In my last book, I wrote that Whitehead’s position, that all entities have a “mental” as well as a “physical” pole, needs to be distinguished “from the ‘panpsychism’ of which he is sometimes accused” (page 28). I now realize that this is entirely wrong; such a distinction cannot be made, because Whitehead’s position is, in a very classical sense, a panpsychist one. Moreover, panpsychism is a respectable philosophical position, and not something that anyone needs to worry about being “accused” of.
I come to this new understanding from reading David Skrbina’s work on panpsychism — the philosophical doctrine that “mentality” is in some sense a universal property of all entities in the universe, or of matter itself. Skrbina’s book, Panpsychism in the West, both argues for panpsychism as a philosophical doctrine, and gives an extended history of this doctrine. Skrbina shows that panpsychism has been a leading strand in Western thought for 2500 years, from the pre-Socratics through Spinoza and Leibniz, on to William James and Whitehead a century ago, and up to many thinkers today. The idea that everything in the world thinks, in some fashion, is far more prevalent than its “crackpot” reputation might lead us to assume.
Skrbina’s companion edited volume, Mind That Abides, contains essays on the possibilities of panpsychism by a variety of contemporary philosophers, ranging from analytic philosophers (among whom Galen Strawson is probably the best-known), through post-Whiteheadian process-oriented thinkers, to “speculative realists” along with other non-analytic metaphysicians (there are contributions from Graham Harman and Iain Hamilton Grant). Together, these volumes make a powerful case for the plausibility of panpsychism, as well as making it clear that Whitehead’s contention that all entities have some sort of incipient mentality is a central expression of the panpsychist doctrine.
Arguments for panpsychism come in many forms, and its adherents often contradict one another. But if there is a central strain to contemporary panpsychist argumentation, it is this. If we reject radical mind/body dualism, and accept materialism, physicalism, or any other form of monism, then we must face the question of \emph{how to explain} the indubitable existence of mind or mentality. I am using “monism” here in its widest possible sense; I define it to include, not just scientific physicalism (the doctrine that the world is composed entirely of mass-energy, or that it is reducible to the subatomic particles described by contemporary physics), but also any form of what might be called “immanentism” (the doctrine that the world is composed of something like Spinoza’s unique substance, or of Bergson’s multiple durations, or of “experience” as it is understood in William James’ “radical empiricism”, or indeed as pure multiplicity, or as an open collection of independent objects a la Graham Harman). In other words, any philosophy that rejects supernaturalism or mind/body dualism as a way to explain the existence of mentality, must find some naturalistic, or at least immanent, way to do so.
I am trying to give as broad as possibile a definition of “mind” or “mentality” as well. This may be defined as consisting in cognition, and cognitive operations, of some sort; and, I would argue, in affectivity as well. But above all mentality consists in phenomenal experience, or of what analytic philosophers call “qualia”: my sensation of the redness or hardness of some particular object, or of pain or delight, or simply of being present in the world. Phenomenal experience is often conflated with consciousness, or the state of intentionality, being-aware-of; I have reservations about this identification, which I will get to later, but the rough equation may be accepted for the moment.
Understood in any of these ways, mentality would seem to be an irreducible aspect of our own existence, at the very least — leaving open the question of what other beings might have it. The question nagging at philosophers is how to explain the seeming indubitability, or incorrigibility of phenomenal experience. (“Incorrigibility” is what Descartes bases his entire philosophy upon. Everything that I think may be false or mistaken; but the fact that I am thinking cannot be mistaken). Cartesian dualism is the great classical solution to this dilemma, of course. Descartes has been (rightly) criticized for hundreds of years for reifying the act or fact of thinking into the the form of the “I” as a thing-that-thinks, and for separating the thinking-mind from any notions of body, matter, or extension. But this doesn’t negate the urgency of his initial observation.
Few of us are willing today to take Descartes’ dualist route, however. So the question becomes: how do we explain qualia, or phenomenal experience, or consciousness, or “inner” experience, on a materialist or monist basis? Modern thinkers have tended to favor either eliminativism or emergentism. Eliminativism is a reductionist thesis; it argues that qualia, consciousness, intentionality, and phenomenal experience are merely illusions, or linguistic misunderstandings, which disappear once we understand how neurological mechanisms operate on the physical level (one can find different versions of this position in Daniel Dennett, in Thomas Metzinger, and in the Churchlands).
Emergentism argues that mentality is the epiphenomenal result of interacting physical processes that have attained a certain level of complexity, as is the case with the massive aggregations of neurons in our brains. Phenomenal experience emerges at some point in the course of evolution; it may be associated either with the existence of neurons and nervous systems in animals, or with some more complex development of the nervous system in organisms of sufficient complexity, or in vertebrates, or in mammals, or just in human beings.
Both eliminativism and emergentism can be criticized, however, for just “explaining away” mentality, rather than actually explaining it. As Whitehead says, “philosophy destroys its usefulness when it indulges in brilliant feats of explaining away.” Eliminativism doesn’t account for mentality so much as it suggests that it is too trivial or illusory to even merit being accounted for; it ignores Whitehead’s insistence that “the red glow of the sunset should be as much part of nature as are the molecules and electrical waves by which men of science would explain the phenomenon.”
Emergentism, for its part, can be accused of begging the question. It is one thing to say that certain physical properties emerge out of other physical properties (in Strawson’s example, a single molecule of H2O isn’t in itself wet). But it is another thing altogether, Strawson argues, to maintain that mentality, or experience, or phenomenality, can emerge from something that is entirely non-mental, non-experiential, and non-phenomenal.
More generally, I think that it is worthwhile to challenge our almost reflexive belief, today, in the power of emergence or self-organization. (See my previous post, “Against Self-Organization”, for more discussion of this). It’s all too easy for “spontaneous emergence” or “self-organization” to be put into play as a catch-all explanation for things that cannot be explained any other way. The emergentist thesis threatens to violate Whitehead’s ontological principle, which is that “there is nothing which floats into the world from nowhere.” Theories of emergent self-organization may well be ways of illicitly reintroducing an idea of preprogrammed finality, or of a benevolent “invisible hand,” into our understanding of events, as Jean-Jacques Kupiec has recently suggested.
Panpsychist thinkers propose, against the eliminativists, that mentality is real. Against the emergentists, they propose that mentality doesn’t just come into being out of nothing; it is always already there, no matter where you look. Mind, in some form or other, exists all the way down. Panpsychists argue that mentality, or experience, is itself a basic attribute of matter (of subatomic particles, of quanta of mass-energy, of actual occasions, of minimal differences, etc.). In other words, mentality is not separate from physicality, but coextensive with it. One might think of this, classicaly, in Spinozian terms (matter and mind are two attributes of the same unique substance) or in Leibnizian ones (every monad is at once material and mental, since it is both a particle of the world and a perspective upon the world). But Galen Strawson, David Skrbina, and others have reconceptualized these arguments in terms that are grounded in contemporary physics. As Strawson puts it, the “ultimates” out of which the universe is composed “are intrinsically experience-involving… All physical stuff is energy, in one form or another; and all energy, I trow, is an experience-involving phenomenon.”
This line of argument intersects in interesting ways with the arguments of the Speculative Realists. For it implies that mentality must be seen as intrinsic to the universe itself — rather than just being a feature of the way that “we” (human beings, rational minds, subjects) approach it. To restrict mentality just to human beings (and perhaps also to some other species of “higher” animals) is an unjustified prejudice, an instance of the “correlationism” denounced by Meillassoux, or the human-centeredness questioned by Harman. (This also accords with Whitehead’s frequent point that the duality of subject and object is a situational and always changing one. Every entity is a “subject” in some conditions or some relations, and an “object” in others).
In Skrbina’s anthology, both Iain Hamilton Grant and Graham Harman write about the relation between realism and panpsychism in ways that are too complicated for me to do them justice here. Grant argues for “panpsychism all the way down, that is, without exception”; but in doing so, he complicates the whole question of emergence. For his part, Harman is reserved with regards to panpsychism. He sees mentality as an inevitable component of any relationality, or interaction between objects; “objects collide only indirectly, by means of the images they present as information.” But objects are not reducible to the “information” that they transmit to other objects. Harman therefore denies the property of information, or mentality, to objects insofar as they are in themselves, and therefore to objects that do not enter into “vicarious” relations with other objects. And of course, for Harman, relationality is only incidental to, and not constitutive of, the nature of objects. Hence, for Harman, “even if all entities contain experience, not all entities have experience.” Grant’s and Harman’s articles both raise important issues that I do not have the space to pursue right now — I will have to leave them both for another occasion.
In any case, Whitehead gives his own crucial twist to the overall panpsychist argument. In Whitehead’s formulation, all “actual entites” or “actual occasions” have both a “physical” pole, and a “mental” or “conceptual” pole. He also expresses this by saying that they have both a “public” aspect and a “private” aspect. “There are no concrete facts which are merely public, or merely private. The distinction between publicity and privacy is a distinction of reason, and is not a distinction between mutually exclusive concrete facts.” Everything exists, to different degrees, both physically or publically, on the one hand, and mentally or privately, on the other. Every occasion is inwardly mental or private, in its own process of “concrescence,” as it prehends other (previous) occasions. But every occasion is also physical or public, insofar as it enters into relations with the universe by serving as a “datum” to be prehended in turn by other occasions.
(There is thus a temporal as well as existential asymmetry between the mental and the physical, or between private and public dimensions of existence. This asymmetry has important consequences for how we understand relationality in general. In the privacy of its self-constitution, the occasion prehends, and thereby relates to, the entire universe. Publically, as a datum, the occasion is prehended by other occasions, and functions as a relational factor. I need to work out this asymmetry in more detail — I think that it is crucial for how Whitehead is able to maintain both relationality all the way down, and the sense that an occasion is something more than just the sum of its relations).
The most crucial way in which Whitehead revises the panpsychist argument is that, for him, mentality — or what William James calls “experience” — is not equated (as it is in the work of most panpsychists) with consciousness. Photons and quarks, and stones and thermostats, all have “experiences,” which means that they do possess some sort of incipient mentality; but for Whitehead, they are probably not conscious. Even in human beings, Whitehead says, most mental processes occur unconsciously, or below the threshold of consciousness. What makes them “mental,” then? Whitehead’s notion of unconscius thought is related to, but also quite different from, both the psychoanalytic sense of the unconscious, and from cognitive science’s recognition that most cognitive processes are unacompanied by, and often irreducible to, consciousness. Like psychoanalysis, Whitehead sees unconscious experience as having to do with “feelings” and “appetitions”, processes of action and reaction that are not merely automatic responses to stimuli; but in contrast to psychoanalysis, for Whitehead these feelings and appetitions do not necessarily involve any sort of representational activity.
For Whitehead, mentality is characterised by what he calls “conceptual feelings,” or “valuations.” These are processes in which potentialities are in some sense contrasted or weighed against one another. There is not just the perception (and perhaps the recognition) of what is. For Whitehead, such a perception and recognition is exactly identical to physical causality; to say that B physically perceives or prehends A is exactly the same thing as to say that A physically affects B, or that A is the cause of which B is the effect, e.g. in the way that one billiard ball transmits energy and motion to another billiard ball by hitting it, and causing it to move in turn. In addition to all this, Whitehead says, B also has a mental or conceptual experience of A: the experience, let’s say, of being-caused-to-move. I doubt that the billard ball is in any sense conscious; but the event of energy-transfer is a mental experience for Whitehead, because it involves the activation of a potential (precisely of a potential for movement). Mentality consists in the comparison of moving and not-moving; this comparison is the “mental pole” of the “occasion” in which billiard ball B is hit by billiard ball A and propelled into motion.
Now, the role of mentality, or experience, in the case of the billiard ball is vanishingly small, or (as Whitehead tends to put it) negligeable. Nonetheless, it exists — it is at least present structurally, you might say. Experience is present potentially, but almost not at all actually. But if this is so, it is because experience is in itself the impress of potentiality. The energetic shock of being hit by another billiard ball is precisely a prehension, or an apprehension, of possiblity. Possibilities, or conceptual prehensions according to Whitehead, are always perceptions of what he calls “eternal objects,” or “pure potentials” — and these, in turn, are equivalent to what other philosophers call “qualia.” The apprehension of qualia — of the red glow of the sunset, for instance — is intrinsic and irreducible, because it is felt, pleasantly or unpleasantly as the case may be, and because, insofar as it is thus felt, it implies potential and contrast. Redness-as-a-potentiality is in excess of merely being a quality or an aspect of this particular moment, this particular sunset. My sense of redness implies that this scene could perhaps change, so as not to be red after all; and also that something else could be imbued by redness as well. And my affective response to the sunset has to do with my liking or disliking of this redness, a reaction that extends into the prospect of other things being red, or of this redness itself disappearing (as it does, once the sun has entirely set).
Experience, or conceptual feeling, thus always involves a certain process of “valuation,” or evaluation. Whitehead agrees with the cognitivists in seeing that these evaluative processes are most of the time non-conscious. But he does not see evaluation as itself a “cognitive” process — it has much more to do with “appetition,” which “includ[es] in itself a principle of unrest, involving realization of what is not, and may be… All physical experience is accompanied by an appetite for, or against, its continuance.” In this way, mentality (or experience) is not just the calculation and representation of what is, but also involves a striving towards some potential novelty. As a result of this, experience always issues in some sort of decision; and for Whitehead, such decision “constitutes the very meaning of actuality.”
Experience is, as Whitehead says, irreducibly private; which means that I cannot observe anyone else’s experience aside from my own. (There may very well even be a limit as to the extent of my ability to observe my own experience — as Harman also suggests from another angle). The privacy of experience has fueled the skepticism found throughout modern Western philosophy, from Descartes to Hume, and beyond into the twentieth century. (I include, under this head, the answers to skepticism, or dissolution of its paradoxes, given by thinkers such as Wittgenstein and Cavell). But for Whitehead, the decision in which private experience culminates is also what makes it public and potentially conscious. Decision is not grounded in consciousness or cognition; rather, decision is what makes consciousness, cognition, and public relationality possible in the first place. “Feelings,” or movements of “appetition,” are the basic elements of mentality (or “inwardness,” or “qualitative experience”). Cognition, consciousness, and responsibility are consequences of this basic mentality, rather than preconditions for it. An aesthetic of decision precedes and grounds cognition and consciousness — rather than either of these being the grounds or preconditions for any process of decision. I say an “aesthetics” of decision, because it is a non-cognitive, and non-generalizable process; the problem of how decision leads from privacy to publicity, in Whitehead’s account, is a transformation of Kant’s problematic of how a singular, non-cognitive, non-conceptual aesthetic judgment can nonetheless lay claim to universality, through the process (precisely) of being made public.
I will stop here; instead of explicating this in more detail (which certainly needs to be done) I will conclude by simply juxtaposing Whitehead’s notion of experience-as-decision with some recent speculation in the physical and biological sciences. This is a continuation and expansion of some of the speculation that is already in my book.
The biologist Martin Heisenberg, in a recent article called “Is Free Will An Illusion?” makes a similar point about the “decisions” made by biological organisms. Arguing from experiments on bacteria, fruit flies, and other organisms, Heisenberg states that such organisms exhibit “behavioral output” that is independent of “sensory input”; that is to say, these organisms “actively initiate behavior” that is “self-determined,” rather than being “determined by something or someone else.” Studies of plants and slime molds, as well as bacteria and fruit flies, have isolated instances of “decision” that are not causally determined by the circumstances in which they occur, or the conditions to which they are a response.
Recognizing decision in all living organisms might seem to point to a kind of vitalism. But it would be considerably different from traditional vitalism, because it would not claim that some sort of intrinsic vital force would make living beings radically distinct from non-living things. Rather, as Whitehead says, the line between life and non-life of fuzzy, and the mentality or decisionality of life is something that is essential to life, but not exclusive to life: it extends all the way down.
Along these lines, the physicists John H. Conway and Simon Kochen propose what they call the Strong Free Will Theorem. According to Conway and Kochen, under certain conditions that arise as a result of quantum entanglement, subatomic particles respond “freely,” that is to say, non-deterministically, unconstrained by any prior physical events. If experimenters may be said to be acting “freely” when they collapse a quantum-indeterminate state by choosing which of several possible parameters they will measure, then to the same extent the particle thus measured is acting “freely” when it “chooses” which value to give this parameter. If this is correct, then even photons may be said to have a certain sort of inner “experience,” and to make a kind of “decision.”
