panexperientialism 2
kames.smiths
Why Should We Be Suspicious of Vacuous Actuality?
Dualists and materialists agree (against idealists) that 'the physical world' is
actual, and they also agree on the nature of the actualities comprising that
world: They both accept a materialistic analysis, according to which these
actualities, at least the most elementary ones, are wholly devoid of experience.
We can, following Whitehead (1978, p. 167), call this the idea of 'vacuous
actuality'.3 This idea has seemed so self-evident in the modern period, since
the time of Galileo, Descartes, and Newton, that no special name for it, beyond
'realism', has been deemed necessary: To be a realist, holding the physical
world to exist apart from our perceptions and conceptions of it, has been
virtually identical with accepting the reality of 'matter' understood as vacuous
actuality. In the present section, however, I will mention seven reasons for at
least entertaining suspicions about the reality of vacuous actualities. I will
then, in the following section, suggest four positive reasons for adopting an
alternative form of realism, according to which experience and its spontaneity,
like the lady's turtles, go all the way down.
To begin with a purely philosophical reason to be skeptical of vacuous
actualities: In the foregoing discussion, I suggested that this idea of nature's
ultimate units is at least as speculative as the idea that these units
experience. I now point out that it is even more speculative: We know from our
own experience that experiencing actualities can exist, but we have no
experiential knowledge that a vacuous actuality is even possible.
Closely related is Berkeley's question: What does it mean to say that physical
things exist? Berkeley pointed out that our immediate experience provides only
two meanings of 'to be': to perceive (percepere) and to be perceived (percipi).
Simply to be perceived, however, is not to be actual but to be merely an idea in
the mind of some perceiver. Only 'being a perceiver' (which for Berkeley
included the notion of being an active agent) gives us a meaningful notion of
what it is to be an actuality. Berkeley, of course, used this argument for his
idealist view, according to which the physical world exists only as perceived
(by divine and finite minds); but Leibniz, by positing 'petite perceptions' in
nature's elementary units, showed Berkeley's point to be compatible with
realism. As Whitehead (1967a, p. 132) says, Leibniz 'explained what it must be
like to be an atom' (now there's a title for an essay!). It can, of course, be
pointed out that we cannot say very much about what it must be like to be a bat,
let alone an atom. But to be able to say only a little bit about what we mean by
believing that such things are actual, existing in themselves (apart from our
perceptions and conceptions of them), is better than being able to say nothing
at all.
A third reason is the recognition, recently emphasized by historians of science,
that the 'mechanical philosophy of nature', according to which the units of
nature are wholly devoid of experience, spontaneity, and the capacity for
influence at a distance, was adopted in the seventeenth century less for
empirical than for theological-sociological reasons, such as defending the
existence of a supernatural deity, the reality of supernatural miracles, and the
immortality of the soul (Easlea, 1980, pp. 100-15, 125-38, 233-35; Klaaren, pp.
93-9, 173-7). For example, this idea of nature's elementary units, according to
which they were wholly inert and (in Newton's words) 'massy, hard, and
impenetrable', proved (to the satisfaction of Boyle, Newton, and their
followers) that motion and the mathematical laws of motion had to have been
impressed upon these particles at the beginning of the world by an external
creator. The fact that this strategy eventually backfired, as this idea of
matter eventually led to an atheistic, materialistic worldview, has long
obscured the original theological motives. Now that we know them, however, we
have an additional reason for suspicion.
The philosophy of science gives us a fourth reason, which is that science, like
any other activity, abstracts from the things it discusses, focusing only on
those aspects germane to the questions being asked. As Chalmers (1995, p. 217)
says, 'physics characterizes its basic entities only extrinsically, in terms of
their relations to other entities. . . . The intrinsic nature of physical
entities is left aside'-which is reminiscent of Whitehead's (1967b, p. 153) that
'physics ignores what anything is in itself. Its entities are merely considered
in respect to their extrinsic reality'. This insight is ignored when Searle, for
example, says that 'science tells us' what the ultimate units of nature are like
in themselves. It does no such thing. It tells us about those aspects of those
entities that its methods have been suited to reveal, and those aspects, for all
'science' knows, may well be abstractions from the full reality of those
entities. Simply to equate those abstractions with the concrete entities
themselves is to commit what Whitehead (1967b, p. 51) called the 'fallacy of
misplaced concreteness'.
A fifth point is that our direct experience, phenomenologically analyzed, also
gives no evidence of vacuous actualities. Some dualists and materialists seem to
consider it obvious that some actualities are devoid of experience. John Beloff
(1994, p. 32), for example, says that, 'when it comes to unicellular organisms,
I am confident that they are devoid of all consciousness whatsoever' (which
seems to mean all experience whatsoever). Perhaps they think they can know this
simply by looking; but, of course, our sensory perceptions do not tell us what
things are in themselves. McGinn may seem to be giving such an argument when, to
support his claim that the brain is 'utterly unlike' our experience, he
describes the latter as 'damp grey tissue' (1991, pp. 100, 27). His argument,
however, is more sophisticated. He is pointing out that our senses 'essentially
present things in space with spatially defined properties' (p. 11), the
relevance of which is that purely spatial entities cannot intelligibly be
thought to have experience (pp. 13, 60, 79). McGinn is right about these
matters, but his pessimism about the problem of consciousness is partly grounded
in the further assumption that sensory perceptions constitute our most direct
observations of nature. Our sensory percepts of nature, however, arise from an
extremely complex, indirect process. When a surgeon, having cut open a skull,
looks at and touches the patient's brain, the percepts symbolized by the words
'damp' and 'grey' result from chains of billions of neuronal (and in vision
photonic) events, plus the mysterious process through which the data received
from the neurons get transmuted into the sensory percepts. A far more direct
experience of nature is the surgeon's experience of his or her own body, through
which the perception of the patient's body is mediated-a point that I will
develop below in providing positive reasons for thinking of nature's units as
nonvacuous. The negative point here is that, given the fact that sensory
perception is a very complex, constructive process, the fact that it presents us
with a purely spatialized nature may tell us more about sensory perception than
it does about the nature of nature itself.
At this point, however, one could well counter: 'True, we cannot directly
perceive that physical entities do not have experience, or even that they do not
have temporal duration. Another necessary basis for reasonably inferring that
anything has experience, however, is that it appear to be capable of spontaneity
or self-motion. Our paradigmatic examples of physical things, such as rocks,
tables, and planets, seem to be completely inert. The attribution of experience
to them, therefore, would be baseless'. The answer to this problem illustrates
the way that empirical discoveries can be very relevant to the conceptual
dimension of the mind-body problem. The relevant discoveries here, such as those
resulting in cell and atomic theories, have shown that things devoid of signs of
spontaneity are not simply individuals but large clusters, or aggregational
societies, thereof. For a considerable time, of course, it was assumed that the
more ultimate units were to be understood by analogy with those visible things:
Atoms were essentially like billiard balls, only a lot smaller. The chief
philosophical implication of quantum physics, however, has arguably been to show
the falsity of that assumption (Capek, 1991). A sixth reason to be skeptical
about vacuous actualities, accordingly, is that science has increasingly
undermined what had probably been the main basis in everyday experience for
inferring their existence, the assumption that the ultimate units of nature must
be analogous to the 'solid material bodies' that Popper (1977, p. 10) takes as
'the paradigms of reality'.
Because it is so crucial to the issue of the plausibility, I should emphasize a
point implicit in the previous paragraph: that to affirm some version of
panpsychism or panexperientialism does not necessarily entail attributing
experience to things such as sticks and stones as such (as distinct from their
unitary constituents). The idea that this conclusion is entailed has provide the
primary grounds for dismissing it out of hand. For example, the charge by McGinn
(1982, p. 32) that panpsychism is 'absurd' is based on his assumption that it
implies that 'rocks actually have thoughts', and the similar charge by Popper
(1977, p. 55) that it is 'fantastic' follows from his assumption that it
attributes feelings to things such as telephones. There have, to be sure, been
versions of panpsychism, such as those of Spinoza, Fechner, and Schiller, that
did take the 'pan' to mean literally everything, so that experience (perhaps
even consciousness) was attributed to all identifiable objects. Leibniz,
however, distinguished between true individuals ('monads') and aggregational
societies of such, attributing experience only to the former, and many other
panexperientialists, such as Whitehead and Hartshorne, have done the same. Being
in this tradition myself, I would not follow Chalmers (1995, p. 217) in thinking
that a thermostat might have even a 'maximally simple experience'. Likewise, I
would resist Seager's conclusion (1995, p. 285) that anything with quantum
coherence, such as liquid helium, must have a primitive state of consciousness
(which seems to follow from Seager's apparent assumption that quantum coherence
would be a sufficient, not merely a necessary, condition for the emergence of a
unified experience.
A seventh reason is provided by the mind-body problem itself. Given our
conscious experience and a naturalistic worldview, one task of rational thought
is to describe the ultimate units of nature in such a way that the emergence of
creatures such as us is intelligible (apart from any appeal, even implicitly, to
supernaturalism). The speculative assumption that these units are vacuous
actualities allows for two possibilities: dualism (including epiphenomenalism)
and materialism The failure of both of these positions seems terminal. The
mind-body problem can reasonably be taken, therefore, as a reductio ad absurdum
of the view that the ultimate units of nature are vacuous actualities. As Seager
says, because the problem of the generation of conscious experience is a real
problem and so otherwise intractable, 'one can postulate with at least bare
intelligibility that [experience] is a fundamental feature of the universe'
(1995, p. 282).