in the world all maintain it. Fun
See also, her book.
Anthologies: Connection, Spiritual Architecture, On the Nature of Things, Humans Aren't Special, Abstractions as Gods