I recently read an interesting article about panpsychism:
Briefly, panpsychism is the claim that “consciousness is inextricably linked to all matter.” If you’re trying to get your head around this idea, read Pullman’s His Dark Materials (one of my favorite works of fiction, incidentally). Pullman has created a world in which consciousness is thoroughly “natural,” part of the fabric of the universe.
Panpsychism, of course, is not a new idea, but it may seem new after a long, dark period of logical positivism in the 20th century, during which positivists tried to relegate the important metaphysical problems of consciousness to the rubbish heap of philosophical nonsense. Nevertheless, the so-called “hard problem” of consciousness — why and how we have anything like first-person, subjective experience — seems strangely difficult to exorcise, especially just by pronouncing it nonsense. This is most likely because the people who try to exorcise it seem to be exorcising it intentionally, which means that, in the act of the exorcism itself, they are engaging in the very thing they are trying to get rid of by calling it nonsense. Which is pretty awkward, as philosophy goes.
When I’m in a more generous mood, I give the logical positivists credit for realizing that the problem of consciousness is at least partly self-inflicted. In the panpsychism article I referenced, the author, Matthew Rozsa, makes the point that much of the thinking on consciousness has involved an assumption of dualism: There’s matter, which has certain properties (like being three-dimensional and susceptible of being cut into smaller bits), and there’s mind, which has certain other properties (like not being three-dimensional or weighing anything or being cut-able), and that these two kinds of thing do not overlap. Descartes is a great example of this kind of dualism.
Rozsa posits that, after the glaring failure of dualism to explain much of anything about consciousness, recent philosophers are (re)trying a different approach: Suppose consciousness isn’t separate from matter. In other words, what would consciousness look like if we stopped assuming dualism is right?
Oddly enough, this reminded me of my dissertation. In my doctoral work, I specialized in philosophical methodology, particularly concerning ontology — the subbranch of philosophy that tackles questions about the ultimate nature of reality. The result was a 400-page book that does not answer this question, but hashes out, in excruciating detail, whether and how we might go about answering questions like this without succumbing to the charge of nonsense, as the logical positivists (and others) feared.
Let’s start with dualism. You could think about dualism — like mind and matter — as a presupposition about the world that we use to frame explanations of what we experience. This may sound weird, but it’s quite common, even in science.
Suppose we have a set of criteria K that tell us what legitimate knowledge-claims are like. For instance, a legitimate claim to know something shouldn’t involve a logical contradiction, like “Matthew is currently 5’11” and also 6’1″, where there’s no equivocation in terms.” There’s been some discussion about this criterion, but most of us agree that Matthew can’t both have and lack the same property in the same way, at the same time. So, that criterion should be included in K.
Now, here’s something interesting about K: There could be presuppositions about a subjectmatter that otherwise yield knowledge claims but can’t be proved on the basis of anything in K or in the subjectmatter. A great example is science itself: We have a bunch of criteria for “real science” that we generally (and uncritically) lump under the term “scientific method.” But have you ever considered that “the scientific method” will only yield something that looks like science if we presuppose that the laws of nature that we discover locally in space and time apply generally, to all places and times?
Think about it: We can use “the scientific method” to discover how things work around these parts, but how can we say anything about what’s going on in the Andromeda Galaxy, 2.2 million lightyears away?
But there’s more: It may seem like the subjectmatter of science includes the “fact” that what we discover applies generally, but look more deeply: What actual evidence do we have of what’s going on in the Andromeda Galaxy? Only a bunch of scattered particles that make it into our neighborhood so we can observe them and extrapolate.
To get anywhere, we have to presuppose that the laws of nature that operate around here operate “everywhere.” A more sophisticated version of this presupposition is that reality is homogeneous with respect to its properties, and oddly enough, Parmenides made this argument 2500 years ago. So, what’s the problem? Well, if you think about it, we use this homogeneity postulate to do science, but we can’t use science to prove it. Why not, you might be asking?
Let’s start with this: What would be involved in proving the postulate? It either has to be in K or it has to be in the subjectmatter. It’s not in K, because it’s not at all obvious that the universe must be homogeneous. So, we’d need to verify that everywhere, and at all times, this homogeneity applies. But how do we get everywhere to check — not to mention checking 2.2 million years in the past as well, which is when the particles we observe today in our neighborhood left the Andromeda Gallery. So, there’s no empirical way to check the postulate that we use to do science. (Incidentally, this is a variant of the so-called “problem of induction” — more on that another time.)
Thinking about the postulate of homogeneity gives us some insight into the problems associated with thinking about consciousness. If we presuppose that consciousness is fundamentally different from and independent of matter, then we’ll inevitably see the problem that way. But what if we adopt a different postulate? It wouldn’t just change the way we think about minds and matter: Maybe the problem would look different, too.
This is the argument I proposed in my dissertation, which I fondly refer to as the Big Book of Ontological Method. To put it simply: instead of presupposing two (or more) fundamental kinds of things, suppose we opt for a single “fabric,” out of which emerges the richness of our experience (not to mention the experience of experiencing!). And that brings me to a key problem:
As Rozsa points out, many philosophers and scientists today are monists, which is the claim that the phenomena of consciousness “appear” out of physical systems like a brain. In other words, this type of monism holds that matter is ontologically basic, and everything else that exists is somehow a parasite on matter.
But where did the idea of matter as fundamental stuff come from? If you guessed that it’s what Nature looks like when you adopt a postulate of discontinuity, you win the philosophical method prize. Why should we presuppose that matter is fundamental? Equally, why swing the pendulum over and assume mind is fundamental? Aren’t both of those kinds of things a product of a postulate we were trying to reject?
Stay tuned! Next up: The Problem of Privileged Access