The first cause has consciousness
This argument is used in the debate Does God exist?.
This argument is an objection to There's no reason why God should be the first cause..
Summary
Quotes
“Better still, we have good reason to believe that physical reality itself is nothing more than a tiny degree of spirituality. To fully grasp the necessity of this point, we need to ask ourselves what the proper reality of a non-physical being might consist of, i.e., a being that is entirely interior to itself, and offers no clue to a sensible location. It can only be a "presence to oneself", in other words, a consciousness. We would therefore say that the first cause is a being conscious, not only of itself, but of everything it does. And since it does everything, since it sustains the universe in its existence, its consciousness is coextensive with the whole of reality. This is what we classically call omniscient. The final loophole would be to invoke a "type-of-imaterial-being-yet-unknown" that would be neither an abstraction nor a mind. But this is a gratuitous, verbal solution. In the absence of evidence to define the content of this hypothesis, and to show that it is more probable than that of a spirit, it is pure fantasy. It's certainly impossible to refute a hypothesis whose main content is that it has none, but this proves nothing against the other hypotheses.”
References
Justifications
Objections
-
The First Cause is the Hindu Brahman, self-conscious and indifferent to humans.