Of course not! I think lurking behind much of physicalism is Descartes’ dichotomy: if it’s not matter (res extensa), then it’s mind (res cogitans) — and nobody can say what ‘res cogitans’ is. That has coloured so much of the thinking about it. Or it used to.
The way Descartes framed the problem these two categories were exhaustive (they described everything) and exclusive (everything had to be one or the other or a combination.) They were the basic constituents of the Universe. This dichotomy is behind most of mechanistic materialism: because it’s impossible to say what ‘res cogitans’ is, and how it reacts with or influences ‘res extensa’, it is rejected – leaving only physical principles. That’s the lineage of a lot of modern materialism. Galen Strawson basically accepts this paradigm when he says he accepts that ‘what is real is physical’.
But there are ways to challenge the entire picture — one of which is to say that that nothing is purely or only physical. After all, physics is open-ended. Physics now has progressed enormously since the 17th century — goes without saying. But it’s still not complete!
Many philosophers of physics say that what we call “particles” (like quarks or bosons tracked by the Large Hadron Collider) are not actual physical objects with intrinsic essences, but rather nodes in a relational structure. In this view, matter has no stand-alone identity or hidden substance; it is entirely defined by how it interacts. When protons collide the LHC isn’t unearthing pre-existing material objects; it is registering excitations in underlying fields rearranging themselves according to mathematical symmetries. It turns out there is no substantive res extensa at bottom, no ‘ultimate existent’ to which objects can be reduced. And that furthermore, as has been known since the discovery of quantum physics, the experimental setup has a causative influence on the observed outcome.
It doesn’t mean that ‘anything goes’. But I think it does mean that ‘everything is physical’ can no longer be meaningfully defended.
One merely has to define “objects or particles” as processes or events and “properties” as relationships between events as modern physics would suggest. It is a short step after that to some form of primitive experience or prehension (mentality) between these events and processes. Thus you can still be a physicalist if you redefine the physical in modern scientific terms. After all what is matter but an excitation in a field which has no precise position or value until it is measured or interacts.
And I as you probably already know think that very primitive forms of experience (interiority and awareness of and connections to the larger reality) are virtually universal and form the ultimate basis for all forms of awareness, experience, mind and later consciousness on an evolutionary scale and pattern. Mind does not arise de novo from completely insentient matter, which would constitute a break in the continuity of the creative advance and ontological origins of nature.
This is a version of panpsychism and thus seems closer to Strawson’s position than yours.
I’m no fan of Strawson, as I disagree with physicalism. I agree the potential fr sentience to arise is implicit in the universe but that is a long way from attributing subjectivity to fundamental particles.
Where does the implicit potential for sentience to arise in the universe reside in your view?
I am going to object to the term “particle” and to the term “subjectivity” in your response as I used neither.
Quantum “particles” are really Quantum “events” or excitation in fields which bring to mind a different picture than “particles or objects”.
Nothing “exists” independent of the larger reality from which it arises and on which it depends and thus relationships to the larger reality are inherent. Thus “properties” are dependent on the method of measurement and things like “entanglement” imply deeper connections between events than we can conveniently detect or envision.
It is only by carefully examining what modern physics tells us the nature of “matter” or the “physical” really is that we can overcome the bifurcation of nature that has made “consciousness” the hard problem. It is a problem of our own making by making false assumptions about the true nature of reality.
If it’s implicit, it hasn’t yet arisen. From a naturalistic perspective, the confluence of conditions have to exist for life to be able to form, but I don’t know if science will ever really understand how it happened.
I’ve written an essay on the philosophical implications called Is Mind Cause or Consequence? It doesn’t bring in Whitehead, rather Hans Jonas (‘The Phenomenon of Life: Towards a Philosophy of Biology’) and Evan Thompson (Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind.)
Totally agree with that! I found an excellent exegesis of Whiteheads’ ‘bifurcation of nature’ (here) and I’m 100% on board with it. Another excellent book I have on interpretation of physics, ‘Nature loves to Hide’ by Shimon Malin, also brings in Whitehead’s ‘throbs of experience’. I probably should read up on it more, but I can’t really understand the problem that Whitehead is trying to solve with that aspect of his metaphysics.
I’d also say that “consciousness” does not refer to a thing or a stuff. It is just the “presence” of “the physical.” Basically the physical is “there” from the POV of organisms that are themselves “physical.”
With a sense of futility, I add that I do not mean “idealism” or that “consciousness” or “mind” is a “primal stuff.” The “shared world” is “primary.” And personally I find nothing illuminating in the claim that “everything is physical.” To me this is like “everything is water.” Basically an incantation, a deepity. On the other hand, I am “with” naturalism in a general sense that isn’t afraid to take music and literature seriously as genuine and very rich phenomena that are no less “real” than “protons” and other entities in the totality of our sense-making.
You can’t pick and choose, this is “real” and that is “not”. It is all part of nature (our experience included). Talking about wavelengths and infrared is not a substitute for feeling the warmth of the sun. Purely physical explanations are partial and incomplete illustrations of experience (music, art, love, etc).
Yes, I agree. I put the lifeworld in its blazing plenitude at the center. Without question. One of my favorite foolosophers is Heidegger. I respect Whitehead. My positivist style, which I sometimes emphasize, is just a rhetorical strategy for this or that context.
Alfred North Whitehead defines speculative philosophy inProcess and Reality as “the endeavour to frame a coherent, logical, necessary system of general ideas in terms of which every element of our experience can be interpreted”
Such a scheme must be coherent, logical, adequate and applicable to our entire realm of experience (subjective and objective)..
The first principle is that reality is a process, a continuous creative becoming not a fixed being.
The fundamental units of reality are events “actual" occasions" sometimes also referred to as droplets of experience or other terms .
Reality is composed of a series of temporal events and relationships not of permanent objects with fixed properties.
What appear to be permanent objects are just repeating patterns of events.
Measured properties are just relationships between events.
What puzzled Whitehead was continuity with the past along with creativity or novelty in the future and the formation of order and value.
To incorporate elements of the past and possibilities from the future into each new event required a form of connection or awareness of the larger reality (past, present and future) through what Whitehead termed “prehension” ( a form of non conscious experience)
The notion of non conscious awareness or experience is key to this flow of reality.
There is also the notion of eternal objects (forms) and the principle of limitation to avoid chaos.
Whitehead’s project was indeed an ambitious one but one by which he wished to put science and philosophy on a path away from Cartesian dualism or mechanistic determinism and towards a philosophy of organism. This would heal the bifurcation of nature which the notion of primary and secondary qualities, and mind versus matter, subjective vs objective has created and of which “the hard problem of consciousness” is a primary example.
I also don’t think that panpsychism is a physicalist theory. Here Strawson already attributes to matter a property that is not normally associated with it. But he correctly puts the question very sharply, in the sense that if matter does not originally possess subjective experience — that is, does not possess it at all, meaning a complete absence of this experience — then, by strict logic, it could not simply arise out of complete absence. This is the same kind of fundamental impossibility of emergence as the Big Bang having to have a first cause, rather than appearing out of Absolute Nothing.
There is also already a loaded assumption in your statement, one that you trust without any doubt: namely, that subjective experiences are the product of the evolution of matter from non-living matter into living matter.
But, for example, Richard Dawkins, within his theory, in his book The Selfish Gene, specifically points out that the first replicator had no goal of replication or survival, meaning that it had no subjective experiences that would push it toward survival or self-replication. And here I already have the same question as Strawson: how could evolution, out of a complete absence of subjective experiences, out of the Absolute absence of this entire space of subjective experience, of any subjective relation to anything whatsoever, produce even a single drop of it?
We are so accustomed to the idea that progress proceeds step by step, from the simple to the complex, from something small to something larger. But small and large are relative categories within a hierarchy, whereas Absolute absence is an Absolute category.
And Strawson began with the claim that one cannot doubt subjective experience. Here, by the way, I can strengthen this with Descartes’ position, because doubt itself is available to us precisely through subjective experience, and one cannot logically consistently doubt one’s own doubt. That is, you can doubt it, but it will not be logically consistent, because this is a logical paradox similar to the grandfather paradox in a jump into the past.
The title of the topic intrigued me because, to me, physicalism is the complete opposite of panpsychism, while here they are literally being identified with one another. And physicalists are Dawkins and Dennett; physicalists are those who absolutize their belief in matter, in physical ontology. They make the physical fundamental, the foundation, while consciousness is declared to be an illusion. Dennett believes that he has no consciousness; it only seems to him that he does. Dawkins claims that there was non-living matter, then in an extraordinarily rare case matter acquired a configuration that, without any will or purpose whatsoever, began to copy itself and survive, but not because of qualia, will, or purpose, but simply because that is how the mechanisms work, and simply because that is how things happened on their own, without any purpose or will toward it. But I want to point to a gaping hole in his logic, relying on Chalmers’ hard problem of Consciousness.
I also want to draw attention to the fact that the entire world is given to us only in our subjective experiences. We believe in matter only after we receive some kind of experience. Switch off all of our qualitative experience, and that is it — we are gone. Even thoughts are given to us through the qualitative subjective experience of thoughts.
And here we need to remember The Matrix: how would you understand, if a virtual knife were stuck into your virtual leg, that you were in a virtual world, if the pain you experience is real and you feel it in your virtual leg, while you do not know whether you have non-virtual legs, or any other non-virtual parts of the body, if you have always existed inside the Matrix?
One of the interesting things is the self organizing self assembling character of at least our little corner of the universe. Interstellar gas becomes stars and planets. Stars evolve through various stages. Stars produce more complex elements from primitive hydrogen through their life cycles. Complex molecules form some of which become self replicating. Simple forms of “life” become more complex forms. Primitive forms of experience evolve into awareness and later “consciousness”. To some these things are just accidental and perhaps purposeless chains of events in an otherwise mechanistic deterministic machine like universe. I think these abilities must be built into the fundamental nature of things. So I think nature is as Whitehead woud say more like an “organism” than a “machine” and that view entails a certain kind of panpsychism and perhaps a touch of teleology. Welcome to the forum keep posting.
I believe this apparently commensensical attitude is under challenge nowadays. There’s a school of thought, phenomenology of biology, which attributes intentionality to even very rudimentary organisms. Surely not conscious intentionality that h.sapiens and arguably other species have. But rudimentary life-forms behave in ways that mineral and other non-organic matter does not so as to maintain homeostasis and replicate (or reproduce.) So I question whether any life-form can be understood in purely material terms.
There’s an emerging school of thought about it, namely the so-called ‘Third Way’ school of evolutoinary theory. Emphatically not intelligent design theory, but also different from and critical of the neo-Darwinian materialism of Dawkins et al.
Its a beautifully written piece but its such a distance from ny own views that I will keep my comments brief
It does depend on what you mean by subjective experience.
You are talking about something very specific the feelings that being a brain generates.
My view is that these are an aspect of neural communication not a separate thing. Feeling is one aspect of what we might call bodymind.
Yes, nature has no goals but biological organisms evolve purposeful like behaviour. In time, the organisms come to turn the pyschological drives and learnt preferences that support the purposeful like behaviours, into formulated goals
None of the organism’s behaviour relies on feelings alone. The behaviour is directed by bodymind operations.
You claim that it is a fact that subjective experience is essential. However, it doesn’t seem very likely that the working of the brain requires felt experience alone as opposed to bodymind computation. Where is the evidence for your fact? Facts need to be justified by evidence?
Thank you. I’ve been looking for a long time for people with whom I could discuss these topics.
That’s exactly why your comment caught my attention. You described Consciousness as a magical property, which, in my opinion, isn’t too far from the truth, but unlike my view, there’s a negative connotation to your statement—the nature of which is clear to me.
I’m sorry you decided to respond briefly; I would have liked to have a substantive discussion with you on this topic.
Qualia, in the broadest sense. The pain of pain, the redness of red, the saltiness of salt, joy, resentment, and even the doubtfulness of that which you doubt—all of this is conveyed through the sensations of subjective experience.
There are a number of thought experiments in philosophy that raise this issue. Mary, the Scientist in a black-and-white room?
If a person who has been blind from birth learnt everything there is to know about colour by studying books, would that in itself give them
a direct sense of the redness of red? Or, as Thomas Nagel wrote, what is it like to be a bat? We understand what echolocation is, but we do not experience it directly, just as someone blind from birth has never experienced the redness of red, and no words in the world can give them that experience.
There is a fungus-like organism called a slime mold, and there is a fairly well-known experiment in which pieces of food were placed on a map of Japan in proportions corresponding to the size of populated areas, while the water and mountains were illuminated with ultraviolet light. Slime molds, being slimy, form trails in an attempt to reach the food, much like ants leaving their anthill to scout for food; in this way, they map out routes to points of interest while avoiding places they find unpleasant.
And the slime creature has NO BRAIN, yet it can distinguish between tasty treats and pain.
Why are you so absolutely certain that qualia are a product of the brain specifically? For example, I’ve come to the conclusion that the brain acts as a switch for living, sentient tissue—just like an office network: if the network is damaged, the employees themselves will remain at their workstations in front of their computers, but their commands won’t be executed correctly and the company’s operations will grind to a halt, even though the network doesn’t produce the information or interactions itself; it is merely an intermediary.
Let’s assume that Dawkins is right, and that the first replicator arose by chance—one that lacked qualia, purpose, and the will to survive and self-replicate; it simply came into being that way. But explain to me: given their complete absence, how did this subjective space accessible to us—even its very first, most basic building block—come into existence in the first place?
And this isn’t like fluidity—where a single molecule didn’t have this property, but a group of molecules did—here, a completely new subjective space, not one of indifference, came into being; this is not a physical property.
I see a logical leap here that you probably aren’t aware of. You’re simply claiming that the subjective, internal aspect of experience just appears out of nowhere, like a rabbit out of a hat. Magic?
Can you explain how to program the sensation of pain into the T-800—or at least give a rough idea of how to go about it? This is a fundamental problem.
Essentially, the T-800 Terminator is a smart lawn mower. The T-800 can sustain damage, and its sensors can report that damage, but this won’t translate into an experience of pain—it’s just a pile of ones and zeros that will trigger the next behavioral algorithm for this lawn mower, and the lawn mower itself doesn’t care whether it’s turned on or off, what combinations of ones and zeros are churning inside it, whether it’s mowing grass or whether the blades have sucked in the family cat or your leg—inside, there is zero subjective space that cares about what’s actually happening or whether anything is happening at all.
Our conversation is proof of this very fact; after all, if neither of us cared, nothing would have prompted you to share your opinion here—that’s the first point.
Second, facts are silent in and of themselves; they’ve never said anything to anyone. They only begin to speak within the framework of a speculative, hypothetical picture of the world; otherwise, the fact of falling apples wouldn’t have remained silent for 300,000 years, waiting for Isaac Newton.
I rely on my own reasoning; for example, in my previous post, I mentioned René Descartes and his famous “Cogito ergo sum,” but I did so in a purer logical form, where it is impossible to logically and consistently doubt that you are doubting.
Doubt is a logical operation, but it is accessible to us directly through the qualia of the experience of doubt. If, as you say, the process itself were sufficient, how would we know about this process if we did not perceive it in any way?