Time and relationships (or, consciousness per Martin Heidegger)

[PhizzicsPhan]

Apeiron, glad you found Griffin's paper. I know David fairly well (he lives very near me in Goleta) and he would very likely agree with me that things have changed quite a bit since he wrote that paper 15 years ago. Panpsychism, due in no small measure to Chalmers and Hameroff (the organizers of the annual TSC conferences), as well as Griffin himself and others like Seager who is now firmly in the panpsychist camp, is definitely on the upswing.

Anyway, the fact that a view is a minority view has little to no bearing for me. I evaluate ideas on their inherent strengths, not their supporters or lack thereof.

And a key problem that has plagued panpsychism, the "combination problem," is exactly what I address in my forthcoming JCS paper.

 

[PhizzicsPhan]

PS. Your last comment in #105 is rather strange considering that you have regularly cited Peirce as the base for your ideas and he is clearly a panpsychist.

 

[PhizzicsPhan]

alt, I love the Wordsworth poem - thanks for sharing.

As for my book, there is a preview available and a free pdf download, at least there is when I click on the link. If you can't find it give me your email and I'll send you a pdf.

 

[apeiron]

Look, there are different levels of explanation and terms such as idealism, monism and panpsychism (not to mention physicalism, materialism, etc.) are themselves a bit squishy.

No, it is the way that you are using the terms that is squishy.

Now, we could split hairs and I suspect you will by saying that dual aspect panpsychism isn't the same as "objective idealism." But when we square Peirce's various statements it seems quite clear that his intent was to stress that mind is omni-present. And this is panpsychism.

It was Peirce who was "splitting hairs" here. And if you read enough Peirce, you will find it hard to pin him down to a final view. As I said, you have to decide on balance whether he is being literal, analogical or generic.

To me the generic interpretation makes the most sense. And so I would characterise his position as pansemiotic. What is universal is not the literal experiencing but the essential causal structure. Which would not be panpsychic.

Again, panpsychism is a reductionist substance ontology. Experience is an essence, a property of substance. Pansemiosis is a systems story. Experience is irreducibly triadic. It develops through organisation. It is about global form as well as local substance.

The problem with squaring Peirce's statements is that he did have his mystical moments. He did sort of believe in god at times. But he also talked about god and mind in such a deflationary way that they just don't mean what the everyday usages mean. And he was also careful to keep separate what he might like to believe from his more rigorous metaphysical arguments. So you could take his semiotic framework and drop the woo-woo bits quite easily.

This is why Peirce is popular with both theologians and systems thinkers. Each can emphasise the aspects that fits their more sharply distinguished worldviews. But again, this does not mean either can lump him with what he argued against.

When I am obliged to get technical in expressing my views, I describe my position as either "panexperiential physicalism," the same phrase Griffin uses, or "panexperiential neutral monism," to stress that there is a neutral substrate that is neither mind nor matter - pure Spirit, to use Hegel's term.

Well, I can go along quite a way with Griffin's panexperiential physicalism because it is a contorted form of systems thinking. It is more pansemiotic than panpsychic because it is about global constraints on local freedoms. He identifies experience with the development of organised states. So I read Griffin and think he has the basic elements, he just doesn't want to assemble them in the explicitly hierarchical fashion of a systems thinker because he is so concerned not to become a dualist - and systems thinking can sound dualistic (it is actually dichotomistic) because it takes both local and global causality as fundamental.

So panexperiential physicalism and objective idealism have an awful lot in common. They are both sophisticated and complex metaphysical positions - that when straightened out become a systems approach.

But "panexperiential neutral monism"? That just sounds a self-contradicting term. Neutral monism says things begin neutral (I would prefer Peirce's vague). And the neutral can't be both neutral and experiential. Experience is one of the things that develop out of a pleni-potential.

As I keep saying, you have to decide which camp you are in and stick to it.

Either you are a reductionist and believe that everything reduces to stuff - the local properties of substance - or you are a systems thinker and believe that everything develops, everything emerges from pure potential by way of an interaction between the local and the global, between local construction (the substantial causes) and global constraints (the formal causes).

Panpsychism takes the reductionist approach. Reality is made of a stuff that has material and psychic properties inherently.

Pansemiosis is a systems approach. Reality starts beyond stuff. It starts out as a raw potential. Then stuff emerges as a bootstrap process of self-organisation.

Arran Gare has done a bunch of good papers on these issues. You might particularly like to check Whitehead and Pythagoras (http://www.google.co.nz/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=3&sqi=2&ved=0CCYQFjAC&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.concrescence.org%2Findex.php%2Fajpt%2Farticle%2Fdownload%2F85%2F47&ei=sNaoTdOrNImiuQPVmPH8CQ&usg=AFQjCNEDIgm3xQD6ZOrVKl-_Itm3P5QA8A) where he compares Whitehead to Peirce and Bergson as well as systems approaches generally.

For instance...

Such ideas have been recently put forward again by
hierarchy theorists, notably by Howard Pattee, Timothy
Allen and Stanley Salthe, among others, who have
argued that emergence is associatedwith newconstraints
emerging which are not in the initial conditions.ä¢ While
developed without reference to pre-twentieth century
thought (or to Bergson), this conception of nature
revives Anaximander’s conception of cosmos as having
formed through the limiting of the unlimited (an idea
also taken up further developed by Schelling at the end
of the eighteenth century).ää Along with the notion
of dišerent minimum durations, or dišerent process
rates, this has enabled Pattee, Allen and Salthe to clarify
the nature of both emergence and hierarchical ordering
in nature. Treating time as pulsational rather than
atomic and treating causation as essentially a matter of
constraining,äß overcomes a number of di›culties in
Whitehead’s philosophy, but then requires a rethinking
of the nature of concrescence.

Last, idealism is a form of monism, labeled more technically "idealist monism," as opposed to "materialist monism," otherwise known as materialism. Distinguishing idealism and panpsychism becomes a matter of semantics and the two shade into each other quite easily.

Err, I think distinguishing positions is pretty important here. And the critical distinctions are between monism (some variety of reductionism, either material or idealistic), dualism (whether ontic mind-body Cartesian dualism or double aspect panpsychic substance dualism), and then thirdly, the systems alternative (which includes pansemiosis and even neutral monism, given the larger intent of neutral monism).

Neutral monism, as I just described, suggests that there is a neutral substrate that can be described as neither mind nor matter. It is somehow beyond the subject/object distinction and to grok this it appears we need to move more into the spiritual and experiential realm and away from the word games of philosophy.

The word games of some people's philosophy in fact do a good job of pinning it down. And science can make the ideas increasingly precise. So no need for grokking. Just patient scholarship.

 

[Pythagorean]

I now realize that I've misunderstood and misused the word "panspsychism".

The word first came to me here in physicsforums. The idea was that if consciousness is the result of a physical process, then that physical process, if it occurs outside of a living thing, would lead to consciousness still. But this is a systems view (consciousness still emerges from the interplay of the matter; it wasn't inherent).

That idea doesn't bother me, personally; it's a consequence of physicalism.

But panpsychism doesn't say that (as I've just learned for the first time); it actually says that all matter has a subjective experience or mind. I would disagree with panpsychism, then.

What does pansemiotic mean?

 

[apeiron]

But panpsychism doesn't say that (as I've just learned for the first time); it actually says that all matter has a subjective experience or mind. I would disagree with panpsychism, then.

What does pansemiotic mean?

It means that all existence is systematic. It arises from unformed potential as an interpretive process. Limits placed on the limitless.

So in a loose way, it is "mental" in that it talks about interpretation. There has to be something like a self-observation. There has to be a global point of view or some kind of strong top-downness that constrains things to be.

But this is a generic description. Interpretation is a general or universal process rather than a literal claim that interpretation = experiencing in the usual sense.

 

[alt]

alt, I love the Wordsworth poem - thanks for sharing.

As for my book, there is a preview available and a free pdf download, at least there is when I click on the link. If you can't find it give me your email and I'll send you a pdf.

Ah ! Got the book now, thanks. I'll start reading.

As to the Wordsworth, I'm glad you liked it. Those guys (and those before them, and those before them, etc) pondered the same things - and it is good that we should continue to ponder them today.

This is a great thread.

 

[Deveno]

reading this thread makes me feel rather, um, stupid. i am not quite sure exactly what is at stake with the various positions involved.

there is something qualitatively different between myself and my guitar. i rather doubt it has a name for itself. this same difference is less marked between my cat and i, he has some of this "self-awareness" (for example, he recognizes his name), but it appears to be to a lesser degree. plants? gosh, I'm not sure...

so, i think a dynamic system needs a certain threshold of complexity and self-organization before consciousness emerges. that said, i see nothing to preclude some superset of myself possessing the same characteristic, perhaps to an even higher degree.

this thread has made for some fascinating reading, and only a little sniping.

if i were pressed to sum up my way of looking at things, i would say it is something like:

Ø = 1

the null set is a weird thing, it has every property, but none of them are realized. it is usually seen as a very small thing, smaller than anything else, but i see it as very large, just empty. a vast wall-less container. but, as soon as you put something IN it, all of a sudden you have distinction, in and out, me and not-me. and i think consciousness hinges on that distinction, a division between subject and object.

i'm probably not saying this very well.

it's like the universe is this huge potential function. there's not really anything there, just a potential for being there. but as soon as you introduce a constraint, it induces being. the potential becomes kinetic, no longer an it-is-what-it-is, but something with a history to it, a directedness. i suppose duality is built-in to this view, but in light of the fact that there is duality, describing half of it suffices. the idea that losing degrees of freedom can create self-organization...i can go along with that, it seems to me to be another way of describing what i am saying so poorly.

the thought that consciousness might be distributed down to even the sub-sub-atomic scales of existence...seems to dilute the concept of consciousness down to worthless. it totally fails to capture the distinction between alive and non-living. consciousness seems to be a sort of fire, burning the fuel of genetically-directed organisms as it goes. it's rather peculiar, that DNA should be able to create such a profusion of delicate homeostatic dynamic systems based on such a simple code, and odder still that some of these systems evolved to become creatures that devised languages to talk about the DNA, but here we are.

anyway, i think that there are different kinds of consciousness, and at the risk of sounding anthropomorphic, we have the best kind going. dolphins may be able to sing, but can they make digital copies of 18th century dolphin hits? and i think this special kind of consciousness we have is inextricably bound up in the fact that we can construct a (largely faithful) internal model of what seems to be what other people we observe seem to model internally. this multiple layering of: i see what you see, and imagine you imagining what i imagine I'm seeing. in other words, we can rectify, both linguistically, and conceptually, a consistent world in which our concepts and the words we use to describe the the concepts and the world are consistent with our perceived observation of other people's use of the same concpets and words. perhaps some other species share a similar ability, but they haven't told us, and until they do, it doesn't count.

i think meaning arises when the maps are good. and i think that reflection, is the distinguishing hallmark of consciousness (using the word in both senses). so it at least requires a brain, or some other physical structure suitable for such mappings. salt crystals don't have it.

 

[Ferris_bg]

PhizzicsPhan, Apeiron,

I think you both make the same mistake and use panpsychism and panexperientialism as an interchangeable terms and they are not. Therefore the definitions of your concepts get messed up.

This is the original http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=2982" . Basically Griffin shows adequate way for escaping the epiphenomenalism, which as according to Kim the non-reductive physicalism theories entail.

If you want we can discuss the both papers in a separate thread.

 

[apeiron]

PhizzicsPhan, Apeiron,

I think you both make the same mistake and use panpsychism and panexperientialism as an interchangeable terms and they are not. Therefore the definitions of your concepts get messed up.

Perhaps you can briefly outline the difference for us then? Griffin does not even use the word panpsychism, let alone spell out a difference. And neither does Kim do anything but say Griffin's panexperientialism is Griffin's term for his approach to panpsychism. So there is not much to go on in those papers.

Anyway, as I said, I do not see Griffin as a million miles away from Peirce or a systems view. Whereas Tam, and others like Hameroff, just have a non-theory in my view. They treat matter and mind as two essences somehow localised in the same substance. No explanation given. So I agree they are not interchangeable terms here.

As to Kim's arguments, I would reiterate that he does not deal with the systems view at all in his work. The systems claim is that top-down constraints restrict local freedoms. So they actively shape their own micro-causes (even as the micro-causes also make for the global states of constraint). Thus the systems view goes far beyond ideas about mereological supervenience. It sees even the micro-causes as something that must develop, not something that pre-exist.

 

[alt]

PhizzicsPhan, Apeiron,

I think you both make the same mistake and use panpsychism and panexperientialism as an interchangeable terms and they are not. Therefore the definitions of your concepts get messed up.

This is the original http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=2982" . Basically Griffin shows adequate way for escaping the epiphenomenalism, which as according to Kim the non-reductive physicalism theories entail.

If you want we can discuss the both papers in a separate thread.

I never even heard of the term panexperientialism until I came across it in this thread. A search for that term in Wiki defaults to panpsychism and says ..

In philosophy, panpsychism is the view that all matter has a mental aspect, or, alternatively, all objects have a unified center of experience or point of view.

Panexperientialism, as espoused by Alfred North Whitehead, is a less bold variation, which credits all entities with phenomenal consciousness but not with cognition, and therefore not necessarily with fully-fledged minds.

So a panpsychist would always place a rock for example, under panexperientialism, unless he thought that that rock had a fully fledged mind ? Am I on the right track ?

 

[JDStupi]

"...Even if we had any senses, we should be situated toward such a world precisely as inanimate objects are toward the present one, provided we suppose that these objects have an absolutely transitory and instantaneous consciousness without memory―a supposition which is a mere mode of speech, for that would be no consciousness at all"

C.S. Pierce ...Just browsing through, might be relevant for those of you claiming C.S. Pierce as a panpsychist

 

[Ferris_bg]

Panexperientialism, as described by Griffin, holds that "everything experiences, or is capable of experiencing". Here by "experiencing" Griffin means the non-cognitive aspect of consciousness - the qualia (Q). So the single particles can have Q, but are lacking M (a fully developed cognitive mind). Panpsychism grants both M and Q.

As Griffin points out "panexperientialism clearly says that the mind emerges from the brain". Mental causation is logically consistent in his panexperiential physicalism, because Q is present in P thus there is no problem the higher level order M to be reported by P or to causally interact with P. That is the core idea of his response to Kim, who has showed that mental causation in non-reductive physicalism is only possible when causal over-determination exists. So Griffin finds a solution to this. But there is always a catch you know. And the catch in his view is the so called "combination problem" or how does Q develops to M in the brain, and not in the rock, when Q is present in all particles.

 

[ConradDJ]

Without hoping to talk anyone out of their pan-____________-ism, I’d like to try explaining Heidegger’s thought once again, maybe in simpler terms.

“Pan” (meaning “all”) is the oldest word in our intellectual vocabulary. Before it had any other concept to work with, Greek philosophy began with “the All” as its subject... the world as a whole, as one thing. That was a profoundly new idea.

By trying to imagine what it could mean, “the All”, these men were learning to see the world as if they were outside it and independent of it. They were inventing the conceptual standpoint that gradually evolved into scientific objectivity, through which we’re gained so much in the way of understanding. Less fortunately, it also evolved a kind of intellectual life in which people attach to “-isms” and argue about them, which has been much less fruitful.

The essence of the Greek intellectual achievement is to create for itself a universal “quasi-viewpoint”, abstracting from any actual point of view on things. Abstracting from what physics calls the viewpoint of “the observer”.

We all know how valuable it is to be able to see the world “from outside” in this way. What was at first only barely imaginable to a few crazy philosophers has gradually become the everyday objective reality we all imagine around us all the time, the world of facts.

Now Heidegger’s essential point is that this way of imagining the world is limited by its very universality. It can uncover the facts, but it can’t perceive what’s fundamental. It can’t get at what’s ultimately going on here, at where the facts are coming from, so to speak. It can't see what the facts are telling us about the world.

For Heidegger, what’s fundamental about existence – about the world we actually live in together, that each of us sees “from inside” – is that it’s always and exclusively one’s own. It’s always from my specific point of view in space, in this particular context of relationships, in this unique ongoing moment “now”, summing up my whole past and creating a future. Most importantly, this “own point of view” arises in its relationships with other points of view.

So what Heidegger suggests is simply that at bottom, the world is a web of connections between “own” points of view, in real time. The world is the world each of us lives in and experiences, in our respective, interconnected present moments, now. And the fundamental character of this web of being-in-relationships can only be seen “from inside” it.

The time and space of “existence”, lived from inside, are very different from the global time and space of objective “reality”. Existence is structured as an “environment” – it’s made of the many unique contexts that each perspective has in its own present connections with others. This business of “being in one’s local context” is the whole show. “Being here, from this point of view, now” has its own complex, multi-leveled structure – whether we’re talking about a human’s point of view or an atom’s. This context involves close relationships and distant ones, things are happening in many time-scales at once. But all this articulates the uniquely located "here and now" -- there's nothing global or universal about this side of the world that's one's own.

Now when we universalize our perspective, we gain a great deal. We gain a theoretical standpoint on the whole universe, and ways of investigating facts to an amazing depth, way beyond the scope of everyday experience. But we also entirely lose sight of the different kinds of structure our world has “from inside”.

Heidegger believed that this “environmental” kind of world-structure, that only exists for me and for you, from this particular point of view that each of us has for our own, is what’s basic. And that makes sense to me, but I’m not trying to prove it’s true. It’s hard for me even to find language for it.

The thing is, we’re all so used to living “in the real world” of objective facts that it’s hard to start imagining the world as we actually see it around us, in real time. A world where there are no facts, a world of momentary connections, impressions, expressions and anticipations. We hardly have even primitive concepts for describing this contextual connectivity we live in... though we’re incredibly adept at objectifying our world, automatically translating all our experience into the universal perspective we take for granted.

To me, the mystery of quantum theory and the mystery about “consciousness” define the boundaries of our traditional intellectual world. I think that so long as we keep inventing models of the world as a whole, from outside, as a vast body of objective fact, these two issues will remain opaque. Not only will we find no real answers, it will not even become clear what the real questions are. And that’s been the situation already for a long time.

But it’s not that QM and consciousness really have anything to do with each other. It’s just that both involve the structure of a web of communicative relationships, that can only seen from a point of view inside it.

So I suggest that unless you’re thinking from the standpoint of your own conscious existence in your relationships with others, then any talk about “consciousness” or about the “mental” vs the “physical”, etc. is going nowhere. If you talk about “mind” or “conscious awarenss” as objective attributes of certain kinds of things, you’re taking a point of view that excludes from the start what you’re trying to understand... you’re abstracting from the “own point of view” within the web that each of us “things” always has, in this moment.

But this “authentic” standpoint – even though it’s where we always are, in our lives, and the only standpoint anything actually has – is very abnormal for us, and still very foreign to our intellectual tradition. It’s a terra incognita that’s open for us to explore, but we’re all just beginners here.

I know there’s a lot of pleasure in inventing theories about “the All”, and I wouldn’t want to deprive anyone of something I’ve enjoyed so much myself. It’s great. But I think the real work to be done now needs a different point of view.

 

[PhizzicsPhan]

Apeiron, if you can accept Griffin's panexperiential physicalism, my job is done here :)

Pansemiotism = panexperientialism, as I have mentioned before. The essence of both is interiority, subjectivity, no matter how simple. A world of objects only cannot give rise to subjects without magic or miracles.

Granted, there is a kind of magic in transitioning from the pure potentiality of Brahman/ether/apeiron, but far better for this magic to occur at the beginning of the chain of being rather than at an arbitrary mid-point in the chain of being, as is argued in the mainstream emergentist materialism.

I use the term panpsychism more generally than panexperientialism because the former term is simpler and has far more currency than the latter. And to me they actually mean the same thing because, again, the essence of both (and pansemiosis/ism) is that interiority is built into all things. The outside and inside are dual aspects of each real thing. As matter complexifies, so mind/interiority complexifies.

Galen Strawson's version of panpsychism is probably the closest to mine. Griffin invented the term panexperientialism in the 1970s to avoid the silly objection to panpsychism that "you're saying rocks have minds?" No, no modern panpsychist or panexperientialist says rocks have mind. Rather, the constituents of a rock have extremely rudimentary minds and the rock itself is most likely a "mere aggregate." As is a chair, table, etc.

My forthcoming JCS paper addresses this issue in detail, suggesting that the key for solving this "combination problem" (what is a unitary subject rather than a "mere aggregate") is field coherence. This idea relies on time being quantized at a fundamental level. We can suggest that the Planck moment (10 to the negative 44 seconds) is the time quantum or chronon. And the universe is re-created with each ticking chronon. Information can travel only so far within each chronon and this is the fundamental limit for what can be a unitary subject. As matter learns how to bootstrap various pathways for faster information transfer, such as high energy storage in cell-based life, it can then lead to far larger unitary subjects than are possible without these bootstrapping techniques.

Last, apeiron, you inaccurately categorize panpsychism as a type of dualism. Obviously, these categories are debatable but I think it's an unhelpful move to categorize dual aspect panpsychism/panexperientialism as a type of dualism because this categorization ignores the fact that a certain type of dualism is necessary to explain the mind/body problem.

It is undeniable that there is a subject here, now, and it is writing to you. The subject I call my "self" is always changing, but it is undeniably here, now, as Descartes famously pointed out (and then went quickly astray in his consequential musings). The subject that is me clearly has a number of objects that present themselves to me. This is the fundamental subject/object distinction that is the mind/body problem.

Cartesian dualism "solves" the problem by suggesting that mind and matter are fundamentally different substances that somehow interact. This "somehow" is the key problem behind this type of dualism - it makes little sense to posit two fundamentally different substances without any clear means of interaction. And it's redundant in many ways.

Dual aspect panpsychism (inside and outside are two aspects of each real thing) obviously has some shades of dualism because it admits two basic features of the universe. But it is not dual aspect substantialism like Descartes' system. Rather, it posits just one substance that has two basic features - an outside and an inside. To be more accurate, the Whiteheadian version of panpsychism posits one basic process that has these two aspects. Whitehead was careful in stressing that his ontology did not deny substance entirely - what can process work with if there is no substance? Rather, he emphasized process and substance.

Actually, one more thing: I call my system "panexperiential neutral monism" for the same reason that Peirce called his system "objective idealism": there is a neutral substrate in my system that is neither mind nor matter; mind and matter only appear as the actuality from the pure potentiality of Brahman/ether/apeiron. The actuality is panpsychist, but the neutral substrate is not. So whereas Peirce's idealist substrate is not objective for him, the "objective" description refers to his notion of matter as condensed mind.

I'm not saying my system is the same as Peirce's (I haven't read enough to map out the parallels), I'm just saying the appellations have a similar logic. And Peirce was also a panpsychist of some stripe because he recognized that mind must be ontologically fundamental.

 

[PhizzicsPhan]

Conrad, thanks for the explanation of Heidegger's viewpoint. I agree entirely. And this is the basis of the panpsychist position: the universe is indeed the sum total of all interconnected subjects. From the top to the bottom. There is no objectivity without subjectivity. Schopenhauer also had a lot to say on this and I highly recommend The World as Will and Representation.

Would you say Heidegger is a panpsychist? Apparently most scholars don't view Heidegger as panpsychist.

 

[apeiron]

Panexperientialism, as described by Griffin, holds that "everything experiences, or is capable of experiencing". Here by "experiencing" Griffin means the non-cognitive aspect of consciousness - the qualia (Q). So the single particles can have Q, but are lacking M (a fully developed cognitive mind). Panpsychism grants both M and Q.

I don't see the relevance of the difference. The only thing either variety of theory claims as beyond physicalism is qualia, the subjective experiencing, not the cognition. So they are not different in the respect that matters here.

BTW I don't buy that you can separate cognition from qualia. It is contrary to the neuroscientific evidence. Even when your eyes are doing something so simple as following a moving light, there is "neural computation" involved.

In a paper in the journal Nature, he and his colleagues showed how nerve cells in the retina respond most actively to the leading edge of a moving object. They also fire slightly ahead of it.

http://bmes.seas.wustl.edu/WhitakerArchives/00_annual_report/meister.html

So it is a false dichotomy in the first place.

 

[apeiron]

My forthcoming JCS paper addresses this issue in detail, suggesting that the key for solving this "combination problem" (what is a unitary subject rather than a "mere aggregate") is field coherence.

So what does your "theory" predict as the difference in consciousness that results from cerebellectomies vs decerebration?

The cortex and cerebellum are reasonably equivalent on measures of complexity such as neural number and synaptic density. Yet cutting one out has quite different results to cutting the other out?

Why is this so according to your field coherence theory?

 

[Ferris_bg]

ConradDJ,

I am sorry we spammed your thread with our "pan-____________-ism", but I can't ignore others questions posed at my comments.

apeiron,

A lot of philosophers use panexperientialism and panpsychism as identical terms, but I think the "little" difference is actually not little at all, because I can't imagine a form of reductive panexperientialism (it always implies emergence), but I can very well imagine a form of reductive panpsychism (where if you know the M of the single particles you can know the M of the subject they form).

About the separation of cognition from qualia, I posted a https://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=447726"). I showed that such type of physicalism implies multiple mental states or some kind of interruption. Now in Griffin's panexperiential physicalism this is not a problem at all, because the two mental states can be linked together (P ~ Q | P ~ M), so that the mental state is unified (the "what it is to smell a rose" and your thought about some equation at the same time appear to you as a single unified mental state, but they could be in fact two or more, which you experience as one). I probably sound like some guy from "Inception", but that's only because we still have to use language and not telepathy haha.

EDIT: If you want to read more on the pan-topic, check http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q...Z9BaU&sig=AHIEtbTBPYFYRXlhx3Abtwbt57K7OCPOmw".

The key panexperientialist move is thus to divorce the existence of experience from the existence of mentality, or more specifically, from the existence of cognition.

 

[ConradDJ]

Conrad, thanks for the explanation of Heidegger's viewpoint. I agree entirely. And this is the basis of the panpsychist position: the universe is indeed the sum total of all interconnected subjects. From the top to the bottom. There is no objectivity without subjectivity...

Would you say Heidegger is a panpsychist? Apparently most scholars don't view Heidegger as panpsychist.

No... I think Heidegger would say, you need to think more deeply about the meaning of “subjective consciousness”, and “objective reality” too. (He said that sort of thing a lot.)

I’m glad you’re in sympathy with my explanations. I get that you’re working on the basic issue, how to understand the world as made of all the relationships between us.

But I don’t think your argument for “panpsychism” is helpful. You say – “...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.” This seems to take it for granted that we know what “mind” is, at a fundamental level – in spite of the fact that the term is being generalized so broadly that it includes both your mind and the mind of an atom.

So I think most of us feel that “panpsychism” or “panexperientialism” is just a theory with no content. Ok, atoms have “mind” – so what does that mean? I agree with Apeiron – we need to see what conclusions you draw from this that have empirical significance.

When we talk about “mind” or “consciousness”, we’re always starting from our own personal consciousness... the one each of us has been evolving since we were born, by learning how to relate to the world as other humans do, and above all by learning how to have talking-relationships with other people, and with ourselves. These are things that not even other animals do. So it makes no sense to me to generalize about “mind” or “conscious experience” while ignoring their roots.

Unfortunately, Philosophy has a long history of ignoring these roots, treating “Mind” – and specifically, the kind of logical mind a philosopher has – as if it were something primal and universal. So even though I see that you’re trying to work out a deeper understanding, I think the label “panpsychism” only continues this tradition of covering over what really needs to be thought about.

Exactly the same could be said about “materialism”. The Cartesian dichotomy of subject-mind and object-matter covers over a deeper difference that we need to learn about. You and I can agree (with Leibniz) that “the universe is the sum total of all interconnected subjects” – but we’re not close yet to understanding what that phrase actually says, or what kind of “system” makes these “interconnections” work the way they do.

The first question should be – where does your own subjectivity come from, in this world of interconnection? And your answer seems to be, in essence, it was there from the beginning. That may be satisfying to you – and you have a lot of company, in the philosophical tradition – but I don’t think it really helps. The kinds of relationships atoms have are obviously different from the kind you and I are having. Until we understand those differences and how they evolve, it won't mean much to talk about the "mind" or "experience" of something that can't talk.

 

[PhizzicsPhan]

A quick note on the difference between panexperientialism and panpsychism: there isn't any.

Both suggest that subjectivity, qualia, experience, mind, interiority, whatever term you prefer, is inherent to actuality. That is, there is no actual stuff without subjectivity.

Griffin coined the panexperientialism appellation to be able to discuss (sell) his ideas, based explicitly on Whitehead, without facing the silly objections to panpsychism that have plagued the theory for centuries - in particular the one I've already mentioned as to rocks and chairs having minds (they don't, but their constituents do).

Humans have a hard time grokking non-human minds. No, the mind of an atom is not much like the mind of a human. But the essential feature, subjectivity, unitarity, interiority, is there - or so we infer based on the best available evidence.

The most simple anatomy of mind I can suggest is 1) perception and 2) internal processing of perceptions that results in a choice as to how to manifest in the next time quantum. So an atom's mind is its perceptions (electromagnetic, gravitational, etc. forces that act on it) and its very rudimentary choice as to how to react to those perceptions. Atoms, being highly rudimentary minds, almost always behave as the mathematics of physics would tell us. But they occasionally diverge, as quantum physics also tells us can happen, and this is a result of that rudimentary mind choosing a different path than the habitual path.

And this process complexifies at each level of actuality, from atoms to molecules, cells, etc.

 

[apeiron]

A lot of philosophers use panexperientialism and panpsychism as identical terms, but I think the "little" difference is actually not little at all, because I can't imagine a form of reductive panexperientialism (it always implies emergence), but I can very well imagine a form of reductive panpsychism (where if you know the M of the single particles you can know the M of the subject they form).

That Kind paper makes the same point I made. Panexperientialism is no milder than panpsychism as both make claims about qualia as fundamental.

But I see that you agree with her that panexperientialism creates a difficulty as many would feel cognition is an inextricable aspect of experiencing.

In the spirit of splitting hairs, I could add that pansemiosis would seem to be committed to the belief that cognition is in fact what is fundamental, not qualia. So physical reality is irreducibly dependent on habits of interpretance. A semiotic structure of interaction.

This might help Tam who seems not to understand the difference as yet.

Panexperientialism believes Q --> C
Panpsychism believes Q = C
Pansemiosis believes C --> Q

 

[PhizzicsPhan]

Cognition is just complex qualia. That's it.

 

[apeiron]

Cognition is just complex qualia. That's it.

And your "theory" handles the difference between cortical complexity and cerebellar complexity how exactly? Let's get back to the real world at some stage please.

 

[PhizzicsPhan]

apeiron, when you can bring yourself to write theory and not "theory" I will humor you. Otherwise you'll have to wait for the paper to come out.

 

[PhizzicsPhan]

Conrad, post #126 generally addresses your points. But let me add a few thoughts.

You seem to be assuming that panpsychism or panexperientialism require a far more complex mind to be "pan-ed" than I am suggesting. As I wrote in #126, mind, at its root, is just the process of information transfer between subject and object(s) and a rudimentary choice as to how to manifest in the next moment. This choice results from the processing power ("connectivity index"in my theory) of each actual entity. For extremely simple actual entities like atoms, the connectivity index, the ability to make choices, is extremely simple. And this is why we see such regularity in simple actual entities like atoms, electrons, molecules, etc.

At the most basic level of actual entities, what I call "simple subjects," there is the brute fact of perception and internal connectivity. There is no explanation below this level, it just is. We can certainly hypothesize that even an atom or an electron has some complexity (as Bohm did with respect to electrons), but at some point we have to just accept that there is some ability to process rudimentary perceptions in the most simple subjects. That is what it means to be actual. We don't know if electrons or quarks qualify as "simple subjects" and I suspect not, but my theory is meant to be a general theory of consciousness and psychophysical laws that will remain valid no matter what current physical theories hold to be the constituents of nature (as Whitehead did with his "actual entities" and Koestler with his "holons").

I've mentioned before that my theory relies on the Perception Index (PI) x the Connectivity Index (CI) = Omega (capacity for phenomenal content/experience/choice).

"Field coherence" is also a necessary component of my theory but the type of field coherence required for a unitary subject to arise as opposed to mere aggregates is a matter of additional research, a framework for which I'm fleshing out currently in Part 2 of my JCS paper (to be published separately).

In sum, it seems that Heidegger was saying essentially what Whitehead and other panpsychists were saying (though I haven't read Heidegger yet, so can't say for sure on this point - I'm relying on your digest).

 

[apeiron]

apeiron, when you can bring yourself to write theory and not "theory" I will humor you. Otherwise you'll have to wait for the paper to come out.

Such a tease. As if you had an answer.

 

[PhizzicsPhan]

Of course I have an answer apeiron - mine is a general theory.

 

[ConradDJ]

A quick note on the difference between panexperientialism and panpsychism: there isn't any.

Both suggest that subjectivity, qualia, experience, mind, interiority, whatever term you prefer, is inherent to actuality. That is, there is no actual stuff without subjectivity...

No, the mind of an atom is not much like the mind of a human. But the essential feature, subjectivity, unitarity, interiority, is there...

The most simple anatomy of mind I can suggest is 1) perception and 2) internal processing of perceptions that results in a choice as to how to manifest in the next time quantum. So an atom's mind is its perceptions (electromagnetic, gravitational, etc. forces that act on it) and its very rudimentary choice as to how to react to those perceptions...

And this process complexifies at each level of actuality, from atoms to molecules, cells, etc.

Cognition is just complex qualia. That's it.

At the most basic level of actual entities, what I call "simple subjects," there is the brute fact of perception and internal connectivity. There is no explanation below this level, it just is... We don't know if electrons or quarks qualify as "simple subjects" and I suspect not, but my theory is meant to be a general theory of consciousness and psychophysical laws that will remain valid no matter what current physical theories hold to be the constituents of nature.

Essentially what I object to here are two things. One is that “subject” and “object” are taken for granted as basic... so the nature of “mind” is taken as something “internal” to “actual entities”. Now as a “thinker” I do spend a lot of time “in my head”. But Heidegger’s first main point was that our “conscious existence” is fundamentally all about being out there in the world. We are “out there” in our relationships long before we develop any sort of “interiority”. This experience we “thinkers” have of existing inside our own minds is not basic at all but derivative.

His second main point was that having an (“authentic”) point of view on the world is not just “given” a priori, as “subjectivity”. Our “subjective” perception of a world of “objects” is an inauthentic viewpoint, a generalizing interpretation of our experience that we learn from others. It amounts to “stepping back” from our engagement with things to the detached perspective we call “objectivity” – very valuable, but ultimately limited... because the heart of what’s going on in the world is “out there” in the engagement. We need the “stepping back” way of thinking, but we also need a way of consciously reconnecting.

So my first objection is that what you are projecting as “simple and basic” is wrong. There are no simple “mind-atoms” in the world, any more than there are simple “matter-atoms”. You think you are talking about relationships, but all your categories (perception, choice, internal connectivity, unitarity, interiority) are all the traditional ways of talking about subjects “in relation to” objects. From my point of view, none of this gets anywhere near what it means to be in relationships, to have one’s ground of being in one’s relationships, which is what Heidegger was trying to describe.


My second objection is to this “reductive” style of thinking... this “pan-whatever“ business. It seems to me that the great contribution of Darwinian evolution was to show that the most complex and finely-tuned functional systems can arise through a series of unlikely accidents. Living systems involve many very different kinds of structures and processes, each of which arose in a specific set of circumstances, and then evolved to suit other contingencies that happened to arise in the species’ history.

If we want to, we can say that all of life amounts merely to self-replication. There is a very deep truth in that. But this is not really at all “reductive” – it states a problem that every species at every stage in its evolution has to solve in a different way, or go extinct. “Self-reproduction” doesn’t really describe any sort of “process” but (as Heidegger would say) a way of “being at issue” – something that can either succeed or fail, in each case, in each unique situation.

Now going back to ancient times, philosophers have again and again fallen in love with an Idea, and convinced themselves that “the All” was all about their Idea – whether “monistic” or “dualistic” or “triadic”, etc. There is a basic “mind-stuff” or “process” or whatever, that explains everything. In most of the sciences, this metaphysical style of thinking has gone by the boards, since Darwin... though it still lives on in physics, and of course, in philosophy. Physicists and philosophers still tend to believe, despite a vast amount of empirical evidence to the contrary, that the ultimate truth about the world must be “unified” by a single Idea.

Being myself a philosopher and the son of two philosophers, I’m deeply in sympathy with this traditional goal. And I have no sympathy at all for the “positivism” that sees no point in the quest for foundations.

But what Heidegger was doing was trying to develop a deeper, “existential” sense for what it means to be a foundation... what it takes to be a basis for something. Our traditional way of thinking wants to find something Simple at the bottom of things. As Aristotle says, whatever is Basic is what doesn’t itself need any basis. Or as you say - "There is no explanation below this level, it just is... "

But from Heidegger’s point of view (and mine), being a basis isn’t ever simple, there’s a difficult and complicated issue at every level, that can either succeed or fail. And it’s different at every level.

So yes, we do want to develop a “unified” view of existence as a whole, “the All.” But I think this involves understanding what’s “at issue” at each stage, in the evolution of relationships between things. Not the reduction of all the unique solutions to one “basic Idea”. The deep lesson is the one we all struggle to learn in our daily lives, about the problematic nature of being a basis for each other... to which there is no single or simple solution.

Atoms are, in fact, very complicated and very finely-tuned little “entities”. The electron-shell structure through which atoms relate to other atoms is remarkable, and the complexity of interaction going on within an atomic nucleus is quite literally incalculable. If you want “interiority” there’s plenty of it there! But things don’t get simpler as you go deeper, in the quantum realm, on the contrary. Nor, despite the efforts of hundreds of brilliant physicists over the past few decades, is there any actual evidence that they get more “unified”.

This is only the age-old prejudice that philosophy needs to outgrow. Until we do, we’ll just keep recycling the same old set of “theories” in new disguises. We shouldn’t be satisfied with that, and keep on “doing philosophy” as a collection of endless debates between “-isms”.


I apologize for going on at such length in these posts of mine. But this thread has been very helpful to me, and I really appreciate the opportunity to try to be more articulate... I hope it turns out to be helpful to a few others as well.

 

[John86]

That's a very fascinating view you have on evolution Conrad. Evolution of physical proceses doesn't have to be lineair in a sense that it has to become always more complex. Microscopic proceses at moleculair or in the quantum realm tent to mostly be more complex, than the theoratically worked steps before the testing

 

[PhizzicsPhan]

Conrad, I appreciate your thoughts.

I think, however, that there is a fundamental disagreement about the fundament of thought. (Almost a palindrome...)

I agree with Descartes, Kant, Schelling, etc., that subjectivity is fundamental. It is the ONLY thing we know with certainty. And this seems to be incontrovertible. What do you know with 100% certainty? Only the fact of your own thought. Not even your "self" is certain - and this is where Descartes actually went astray, immediately after his initial correct insight.

There is, here, now, simply the stuff of thought, always changing. This is all we know. Everything else we think we know about the world "out there" is actually "in here," presented to our little Cartesian theater through various means.

This is of course the mind/body problem: how does each of our "in here" relate to the "out there"? How does the "out there" get "in here"? And is there any "out there" that doesn't have its own "in here"?

Panexperiential neutral monism suggests that every "in here," which I'll call a subject from now on, is also an "out there," which I'll call an object from now on. This is the case because the only thing we know - our own thought - is a subject, and we surmise that we/our bodies are objects for other subjects through our normal interaction with people and other thinking creatures like dogs, cats, etc. So the only objects we know with any intimacy at all are in fact subjects - our own subjects.

It is interesting that you bring evolution in as support for your ideas. I think you've got it backwards. Evolution shows that complexity arises from simplicity. Even though certain species can indeed become simpler over time this is anomalous and the general trend of evolution is clearly toward more complexity. And the other clear lesson from evolution is that the universe proceeds incrementally not discontinuously.

This is called "the principle of continuity" and is itself a very powerful argument for panpsychism and against emergentist materialism. This is the case because when we study the natural world we don't see sharp jumps - nature abhors sharp jumps. Yes, species themselves display some discontinuity with their cousins, but evolutionary biologists (my first training) are clear that evolution doesn't proceed through "hopeful monsters," but rather through incremental change. Punctuated equilibrium doesn't change this statement - even this "saltational" theory of evolution still requires lengthy spans of time and small changes to achieve speciation.

Sewall Wright, the American biologist, said it well: "Emergence of mind from no mind is sheer magic." Mind doesn't emerge - it is always there in some form and it complexifies as form complexifies. This is the key insight from biology.

Now, I also infer a ground of being, the neutral substrate for reality (Brahman/ether/apeiron), because it seems clear to me that there has to be a foundation for reality to rest upon. If there is no base, no ultimate level of being, it all just falls away and there is nothing. We clearly have something, however - an entire universe. Thus, for this universe to stand it must have a foundation.

This last point is a contentious one between Buddhism and Vedanta. Buddha famously taught that there is no foundation, it is all "dependently arising." But some schools of
Buddhist thought agree with Vedanta and many descriptions of the Buddhist "Emptiness" sound to me just like Vedanta's Brahman. Indeed all things are in process, all dependently arising, but there must be a substrate to have process. Otherwise, what is there to process?

So we may simply have to disagree on the fundament, and I should read some more Heidegger at some point. But what I have read thus far seemed to mistake psychology for ontology. Heidegger didn't seem to be looking for fundamental ontology separate from any human viewpoint, which is what ontology desires.

Again, my panexperiential neutral monism is a general theory that can apply to quarks to quagga mussels to quasars. And this is what philosophy should be seeking, as well as science.

 

[apeiron]

This is called "the principle of continuity" and is itself a very powerful argument for panpsychism and against emergentist materialism. This is the case because when we study the natural world we don't see sharp jumps - nature abhors sharp jumps.

Discontinuity is as basic to nature as continuity. We see it all the way from quantum jumps and big bang phase transitions to the freezing of water, the onset of chaos, to mitotic replication and the sudden emergence of symbolic thought in Homo sapiens.

Nature loves sharp jumps as much as it abhors them it seems.

 

[apeiron]

So yes, we do want to develop a “unified” view of existence as a whole, “the All.” But I think this involves understanding what’s “at issue” at each stage, in the evolution of relationships between things. Not the reduction of all the unique solutions to one “basic Idea”. The deep lesson is the one we all struggle to learn in our daily lives, about the problematic nature of being a basis for each other... to which there is no single or simple solution.

How can this "unification that isn't a unification" succeed?

It sounds as though you are arguing that only local particulars are authentic (the actual dyadic interactions which are everywhere going to be different and individual).

The general is identified with the inauthentic. So the global rules, the universal truths, Peircean thirdness, the laws of physics, the unified field theories, are all wrong as a basis of reality. There is only the local atomic particulars.

But you can't actually have the local without the global. You can't have "just the interactions" without the space and time that is necessary to separate them - to allow them to be particular. Atoms have to have voids to be atoms. It is incoherent to talk about events without having the contexts that allow them to be distinguishable as events.

Even in Heidegger's philosophy it seems, this dichotomy is inescapable. It is basic and fundamental. You need the inauthentic to ground the concept of the authentic. The authentic is particular and definite only in relation to what it is not.

And once you accept that the duality of a metaphysical dichotomy is basic, rather than the monad of either the particular, or the general, either the authentic or the inauthentic, then it is a short step to the triad of a developmental ontology where both the particular and the general then have to be unified within something else - a ground of naked potential such as the Apeiron or Vagueness.

Again, your argument wants to take local particular and individual interactions as the basis of reality. But to be able to distinguish even one end of an interaction from the other, a larger context is already implied (and so ontically required) in this very distinction.

 

[PhizzicsPhan]

I agree entirely with apeiron's #138 comment.

 

[PhizzicsPhan]

apeiron, responding to #137: I agree that at the most basic level natural loves jumps and I have argued that quantum theory needs to embrace quantized time as well as quantized matter. These quanta are apparently the brute facts of the universe upon which everything is built.

But beyond that level nature generally abhors jumps, particularly when we reach cell-based life. The growth of symbolic thought was indeed rapid from an evolutionary point of view, but it was hardly discontinuous. It was, rather, continuous each step of the way as far as we can tell.

So I'll amend my statement: "Nature abhors jumps except at the most fundamental quantum level; and she particularly abhors jumps once the level of cell-based life has been reached."