Time and relationships (or, consciousness per Martin Heidegger)

[ConradDJ]

Time and relationships (or, "consciousness" per Martin Heidegger)

In this forum we focus again and again on questions about “consciousness” – and I think there’s a deep reason why the meaning of this term tends to remain so unclear. Basically what we’re trying to understand is how our subjectivity fits into the world of objective reality described by science.

We have two basic standpoints available to us. If we take the (Cartesian) standpoint of science, we treat “consciousness” as an objective property that certain kinds of entities “have”. After all, we experience consciousness, so it must be objectively real, right? But this leads only to confusion.

Or, we can take the (Kantian) perspective of subjectivity itself, which is after all the only thing anyone ever experiences. Therefore “consciousness” must be something basic and irreducible, right? This justifies various kinds of mysticism, but otherwise leads nowhere. It treats “consciousness” so abstractly that it loses any relevance to science or to our actual experience.

Heidegger’s Being and Time (1926) was an explicit attempt to get past this dichotomy. He said, the reason we can’t fit subjectivity into our scientific picture is that we haven’t gone deep enough on either side. Yes, we need to develop an ontology based on our own existence, because that’s ultimately all we have. But our own existence is not mainly a subjective viewpoint on a world of objects – it’s an active / receptive engagement in relationships of many kinds.

In other words, consciousness is not basically “self-enclosed”... though it can seem that way when we become self-reflective about it. This capacity for focusing on our own experience as something going on “in our heads” is basic to how we philosophers think, since the 17th century. But it’s not basic to human consciousness, which is essentially involved with the people and things it cares about.

Now presumably, existing in a world of connections is something we humans share with all other kinds of beings. It’s not a matter of some things being “inert objects” and other things being “conscious subjects”. It’s a matter of different kinds and levels of beings coming to exist in the context of different kinds of relationships. So Heidegger’s project was to develop the kind of categories needed to describe a world of relationships “as seen from inside.”

The idea that consciousness is built on engagement is not unique to Heidegger. But his analysis of human existence was specifically intended to sketch out a new concept of time that he thought was fundamental to all forms of existence as “being in the world,” not just human.

I’ll summarize his idea of time in another post. But does it make sense to anyone that we could “bridge the gap” between subjective awareness and objective reality in this way? Thinking of the world as made not just of different kinds of things – some “conscious” and some not – but as a nexus of different modes of involvement between things.

From this perspective, what’s unique about human beings is not what goes on in our brains, but the kinds of communicative relationships that our brain-software has evolved to support. That is, we grow into “having a conscious perspective” through the kinds of relationships we develop with others who have such a perspective. (And when dogs or cats or chimpanzees have relationships with us, it’s not surprising that they too can at least begin to develop in this direction.)

 

[Maui]

Science is pretty much sterile on questions concerning existence and its not possible to model existence even in principle.

I would say that such questions might be addressed through other means - e.g. self-reflection and meditation. Consciousness is not like anything else we've observed in the universe so it makes sense(to me) that perhaps questions about it should be relegated to exploring its true inner nature. Especially if we can get some form of reputable findings and research to compare and draw conclusions.

This justifies various kinds of mysticism, but otherwise leads nowhere. It treats “consciousness” so abstractly that it loses any relevance to science or to our actual experience.

I would say that both approaches become equally abtract once you push them hard enough. But the first is definitely more intuitive.

Sorry i am not of much help, your questions seem quite abstract by themselves.

 

[dm4b]

From what I can tell, Heidegger’s idea is not unique. It's just another viewpoint, or formulation, of old, old ideas, from many mythologies, and within seemingly disparate belief systems, such as Buddhism to the American Indian myths. (Of course, the disparities aren't as deep as they seem, as has been shown)

It's often called the idea of Interdependence.

In the modern day western mind, we like to view ourselves as separate beings from the environment around us. But, the claim could be made that this view we hold is just a "modern-day" myth (i.e. an image we create in our minds to help us get on in the world, help us make sense of it), but it's not at all how things really are. If that is the case, then, yes, we are truly limiting ourselves in understanding what consciousness really is, by adhering to this viewpoint.

 

[apeiron]

It is hard to find anything to disagree with in this preliminary statement. I would much prefer Peirce to Heidegger of course. Heidegger remained too attached to the human condition and a narrowly psychological model IMHO. But the essential approach is the same.

We have two basic standpoints available to us. If we take the (Cartesian) standpoint of science, we treat “consciousness” as an objective property that certain kinds of entities “have”. After all, we experience consciousness, so it must be objectively real, right? But this leads only to confusion.

Right. The traditional "scientific" approach is to work with a stripped down "objective" view. The apparently subjective stuff, like mind, meaning, reason, intelligent organisation, rational form, gets left out ontologically. And then can never be found again.

So the alternative view (suggested by quite a few) is to generalise the whole(ness) of our experience. Take the mind and reduce the entirety of what it is about.

Heidegger’s Being and Time (1926) was an explicit attempt to get past this dichotomy. He said, the reason we can’t fit subjectivity into our scientific picture is that we haven’t gone deep enough on either side. Yes, we need to develop an ontology based on our own existence, because that’s ultimately all we have. But our own existence is not mainly a subjective viewpoint on a world of objects – it’s an active / receptive engagement in relationships of many kinds.

This is key. The traditional view sets up mind and world as two realms with no real connection. You have a passive subjective realm simply contemplating a world of causal action. The mind is outside, looking in the window. And its presence makes no difference (just as the mind does not need a world to be full of thoughts about things such as its "self").

The alternative view says mind only exists in interaction with the world. It is part of the action. And generalising the very notion of mind as an action is a way of describing precisely those parts of reality that have gone missing in the atomising reductionist paradigm. Like a direct causal linkage for a start.

The idea that consciousness is built on engagement is not unique to Heidegger. But his analysis of human existence was specifically intended to sketch out a new concept of time that he thought was fundamental to all forms of existence as “being in the world,” not just human.

I don't see Heidegger's approach to time as that unique or that successful. The anticipatory aspect is excellent, but also routine in this kind of approach. The final cause aspect - with death as a finite horizon that draws out the actions of the moment - probably does also work. Especially I guess because we can generalise these days to talk about dissipative structure and the heat death of the universe as the same story.

But I wasn't grabbed by it that much, so it would be interesting to hear more of why you like it.

 

[ConradDJ]

From what I can tell, Heidegger’s idea is not unique. It's just another viewpoint, or formulation, of old, old ideas, from many mythologies, and within seemingly disparate belief systems... often called the idea of Interdependence.

The traditional view sets up mind and world as two realms with no real connection. You have a passive subjective realm simply contemplating a world of causal action. The mind is outside, looking in the window... The alternative view says mind only exists in interaction with the world.

I don't see Heidegger's approach to time as that unique or that successful...

Yes, we’re looking for a way to understand our existence as interdependent. And the notion that the mind grows out of active engagement in the world is by now commonly accepted. This is very good... but it’s not hard to make objective statements like this. In the same vein physicists learned to acknowledge the viewpoint of “the observer” in Relativity, and even “observer participation” in Quantum Mechanics – and continue to develop theories about the world from the same objective viewpoint, as if we could put the world on our desks and inspect it “from outside.”

What I think was important about Being and Time is that it tried to develop a radically new conceptual framework for understanding the world “from inside,” as a web of interactive dependency. And it certainly did not succeed. Heidegger couldn’t even complete the work as he’d originally envisioned it... “Part Two” of the book never appeared. Most readers saw the book as a profound analysis of “the human condition,” but didn’t take seriously its claim to open up a new “fundamental ontology” relevant to all the sciences.

So that task is still before us, as I see it. We know how to describe “systems” of many kinds objectively, from the outside... and we’ve developed ways to investigate the structure of our internal subjective experience. But the deep problem is how to reconceive the “outside” world of relationships from the standpoint of one participating in it.

I have to apologize, because I’m thinking slowly this morning and I have to get to work, so I won’t get to the question of time until tomorrow. But I think this is where Heidegger made his most important contribution. He understood that the essential thing about “the world from inside” is that it operates with a different time-structure, more fundamental than the time-continuum of objective reality. But the point is not to replace the old concept of time with a better, more accurate one.

It’s not that our view of the world “from outside” is inaccurate. The problem isn’t that our objective scientific theories are wrong, but that they’re not fundamental – they’re operating with the wrong notion of what a foundation should look like. So we can know all about the physical world, down to an incredible level of detail, and still have no clue what the picture is showing us.

We can recognize that we live in a “participatory” world, but we’re still looking for a way to understand what that means.

 

[Energystrom]

So that task is still before us, as I see it. We know how to describe “systems” of many kinds objectively, from the outside... and we’ve developed ways to investigate the structure of our internal subjective experience. But the deep problem is how to reconceive the “outside” world of relationships from the standpoint of one participating in it.

I'm not sure how fruitful this reference will be, but Dilthey's Introduction to the Human Sciences seems to treat, briefly, this idea of "interdependence"

He posits two different standpoints, that of the transcendental ("inner experience") and that of the scientific (starts from the world of "physical nature").

Here are his conditions for the reconciliation of the two: "a demonstration of the objective reality of inner experience and a proof of the existence of an external world from which we can then conclude that this external world contains human facts and spiritual meaning by means of a process of transferring our inner life into this world."

While I'm not sure he tells us HOW to fulfill either of the necessary conditions, he seems to encapsulate some of the issues quite clearly.

Let me know if any of these quotes need clarification, or if they are germane to the conversation. Dilthey seemed a natural element to inject into this conversation, as he is manifestly concerned with the ultimacy of the human individual, and the nature of the relationships his existence in the "objective" world entails.

 

[apeiron]

Again, I will come back to Peirce. And his reduction thesis. The claim that a worldview must be not monistic, nor even dualistic, but fundamentally triadic.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categories_(Peirce )

Monism seeks the one - the one true principle, the one essential stuff, the one fundamental thing. So this is standard issue reductionism. What is reality made of? Atoms. Or energy. Or geometry. Or something. Even "everything is mind" - our mind, god's mind, a panpsychic property, or a Matrix-style simulation.

It then seems obvious that the one must become two. Relationships seem primal. Dichotomies seem fundamental. You have to have a worldview based on dynamic interaction somehow. Monistic approaches always end up with dichotomies anyway. If everything is atoms, you still need a void. If everything is geometry, you still need an energy or an entropic direction to animate it.

But Peirce's approach was triadic. Hierarchical. He pointed out that a little bit of inter-relating eventually must end up with a stable global pattern of relationships. Local dynamics eventually produces global equilibrium states. And the local dynamics has to arise out of some potential in the first place. So you have an essential threeness.

And how else could we place ourselves in the universe except in the middle of it? To be the interior or subjective POV, we must have reality extending to either side. To both the larger and the smaller. We must be bounded both above and below.

Dyadic relations still leaves one side standing looking at the other. There may be an interdependence, but the two entities anchoring it are not "inside" the relationship. They are its object(ive) boundaries.

But a triadic framework puts all the localised interacting within a more general realm, a broader, more stable and enduring, context. So a local subjective POV can make sense as it is now both made of - or generated from - something (firstness), and it constrained by something (thirdness), and it is then freely doing something (secondness) within this world. The world, in the end, is all spun of relating. But there is that further level of global relations which stabilises the local relating, forming a meaning-making context.

Now this is obvious to many people. But Peirce really went to town to construct a whole metaphysics based on triadic systems principles. It was fundamental and explicit in his worldview, rather than something that popped out as a result, or was left vaguely implied.

Heidegger's approach to time in fact also seems to have just this Peircean structure of firstness, secondness, and thirdness. But more by luck than design perhaps.

Time is naturally triadic - we divide it psychologically into past, present and future. And as you say, the objectifying reductionist wants to reduce our subjective experience to a monistic description. Time is a linear succession of moments - atomic intervals, points on an endless line. Past and future are meaningless. We have mechanical equations that can describe everything as a frozen block.

But Heidegger wanted to re-psychologise time (from the admittedly little I have read him). So the past became firstness - the ground of possibility. A history of events creates a memory that sets the scene for what can happen. Then the future weighs down as a strong set of global constraints that create a context for what ought to happen. Then the present is about what is happening, the freedoms being expressed from this POV suspended between grounding possibility and super-arching constraints.

So, to the extent that Heidegger sounds to have got it right, it is because he is talking about a hierarchically organised, dynamically evolving, systems view. The Peircean metaphysic. Does this sound plausible from your readings?

 

[ConradDJ]

I'm not sure how fruitful this reference will be, but Dilthey's Introduction to the Human Sciences seems to treat, briefly, this idea of "interdependence"...

Dilthey seemed a natural element to inject into this conversation, as he is manifestly concerned with the ultimacy of the human individual, and the nature of the relationships his existence in the "objective" world entails.

I don’t know Dilthey well, though Heidegger did. He mentions Max Scheler along with Dilthey in a passage in Being and Time. They were all looking for ways to talk about the depth of human “lived experience” (as opposed to the merely observational sense of “experience” as used in physics). In effect, instead of making the opposition between objective, physical reality and conscious subjective awareness, they took “subjectivity” in a deeper “existential” sense. This was when Kierkegaard’s critique of Hegelianism was becoming widely read.

So Dilthey took “life” as a fundamental category – not in a restricted biological sense, but in the sense of an entire human life, from beginning to end. I don’t know where he went with that, but it’s appealing to me. But of these philosophers, I think Heidegger is the one who made a real breakthrough, seeing “subjectivity” as growing out of relationships, taking “being in the world” as his basic category, describing subjectivity as “being there”.

This points toward human connection as what’s fundamental in our “lived experience” – though Heidegger’s was too abstract a thinker to develop that theme very far. I think it’s the basic weakness of his work that it doesn’t focus specifically on human communication, or give it a central role in the nexus of relationships that underlie our existence. But by making being-in-relation a basic ontological category, he did open up the possibility of seeing both physical “objects” and conscious “subjects” as having the same ultimate ground in a world of connections.

 

[ConradDJ]

It then seems obvious that the one must become two. Relationships seem primal. Dichotomies seem fundamental. You have to have a worldview based on dynamic interaction somehow...

But Peirce's approach was triadic. Hierarchical. He pointed out that a little bit of inter-relating eventually must end up with a stable global pattern of relationships. Local dynamics eventually produces global equilibrium states. And the local dynamics has to arise out of some potential in the first place. So you have an essential threeness.

And how else could we place ourselves in the universe except in the middle of it? To be the interior or subjective POV, we must have reality extending to either side. To both the larger and the smaller. We must be bounded both above and below.

Dyadic relations still leaves one side standing looking at the other. There may be an interdependence, but the two entities anchoring it are not "inside" the relationship. They are its object(I’ve) boundaries.

But a triadic framework puts all the localised interacting within a more general realm, a broader, more stable and enduring, context...

Apeiron – thanks for putting so much into your response. I’ll have to discuss the time question separately – with apologies again if it gets pushed off to another day!

In the abstract, I can agree with what you say here. “Triadic” thinking has a long history in our tradition, always as a kind of resistance movement against the monistic ontology and dualistic logic of the dominant Greek philosophy. In the development of Christian doctrine, which was (from an intellectual standpoint) a defense of a “mythic” way of thinking against Greek rationalism, the Trinity was a key idea. Where the NeoPlatonists, for example, saw the dynamic of the universe as an emanation of Oneness out into Difference, Trinitarian thinking always kept alive a sense of connection-in-difference as belonging to unity itself.

So I’m in sympathy with your metaphysical inclinations. I appreciate the grand scale of your vision and how much thought has gone into constructing it. To me, though, you seem to be standing a long way outside the universe, not merely viewing it objectively the way a physicist does, but seeing it as a unfolding drama of essences, ideas. I get what you mean when you say “one must become two”... or “how else could we place ourselves except in the middle”? But although I recognize this is trying to express the dynamic / relational nature of existence, this kind of quasi-logical language doesn’t appeal to me – “local dynamics has to arise out of some potential...”

When I read “self-evident” statements like this, I think of Heidegger’s constant (and even tiresome) refrain, that the basic categories we use rest on assumptions we haven’t thought through. To me, what we take as “basic” reflects the aspects of our own “lived experience” that we’ve implicitly chosen as most meaningful. So with Peirce – he takes very seriously that as thinking beings we emerge out of a formless vagueness, as we grow up, and learn to structure our experience through interacting sets of dichotomies. As I’ve mentioned before, this has a kinship with Hegel, who found deep meaning in the intellectual experience of resolving philosophical antinomies by brilliant strokes of insight, and developed his basic ontological categories on this model – thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Peirce also seems like someone for whom the experience of achieving intellectual clarity went very deep.

As for me, I identify with Kierkegaard, in that struggling with personal relationships is by far the deepest experience in my own life. What I found in Heidegger was an attempt to build categories not to describe the world as “a nexus of relationships” seen from afar, but to describe existence as an issue of being in relationships. So even as I’m trying to understand the physical world, I remind myself over and over – the basic structure of a world of relationships can’t be envisioned “from the outside”. Relationships don’t even exist, except for the ones who are in them.

This is just my own perspective, the basis from which I’m trying to work. But it explains why I don’t find Peirce’s categories and logic convincing, even though I appreciate the creativity of his intellectual imagination. But the dynamic of intellectual dichotomies just does not seem profound to me, as compared with the dynamic of actual one-on-one relationships.

 

[apeiron]

What I found in Heidegger was an attempt to build categories not to describe the world as “a nexus of relationships” seen from afar, but to describe existence as an issue of being in relationships. So even as I’m trying to understand the physical world, I remind myself over and over – the basic structure of a world of relationships can’t be envisioned “from the outside”. Relationships don’t even exist, except for the ones who are in them.

How would your relationships with yourself fit into this scheme?

I of course see selfhood as hierarchically and semiotically structured. So it is full of internal or subjective dichotomies such as impressions~ideas, surprise~anticipation, habit~attention, what~where, figure~ground, action~sensation, psychology~sociology. And all these dichotomies are based on local~global interactions, and all can be mapped onto the brain's actual design.

So I see selfhood/consciousness as having an immense amount of structure. It is not at all a pure "being there", but complexly organised. And organised according to the common logic of a hierarchy in which local and global are in interaction - that is the fundamental nature of interaction.

But I don't see how this obvious rich complexity can be handled just by a stripped-down view of pure relating, with no account of the differing scales of relating.

My view is essentially asymmetric. There is the small at one end interacting with the large at the other. Whereas you seem to be talking about a symmetric interaction (neither side is dominant). Or at least scale seem irrelevant.

So is "being there" really about a "me" in interaction with a world (which is actually pretty asymmetric I guess). Or is it more accurately describe as my ideas in interaction with my impressions? So my global weight of memories and expectations bearing down as a context to organised the current upwelling flood of stimuli both predicted (so able to be handled thoughtlessly) and surprising (so the proper focus of attention and learning).

Being there could be very simple (a pure dyad), or it could be irreducibly complex (a hierarchical triad).

 

[ConradDJ]

... I see selfhood/consciousness as having an immense amount of structure. It is not at all a pure "being there", but complexly organised. And organised according to the common logic of a hierarchy in which local and global are in interaction - that is the fundamental nature of interaction.

But I don't see how this obvious rich complexity can be handled just by a stripped-down view of pure relating, with no account of the differing scales of relating.

My view is essentially asymmetric. There is the small at one end interacting with the large at the other. Whereas you seem to be talking about a symmetric interaction (neither side is dominant).

Yes, “self” is complicated, and operates on many levels. Likewise “relating”. One of the things I most like in Being and Time is that in trying to grasp what’s fundamental in human existence, Heidegger isn’t looking for a single basic structure. For example, he talks about the “being in” aspect of existence – that is, relating to one’s overall environment – and the “being with” aspect – relating to other people – and he calls them “equiprimordial”.

We could say – existence involves an “I - it” kind of relationship, which is asymmetrical. It could be a relationship of “observing”, or a more practical kind of involvement with things we need and things we make. In any case there are particular objects we’re relating to, as well as a general background-context of other relationships.

And, existence also involves an “I - You” kind of relationship, which we experience as mutual, or at least as having a potential for mutuality. Here also we’re having a relationship with someone in a context of other relationships.

And our relationships with ourselves involve both an “I - it” aspect – reflecting on our own behavior, for example – and an “I - You” aspect, i.e. talking with ourselves. So there are quite a few “basic” relationships going on, each contributing to the context of meaning in which the others evolve.

I think your asymmetric dichotomies capture some aspects of this kind of structure. The key question for me is whether they’re adequate to describe this intersection between the essentially impersonal world of “I - it” relationships and the essentially personal world of “I - You” relationships. Since I think the difference between these two is fundamental, along with their interdependency.

There’s no question about the importance of hierarchies and differences of scale. And I think we agree that the very notion of “relationship” has nothing “pure and simple” about it, since relationships can happen only in the context of other kinds of relationships (even in physics). The question is how best to clarify what’s involved in this irreducibly complicated business of being in relationships.

 

[ConradDJ]

Heidegger's approach to time in fact also seems to have just this Peircean structure of firstness, secondness, and thirdness...

Time is naturally triadic - we divide it psychologically into past, present and future. And as you say, the objectifying reductionist wants to reduce our subjective experience to a monistic description. Time is a linear succession of moments - atomic intervals, points on an endless line. Past and future are meaningless. We have mechanical equations that can describe everything as a frozen block.

But Heidegger wanted to re-psychologise time (from the admittedly little I have read him). So the past became firstness - the ground of possibility. A history of events creates a memory that sets the scene for what can happen. Then the future weighs down as a strong set of global constraints that create a context for what ought to happen. Then the present is about what is happening, the freedoms being expressed from this POV suspended between grounding possibility and super-arching constraints.

We’re talking about two kinds of time. The one is the objective time we measure with clocks and mark out on calendars. This sense of time is basic to the very notion of an “object”, as something that keeps on being what it is over time, and also moves and changes, in time.

Heidegger calls this “inauthentic” time (“uneigentlich”, i.e. not one’s own). Essentially this just means time conceived “from no point of view,” as if we could stand outside of time and view the whole course of history from a distance, mapped on a time-line. In contrast, “authentic” time is this ongoing present time that is all we ever actually experience, in which we live our lives from our own points of view.

The conceptual shift from the usual “subjective” / “objective” dichotomy to “authentic” / “inauthentic” is at the heart of Heidegger’s project in Being and Time. It’s a shift from a relatively neutral language about experience and reality into language that’s highly charged with psychological and even moral overtones. For Heidegger, being a “self” and having a point of view of one’s own is not at all something to be taken for granted. Our normal view of the world is an inauthentic one, a view we learn from other people as we learn to talk and think. The shared world of “objective reality” is an aspect of this inauthentic view.

Because of the highly charged language, it’s very easy to misunderstand this, and interpret Heidegger as saying that the “inauthentic” view of the world is wrong. On the contrary, we can only be “objectively right” about things within this inauthentic framework, which is the framework of science, among other things. Our own “authentic” view is of course partial and limited and biased, always merely subjective, with respect to the facts about reality.

“Subjectivity” in this sense is just a given. “Authenticity” in contrast is something we have to fight for and struggle to achieve – learning to see and understand things from our own unique viewpoint. We get to “have a self” only to the extent that we learn a certain degree of independence from the way “everybody” thinks.

Now the reason this is so important, for Heidegger, is not just that independent thinkers may sometimes break through the limits of our collective worldview and discover new truths. The point is that what’s truly fundamental about the world can only be seen from a point of view “inside” it. The objective, inauthentic view may get the facts right, but because it only sees the world in general, from a distance, it misses the inner life of the world, so to speak – that is, the one-on-one engagement each of us has in our relationships. Our lives are not just the subjective observation of objective facts!

So there’s a paradoxical aspect to the language of Being and Time. This highly charged language of “authenticity” seems to pertain exclusively to human psychology and human morality. But it’s only by getting to the depths of our own emotional existence that we can see what’s fundamental to “existence” as such. A more neutral language – for example, about logical dichotomies and hierarchical systems – remains at a distance. So it may not be able to get to the heart of what it means to “have a point of view” – to be lucky enough to get to participate in this world.

Inauthentically, we live in a world of objects, things that last through time and change over time. No doubt, this objective reality is important for us to get to know and understand. But authentically, we live in a world of "real-time" connections which is no less important, and maybe even more fundamental.


So what is “authentic” time? The idea is not to replace the “inauthentic” view of the time-continuum, as if it were incorrect. The objective view is right, but may not be fundamental – since it doesn’t get how time actually happens, how this business of “the present moment” actually works. It just takes it for granted that “time passes”.

From one’s own point of view, there is always only “now”. The objective past is gone, and the objective future doesn’t yet exist. But this ongoing moment in which each of us lives is nothing like the frozen “point in time” captured in a photograph. It’s a continual happening, that has an “authentic past” and an “authentic future” built into it.

So you’re correct about the “triadic” structure of time, except that the “ground of possibility” is what Heidegger understands as the “authentic future”. The “now” we experience is first of all an anticipatory openness to what can happen. Like the wave-function in Quantum theory, the “present situation” is essentially a structure of what’s possible. Secondly, it’s constrained by “the authentic past”, i.e the structure of facts inherited from the past. Thirdly, what happens in each moment, in our connection with the world, revises the shape of what’s possible by adding new facts to the situation.

So this does have affinities with your way of describing how the world happens. Though Heidegger was building on Husserl’s phenomenology of time-perception rather than Peirce’s metaphysics. Heidegger also sees this as a phenomenological description of our human experience of time – but again, what he’s really is something deeper. He’s trying to develop a basic understanding of how this side of the world works, that’s based on participating in relationships.

And Being and Time was only a preliminary sketch, despite the length and density of its arguments. Even as a sketch, I think it has serious limitations. Heidegger was never able to focus on the structure of one-on-one (“I - You”) relationships, or on human communication. And in his analysis of the triadic structure of the moment, he has surprisingly little to say about “the authentic present” itself.

But these are limitations of our entire intellectual tradition. My sense is that we’re still at a very primitive stage when it comes to envisioning the world we actually experience, each from our own existential viewpoint “in real time”. And I think that’s why we’re still so far from an integrated evolutionary picture of the world that encompasses physics, biology and our own humanity. There are big pieces of the puzzle that are invisible when we only see the world from a distance.

 

[Maui]

But authentically, we live in a world of "real-time" connections which is no less important, and maybe even more fundamental.

I can find zero reason to assume that time is fundamental. Or space or causality. In fact we know they are not. The fields ontology being our by far the best and most consistent theory of the world, i would say that awareness is the odd one out. Think about it, the longer you think, the less likely you'd be to return to naive common-sense views. You do have a no-go theorem that explicitly forbids the fields from being both local and realistic and the foundations of all human knowledge is a philosophy that we believed was true(though it never really made sense either).

So what is “authentic” time? The idea is not to replace the “inauthentic” view of the time-continuum, as if it were incorrect. The objective view is right, but may not be fundamental – since it doesn’t get how time actually happens, how this business of “the present moment” actually works. It just takes it for granted that “time passes”.

Well if space and time really turn out to be not fundamental, then the fundamental dynamics of reality would lie completely out of sight(i am stumped by this possibility).

 

[apeiron]

“Subjectivity” in this sense is just a given. “Authenticity” in contrast is something we have to fight for and struggle to achieve – learning to see and understand things from our own unique viewpoint. We get to “have a self” only to the extent that we learn a certain degree of independence from the way “everybody” thinks.

I think this is a basic disagreement I would have. My view would be that the authentic, in systems terms, would be an equilbrium outcome - the parts in synch with the whole. So the concern is not about "being a self", in some way distinctive, but being a creative part of the collective.

This is why I like Peirce's epistemology.

Peirce's sense of truth is what an ideal community of inquirers would believe. That allows him to compare like to like. (i.e. our beliefs versus some potentially hypothetical beliefs in the future) This avoids the problem of correspondence between thought and reality typical in metaphysical realism since what corresponds are our thoughts and that ideal inquirer's thoughts. It's a realism since reality acts on inquirers eventually leading to stable beliefs.
The way Peirce rescued realism from this sort of idealism (since all metaphysics and physical laws are a sort of mind-relation) is by saying they are independent of what any finite set of inquirers would believe. So the notion of infinity is very key to avoiding a lot of traditional problems for Peirce.
http://enowning.blogspot.com/2010/05/in-der-blog-sein-mormon-metaphysics-on.html

 

[PhizzicsPhan]

Responding to the OP: read Whitehead's 1925 book Science and the Modern World and his 1929 book Process and Reality. Whitehead is difficult, but SMW is the best introduction to his thought. He presents a comprehensive and compelling worldview that encompasses science, philosophy and faith. He was a mathematician, logician, physicist and philosopher at Cambridge and Harvard so he is well-qualified to write on these issues. The last phase of his career was his philosophical phase and he sums up a lifetime of thinking about nitty gritty mathematical, logical and scientific problems in the books I mentioned. His vision is panpsychist: the fundamental constituents of the universe are "drops of experience" and it's all about relationships, as Heidegger writes. I agree with Apeiron that Heidegger seems to mistake psychology for ontology at times, but he certainly got it right in focusing on relationships.

 

[PhizzicsPhan]

Some essays on these issues, from a Whiteheadian perspective:

http://www.independent.com/news/eco-ego-eros/

 

[Maui]

His vision is panpsychist: the fundamental constituents of the universe are "drops of experience" and it's all about relationships, as Heidegger writes.

That would have been the minimalist, no-assumptions, critical view of everyone, had they spent enough time pondering the following:

1. Reality is surprizingly knowable and comprehensible(no requirement that it had to be so)
2. The geometrical nature of spacetime and the relationships that are its sole occupant
3. Laws - the constituents of reality follow strict physical laws that can be modeled effectively by math(no requirement that it had to be so)
4. Mind and awareness cannot be explained by the prevailing philosophy of science(mind is unlike anything else found in the universe)
5. Inexplicable but seemingly fundamental features of the reality we experience - Meaning, Logic, Intelligence
6. The inexplicable by the current mainstream philosophy rich inner life of each one of us(or at least me in particular)


These points don't prove anything yet but should serve as red flags for hasty conclusions.

 

[PhizzicsPhan]

Maui, are you saying you agree with Whitehead's panpsychist approach to the mind/body problem?

 

[Maui]

Maui, are you saying you agree with Whitehead's panpsychist approach to the mind/body problem?

I am not in a position to say what the deep nature of 'everything' is and claim that it has a mental aspect to it, so i withhold judgement(though i would generally doubt such claims). But i would be willing to agree that mind, existence and reality are terms referring to one and the same thing.

 

[apeiron]

His vision is panpsychist: the fundamental constituents of the universe are "drops of experience" and it's all about relationships, as Heidegger writes.

How is the monist position of pan-experentialism "all about relationships", the dyadic view"?

If it is all about drops of experience, then it is precisely not all about the interactions those drops may subsequently experience. The experience is being said to exist regardless of whether or not interactions are also taking place.

 

[ConradDJ]

Responding to the OP: read Whitehead's 1925 book Science and the Modern World and his 1929 book Process and Reality... His vision is panpsychist: the fundamental constituents of the universe are "drops of experience" and it's all about relationships, as Heidegger writes.

Compared to other versions of “panspychism”, I think you’re right that Whitehead is tuned into the question – how to describe a universe made of relationships rather than things.

In comparison with Heidegger, his “apperceptions” could be seen as tiny bits of a “subject / object” relationship, or “observer / observed”. British philosophers liked to keep things light and intellectual, where the Continental ones tended to go deeper. But I’m not sure any of them really got into the question – what are the fundamental relationships out of which human consciousness emerges?

I don’t know Whitehead very well, but I think of him as a modern version of Leibniz – still envisioning the world as a whole, “from the outside”, though as a web of relationships rather than as a collection of things. To me, what’s important about Heidegger is his insistence on “being in” relationships as the starting-point for ontology, rather than “relationships” per se, almost as if they were a kind of “object”.

The key difference has to do with time. So long as we’re thinking of the universe as this vast space that exists over a vast length of time – the view “from outside” – we can’t help but objectify what we imagine to exist in it. Even “drops of experience” or “moments of connection”. I think it’s only to the extent we can think about the world “from inside”, from the “authentic” point of view each of us actually has in this ongoing present moment, the now that connects us into the web of existence, that we can begin to appreciate the kind of “relationships” that the world is made of.

The “inauthentic” viewpoint that can so easily imagine the whole universe at once, from no point of view in particular, is basic to all our conceptual language. This viewpoint is essentially what the first Greek philosophers discovered, and virtually all our science and philosophy over the centuries has taken it for granted. So even when we’re talking about “subjective consciousness”, we tend automatically to assume it’s sensible to talk about it from this global viewpoint, as an objective property of certain kinds of entities.

And this leads to the specious arguments made in favor of “panpsychism” by people like Tam Hunt in the articles you linked to above. He says –

“Consciousness is entirely different because we are not talking about relational properties of the outsides of various substances. We are talking about insides, experience, consciousness, phenomena, qualia, and all the other terms we can use for mind or subjectivity. And when we define our physical constituents as wholly lacking in mind then it is literally impossible for mind to “emerge” from this wholly mindless substrate... The emergence of insides from what previously consisted only of outsides would be the spontaneous creation of an entirely new category of reality. And it is philosophically profligate to suggest that this kind of thing can happen when there are other, more plausible, alternatives.”
​

This treats the “inside” point of view as if it were some mysterious kind of objective reality in addition to the “outsides” of things. This just points to the basic inadequacy of the ontology our intellectual tradition tends to take for granted, that Heidegger was trying to remedy.

I tried to make this point in a couple of posts in the recent “Brains create consciousness?” thread –

https://www.physicsforums.com/showpost.php?p=3200689&postcount=16"
https://www.physicsforums.com/showpost.php?p=3202562&postcount=24"

 

[ConradDJ]

4. Mind and awareness cannot be explained by the prevailing philosophy of science(mind is unlike anything else found in the universe)
5. Inexplicable but seemingly fundamental features of the reality we experience - Meaning, Logic, Intelligence
6. The inexplicable by the current mainstream philosophy rich inner life of each one of us(or at least me in particular)

It’s true that mental experience is profoundly different from the world of objective fact, but there’s no reason its emergence should be “inexplicable”. Again, the radical difference that appears here is a difference in point of view, not in the objective nature of things.

We can describe a human being as a certain kind of entity that talks and behaves more or less intelligently. Such a description is perfectly correct and reasonable, yet nothing like “consciousness” appears in the picture... simply because what we mean by “consciousness” only exists from its own “authentic” viewpoint. “Mind” is not a different thing from the “brain” – it’s the brain’s own moment-to-moment functioning as “seen” from inside.

I don’t think there’s anything inexplicable or even mysterious about what makes humans different from other animals. Because we relate to other people by talking with them about the world, we can also talk to ourselves about the world. We not only pay attention to things in our environment the way other animals do, in the moment, but we evolve a “rich inner life” and a highly articulated “model of reality” in our heads. So we can pay attention to things that happened centuries ago on some other continent, and we can pay attention to how it feels to pay attention to certain things, what colors look and feel like, etc. This is all possible not because of anything magic in our brains, but just because of the software we run on our brains, that constitutes our “experience” and “sense of self”. It’s basically software for developing and maintaining talking-relationships, including our relationship with ourselves.

No other beings that we know of have this kind of relationship with each other. But there’s no reason to think trees, rocks or atoms don’t have some kinds of relationships with each other, that are important to their existence as language is to ours. As a matter of fact, we know that atoms exist in several kinds of complicated relationships, which among other things support the existence of stable molecules and chemical interaction.

So far physics has been operating on the assumption that it’s enough to describe atoms as objects with objective properties, “seen from outside”. And yet, both in Relativity and in Quantum theory, the standpoint of “the observer” plays a fundamental role. This has led to a certain amount of nonsense connecting Quantum physics with consciousness... and more importantly, to a situation in which physics has essentially given up on ontology. It has no way any more of envisioning the world its theories describe, because QM in particular seems so radically “counter-intuitive”.

But I think the problem here is just the same one that leads to treating “mind” as something inexplicable. We need an ontology that includes both the objective “view from outside” and the “view from inside” – from the point of view of being in the world of relationships, i.e. an “authentic” point of view.

From any point of view “inside” the world, including that of an atom, the structure of space and time is very different from that of the global “block universe” we’re used to imagining. From inside, the world is not a collection of objects spread out in space, that move and change over time... it’s an environment made of moment-to-moment interactions, in the context of evolving relationships. In the language of QM, it’s a world of “measurement contexts” defining information that sets up other “measurements”.

Atoms don’t have “consciousness” in the human sense because they don’t talk to each other the way humans do. But they do a lot of other things with each other, and we know that a tremendous amount of interaction goes on within each atom as well. I don’t think it’s in any way “anthropomorphic” to suggest that physics needs to develop a description of what the world looks like from the atom’s “authentic” viewpoint – a description of this complicated interaction-web from inside.

 

[PhizzicsPhan]

How is the monist position of pan-experentialism "all about relationships", the dyadic view"?

If it is all about drops of experience, then it is precisely not all about the interactions those drops may subsequently experience. The experience is being said to exist regardless of whether or not interactions are also taking place.

Apeiron, for Whitehead, the fundamental "atoms" of the universe are drops of experience, yet these drops are each interconnected in some manner to all other "actual entities." The process of becoming concrete occurs in each moment, starting from the "prehension" of other actual entities and ending with a decision about how to become concrete. It's highly abstract but Science and the Modern World does a great job of explaining why he went down this path and why the prevailing materialist/substantialist position fails on principle.

 

[PhizzicsPhan]

Conrad, you make a lot of very valid points. I have a paper forthcoming in the Journal of Consciousness Studies that attempts exactly what you say we need: a physics that accounts for both external and internal relationships.

Here's the abstract:

A new approach to the “hard problem” of consciousness, the eons-old mind/body problem, is proposed, inspired by Whitehead, Schopenhauer, Griffin and others. I define a “simple subject” as the fundamental unit of matter and of consciousness. Simple subjects are inherently experiential, albeit in a highly rudimentary manner compared to human consciousness. With this re-framing, the “physical” realm includes the “mental” realm; they are two aspects of the same thing, the outside and inside of each real thing. This view is known as panpsychism or panexperientialism and is in itself a partial solution to the hard problem. The secondary but more interesting question may be framed as: what is a “complex subject”? How do simple subjects combine to form complex subjects like bats and human beings? This is more generally known as the “combination problem” ” or the “boundary problem,” and is the key problem facing both materialist and panpsychist approaches to consciousness. I suggest a new approach for resolving this component of the hard problem, a “general theory of complex subjects” that includes “psychophysical laws” in the form of a simple mathematical framework. I present three steps for characterizing complex subjects, with the physical nature of time key to this new understanding. Time is viewed as fundamentally quantized. I also suggest, as a second-order conceptualization, that “information” and “experience” may be considered identical concepts and that there is no double-aspect to information. Rather, there is a single aspect to information and it is inherently experiential. Tononi’s, Chalmers’ and Freeman’s similar theories are compared and contrasted. Part 2 of this paper will propose an experimental research program for obtaining data to support or negate the asserted framework.

 

[Maui]

It’s true that mental experience is profoundly different from the world of objective fact, but there’s no reason its emergence should be “inexplicable”. Again, the radical difference that appears here is a difference in point of view, not in the objective nature of things.

We can describe a human being as a certain kind of entity that talks and behaves more or less intelligently. Such a description is perfectly correct and reasonable, yet nothing like “consciousness” appears in the picture... simply because what we mean by “consciousness” only exists from its own “authentic” viewpoint.

So the brain has its own viewpoint but you want to assert that this fact is somehow not mysterious and deseriving attention? What is the reason for you what you assert?

“Mind” is not a different thing from the “brain” – it’s the brain’s own moment-to-moment functioning as “seen” from inside.

Could be, but i see little more than assertions so far.

I don’t think there’s anything inexplicable or even mysterious about what makes humans different from other animals. Because we relate to other people by talking with them about the world, we can also talk to ourselves about the world.

Why would be interested in animals? Aren't we supposed to look through a much wider perspective to encompass existence, reality, the fundamental concepts in physics? What clue could a couple animals and their behavior give us for the nature of existence, time and even consciousness(the title of the thread)?

We not only pay attention to things in our environment the way other animals do, in the moment, but we evolve a “rich inner life” and a highly articulated “model of reality” in our heads.

Who needs another description? We are supposed to look for the explanations, right?

So we can pay attention to things that happened centuries ago on some other continent, and we can pay attention to how it feels to pay attention to certain things, what colors look and feel like, etc. This is all possible not because of anything magic in our brains, but just because of the software we run on our brains, that constitutes our “experience” and “sense of self”.

What software are you talking about? Do you have a reference that the brain FIRST operates like a machine(essentially a computer) and SECOND that it's digital? Where do you get the idea that the software is the "personal experience" and "the sense of self"? You should support anything you assert with references or reasoned argumentation as per the PF rules.

It’s basically software for developing and maintaining talking-relationships, including our relationship with ourselves.

I know of no software in ANY human brain at all. I don't think anybody knows of such, please support your assertions. First prove that the brain is a computer, you can't use it as a starting premise unless you can prove it.

No other beings that we know of have this kind of relationship with each other. But there’s no reason to think trees, rocks or atoms don’t have some kinds of relationships with each other, that are important to their existence as language is to ours.

Rocks have some kinds of relationships with each other? I guess my participation in this thread is over.

 

[PhizzicsPhan]

Maui, of course rocks have relationships with other things - every electromagnetic, gravitational, etc., connection is a relationship.

The deeper question in this thread, however, is do things like rocks have anything we can call consciousness or mind-like? I would say "no" because even if we ascribe some rudimentary mentality to the fundamental constituents of the universe (as I do), it doesn't follow that all things are themselves mind-like. Rather, we can have "mere aggregates" of mind-like entities that are not themselves mind-like. Rocks and chairs are great examples of mere aggregates. So even if the atoms or molecules comprising these objects are mind-like in a highly rudimentary manner (a simple humming of connectivity perhaps), these collections are not themselves mind-like in any manner.

This the "combination problem" or "boundary problem" and is the key question I tackle in the paper I just mentioned above.

 

[apeiron]

Apeiron, for Whitehead, the fundamental "atoms" of the universe are drops of experience, yet these drops are each interconnected in some manner to all other "actual entities." The process of becoming concrete occurs in each moment, starting from the "prehension" of other actual entities and ending with a decision about how to become concrete. It's highly abstract but Science and the Modern World does a great job of explaining why he went down this path and why the prevailing materialist/substantialist position fails on principle.

Of course I agree with process philosophy in general, and I go along with Whitehead quite a long way, but it all breaks down for me in the end as he has the aim of working god and conscious experience into the very fabric of reality.

Now where I agree with Whitehead is on his "decoherence model" for actual occasions. There is a transition from potential to actual that comes about as a localised potential becomes crisply developed into an atomistic something through interaction with a globally prevailing context. But note that this is not a symmetrically dyadic interaction (a one to one), but instead an asymmetric or hierarchical interaction (a one to many, or rather a local to global).

Or if we stick to the actual occasions view, we could see the whole of the universe as the largest scale actual occasion (a crisp global context defined by a lightcone event horizon) and then every new event that happens within the universe is a localised act of prehension~concrescence, formed by a local~global interaction, that contributes novelty to the total swelling story.

So for me, all that works as it derives from QM, it fits with known physics, it is the same basic systems ontology you can find in Peirce, and it is what is modeled in modern hierarchy theory by the likes of Stan Salthe and Howard Pattee.

Yet then there is the regressive move of panexperientialism and theism.

If you are taking a systems approach, then you are arguing for some notion of holism or emergentism. You are not looking to atomise or localise everything because you are accepting that some aspects of what you are describing are fundamentally global in nature. Or rather trans-global, as there is an irreducible triadicity to the situation. It is no longer even about local vs global properties, but about local, global, and the interaction, with the whole system having certain "properties".

So Whitehead appears to be building towards a system view, and then suddenly he wants to locate "the wholeness of consciousness" within atomistic drops of experience. Very complex states (and even generalised feelings of sympathy are complex states, as the neuroscience can tell us) are suddenly posited at the simplest possible level of reality's structure. And this trick is passed off with the usual hand-wavey philosophical device of saying "well, you know what a property is when it exists at full strength, now imagine diluting it to the point it is barely even there, and that's how it would work".

I should call this the homeopathy gambit perhaps. Take a solution and dilute it until there is barely anything there. Just a single molecule/atom in a tube of water. Then dilute further and there is still the impression of what has just departed. In the same way, take consciousness as a complex systems property and reduce, reduce. Imagine it then never vanishes even as you consider the view from inside an actual occasion.

Yet if the triadic interaction is irreducible - the one between a locality being shaped up to have concrete being, and the global context that is doing the shaping - then there just cannot be a systems property inside the local event. The systems property is only inside the system. The local event is in fact an event horizon on that systems property.

It is just like asking about the structure of the information that has fallen inside a black hole. Structure is precisely what cannot exist beyond the horizon. You can "dilute" the system only so far. Eventually there is a radical breakdown and the holistic properties are no longer there.

So I find Whitehead frustrating. He clearly has a much more sophisticated approach than someone like Heidegger (sorry Conrad!), but it all gets twisted into a faulty argument for panexperentialism and theism as far as I can see. There is a sleight of hand where what is clearly a property of a system (like consciousness) gets suddenly transferred across the local event horizon of the system. We get down to talking about the grainy microscale - the simplest and smallest actual occasions - and suddenly experience pops up again inside the grains.

Homeopathy. Remove every molecule and still the essence of the molecule remains present. Although at least homeopathy claims that the surrounding water molecules can take a ghostly imprint. Which smuggles a systems perspective back into things to make the endless dilution story seem credible.

Anyway, this view of process philosophy I accept. There is a local unformed potential, some localised degrees of freedom. There is a local~global interaction - the degrees of freedom come into contact with a global realm of crisply-formed constraints. There is then an act of development that results in a concrete local identity. What was just a potential becomes a well-formed, enduring and contributing part of the greater whole.

But I do not see any argument here that gets the experiencing across the event horizon that is the "actual occasion" before it actually became part of a larger wholeness. Before the local occasion became something actual for the system, and so part of a state of experience, it was only a potential and so not actually contributing to such a state.

Panexperientialism just seems like the same kind of illegitimate manoeuvre as hidden variables in QM, put this way.

The process/systems approach is irreducibly tradic. It believes in 1) a raw unformed potential that 2) through interaction becomes 3) hierarchically developed. You can't then seek to collapse all this back to a monistic existence view which talks now about concrete, atomised, drops of experience. The whole point is that if you take away the reality structured by its interactions, all you will have left is again the initial raw unformed potential.

There is no concrete "inside" to an actual occasion. This would be to take an illegitimate spatialised view. Even for Whitehead, the correct view must be to ask about panexperience "before" an occasion was actual. We must do justice to the the axis of development that is the foundation of a process philosophy. And before something has developed, logic says it just isn't there - except in the potential sense (potentially yes, potentially no, let's interact with a concrete context and we will find out a concrete answer).

 

[Maui]

Maui, of course rocks have relationships with other things - every electromagnetic, gravitational, etc., connection is a relationship.

I thought we were past that already.

The deeper question in this thread, however, is do things like rocks have anything we can call consciousness or mind-like?

Do i need to remind again that the primary substance of reality are NOT objects in spacetime, but potentials, superpositions and relationships(and for some reason when you look or inquire about a system it returns to a common-sense, classical state)? You can of course choose to live in the past, the 19 century was particularly romantic and enlightening, but you are not making progress. The current prevailing ontology has its own share of paradoxes and it's is in a deadend, not because quantum physics is strange or relativity is weird, but because our ASSUMPTIONS of reality don't fit the facts that come of these theories.

 

[apeiron]

Do i need to remind again that the primary substance of reality are NOT objects in spacetime, but potentials, superpositions and relationships(and for some reason when you look or inquire about a system it returns to a common-sense, classical state)? You can of course choose to live in the past, the 19 century was particularly romantic and enlightening, but you are not making progress. The current prevailing ontology has its own share of paradoxes and it's is in a deadend, not because quantum physics is strange or relativity is weird, but because our ASSUMPTIONS of reality don't fit the facts that come of these theories.

But here, what about your presumptions?

A systems/process view of reality would argue that classical objects in spacetime are what become the primary substances. While the potentials, superpositions and relationships are just that - the unformed potentials from whence the concrete objects developed.

And it sounds odd to call the unformed potentials more real than the formed objects (and the world that is forming them).

So the real is what has become. And science just has to come up with a developmental ontology that matches the facts we already know about the quantum rules of becoming.

This is where the philosophy of Peirce (and, alright, Whitehead) can make sense of QM and GR, in a way that atomistic, monistic, reductionism is doomed never to do.

 

[PhizzicsPhan]

Do i need to remind again that the primary substance of reality are NOT objects in spacetime, but potentials, superpositions and relationships(and for some reason when you look or inquire about a system it returns to a common-sense, classical state)? You can of course choose to live in the past, the 19 century was particularly romantic and enlightening, but you are not making progress. The current prevailing ontology has its own share of paradoxes and it's is in a deadend, not because quantum physics is strange or relativity is weird, but because our ASSUMPTIONS of reality don't fit the facts that come of these theories.

Maui, Whitehead's key point (and mine) is that modern materialism has unworkable assumptions built into it, which I think is what you're arguing. And that modern materialist view includes the Copenhagen interpretation of QM that you are apparently advocating as though this is somehow an unassailable conclusion about the nature of reality. There are numerous (dozens) of interpretations of QM that are all adequate to the facts. Similarly, there are many interpretations of relativistic data that don't require that we view space and time as malleable in an ontological manner. In fact, there are literally an infinity of interpretations for any given set of data. Obviously, one or a few interpretations gain prominence and there is generally one prevailing interpretation. But surely you know enough history of physics and science to know that one generation's prevailing interpretation can quickly become the next generation's joke.

I actually agree with you that the primary stuff of reality is pure potential - call it the vacuum, ether, apeiron, Brahman or what have you. I currently believe that this primary stuff of the universe is non-experiential and that experience only arises when potentiality becomes actuality. But the totality of actual entities comprise collectively the universe itself - there is no other stuff that is actual (as opposed to the pure potentiality of apeiron). Whitehead shifted on this issue, apparently endorsing something like what I just wrote in Science and the Modern World but then adopting a more Leibnizian view of actual entities independent from any substrate in Process and Reality. But in both cases he is an avowed panpsychist even though he doesn't ever use this term.

But don't fall into the trap of presuming that your assumptions are unassailably true. There is no ultimate truth - only conjectures that are more or less supported by data.

 

[PhizzicsPhan]

Apeiron,

I'm going to plagiarize myself and quote at length from a recent essay of mine on these topics:

Whitehead’s system is compelling for a number of reasons, not least of which are its adequacy to the facts of human experience, its logical consistency, and the pedigree of its creator. It’s hard to find someone more qualified than Whitehead to create a comprehensive philosophical system, due to his background in mathematics, logic, and physics at the highest levels of academia.

Perhaps the primary purpose of philosophy is to explain the objective world and how we fit into it. When we look around us, feel around us, sense around us in the most general sense, we detect solidity. The chair I’m in right now stops me from falling to the ground because of its solidity. The ground, because of its solidity, more generally stops me, and you, from falling through the Earth. The stars in the heavens are detectable to our telescopes because of their presumed solidity. And the microbes and electrons we see in our microscopes are detectable because of their solidity. So what is this solidity?

Physics is of course the science that directly addresses solidity, and “matter” is what we generally call most of the stuff that collectively comprises solidity. Most non-physicists — and perhaps many physicists also — presume that modern physics has in fact pinned down solidity. But it hasn’t. Physics still has no idea what matter really is. Theories abound. Most physicists, when pressed to really drill down deep, would suggest that matter is comprised of fields which are themselves comprised of energy, or vice versa. Quantum field theory, one of the crown jewels in modern physics, successfully combined quantum mechanics with special relativity. (See Max Jammer’s Concepts of Matter).

The far more difficult task of reconciling general relativity (the prevailing theory of gravity, space, and time) with quantum mechanics (the prevailing theory of matter) has yet to be achieved. String theory is the most well-known reconciliation attempt and this theory (or actually “set of theories” because there are a huge number of related theories) suggests that all matter/energy/fields are really tiny strings vibrating in many dimensions. There are many problems, however, with string theory, as described by Lee Smolin in his 2006 book The Trouble With Physics.

My point here is not, however, to survey all the candidates for a “general unified theory.” Rather, my point is to highlight that we really don’t know — still — what the heck this is.

But there is a solution. The solution is more philosophical than physical, even though there’s really not a separation between these two endeavors because philosophy’s role is to truly generalize science. And we don’t need to get hung up on the terms — matter, energy, fields, strings, etc. — to get to that solution.

For example, if we consider energy to be the most fundamental reality behind the apparent solidity of matter, it suddenly becomes very difficult to define what energy “really” is. The discussion becomes a word game. We can define energy by using yet more words. If we’re trying to explain the apparent solidity around us, the apparent solidity that our senses present to us, we can label it “matter,” as is the usual convention. Or we can label it “condensed energy” or we can use both terms. Or we can describe it as “really” tiny vibrating strings, when we look all the way down. We could even label the “true” reality behind our senses “Ideas,” as Plato did and many Idealist philosophers since Plato have done.

What really matters, however, is not the terminology but the conceptual placeholder. What are we trying to explain? In this case we’re trying to explain the apparent solidity of the objective world. Philosophers like Alfred North Whitehead and Arthur Koestler, the Hungarian novelist and polymath, have recognized this difficulty and opted to use more general terms that will remain accurate and useful no matter what terms our current physical theories prefer.

For Whitehead, the ultimate constituents of reality are “actual entities.” An actual entity is just another name, but it’s very different than traditional views of “matter” or “energy.” An actual entity is a general description for an event. An event is a happening, a becoming. So the actual entity is very different than the traditional notions of matter or energy. An actual entity never exists outside of time. It’s a process, not a thing. Time — duration — is built into the definition.

Whitehead’s “actual entity” is thus a more complete description of fundamental reality because it necessarily implies that no physical thing exists outside of time. All actual things, to be actual, which means they are perceivable or “physical,” must exist in time. We can conceptually freeze objects. We can image an arrow frozen in mid-flight, hanging in space. But this is just a reflection of our imaginations, not a reflection of reality. Similarly, modern physics often imagines that the ultimate constituents of matter could in actuality be frozen in place and given a name, independent of time. Physics takes the approach of asking the universe to “just please hold still for a second so that we can study you.”

But it never does. The universe is always in motion, always becoming. Time is always proceeding forward. It is, then, a mistake to conceptually separate matter from time and to believe that this conceptual separation is indicative of reality.

Arthur Koestler coined another term that is perhaps even more general than Whitehead’s actual entities. Koestler described a “holon” as a universal unit of organization that is both a part and a whole. Koestler writes:

“A part, as we generally use the word, means something fragmentary and incomplete, which by itself would have no legitimate existence. On the other hand, there is a tendency among holists to use the word ‘whole’ or ‘Gestalt’ as something complete in itself which needs no further explanation. But wholes and parts in this absolute sense do not exist anywhere, either in the domain of living organisms or of social organizations. What we find are intermediary structures on a series of levels in ascending order of complexity, each of which has two faces looking in opposite directions: the face turned toward the lower levels is that of an autonomous whole, the one turned upward that of a dependent part.”

Koestler’s holon is a very useful explanatory concept that can be used to describe any level of reality. It can also be used outside of physics to describe social organization or biological structures.

Holons and actual entities are, then, the most general of terms to explain the apparent solidity around us. For Whitehead and Koestler, all actual entities and all (physical) holons have an accompanying experience. This is more than a re-labeling. Holons and actual entities do a far better job of explaining the solidity around us because they also explain our relationship, as conscious beings, to that solidity. Each actual entity is, according to Whitehead, a “drop of experience.”

If all things are actual entities, then all things have experience. Ergo: Experience goes all the way down. And up. This is where we return to the theme of this series of articles: absent-minded science. Today’s prevailing physical theories have such a hard time explaining consciousness because they subscribe to a view of matter that from the outset excludes mind.

Whitehead, Koestler, Griffin, and other panpsychists have realized that our explanations of solidity had to be revised in order to adequately explain our place in that solidity, the universe around us.

Now, back to my opening theme. I’m still infatuated with Whitehead because his ideas are, as mentioned, logically coherent, empirically adequate, and come from such a respected intellect. But I’ve realized since my initial infatuation that Whitehead is one in a long line of comprehensive thinkers that includes Heraclitus, Aristotle, Plato, Plotinus, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, Schopenhauer, Locke, Russell, James, Royce, etc., all the way to the modern era with such key figures as Ken Wilber, David Chalmers, etc. I’ve also realized that thinkers who I at first dismissed as silly, such as the idealists Berkeley, Hegel, Schelling, etc., were actually getting to many of the same truths. They just use different language.

The terms don’t matter as much as what these terms point to. Whether we call our philosophy “idealism” or “materialism” or “panpsychism,” we are trying to explain the same thing: reality, this. Some approaches are better than others—but our criteria are themselves subjective. I have highlighted empirical adequacy, logical consistency, and intellectual pedigree here. But other criteria could be used and different conclusions reached.

 

[PhizzicsPhan]

PS. I need to read some Peirce - I must admit I've not a read a thing by him.

 

[apeiron]

PS. I need to read some Peirce - I must admit I've not a read a thing by him.

I'm about to read your JCS sample. Meanwhile a good fun article on Peirce (with a set of direct quotes relevant to this discussion) is...

http://agora.phi.gvsu.edu/kap/Neoplatonism/

Although Parker is stretching in trying to make a direct connection between Peirce and Plotinus (as he admits at the end).

 

[apeiron]

For Whitehead, the ultimate constituents of reality are “actual entities.” An actual entity is just another name, but it’s very different than traditional views of “matter” or “energy.” An actual entity is a general description for an event. An event is a happening, a becoming. So the actual entity is very different than the traditional notions of matter or energy. An actual entity never exists outside of time. It’s a process, not a thing. Time — duration — is built into the definition.

No controversy here. The usual natural presumption is that the world is made of stuff that is solid and unchanging. But watch anything over enough time, and everything appears to develop, change, evolve. In Whitehead's day, QM and GR were demonstrating that this was true at a physical level for both local events and global contexts.

Holons and actual entities are, then, the most general of terms to explain the apparent solidity around us. For Whitehead and Koestler, all actual entities and all (physical) holons have an accompanying experience. This is more than a re-labeling. Holons and actual entities do a far better job of explaining the solidity around us because they also explain our relationship, as conscious beings, to that solidity. Each actual entity is, according to Whitehead, a “drop of experience.”

But here is where I don't see a proper argument. Why should we conclude that conscious experience is a property that goes all the way down to the smallest scale of being?

The standard argument seems to be that because reductionism fails to deliver us a causal account of consciousness as an emergent property of complexly organised brains, then we have to presume that consciousness never actually emerges. Instead it exists all the way down to the simplest levels of organisation. And even past that to the atomistic state of things where what exists is not even part of an organisation.

This does not strike me as a powerful story. Reductionism fails to explain consciousness as a systems property, so therefore we have no choice but to still reduce consciousness to the littlest atoms of experience (rather than getting on with modelling systems as actually systems).

So apart from justifying a belief in panpsychism on the all too evident and widely agreed failure of simple-minded reductionsism, are there any positive, evidence-backed, reasons for believing the idea?

(And when you say Koestler also believed that all holons have experience, I don't think this is correct. He talked about autonomy and other such qualities. But I don't believe he was a card-carrying panpsychic at all. Or can you point to a source on this?)

 

[Maui]

And that modern materialist view includes the Copenhagen interpretation of QM that you are apparently advocating as though this is somehow an unassailable conclusion about the nature of reality. There are numerous (dozens) of interpretations of QM that are all adequate to the facts.

None of the interpretations(save for maybe one) retain the old notions of a mechanical universe. The BI isn't much farther than the belief in unicorns, you could always label the pink unicorn a hidden variable that's able to manipulate outcomes of experiments. So when you talk about a mind arising from matter in spacetime, keep in mind that your thesis isn't entirely inkeeping with the facts.

Similarly, there are many interpretations of relativistic data that don't require that we view space and time as malleable in an ontological manner. In fact, there are literally an infinity of interpretations for any given set of data. Obviously, one or a few interpretations gain prominence and there is generally one prevailing interpretation. But surely you know enough history of physics and science to know that one generation's prevailing interpretation can quickly become the next generation's joke.

Obviously, but yet, we are now better informed than we previously were. There is nothing strange about looking at the double slit and getting classical, common-sense results. We do this every day - i open the door and expect that the room is there in a classical, well-defined state. When i don't look at the double slit - i don't care that i get non-sensical results. After all i live and exist when and where i take a look, not when and where i cannot possibly look. This is well illustrated in the DCE.

The only problem is people's expectations that existence has to be certain way - i.e. preexisting, definite and absolute. This cannot be supported.

I actually agree with you that the primary stuff of reality is pure potential - call it the vacuum, ether, apeiron, Brahman or what have you. I currently believe that this primary stuff of the universe is non-experiential and that experience only arises when potentiality becomes actuality.

Add the determinsim of SR and the blockworld view, and you might reach interesting conclusions about being.

But the totality of actual entities comprise collectively the universe itself - there is no other stuff that is actual (as opposed to the pure potentiality of apeiron). Whitehead shifted on this issue, apparently endorsing something like what I just wrote in Science and the Modern World but then adopting a more Leibnizian view of actual entities independent from any substrate in Process and Reality. But in both cases he is an avowed panpsychist even though he doesn't ever use this term.

But don't fall into the trap of presuming that your assumptions are unassailably true. There is no ultimate truth - only conjectures that are more or less supported by data.

It makes no sense to me to suppose that matter down to the last atom has consciousness. The definition of an "atom" seems quite ambiguous when the atom is not in an observed state. So i see no reason to attach more mystery(mind) to something that sits as near infinite as a potential.