Panpsychism, Intersubjectivity
and the Nature of Time
by David
Pleasants, MA
KEYWORDS: Consciousness,
time, panpsychism, panexperientialism, intersubjectivity, quantum theory,
many-worlds theory, presponse.
In the discussion of the relationship between mind and matter, there are four main doctrines that have been put forth. These are dualism, materialism, idealism, and panpsychism. The most logically coherent theory among these is panpsychism, in which all matter or nature is conscious or has some element of consciousness within it. Generally the other philosophies, while popular, have an inherent weakness in that they all call for some type of miraculous event calling into being mind from matter or matter from mind. Even though panpsychism is the only doctrine that does not seem to call for this type of divine leap, the proportion of panpsychists among philosophers and scientists still remains low. One possible reason for this is that there are significant objections to panpsychism, which have not been sufficiently rebutted - at least not in the eyes of most individuals. In addition there are many variations of panpsychism as well as various aspects of panpsychism that have yet to be fully explored. In this paper, I will examine panpsychism, discussing some of its strengths and weaknesses, and suggest a theoretical framework that may prove useful to meet the objections that have been put forth, as well as venture into areas that have remained largely unexplored.
First however, we must discuss the paradigm, from which much of our thinking regarding the relationship between mind and matter has arisen. Nearly all philosophers and scientists are familiar with Cartesian dualism and its trappings and have ostensibly rejected Cartesian dualism. Nonetheless they have “uncritically accepted the Cartesian image of matter” (Farleigh, 1998). This one-sided acceptance of Cartesian dualism has produced a situation in which most contemporary scientists are materialists that view consciousness as epiphenomenal to the brain. Subsets of materialism include reductionism, emergentism, and eliminativism. Reductionists are materialists that believe that all aspects of nature, including consciousness, can be reduced to the very smallest physical components. Emergentism is the doctrine that some higher order phenomena, such as consciousness, arise from complex interactions of physical substances. Eliminitavists are materialists who believe consciousness to be a shadowy nonexistent thing whose popular ontology is upheld only by folk psychology. As emergentism is one of the most widely accepted philosophies of mind, we will now discuss various objections to this philosophy.
Among objections to emergentism, W.K. Clifford has raised one of the strongest. According to Clifford:
…we cannot suppose that so enormous a jump from one creature to another should have occurred at any point in the process of evolution as the introduction of a fact entirely different and absolutely separate from the physical fact. It is impossible for anybody to point out the particular place in the line of descent where that event can be supposed to have taken place. The only thing that we can come to, if we accept the doctrine of evolution at all, is that even in the very lowest organism… there is something… which is of the same nature with our own consciousness… (1874, p.266).
Of course,
Clifford made those remarks in the 19th century after
Still another objection to emergentism comes from Thomas Nagel, who characterizes the doctrine as an epistemological rather than ontological matter.
There are no truly emergent properties of complex systems. All
properties of a complex system that are not relations between it and
something
else derive from the properties of its
constituents and their
effects on each other when so combined. Emergence is an epistemological condition: it means that an observed feature of the system cannot be derived from the properties currently attributed to its constituents. But this is a reason to conclude that either the system has further constituents of which we are not yet aware, or the constituents of which we are aware have further properties that we have not yet discovered. (1979, p.182, italics added)
From both of these objections, panpsychism arises as a potent alternative. In regards to Nagel, panpsychism presupposes that the “properties that we have not yet discovered” are indeed the property, or properties, of consciousness. In regards to Clifford, we are inclined to extend his argument to nonliving physical substances as well. After all, for what reason does Clifford’s boundary end at the “lowest organism”? Isn’t it true that this boundary represents an artificial demarcation imposed by human culture and beliefs? For what magic lies in a DNA molecule of a bacterium that does not lie in the RNA molecule of a virus? Indeed, the doctrine of panpsychism forces us to re-examine our cherished notions of living organisms and life in general. To be clear, the panpsychist’s alternative to Clifford’s ontological leap is that “its consciousness all the way down” (de Quincey, 2002), that matter and consciousness are united as primary constituents of the universe.
Unity does not necessitate identity however; even though matter and consciousness are intrinsically bound, matter and consciousness are not the same thing. Just as an object has both form and substance, so does an object have both consciousness and physicality. And while both consciousness and physicality are bound to the same wholeness, the way in which they manifest themselves are not bound to each other in the same way. In other words, just as you can alter an object’s form without altering its substance, so too can conscious aspects of an object change while it’s underlying physicality has not. In this way, within the panpsychist theoretical framework, consciousness can change and evolve even though the underlying physical nature of the object in question may be unchanged.
For instance, according to a generalized theory of panpsychism, a relatively inert molecule that has consciousness only in a very rudimentary way may later become part of a living molecular system such as a protein embedded in the cell of a neuron. In doing this, the idea is that the molecule incorporates its property of consciousness into the conscious structure of the living being, a conscious structure very different from its previous state. In this way it seems that a particle’s property of consciousness may combine with similar properties of other particles to yield more complex states of manifestation. These various states of manifestation, a key element of panpsychism, call for a re-evaluation of our approach to consciousness studies.
According to de Quincey, there are two main questions in consciousness studies: the philosophical question, which has to do with whether or not consciousness is present, and the psychological question, which has to do with degrees of consciousness within an already conscious being, such as the conscious and unconscious parts of the mind (2002). Interestingly, in the realm of panpsychism where everything is conscious, the first question is naturally rendered moot. And yet the second question doesn’t quite seem to fit either, at least not within our theoretical framework. For in a universe where consciousness is nearly ubiquitous (except perhaps in empty space), the notion of a conscious being loses its exclusivity. Indeed within a panpsychist framework neither question is able to retain it’s logical integrity. Instead, we must find a new path.
In searching for such a path, I was struck by de Quincey’s discussion of aggregate consciousness and unitive consciousness (2002). De Quincey explained that in a nonliving object such as a rock, the atoms and molecules within the rock do have consciousness, but their individual consciousnesses remain separate from one another. Conversely, it appears that the individual consciousnesses of the many atoms and molecules that make up a living brain somehow come together and interact in a new and conscious way. In doing so, these disparate entities create a singular or quasi-singular consciousness referred to as unitive consciousness. It is the existing gradation between aggregate and unitive consciousness within in nature as well as the active evolution and regression across this gradation, that have occupied my thoughts most persistently during and after the Nature of Consciousness course at JFKU.
The merging of this property of consciousness into other like properties to bring forth a single or quasi-singular consciousness such as our own constitutes one of strongest objections to panpsychism. William Seager refers to this objection as the “combination problem” (1995) and is well illustrated by the words of William James:
Take a sentence of a dozen words, and take twelve men and tell to each one word. Then stand the men in a row or jam them in a bunch, and let each think of his word as intently as he will: nowhere will there be a consciousness of the whole sentence. (1890, p.160)
Although James’ logic was robust at the time, as with Clifford, James made his pronouncements before the advent of contemporary scientific thought with its accompanying new metaphysical implications. One such example is the quantum superposition in which properties of many separate particles, if not the very particles themselves, are combined in such a way that there is a merging that goes beyond the simple “sum of the parts”. Another fairly recent notion that has been used by various researchers such as Danah Zohar is the Bose-Einstein condensate, which is characterized by the merging of various particles into a single whole. While neither of these examples represents a direct rebuttal to James, they do serve to weaken the foundation on which his statements rest, as well as show us new possible avenues of thought.
Another theoretical approach, which is not a direct rebuttal to James, but which may indeed alter the context of the combination problem has to do with intersubjectivity. In recent years de Quincey has been a staunch supporter of this second-person approach to consciousness studies. In his essay entitled “Switched on Consciousness”, de Quincey makes a distinction between the standard meaning of intersubjectivity and the experiential meanings of intersubjectivity. He defines the former as “consensual validation between independent subjects via exchange of signals” (2000). Within this standard meaning, individual subjectivity remains ontologically primary while intersubjectivity is always secondary.
Among the more experiential meanings of intersubjectivity, de Quincey makes two distinctions: the weak-experiential meaning and the strong-experiential meaning. The former, referred to as intersubjectivity 2a, is defined as “mutual engagement and participation between independent subjects, which conditions their respective experience” (2000). The latter, referred to as intersubjectivity 2b, is the “mutual co-arising and engagement of interdependent subjects, or ‘intersubjects’, which creates their respective experience”. The most important distinction between the two is that in the case of the weak-experiential meaning, subjectivity is still ontologically dominant, while in the case of the strong-experiential meaning, subjectivity becomes subordinate to the existing intersubjectivity. In other words, in this case it is intersubjectivity that is primary (de Quincey, 2000).
Normally we think of intersubjectivity as existing between subjects, such as humans or other intelligent beings. And yet within a panpsychist theoretical framework, even disparate microscopic objects/entities have consciousness. Consequently their “properties of consciousness” interact with one another creating a level of manifestation, which may indeed satisfy de Quincey’s definition of intersubjectivity 2b. It follows then that this increased level of intersubjectivity constitutes a progression towards a more unitive form of consciousness. Indeed we can generalize that a movement towards greater intersubjectivity is a movement from aggregate consciousness to unitive consciousness.
Returning to the context of James’ argument, it is not inconceivable that aggregate consciousness, such as the consciousness of a rock, may fit the standard definition of intersubjectivity 1, while unitive consciousness, as in the case of a living organism, might be characterized by both intersubjectivity 2a and 2b; 2a in that the respective interiorities may exist and be ontologically dominant, and 2b in that there may be a new level of co-creative manifestation, in which intersubjectivity is ontologically dominant. This new structure would then be characterized by what de Quincey refers to as “an interpenetrating co-creation of loci of subjectivity – a thoroughly holistic and organismic mutuality” (2000). And so intersubjectivity seems to be vital to our discussion of panpsychism, especially in the progression from aggregate to unitive consciousness. And yet although our position has been strengthened, we have not yet reached a strong rebuttal to James’ objection. In the hopes of doing this, we must transcend the demarcations between consciousness and matter that lie at the heart of James’ argument as well as Cartesian dualism itself. One such transcendent panpsychist model is Alfred North Whitehead’s process-oriented relational ontology.
Whitehead’s philosophy, which is often referred to as panexperientialism, psychicalism, or process philosophy, usurps the Cartesian notion of matter and replaces it with conscious events and series of these events. In other words, in Whitehead’s world, the universe’s primary constituents are events as opposed to objects. Consequently objects, while ostensibly real, are comprised of these primary events, which are also referred by Whitehead to as “occasions of experience”. Bertrand Russell, a colleague of Whitehead, put it this way:
An event does not persist and move, like the traditional piece of matter; it merely exists for its little moment and then ceases. A piece of matter will thus be resolved into a series of events. Just as, in the old view, an extended body was composed of a number of particles, so, now each particle, being extended in time, must be regarded as composed of wheat we may call ‘event-particles’. The whole series of these events makes up the whole history of the particle, and the particle is regarded as being its history, not some metaphysical entity to which the events happen. (1969)
One of the
strengths of Whitehead’s panexperientialism is that it is able to deconstruct
the philosophical foundation on which most of our assumptions about the nature
of the universe has rested. For
instance, while teaching at the
For instance, I’d like to turn the reader’s attention to an anomaly found in experimental psychology involving precognition. In the last several years a very intriguing experiment has been conducted by Dean Radin and then replicated by Dick Bierman. The design of the experiment was fairly simple. A group of subjects were told to press a button, several seconds after which an image would appear on the computer screen. The images would be either calm, that is emotionally neutral, or emotional, depicting violent or erotic scenes. Various means of measuring skin conductance were employed to gauge the subjects’ unconscious reactions to the various images before, during, and after the image was shown. Radin’s experiment was designed to “explore whether some intuitive hunches, especially ‘bad feelings’ about upcoming decisions or actions, may be due to unconscious precognitive glimpses of future emotions” (Bierman, 1999).
As expected, the highly emotional images prompted increased skin conductance in subjects during and after the images were displayed. Prior to the image being displayed however, there was a six second gap between the moment the subject pushed the button and the moment the computer displayed the image. The remarkable result that Radin and Bierman found is that a few seconds prior to the emotionally charged image being flashed, there was a discernable increase in skin conductance. Radin referred to this “precognitive response” as a presponse. When Radin and Bierman measured galvanic skin responses in place of skin conductance the same results were found.
The results of Radin and Bierman’s experiments hold great promise not only because they represent a potential revolution across multiple disciplines, but also because they may be an excellent illustration of Whitehead’s panexperientialism and the extension of the aggregate-to-unitive progression beyond what may be considered the typical temporal boundaries. For example, if objects are collections of events with spatial and temporal extensions, then the same is of course true for subjects as well. Therefore it follows that consciousness has extensions in space and time.
While I am familiar with the argument that consciousness is a nonlocal phenomenon with no spatial or temporal dimensions, I disagree with this position. For if it is true that the singular or quasi-singular consciousness we identify with is a new level of intersubjectivity created by the merging and interaction of the brain’s or the entire body’s lower level series of events and it is true that these series are contained within the spatial locale of our body or brain, then it follows that what we refer to as our consciousness has a definite spatial extension. In addition, according to Einstein, space and time are integral parts of a unitive continuum. Taking this view as well as Whitehead’s point about even-fields having temporal extensions, it is then reasonable to assume that our consciousness has temporal extensions as well. The question remains however: what are the temporal boundaries containing consciousness?
Instead of attempting to answer this question, which would derail us from our present focus, I would rather move our attention to the intersubjective evolution of consciousness, not in the extent of separate event-fields within close spatial proximity, but in regards to separate event-fields within close temporal proximity. For if consciousness is a primary teleological constituent of the universe, then it follows that consciousness would continue to strive for greater intersubjectivity (ie.; unitive consciousness) even across typical temporal boundaries. Might it be that Radin and Bierman’s presponse represents a new level of intersubjectivity, that the event of precognition represents a new form of unitive consciousness? I recommend against forming an objection based on the Newtonian view of time. Surely with the deconstruction of Cartesian dualism, clinging to a Newtonian notion is a mistake.
And yet I am aware of various objections to this conjecture that are not so easily dismissed. One such objection would surely arise from those proscribing a deterministic view of the universe, in which information from the future somehow relayed to the past would constitute to a causal paradox. In a conversation with Dick Bierman in April of 2002, I brought up this very point as an objection to his work even though I did not subscribe to such a position. Bierman expressed that he did believe that there was a level of determinism present and that this was the event that lead to the increased stimulation by the participant. What is not yet determined, he stressed, is the participant’s reaction to the stimulus. In this way, the presponse would enable the individual to get a headstart, so to speak, on the stimulus or possible danger.
The gradation between determinacy and indeterminacy that Bierman alluded to is well known and is perhaps most strongly advocated by Murray Gell-Mann. In his book The Quark and the Jaguar, Gell-Mann refers to course-grained histories and fine-grained histories, both of which are aspects of the many-histories theory, more widely known as the many-worlds theory or the theory of parallel universes (1994). All of these variants arise from Hugh Everett’s work in 1957, where he rejected the collapse of the quantum wave function as an ad hoc addition to quantum theory. Instead Everett proposed that the quantum wave function, with its multitude of possibilities co-existing, continues to persist, but we cannot observe this phenomena because at the point of observation we have entered one of the “possible worlds” allegedly described by Schroedinger’s equation.
One of today’s most famous and vocal
supporters of
This brings us to additional intriguing speculation. If higher order consciousness is a “mutual co-arising” of events having separate temporal coordinates, “which creates their respective experience”, then how can we accept the one-way nature of the arrow of time? It seems that the same objections to precognition would also apply to this view of consciousness. For a “mutual co-arising” across a temporal duration calls for events from a “future coordinate” to affect event-experiences located at a “past coordinate” relative to the first. Although I am not able to thoroughly discuss this issue at this time, I will suggest that what is needed here is a re-evaluation of the notion of the arrow of time.
To this researcher, it seems that a mutual co-arising would occur across temporal coordinates in a manner analogous to the phenomena of lightening. When lightening is said to “strike the ground”, it appears that the bolt originates from the clouds above and travels to the ground below, but this is not entirely accurate. In actuality, many bolts attempt to rise from the ground to meet with the large bolt moving downwards, but just one is successful in doing so. Perhaps something similar happens to create the illusion of the arrow of time. Perhaps events of varying temporal coordinates reach towards each other, towards greater intersubjectivity. For if we could freeze time, could we point at something called consciousness or is consciousness, by its very nature, a relational phenomenon that must have the duration of time. This researcher feels very strongly that it is the latter and that one-way nature of time is not entirely accurate. Perhaps one avenue of thought could arise from the musings of Brian Greene, one of the world’s leading string theorists. In his book, The Elegant Universe, Greene makes the assertion that among the 11 or so dimensions of string theory, some of these may indeed by additional time dimensions (1999). He remarks that we would not even know what this might look like.
In any case, we have surely brought our discussion of consciousness studies and panpsychism in particular to the fringes of research and theoretical discussion. It was my goal to supply the reader with a general understanding of panpsychism and the strengths of Whitehead’s version, as well as the challenges it still faces. It is my hope that continued debate regarding panpsychism as well as results from researchers such as Radin and Bierman will provide us with new ways of viewing consciousness, time, and the nature of the universe. Indeed “major progress in science comes when the orthodox paradigm clashes with a new set of ideas or some new piece of experimental evidence that won’t fit into the prevailing theories” (Davies, 1995, p.199).
References:
Bierman, Dick
J., and Radin, D. (1998). Conscious and Anomalous Nonconscious
Emotional Processes: A Reversal of the Arrow of Time. publ.
in Toward a Science of Consciousness: The Third Tuscon
Discussions and Debates. Hameroff, S., Kaszniak, A., Scott, A. (Editors),
Clifford, W.K. (1874) 'Body and mind', Fortnightly Review. Reprinted in Lectures and Essays, ed. L. Stephen and F. Pollock (London: Macmillan, 1879).
Davies, Paul. (1995) About Time:
Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution.
de Quincey, C., (2000) Course Reader :
Nature of Consciousness.
de Quincey, C., (2002) Class discussions: The Nature of Consciousness.
Deutsch, David. (1997) The
Fabric of Reality: The Science of Parallel Universes and Its Implications.
Farleigh, Peter.
(1998) Whitehead’s Toward a Science of
Consciousness II: The 1996 Tucson Discussions and Debates, Chapter 9. Hameroff, S., Kaszniak,
A., Scott, A. (Editors),
Gell-Mann, Murray. (1994) The Quark
and the Jaguar.
Greene,
Brian. (1999) The
Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and Quest for the Ultimate
Theory.
Hameroff, S., Kaszniak, A.,
Scott, A. (Editors), (1998)
Toward a Science of Consciousness II: The 1996
James, William (1890) The Principles of Psychology, vol. 1, (New York: Henry Holt and Co. Reprinted by Dover Books, 1950).
Russell, Bertrand.
(1969) The ABC of Relativity (3rd Ed.)
Seager, William. (1995) Consciousness, Information and Panpsychism publ. in The Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2 (3), pp. 272-288.
David Pleasants
[email protected]
Copyright (c) G. David Pleasants III 2002