Panpsychism and the Problems of Modernity - Part 3
Instrumentalism and Disenchantment
“Then all of this strange land belongs to him?” ‘No indeed! she answered, and her smile faded. “That would indeed be a burden,’ she added in a low voice, as if to herself. ‘The trees and the grasses and all the things growing or living in the land belong to themselves. Tom Bombadil is the Master. No one has ever caught old Tom walking in the forest, wading in the water, leaping on the hill-tops under light and shadow. He has no fear. Tom Bombadil is master.”
— Goldberry (The Fellowship of the Ring, 155)
“Modern scientific philosophy may well begin with the notion of the two substances, res cogitans and res extensa – but as the extended matter becomes comprehensible in mathematical equations which, translated into technology, ‘remake’ this matter, the res extensa loses its character as independent substance.”
— Hubert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (p. 152)[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.
In the first episode of this series (see also the discussion on Philosophy for the People), I laid out a case for panpsychism as the best available resolution to the tension between two of the primary assumptions of modernity, i.e., the partitioning of the mental from the physical and the presumption of the (preferably) scientific intelligibility of nature. If the mental is utterly distinct from nature, then making any sense of the obvious interplay between the brain and the mind is a perplexity, and the preference to explain the mental through the physical is no less chimerical. The panpsychist argues that intelligibility can be maintained by positing consciousness-ish among the essential properties of basic physical particles. Since rudimentary subjectivity is constitutive of the basic physical building blocks, it is no great mystery how higher levels of organization (especially those structures resulting in integrated information) can account for bona-fide consciousness. Thus, by settling for a Near Enough Partition (in place of the original Great Partition that strictly voided nature of subjectivity), the panpsychist maintains the autonomy of the (full-blown) mental and the (merely conscious-ish) physical, without interfering with the supremacy of modern science.
With the case for panpsychism in place, I turned in the second episode of this series (see the discussion on Philosophy for the People) to a metaphysical critique of panpsychism. When pressed to give an account of the relation of negative charge and consciousness-ish to the electron which supposedly has them both as essential properties, the panpsychist is forced to choose between either a bundle theory or substance theory account. In light of a Hegelian analysis of oppositionally defined terms, we can see that both stories run afoul of the conjunction of the dualist sorting and the assumed intelligibility of the world, neither of which the panpsychist is in a position to give up. Thus, on narrowly metaphysical grounds, panpsychism is in significant trouble.
In this third and (maybe) final part of the series (here is a discussion of this essay on Philosophy for the People), I am going to raise a line of criticism that situates panpsychism within a much broader philosophical and cultural landscape. Though I used Phillip Goff’s position in Galileo’s Error as a representative or generic version of panpsychism when making the case for the view (because I take Goff’s to be the most plausible and closest to many of my own views), the criticisms I made in the sequel were not aimed at his stance in particular. The Hegelian argument has significant traction against any of the contemporary versions of panpsychism (along with any other position hoping to couple the dualist sorting with a commitment to ultimate intelligibility).[2] Now, however, in order to wade into these deeper cultural waters, I return to Goff’s presentation of panpsychism in particular. One of the most interesting moments in Galileo’s Error comes in the closing chapter, “Consciousness and the Meaning of Life,” wherein Goff deploys his version of panpsychism in the service of humane and existentially significant concerns ranging beyond formal philosophical fretting over the mind-body problem. Though his delving into the philosophy of religion and treatment of the free will debate are worthy of serious discussion (I’m in almost wholehearted agreement with much of what Goff has to say regarding the latter), I am mostly interested in Goff’s proposal of panpsychism as a remedy for such distinctively modern maladies as the instrumentalization of nature and the “disenchantment of the world.” I agree with Goff regarding the gravity of these manifestations of the modern predicament, but after discussing his confrontation with them, I will argue that panpsychism is far from up to this task of providing a way out. We will see that Goff (though he is not distinctive among contemporaries in this way) is confused regarding the actual character of instrumentalization and disenchantment, and this misdiagnosis leaves panpsychism inept in its proposed cultural task, despite Goff’s well-intentioned efforts. Once again, these failings are not really so much Goff’s own as they are common symptoms of the distinctive myopies of contemporary philosophy.
Goff makes the familiar (and I believe correct) connection between the dualist sorting and the instrumentalism and indifference that hamper efforts to address the climate crisis. Certainly, Goff is not claiming that such insalubrious attitudes toward nature are logically entailed by the dualist sorting. A reflective Cartesian could honestly say “I am claiming nothing of the sort!” but that misses the point. Rather, these attitudes are background biases in a culture wherein a radical break between the mental and the physical is an unquestioned practical presumption. Dualism, even among those claiming to be materialists (who nevertheless define their ontology in terms of the opposition between the physical and the non-physical, even while claiming the latter category is empty), quietly goads us toward unconcern for anything outside of consciousness. Goff articulates two particularly injurious attitudes suggested by the Great Partition:
“Dualism can create an unhealthy relationship with nature in at least two respects. [A] Firstly, it creates a sense of separation. Dualism implies that, as an immaterial mind, I am a radically different kind of thing from the mechanistic world I inhabit. Ontologically speaking, I have nothing in common with a tree. There is no real kinship with nature if dualism is true. Secondly, dualism can imply that nature has no value in and of itself. If nature is wholly mechanistic, then it has value only in terms of what it can do for us, either by maintaining our survival or by creating pleasurable experiences for us when we take it in with our senses. There is a worry that dualist thought can encourage the idea that nature is to be used rather than respected as something of value in its own right” (Goff, Galileo’s Error, 190, author’s emphasis).
On the one hand, [A] dualism sows the seeds of alienation by giving us a sense of being utterly distinct form nature; we (or our “minds” at any rate) are mental substances defined in terms of consciousness, whereas all the rest is merely mindless, mechanistically operating, and subjectivity-free matter. Part of the problem is that the dualist sorting obscures any significant sense of solidarity we might have with a natural world that is ontologically alien. Why would we care very much what goes on “out there” in that foreign land? Moreover, if we see ourselves as enclosed on our own private islands of consciousness, surrounded by oceans devoid of subjectivity, it is difficult even to envision grounds for solidarity among other conscious beings. As Goff puts it, “in the dualist worldview, we conscious creatures . . . are profoundly isolated from each other, housed as we are in this unfeeling mechanism of the physical world” (Goff, Galileo’s Error, 190-191). Thus, the dualist sorting tempts us with solipsism and narcissism on both the individual and species scales. Goff is on the mark to claim that the “sense of a unified, interdependent ecosystem that comes naturally to us when we engage with nature does not fit with the dualism that, so long as we construe nature as purely physical, we cannot but believe” (Goff, Galileo’s Error, 191), and such solipsistic alienation from the world is not surprisingly linked to noxious social and environmental consequences. Narcissistic self-obsession on the part of the dominant species on the planet is very bad news for those beings and everything else they might get their hands on.
On the other hand, [B] dualism, since it voids nature of consciousness, “tells us nature is nothing more than a complex mechanism,” and it “is hard to feel any genuine warmth for a natural world so conceived” (Goff, Galileo’s Error, 190). Since the intrinsic-value-bestowing property (as Goff assumes) is conscious subjectivity, inasmuch as we think of nature as subjectivity-free, it then seems we are free to do with the physical world as we please. For Goff, a nature without consciousness would have only instrumental value, i.e., its moral standing is entirely derivative from its effects on our subjectivity, so the only moral limits on our treatment of nature will be those stemming from the dictates of our survival and whimsy. Moreover, the coupling of these attitudes is most definitely dangerous – alienated aloofness and a sense that value depends on little more than our whims and interests puts almost nothing beyond the pale when it comes to the treatment of nature (including natural human bodies)!
Goff calls our attention to another sense in which the dualist sorting “can lead to a sense of alienation” when he invokes Weber’s notion of the disenchantment of the world:
“We seem to have nothing in common with the universe, no real home within it. The ‘big picture’ story of the universe is one of insentient and meaningless physical processes, from which we are a senseless aberration. In the sense of a place in the universe, we have only consumerism and the endless quest for economic growth to make sense of our lives.” (Goff, Galileo’s Error, 216)
In other words, the mechanization and scientism (though Goff does not seem to recognize the latter as a culprit) that comes along with the dualist sorting leads us to think of ourselves as being unintended evolutionary biproducts of a blind and meaningless universe; the proverbial tale told by a fool saying nothing at all. As we have come to see nature as increasingly disenchanted, which for Goff simply means that the universe outside of us is “insentient,” we slouch into nihilism. Since we, as conscious beings, have no fit in this unconscious universe, we conjure the simulacrum of meaning by structuring our lives around self-destructive consumption and insatiable economic acquisitiveness. Even worse, as we increasingly see ourselves on a global scale, our traditional forms of life “come to be seen as empty of meaning, leading to relativism or even nihilism,” because without “the meaningful structures once given by traditional society, are left with nothing but mechanistic nature and meaningless abyss of empty space” (Goff, Galileo’s Error, 217). In other words, we used to find homes for ourselves in our cultures and religions, but modernity has made it extremely difficult for reflective people to take those institutions seriously, as they are supposedly just more products of the blind universal machine. Though I will disagree with Goff’s account of disenchantment primarily in terms of expunging nature of consciousness, I could not agree more with his diagnosis of it as the central cause of contemporary nihilism. In short, the disenchantment of nature brought on by the dualist sorting has led us down a garden path of despair that ruins the traditional institutions that once gave our lives direction, while addicting us to the anesthetizing pseudo-enchantments of consumption and acquisition.
Though he is not claiming to hold a panacea, Goff argues that panpsychism can make significant contributions to the resolution of these problems. First, with respect to instrumentalism and solipsism, Goff claims that:
“Panpsychism has the potential to transform our relationship with the natural world. If panpsychism is true, the rain forest is teeming with consciousness. As conscious entities, trees have value in their own right . . . For a child raised in a panpsychist worldview, hugging a conscious tree could be as natural as stroking a cat . . . it’s reasonable to suppose that children raised in a panpsychist culture would have a much closer relationship with nature and invest a great deal more value in its continued existence.” (Goff, Galileo’s Error, 191)
Goff sees moral standing as tied to the degree of subjective consciousness possessed by a particular substance, and he is not alone in this assumption. His panpsychism entails that all of nature as suffused with subjectivity, from the consciousness-ish of sub-atomic particles to the full-blown consciousness of higher animals, depending on the degree of integrated information in an organic structure. Thus, nature is likewise inhabited by far more beings with moral standing than imagined by standard versions of materialism or dualism. Thus, the limits of intrinsic (as opposed to instrumental) boundaries are far broader than one might have thought, encompassing even plants that have sufficiently sophisticated organizational structures. The destruction of even some plants (or systems of plants) will then not be immune from moral consideration. Moreover, we are not radically other with respect to nature, nor are we isolated for our non-conscious bodies, but moments in an ecological whole composed of vast multitudes of conscious beings. In short, Goff proposes that panpsychism does much to overcome the compartmentalization of consciousness behind our indifference to and alienation from the natural world and each other.
Similarly, Goff is optimistic about the contribution panpsychism can make to reversing the nihilistic trend that has steadily gained momentum since the Galileo’s Great Partitioning:
“Panpsychism offers a way of ‘re-enchanting’ the universe. On the panpsychist view, the universe is like us; we belong to it. We need not live exclusively in the human realm, ever more diluted by globalization and consumerist capitalism. We can live in nature, in the universe. We can let go of nation and tribe, happy in the knowledge that there is a universe that welcomes us. My hope is that panpsychism can help humans once again to feel that they have a place in the universe. At home in the cosmos, we might begin to dream about – and perhaps make – a better world.” (Goff, Galileo’s Error, 217, author’s emphasis)
Goff believes that the universe can be re-enchanted because panpsychism returns sentience back to its native land – everywhere! It turns out that we are at home in the universe after all because it is “like us.” The Great Partition obscured the ubiquity of consciousness, but that was only the temporary price to be paid for ridding ourselves of superstition. Lest we throw the baby out with the bath water, the panpsychist’s Near Enough Partition returns the “spirits” to nature, so that we can once again find satisfaction and meaning by accepting our place in a world of sentience among other creatures with moral standing. In other words, panpsychism returns the fairies to the hedgerows that fascinated our quaint pre-modern ancestors, but in a scientifically respectable manner. The meaningfulness of our lives does not require traditional institutions or the delusion that the world was made for us, once we rightly understand that the universe is itself a community of morally significant beings in virtue of our the universal distribution of consciousness (to some degree or other). On Goff’s view, we can find meaning without appealing to a supernatural origin of the world or by clinging to the fellowship of “nation and tribe,” because we can now find fellowship with nature writ large.
I cannot applaud more heartily a philosopher of mind attempting to apply the results of his technical reflections to issues of truly existential importance. Philosophy of mind too readily relegates itself to conceptual parlor tricks, science fiction fantasy, and just-so stories rigged to preserve theories otherwise odious to common sense, without taking the time to articulate the implications that the discipline obviously holds for our self-understanding. Like Goff, I too attempt to make-up for this academic indifference to our human anxieties in Thinking about Thinking: Mind and Meaning in the Era of Technological Nihilism. For these reasons I want to express admiration for what he is up to in the final chapter of Galileo’s Error, before I get down to critical business. That being said, I have serious reservations regarding Goff’s attempts to enlist panpsychism in the struggle against solipsistic instrumentalism and the nihilism brought on by disenchantment. In the former case, I argue that Goff’s panpsychic case for the moral standing of a broader swath of nature is parasitic on the dualist sorting (though only “near enough,” Goff still recommends a partition), which preserves some of the very same morally dubious attitudes he rightly wishes to exorcise. In the latter case, I argue that Goff confuses disenchantment and demythologization. This confusion blocks the pathway out of nihilism that Goff hopes panpsychism might provide.
The dualist sorting of the Great Partition draws an absolute line between the physical and the mental. If one adds the assumption that sentience (consciousness) is the mark of moral standing, then we can use the Great Partition easily to sort those beings possessing intrinsic worth from those that have merely instrumental value. Thus, for standard dualism, human minds (though maybe not bodies!) and possibly some non-human animal minds have intrinsic moral worth, but as far as the rest of the world stands, anything goes subject to our pleasures and needs. The Near Enough Partition of panpsychism complicates (ambiguates) the dualist sorting, but it doesn’t get rid of it. All of nature is conscious-ish (at least the ultimate constituents of every aggregated entity have rudimentary sentience), but only certain pockets of highly organized informational integration have bona fide consciousness, i.e., human beings, animals, sophisticated plants, forests, etc.[3] We can’t seriously say that consciousness-ish is sufficient for moral standing (we need to eat something!), so the only option is to argue that moral value depends on the degree to which something approaches bona fide consciousness. Moreover, I take it that the standard for bona fide consciousness will end up being (at least for practical purposes) the sort of self-consciousness we find in adult human beings. Thus, we are yet left with a sorting of beings into broad groups of those very much like us and those that are not so much like us, and at the edges there will be ambiguity and controversy. Maybe it’s easy to recognize the redwood forest as like us, but it’s hard to say what we should do with the rows of Douglas Firs at the Christmas tree farm. Moreover, the degree to which something is or is not like us marks a corresponding difference for its moral value, i.e., the degree to which something is unlike us (taken as possessors of bona fide consciousness) is the degree to which it can be treated instrumentally. Maybe we need to give consideration to the Redwoods, but we can act with impunity on the Christmas trees haphazardly arranged among the plastic reindeer and snowmen in Walmart parking lot.
One wonders then how far panpsychism goes toward de-instrumentalizing our stance toward nature. No doubt, Goff’s position would push the borders of Mordor back beyond the Fangorn Forest, but we are nevertheless left with license to do as we will to what is not like us. Goff’s intentions are nothing but noble, but any talk of valuing something or someone to the degree that it is “like us” is alarming. The debate among 16th-century Spanish scholastics and power brokers over the propriety of the enslavement of the native people of the new continent was really a disputed question over whether such “animals” were sufficiently “like us” (Europeans) who possess bona fide consciousness to be spared oppression and genocide. We could produce many examples of these “like us” determinations that should be seen now as horrific. Moreover, decisions about something’s status as “like us” often seem convenient and arbitrary. I hate to indulge caricature (and if I am wrong, I apologize), but I suspect that Goff would see the Redwoods as sufficiently like us to have strong moral standing, while denying that status to unborn human children. (By the way, I think this accusation of arbitrariness can run frequently in the other direction too!) In any event, the point is that Goff’s panpsychism still sorts the world into two categories, those with intrinsic value and those with instrumental value, and that determination is made based on something’s similarity to us. Certainly, he has extended the circle of moral consideration in a constructive manner, but this way of approaching the issue reiterates some of the greatest ills of instrumentalist thinking.
Furthermore, many of us worry not just about the actual “body count” among the creatures of the Earth (though that is a grave concern), but the attitude of technological manipulation and domination toward nature that dominates our thought whatever its consequences. Goff’s panpsychism does not restore anything like a sense of gratitude or debt for the mere fact of creation (leaving aside how literally one takes that term), but justifies the value of our fellow denizens of the world in terms of their likeness to us. The panpsychist can still operate under the delusion that “man is the measure of things,” even though she has come to see more things as “men” in a scientifically respectably re-enchanted world suffused with consciousness-ish. This “solution” is only an expression of the deep origin of the problem, as it puts the burden of proof on nature to justify its moral standing to us in terms of a likeness to our consciousness. Goff’s panpsychism ascribes value to nature only inasmuch as it bears our likeness and image. There is no sense of a default reverence for nature, but merely a lowering of the standard for entering the protected circle; and yet those standards must be met. He wants reverence for nature, but he attempts to ground it in a way that’s amenable to Enlightenment humanism. Goff is acutely aware of the problems provoked by the Copernican Revolution that Galileo tried to sweep aside with his great error, though he falls unwittingly into Kant’s second “Copernican Revolution” and sees human consciousness as the measure of value. That is not reverence or respect, cherishing or fellowship, but narcissistic self-indulgence on a cosmic scale.[4] Whether something has intrinsic value may have nothing to do with whether it is at all like us.
Let’s turn now to the disenchantment of the world. As I mention above, I agree with Goff that disenchant is one of the seeds of our nihilism, though I am about to argue that he mischaracterizes it to the detriment of his proposal of panpsychism as a solution. Consider the following famous remarks from Max Weber, who did the most to make the notion of disenchantment central to the analysis of modernity:
“It means that in principle, then, we are not ruled by mysterious, unpredictable forces, but on the contrary, we can in principle control everything by means of calculation. That in turn means the disenchantment of the world. Unlike the savage for whom such forces existed, we need no longer have recourse to magic in order to control spirits or pray to them. Instead, technology and calculation achieve our ends. This is the primary meaning of the process of intellectualization.” (Weber, “Science as Vocation,” in The Vocations Lectures (Hackett, 2014), 13).
Here, Weber highlights what he thinks of as the upside of disenchantment, i.e., we need not consult anything occult in determining what we can and cannot do with nature. We have the technological power to make nature play by our rules (at least we are powerful enough to afford ourselves that illusion for a while), and we don’t need to ask the permission of any spirits to do so. There is, however, a downside:
“All natural scientists provide us with answers to the question: what should we do if we wish to make use of technology to control life? But whether we wish, or ought to control it through technology, and whether it ultimately makes any sense to do so, is something that we prefer to leave open or else take as given.” (Weber, “Science as Vocation,” 18)
That is, the problem of disenchantment for Weber is not only that we don’t find any spiritual (sentient) beings in the hedges and forests with whom we can have fellowship, but that we can longer seek direction from nature as to how we ought to comport ourselves in our use of it. We have increased our ability to control nature by voiding it of anything but what can quantified, but pure quantity provides us with no norms. Thus, it seems that our projects lack anything but an arbitrary justification in merely subjective “values.” That is, as nature has been disenchanted, it has become more pliable to our whims while at the same time we have lost it as a source for normativity. This leaves us with a sense of our lives being merely arbitrary. In short, the primary loss wrought by disenchantment is not a sense of solidarity with our brothers and sisters in sentience among the plants and animals, but the absence of any normative guide provided by nature itself.
All of that is to say that Goff seems to confuse demythologizing and disenchantment in the most important sense meant by those who are critical of modernity. This distinction can already be seen in Aristotle:
“There is a tradition handed down form the ancients of the earliest times and bequeathed to posterity in the shape of a myth to the effect that the heavenly bodies are gods and that the divine encompasses the whole of nature. The rest of the tradition has been added later in a mythical way with a view to the persuasion of ordinary people and the view to its use for legal purposes and for what is advantageous. For they say these gods are human in form or like some of the other animals, and also other features similar that follow from or are similar to those just mentioned. But if we separate the first point from these additions and grasp it alone, namely, that they thought that the primary substances were gods, we would have to regard it as divinely said, and that while it is likely that each craft and each philosophy has often been developed as far as possible only to pass away again, these beliefs about the gods have survived like remnants until the present. In any case, the beliefs of our forefathers and of our earliest predecessors is to this extent along illuminating to us.” (Aristotle, Metaphysics, trans. Reeve, Hackett, 2016 - 1074a36-1074b13).
Aristotle writes this passage immediately after he completes his argument for the unmoved mover (eternal thought thinking about itself) as the object toward which all other entities essentially strive. Along the way, he argues that the planets are “divine.” That is, they are eternal and thinking in the sense that they move toward the unmoved mover in a way that is rationally justified; the planets (along with everything else) are rationally attracted to The Good in the god. Though he arrives at it through metaphysical deduction, Aristotle comes to the same conclusion as that which his primordial ancestors gained by a sort of revelation, i.e., “the heavenly bodies are gods and the divine encompasses the whole of nature.” Indeed, Aristotle’s universe is quite an enchanted place! It is top-to-bottom populated by beings following a course of rational activity – pursing the norms of their being which are expressions of the norms of the whole universe. Notice, however, that Aristotle is dismissive, even a bit cynical, when it comes to those additions to the original insight that have been accumulated in a “mythical way” for the sake of persuading “ordinary people.” That is, he is not going for the anthropocentric superhero stories of the popular Greek religion, and Aristotle does not think the divinity surrounding nature is best understood as modeled on human sentience. Rather, for Aristotle, the world is enchanted because it has a normative direction autonomous with respect to our whims. It is our job, in order to find meaning and purpose, to get with the program of the universe. This is the central point of Aristotle’s ethics and politics, i.e., to instantiate the normative (“divine”) order of the universe in the city that supports the subsequent instantiation of that same order in the soul of the citizen.
It is then the loss of normativity that represents the major cost consequent upon the quantification and disenchantement of nature. Herbert Marcuse puts this well (though he’s not wholly endorsing the classical Greek view):
“The union of Logos and Eros led already in Plato to the supremacy of Logos; in Aristotle, the relation between the god and the world move by him is ‘erotic’ only in terms of analogy. Then the precarious ontological link between Logos and Eros is broken, and scientific rationality emerges as essentially neutral. What nature (including man) may be striving for is scientifically rational only in terms of the general laws of motion – physical, chemical, or biological. Outside this rationality, one lives in a world of values, and values separated from the objective reality become subjective.” (Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 147)
“If the Good and the Beautiful, Peace and Justice cannot be derived either from ontological or scientific-rational conditions, they cannot logically claim universal validity and realization. In terms of scientific reason, they remain matters of preference . . . .” (Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 148)
Though he blames the Greek philosophers with beginning the process culimating in the disenchantment of the world, Marcuse sees that the most damaging loss along the way is the normative notion of nature that Plato and Aristotle sought to articulate. Once we no longer think of the universe as an expression of the Good or the Beautiful, or as striving to satisfy the demands of its nature in the god, all values become merely “subjective” or “matters of preference.” Marcuse and Weber (and I’m sure Aristotle would agree) see the source of our nihilism not as resulting from our being disabused of fairy stories, but being denied any normative direction from the world into which we are thrown.
The point of all this is that Goff, by his attempts to restore sentience to nature, only addresses the mythical superficialities added to the original insights of our ancestors. Maybe kindred feeling with the dyads and nymphs of the woods and waters was how these philosophical insights were expressed among the folk. Nevertheless, we are living directionless lives, plagued by a sense of arbitrariness and meaninglessness, not because we think we are alone here as sentient beings. Rather, our listlessness stems from our loss of confidence in the normativity of nature. Re-enchantment in that sense will take much more then spreading the burden of sensate dissatisfaction more broadly among living things.
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[1] Herburt Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Beacon, 1964), 152.
[2] Graham Harman develops what he sees as a fellow traveler position with panpsychism. I am quite sympathetic to his view and I do not think the Hegelian argument I made in the second part of this series poses any problem for Harman. I would also be reluctant to place Harman’s object oriented ontology very close akin to panpsychism, as he decidedly does not set out to solve the mind-body problem, and he rejects the original partitioning of the mental and the physical. In fact, Harman’s object oriented ontology paints a plausible picture of an approach liberated from the humanistic and psychologistic tendencies I complain about in the critique of panpsychism (Goff’s version) I am developing in this essay. See Harman’s The Quadruple Object (Zero, 2011).
[3] See Scheldrake’s “Is the Sun Conscious?” for an argument to include stars on the roster of the bona fide conscious subjects.
[4] Once again, see Harman’s interesting and decidedly non-humanist version of “panpsychism” in The Quadruple Object, though I am reluctant to use that moniker for his position.