Panpsychism and the Problems of Modernity -- Part 1
Consciousness-ish and the Mind-Body Problem
“Both views, the materialistic as well as the spiritualistic, are metaphysical prejudices. It accords better with experience to suppose that living matter has a psychic aspect, and the psyche a physical aspect.”
— Carl Jung, Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies[1]
Caveat: I originally wrote this piece before Philip Goff published Why?: The Purpose of the Universe. Having now read that profound text, I am unsure whether much of what I have to say critically about Goff’s position in this series still holds water. I plan to revisit these articles in the near future.
The versions of panpsychism abroad today are well-placed attempts to address the central problem of modern philosophy of mind, and in some broad sense I am sympathetic toward this position (though with many caveats). In this first part of this series, I will only concern myself with how panpsychism does the job it was jerrymandered to do, and to that end it performs rather well. That’s all well and good, but there is a significant question as to the propriety of doing that job in the first place. The problems of modern philosophy of mind are the inevitable symptoms of the broad presuppositions of modernity, which are themselves deeply problematic on a grand scale, and I will argue in the next part of this series that panpsychism presses the confusions of modernity nearly to their logical conclusion. Before all that, however, I want to convey a sense of how panpsychism operates in its intended workspace.
Panpsychists present their position in terms of a rejection of what Hubert Drefuys and Charles Taylor call the dualist sorting: “there are bodily, extended things; and there are things which are not these, and so ‘mental,’ nonextended, perfectly non-physical; this comes with the mechanization of the world picture.”[2] On the one hand, the scientific revolution – the success of the Galilean framing of things – has saddled us with an entirely mechanized, non-intentional, and purely quantitative take on nature (at least that has long been the ideal), while, on the other hand, we are left with recalcitrant facts regarding all sorts of qualitative awareness and intentions. There is seemingly no place for the latter among the former, and we cannot have Galilean science getting hampered by the distractions of meaning and sentience. What are we to do? Dualism has been the going answer since the inception of modernity. Phillip Goff, who will serve as my representative among contemporary panpsychists, puts it thus:
Galileo’s universe was divided up into two radically different kinds of entity. On the one hand, there are material objects, which have only mathematical characteristics of size, shape, location, and motion. On the other hand, there are souls enjoying a rich variety of forms of sensory consciousness in response to the world.[3]
In other words, the great Faustian pact of the scientific revolution was to solve the problem of the ill-fitting facts of the mind (sentience and meaning) by kicking them out of the space governed by the new science and into the newly settled game preserve of consciousness. The pre-Galilean view saw nature as rife with qualitative attributes and meaning (purpose, intention, direction), just as sentience was then taken as one of the more interesting outgrowths of organic being. Now, in the Galilean era, nature is utterly voided of any meaning or intrinsic qualitative differences, while it is opposed by a shadow domain wherein mental properties (and even substances) may reside unscathed, so long as they mind their own business. These two worlds, body and mind (for Descartes) or the physical and non-physical (according to more recent tastes, and help yourself to whatever other of the myriad guises this distinction has taken), are supposed to be explanatorily and ontologically independent. One can help himself to all the mental and the physical he would like, since these are two utterly distinct ontologies. The goings on in the domain of consciousness can’t possibly interfere with quantitative science, and the new physics poses no threat to our introspective sense of our mental life. “Separate, but equal,” as it were. In short, the “discovery” of dualism, what I will call The Great Partition, safely sequestered the newly reconceived mental from the equally novel repackaging of nature by Galilean science. Maybe, so it was hoped, modernity could have its cake and eat it too.
I won’t rehearse the details of this quite familiar history, but almost immediately it was obvious that the Great Partitioning wasn’t going to keep the peace. Again, with Goff:
“So long as we follow Galileo in thinking (A) that natural science is essentially quantitative and (B) the qualitative cannot be explained in terms of the quantitative, then consciousness, as an essentially qualitative phenomenon, will be forever locked out of the arena of scientific understanding. Galileo’s error was to commit us to a theory of nature which entailed that consciousness was essentially and inevitably mysterious. In other words, Galileo created the problem of consciousness.” (Goff, Galileo’s Error, 21-22)
Of course, one might question why the fact something is “locked out of the arena of scientific understanding” implies that it is “inevitably mysterious.” Is modern science the only way to head off mystery? The affirmative answer is something many of us take as dubious, and one might also wonder whether something’s being mysterious necessarily poses a problem. Furthermore, one should likewise be deeply suspicious of any supposedly “separate but equal” partitioning. Such divisions are always end up favoring the interests of one side of the divide. I’ll leave all that for the next iteration of this series and grant the scientistic assumption in the background here.
Be that as it may, Goff, typical of the panpsychists, is correct to point out some serious difficulties in this vicinity. I’m going to move quickly here, as this is likely familiar territory. The central difficulty is that the Great Partition ignores the obvious fact that mind and body clearly do not go about their own business without bothering each other. There is more than a little black-market commerce transacting across the DMZ imposed the Great Partition. On the one hand, it’s undeniable that goings-on in the body have effects on goings-on in the mind (a bit too much cough syrup, and Smitty’s consciousness will go rather sideways), and happenings in the mind have effects on the body (Smitty’s intent to drink that cough syrup very plausibly played a role in the chain of events resulting in his currently unbalanced neurochemistry). There are plenty of people today prepared to deny the latter, but the practical impossibility of ignoring our sense of conscious agency places them under a ponderous burden of proof. Since we are abjuring mysteries and taking science as the only mystery-stopper, there must be some explanation of this relationship in terms acceptable to the bodily/physical side of The Great Partition, i.e., however we figure an account of the mind-body (brain) relation, it must leave nature entirely to the new science.
One could bite the bullet and be an interactive substance dualist, arguing that even though body and mind are essentially contradictory according to the Great Partition, they do somehow interact, through special physical-to-nonphysical “pushing” and “pulling” that goes on between the two domains in the brain. A lot of excruciatingly burdensome problems have been raised over the centuries for interactive dualism, but I don’t see any of them as non-negotiable dealbreakers. Nevertheless, I am not sanguine about interactive dualism; the reason being that as the development of the physical side of The Great Partition has been progressively articulated by Galilean science, it seems less likely that there are any “gaps” in which the non-physical side could intervene. There doesn’t appear to be work left for a non-physical mind to do once all the prior physical factors have obtained. Goff puts this point well:
“It’s hard to believe that such anomalous events would not show in our neuroscience. There would be all kinds of things going on in the brain for which we had no neuroscientific explanation, precisely because they were caused by the interventions of the nonphysical mind. As we examined the brain, we would find “gaps” in the chains of physical causation where the mind had made a change in the brain . . ., if a nonphysical mind intervened regularly in the brain, then its presence would be obvious, because there would be a multitude of happenings in the brain each of which lacked a physical cause. The problem for the dualist is that we don’t seem to find anomalous events in the brain.” (Goff, Galileo’s Error, 39)
The point is that if the mind is causing things to happen in the brain, then we would expect there to be occurrences in the brain that lacked sufficient causes by prior physical events, but that doesn’t seem to be the case, at least so far as we can tell. Maybe some “gap” will eventually manifest itself, but the history of “. . . from the gaps” arguments is famously tragic. This is all a very long story to tell, and I am not going to wade any deeper into those waters, since I’m in agreement here with Goff, and he is my representative panpsychist.[4]
The most popular way to deal with the mind-body problem, at least in the Anglo-American university, is to adopt a version of materialism. On this story, after some clever reflections on the notion of identity, we can suppose that the mental and the physical (as localized in the brain) really are just one and the same thing, in the same way that water is H2O, or maybe less ambitiously in the way that Paris is the capital of the Fifth Republic. Either way, mental talk isn’t referring to anything in addition to what is found in the current complete physical description of the universe. We are entirely on the bodily side of The Great Partition because it turns out there is only one side, which can be described in flowery, mental terms in addition to the rigorous idiom of science. Since there is no real question of how Paris interacts with the capital of the Fifth Republic (the way events happened to turn out, they are the same thing), there is likewise no real question of how Smitty’s mind and brain interact. On this proposal, we make sense of the Great Partition basically as two ways of talking about one and same thing, and being the same thing is a basically intelligible relation. What could be more transparent? Since Galilean science enjoys a broader explanatory power (supposedly ranging over everything), it is privileged in the sense that we say the mind just is the brain (the physical localized in the skull), rather than vice versa. Nobody doubts there is a close correlation between the mind and the happenings in the brain, and the hypothesis that they are the very same thing has the cardinal virtue of simplicity.
Materialism, however, is perennially plagued by the stubborn difference between the mental and physical. First and foremost, according to The Great Partition, body and mind are supposedly essential contradictories, defined by their absolute opposition. To be a mind is not to be a body, to be a body is not to be a mind, and everything must fall into one of these categories. The exhaustive exclusion was what was supposed to keep the peace between the new science and the facts of mental life. How they can be revealed as being the very same thing is rather puzzling, if not outright incoherent. As Goff says, “Materialists who claim both that reality can be exhaustively captured in the quantitative language of physical science and that there is a quality-rich consciousness contradict themselves” (Goff, Galileo’s Error, 68). A bit less ambitiously (though I think Goff is correct on this point, and we will return to it later), from the beginning with Descartes, it has been obvious that one can conceive of minds without bodies and bodies without minds, and more recent thought experiments (zombies, incarcerated savant neuroscientists, bats on the hunt, etc.) only pile on that intuition. My personal favorite is Thomas Nagel’s underappreciated insight that if you lick my brain while I’m eating chocolate, you won’t taste chocolate. Clearly, there is a taste of chocolate, but it’s not the very same thing as the activity in the brain.[5] Thus, the claim that minds and brains (or even their properties and processes) are one the same thing as demanded by materialism is dubious. Come what may, even an exhaustive description of the physical side of the Great Partition leaves something undeniable out of the picture.[6] There is, indeed, a very hard problem of consciousness, and it will not be made to go away by introducing subtle notions of identity.
Of course, we could, at this late date of neuroscientific progress, propose jettisoning the mental, just as psychiatry and internal medicine no longer hobble themselves with demons or bad humours. No sense worrying about interacting with what does not exist, and the advances of neuroscience are showing us that the entire mental side of the Great Partition can go the way of witches, fairies, and all its other superstitiously suggested forefathers. Although pragmatically useful in their day, we may safely disabuse ourselves of these outdated theories of what is going on behind the scenes now that we have the real story. All of that, however, is hard to swallow. First, whatever one might say about witches and demons, it’s far from clear the mental side of the Great Partition is a theory or hypothesis as opposed to something we directly experience. Do you really posit the taste of your morning coffee as a hypothetical explanation of your behavior or do you simply experience it? It is hard to take the latter perfectly seriously (I certainly don’t infer the taste from some other datum), so it is likewise difficult to take seriously that a neuroscientific explanation is going to replace that taste with some entirely quantitative description as part of a better confirmed theory. Maybe the neuroscientific description tells us what causes the taste, but that isn’t how I find out about the taste. For lack of a better phrase, I just taste it, and no scientific story, however sound, is going to make that experience disposable. What’s more, there is a famous worry whether one can coherently believe that the mental is an illusion. Illusions are themselves mental goings on, so the claim that the mental is an illusion would seem to imply that there are mental states after all. It cannot be an illusion that there are illusions, so we cannot rid ourselves of the mental by decrying it as illusory.
It looks like there is no way of getting around the Great Partition by claiming there is happy commerce between the two domains (interactive dualism), collapsing the one side into the other (materialism), or resolutely ignoring what can plainly be seen on the far side of the physical boarder (illusionism). All, however, may not be lost. Maybe, though they are essentially distinct, the mental and the physical are related by some special causal or explanatory relation, call it emergence. Our problem is that minds and brains are fundamentally different kinds of things, such that the one (the mind) has properties (sentience and meaning) that are supposedly utterly absent in the other, and yet we wish to explain the mind in terms of the brain. It’s easy to explain the motion of one entity in terms of another, when the first is itself in motion. There’s no problem getting another A from a prior A, but, how does one get A from non-A? Consider a box constructed from plywood and screws. The materials certainly don’t have the property of containability, but the box does. Is there a mystery here regarding how we get the containable from the non-containable? No! It’s easy to see that the structure of the box does all the work. Get plywood and screws, none of which themselves have intrinsic containability, together in the right sort of structural relationship, and you will get plenty containablity with complete intelligibility. There is nothing obscure in the suggestion that containability emerges from the structuring of the plywood and screws. The point is that organization or structure can bring about attributes that we do not find among the materials that are so structured.
We might then suppose the following analogy: containability is to structured plywood and screws as sentience and meaning are to organized neurons, i.e., under the appropriate conditions of organization, such properties can emerge from such materials. The box isn’t the very same thing as its materials (it has distinct essential properties like containability), though it is completely explained by the structural organization of the materials. Likewise, the emergentist might claim, the mind is non-illusory and not the very same thing as the brain, but it is a product of the organization of the brain. Thus, we maintain the Great Partition, but the channel of commerce between the two sides is perfectly transparent (even though it may be only a one-way thoroughfare). Emergence is easy to see in the case of containability (a box is a simple arrangement), but it is harder to see in the case of the mind because of the dazzling complexity of the brain from which the mind emerges. Nevertheless, we are assured we can trust that as neuroscience advances this emergence relation will become far less opaque too.
I have no problems with emergence, even in cases wherein the emergent entity is vastly different from its materials and has autonomous effects.[7] Nevertheless, the analogy of emergence applied to the mind and the brain is strained. In the case of the box, it is transparent how the non-containability of the materials can explain the containability of the box. The hardness of the plywood, the bindingness of the screws, and their structural organization transparently explain the containability of the box. Notice that all three factors are necessary to this explanation. What about neurons, or their parts, or the parts of their parts, etc., sheds any light on how we get the mental? Are there any attributes had by these materials (from neurons down to the quarks) that shed any light whatsoever as to why a certain structural arrangement would give rise to sentience and meaning? For all we can imagine, the answer is “none.” You can organize and structure a pile of sand all you want, but without adding some further element with containing-related properties, you won’t get containablity. In short, organization and structure are not enough to account for emergence. We also need some sense of how the properties of the materials explain the emergent entity through the structuring relation. There is nothing about the chemicals exchanging along the membranes of neurons that sheds any light on sentience and meaning, however much organization we add to the picture. Of course, it is possible that someday science will find these yet unknown properties of the materials of the brain, but that strains credulity. Betting on a future scientific revolution is not a reasonable strategy, and promissory note naturalism is no less odious than mind of the gaps dualism.[8]
That’s all very quick, and I’m sure I’ve done little more than offend the honest and diligent proponents of all these views on how to address the consequences of the Great Partition.[9] Suffice it to say, however, the panpsychist is well within her rights to have had enough of the mind body problem, and correctly questions the wisdom of the Great Partition in the first place. I applaud the diagnosis of “Galileo’s error.” More on that later, but for now, consider a case of non-controversial emergence: a crowd of people in a cafeteria all speaking quietly at their tables, but resulting in a great cacophonous ruckus. We have all had this experience, and it’s not terribly mysterious how it works. Even though there is no structuring principle organizing the quiet conversations, the loud ruckus emerges. That’s not surprising at all, because we started by inputting a bunch of sort-of-louds or proto-louds, i.e., a quiet conversation is on the scale of loudness. Thus, this case is not the emergence of A from non-A, but the emergence of A from A-ish, and that is perfectly intelligible. None of the grains in a giant salt pile is heavy, though they are all heavy-ish. Thus, the emergence of the heaviness of the pile from the additive presence of the aggregated grains is a fine explanation.
What if it turned out that the basic physical building blocks of the universe (the fabled ground floor particles) were conscious-ish? Just as these particles have velocities, spins, charges, etc., suppose they also have some very basic properties on the scale of consciousness (however difficult the phenomenology of quasi-consciousness might be for us to imagine). We don’t need to account for why electrons have negative charges, because that is their essential property, and on this view the same goes for their quasi-conscious attributes. In that case, one might argue that the emergence of consciousness in humans and other higher-animals is not so obscure, as everything, down to the quarks, is conscious-ish. It’s no wonder that when you put a great many (billions) of conscious-ish entities together, that you get a big, full-blown output of bona fide consciousness. We’re only getting A from A-ish, and that’s not in the least dodgy.
Does this sort of additive emergence amount to the saving grace of the Great Partition? Not quite. We don’t want just any “cacophonous” pile of quasi-conscious quarks amounting to full-blown consciousness. The gripe that one of my socks might turn-out to have sentience and meaning has become a standard trope in this debate, and no polite modernist wants piles of sand or folding chairs counting as minded beings. Prima facie, the worry here is the supposed absurdity of conscious footwear, but I think there is something deeper in this complaint that goes to the heart of the promise of modernity. Part of the appeal of the Great Partition is a thoroughly disenchanted nature, a physical universe that has been spared the burden of consciousness, which we may then manipulate and consume with our post-Galilean technology with a clear conscience. We can’t broker a deal for solving the mind-body problem that infects pure nature with so much pesky consciousness. That was part of the point of breaking things up into dualism – nature and mind were safely sequestered from interfering with each other. We don’t want overly fastidious qualms about qualitative differences and meanings interfering with our technological domination of nature, so we can’t tolerate mindedness popping up everywhere in nature.
Moreover, since the Great Partition, we have grown accustomed to thinking of our “selves” (now taken exclusively as minds) as autonomous with respect to nature. That is, we take the self as something utterly distinct and untethered from any external natural order. We humans (or human minds) have a special sort of subjective status that can only be accessed “inwardly,” and that has nothing to do with the objective transactions of nature. Since the Great Partition, sentience and meaning have been relegated to explanatory irrelevance, but for the cost of exile the mind has been liberated from the authority of nature. Thus, both our technological praxis and sense of humanistic liberation presuppose a significant partition between nature and mind. Whichever way we deal with the mind-body problem, modernity demands that nature and mind cannot end up too tightly bound such that we lose this dual-liberation of nature from mind and mind from nature.
At this point the cleverness of recent versions of panpsychism comes into view: they combine both versions of emergentism to solve the mind-body problem while keeping nature and mind more or less neatly partitioned (though less so than maybe many naturalists would prefer). Here is how Goff articulates the position:
[A] “The panpsychist aspires to explain the complex consciousness of human and animal brains in terms of simple forms of consciousness, simple forms of consciousness that are postulated to exist as fundamental aspects of matter.” (Goff, Galileo’s Error, 115)
[B] “. . . panpsychists tend not to think that literally everything is conscious. They believe that the fundamental constituents of the physical world are conscious, but they need not believe that every random arrangement of conscious particles results in something that is conscious in its own right. Most panpsychists will deny that your socks are conscious, while asserting that they are ultimately composed of things that are conscious.” (Goff, Galileo’s Error, 113)
[C] “But it is possible that the light of consciousness never switches off entirely, but rather fades as organic complexity reduces, through flies, insects, plants, bacteria and amoeba. For the panpsychist, this fading-while-never-turning-off continuum further extends into inorganic matter, with fundamental entities – perhaps electrons and quarks – possessing extremely rudimentary forms of consciousness, to reflect their extremely simple nature.” (Goff, Galileo’s Error, 114).
In [A] we are given an A from A-ish story about the emergence of consciousness from matter. Supposing that the quarks and electrons are conscious-ish, it’s not surprising to find that sufficiently aggregated subatomic particles can cross the threshold to full-blown sentience and meaning. With [B] Goff assures any scoffers that this need not commit the panpsychist to the horror of full-blown conscious socks, or even quasi-conscious socks as opposed to their parts,[10] because in [C] he ties the level of consciousness in an aggregate to its level of structural complexity and organization. Goff goes on to offer an interesting and empirically supported account of the complexity that moves mere aggregates of conscious-ish entities to full-blown consciousness in terms of integrated information theory (see Goff, Galileo’s Error, 138-139 and 165-169), but I will not get into those details here, as I do not plan to offer any objections to Goff’s account in this respect.[11]
The result is a somewhat weakened partition, since consciousness-ish (which presumably entails sentience-ish and intentionality-ish) saturates nature at the most basic levels. Nevertheless, a Near Enough Partition can be salvaged, because we can safely localize the full-blown consciousness that we are really worried about to those rare places in the grand scheme of the universe where the informational integration crosses a threshold of complexity. Thus, though the border will now be a matter of perpetual dispute, there is a workable divide between mind and nature (or maybe we should say the rest of nature). Moreover, the mind-body problem seems to be dissolved, as we now have a satisfying account of how the physical can account for the mental – the conjunction of structural and quasi-intrinsic emergence, both of which are quite plausible based on common sense examples. Of course, one might argue that we don’t have a shred of direct evidence for the consciousness-ish of fundamental particles, but that is not necessarily a worry. If we are committed to the complete intelligibility of things and the dualist sorting, along with the dead-end status of all the other available options for solving the problems raised by that conjunction, then the panpsychist has traction for a reasonably strong inference to the best explanation.[12]
Thus, the panpsychist relieves us of the mind-body problem while preserving a Near Enough Partition allowing for the free play of technological manipulation and our interpretation of ourselves unfettered by the natural order (our bona fide consciousness “in here” is still distinct and autonomous from all the conscious-ish entities or lesser organized subjectivities “out there”), and that is all anyone ever wanted from modernity. Nature has been sufficiently disenchanted, even if panpsychism pushes to the outer edge of spookiness allowed in the polite circles of contemporary naturalism.
In fairness to Goff, he is quite worried about the nihilistic and destructive consequences of modern disenchantment (see Galileo’s Error, 205-217). Here too we are fellow travelers, though I will argue in the next parts of this series that panpsychism such as Goff’s fails to address these problems, and possibly makes them worse.
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[1] C.G. Jung, Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky (Princeton, 2015), 105.
[2] Hubert Dreyfus and Charles Taylor, Retrieving Realism (Harvard, 2015).
[3] Phillip Goeff, Galileo’s Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness (Vintage, 2019), 18. I have taken Goff as my foil since he is among panpsychists the most historically conscious to the problem I will raise and offers the most plausible version of the theory. Galileo’s Error, for my money, is the best available entry point into this debate and a superb introduction to contemporary Anglo-American philosophy of mind. For other influential treatments of panpsychism, see also Galen Strawson, Real Materialism (Oxford, 2008) and Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False (Oxford, 2012).
[4] I think the best attempt to deal with the “gaps” problem is E.J. Lowe’s Personal Agency: The Metaphysics of Mind and Action (Oxford, 2008), and I deal with it at some length in Mind, Matter, and Nature (CUA, 2013).
[5] See Nagel’s What Does It All Mean? (Oxford, 1987).
[6] I take up this issue in some detail in “The Evolution of Suffering, Epiphenomenalism, and the Phenomenon on Life,” Religions, 2021: https://www.mdpi.com/2077-1444/12/9/687/htm
[7] See Graham Harman’s brilliant defense of the ontological standing of the Dutch East India Company in Immaterialism (Polity, 2017).
[8] See Nagel, Mind and Cosmos on this point.
[9] For a better attempt at a fair treatment, see my Mind, Matter, and Nature (CUA, 2013).
[10] One wonders why conscious socks is odious, but quasi-conscious sock parts is not.
[11] Edward Feser offers a very interesting critique of the Goff’s panpsychism concerning standard issues in the philosophy of mind and physics. See Feser, Problems for Goff’s Panpsychism: http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2022/07/problems-for-goffs-panpsychism.html. My concerns to follow are not aimed at Goff’s panpsychism in particular, so I’ll leave it to those two fellows to sort this out. For an account of emergence in terms of the information richness of organized conscious-ish entities (and one that leaves nature quite enchanted!) see Rupert Sheldrake, ”Is the Sun Conscous?,” The Journal of Consciousness Studies (2021): https://www.sheldrake.org/files/pdfs/papers/Is_the_Sun_Conscious.pdf. For a critic of panpsychism based on the composition problem, see Bernardo Kastrup, “The Universe in Consciousness,” Journal of Consciousness Studies (2018): https://www.imprint.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Kastrup_Open_Access.pdf.
[12] Goff is also serious about coming up with testable hypotheses that will serve put his panpsychism up against the force of scientific evidence.