Consciousness, a Human Affair?

The Road from Physicalism to Panpsychism

“The original sin is our inveterate habit of regarding the spiritual not as
the rule but as an exception in the midst of nature.”

William James on Gustav Fechner

Philosophy of Mind, SSC 3023

Marco Caputa, i523488

April 10, 2010

From Dualism to Physicalism

As organisms, whose evolutionary development was guided by the

same principles that guide all species, we are necessarily limited in
our apprehensive capacities. All of an organism’s behavioral
capacities develop in relation to its physical environment and thus
have domain-specific purposes. And so we must assume that our
mental or physical capacities all have strong teleological and
relatively limited explanations as well. Thus, at first it seems
temptingly sensible to attribute human consciousness a function,
which serves our own adaptation rather than a general function
found throughout the material world (Mc Ginn, 2000)

However, it is our subjectivity, which led us to postulate and

seek such particular functions of consciousness, limited to humans.
This endeavor necessarily is misled and hopeless, I contend, since
we have taken a false starting point. This starting point was an
arbitrary separation of brain and mind.

As Descartes erroneously separated mind and matter into

separate substances, the Western philosophical and scientific
community was left with the burden of explaining away this
epistemological gap. The need to deal with the mind-body problem
is commonly assumed. But while Descartes still had God in order to
explain phenomenal consciousness and its relation to the brain and
body, one is now faced with insurmountable explanatory gaps, in
the absence of such ‘ad autoritatiam’ arguments (Descartes, 2002).

William of Ockham would certainly agree that, without god as

a premise, it is much more digressive and complicating to presume
that humans were instilled with a cosmic privilege of consciousness,
one that grants them an ‘additional quality of being’. In fact, rather
than conscious experience being humanities prized possession, it is
far more likely that we are misconstruing the nature of
consciousness as such and that our warped concepts thereof
mislead us (Baker, 2007).

The physicalist Papineau has explained the error of separating

mind and body through the ‘antipathetic fallacy’. Generally, there
are but two ways of viewing any event: through first-person data or
through third-person data. The error of the mind-body problem
arises from this distinction. Early dualists realized that there was a
fundamental difference in the manner in which external occurrences
are viewed as opposed to conscious experience itself and that the
former therefore seemed to ‘leave something out’, the subjective
‘feel’. A third-person observation does not give us the experience,
which we are referring to (Papineau, 1995).

If one accepts the ultimate laws of the universe, cause and

effect, and that physical effects must have absolute physical
causes, then there seems to be no place for mentality. At this point,
staunch physicalism can be led to the conclusion that the universe
consists solely of the physical. However, it has long been settled in
philosophy that there is nothing more real than experience itself. If
time is taken to contemplate this it becomes obvious that
experience is the only thing one can truly be certain of. And so
realistic physicalism must fully acknowledge this as its starting point
(Strawson, 2008).

If one does not consider thought and matter separate

substance then it remains tempting to think that mental life is
identical with neurological activity. At first, this physicalist premise
necessarily seems to denigrate thought to an illusion or to an
epiphenomenon without influence on the physical. However, it could
also be claimed that there is more to the physical than merely
physics and neurophysiology. Galen Strawson refers to this as the
only real(istic) physicalism. However, Strawson objects to being
referred to as real physicalist, merely having used this term for
explanation within the context of debate, and is commonly
considered a monist (Strawson, 2008).

Panpsychism and the Role of Consciousness

Having passed sweepingly from Dualist erring through Physicalism’s

recognition of the experiential, I arrive at Strawson’s monism, which
allows for the move to panpsychism. Strawson himself admits that
panpsychism is not ruled out by his view.

Panpsychism has a very ancient history and often is thought

of as magical and counter-intuitive. But then again, why should we
assume the explanation of conscious experience to be intuitive? The
opposite should be expected, in my opinion, since intuition only
occurs within subjective consciousness. Also, panpsychism is more
than yet another amusing idea, such as attributing consciousness
agency to a willow tree. This school of thought may be considered
an ‘extension’ of physicalism and has developed several directions,
often stemming from the difficulty of providing conceptions of
consciousness broad enough to encompass other species or even
smaller constituents of the physical (Skrbina, 2005).

Panpsychism seeks the role and nature of consciousness in a

common denominator of its role in all being things. And so, in this
view, conscious agency is unlikely to be taken as definitive of
conscious experience. Perhaps, in the human being, conscious
experience exists as part of an evolutionary tool for adapting to
novel situations and social environment. As psychology has shown,
higher-order thinking relates to the proximal purpose of intervening
and correcting more or less routinized behavior to adjust to a
dynamic and complex (social) environment. But this is surely not
the common denominator sought by panspychism and it is more
likely to be but one manifestation of consciousness’s true role
nature in the universe. Furthermore, as experiments on free will
have shown, mental acts presumed to be initiated or elicited by free
agency, may really be determined by neurological events. And so it
seems even more unlikely that conscious cognition would be the
essence of consciousness since it appears to be an illusion. The role
of this illusion is yet another question, not answered here (Libet,
1985).

Also, the adaptive function of consciousness in humans

relates to cognition rather than phenomenal awareness. It is
conceivable that plants may have phenomenal awareness without
cognition and thus not a fully-fledged mind. This reflects essential
notions to Pan-Experientialism. It is therefore initially counter-
intuitive to attribute consciousness to trees because one tends to
conflate and arbitrarily order conceptual aspects such as mentality,
cognition, bound phenomenal awareness and bound conscious
awareness, without even knowing whether they exist as such! This
is understandable since we never have objective external criteria
given and so our only criteria and limits for conceptualizing
conscious awareness is ‘what it feels like’ and so, in our natural
aversion to discomfort, folk psychology developed in a direction as
to be pleasant and maintain our self-importance (Skrbina, 2005).

The Integration Problem and Possible Panpsychism

As mentioned, panpsychism does not require one to believe that

inanimate objects, for instance a chair, are subjects of experience.
The first obstacle one encounters in panpsychism is general: how
could we ever relate experience, which lacks spatio-temporal
dimensions to the physical in a broad manner, which encompasses
humans and other more fundamental things that exist.

The above notion only seems strange if one assumes to have

reliably intricate knowledge of the physical world. However, it is
inarguable that we do not have a direct and complete
understanding of the physical. In fact, our knowledge of the physical
is infinitely small in contrast to what we do not know. We have
‘distilled’ our physical laws from nature but are these all
encompassing? In reality we have a very abstract and narrow
conception of the physical world, of which much is theoretical. Our
abstract knowledge of the physical world does not allow us to see
how its intrinsic character is related to that of the world of the mind.
For instance, our knowledge of atoms is limited and largely indirect,
in that it consists of instrument readings and postulation. There is
no evidence, which allows us to dismiss the possibility of atoms or
even smaller fundamentals being a thinking object. We can also not
dismiss the possibility of such a fundamental part being something,
which in assemblage creates ever-higher levels of phenomenal
consciousness. Again, it is the concepts we formed of the physical
and the mental, not our concrete scientific knowledge, which led us
to exclude the mental from the physical (Strawson, 2008).

Since it is possible that certain physical ‘ultimates’ may be

related to the experiential, the problem of how to integrate
experience and matter emerges. Thus, debates of consciousness
have moved from the mind-body problem to the integration. There
is now theoretical elbow space to allow for the introduction of
specific arguments for panpsychism. However, emergentism must
be taken into consideration alongside panpsychism, as its rival
approach to solving the integration problem. It must be mentioned,
since the alternative to accepting that certain physical ultimates
may have mental attributes is to claim that they are entirely devoid
thereof. And herein rises emergentism, since mind must then arise
at higher levels of complexity in the arrangement of matter. The
emergentist therefore seeks to explain how the physical gives rise
to the mental while the panpsychist seeks to explain how the
mental exists in lower levels of the physical. The emergentist
commonly also tends to believe that mind can only arise under
special and seldom conditions while panpsychist's view it as a basic
constituent of the physical universe. Thus, I will outline some of the
stronger so-called ‘genetic arguments’ from panpsychism, which
deal with emergence (Butler, 1978; Strawson, 2008).

I contend, as Fechner (1972) had convincingly argued, that

physical entities have mental attributes running parallel, which are
yet unknown to us. David Chalmers has also presented works
sympathetic to panspychism. He refers to the problem of explaining
how the mental arises from the physical as the ‘hard problem’ and
in a way, panpsychism circumvents or reformulates this problem,
since ‘emergence’ itself need not be explained, only the relation
between matter and mind (Fechner, 1972; Chalmers, 1996).

An old argument in favor of panpsychism actually arises from

a failure or shortcoming of emergentism. It relates to the dictum
mentioned earlier that physical effects must have absolute physical
causes and states: “ex nihlio, nihil fit”, meaning ‘nothing comes
from nothing’. As Nagel’s article ‘Panpsychism’ (1979) explains,
there cannot be truly emergent properties of complex systems. All
properties of a system necessarily derive either from relations
between it and something else or from relations between its
constituent parts and the effects thereof. Thus, since complex
systems like our brains our artificial intelligence can have mental
attributes, mentality must be related to matter in a most
fundamental form, it must ‘already be there.

At this point I would like to draw an argument from theory of

evolution once more, as in the beginning. Darwinism holds that the
raw materials of evolution remain the same always. Evolution’s
marvelous creations do not stem from frequent emergences of
novel properties, which would not be coherent. Rather it is
recombination and molding of the same fundamental constituents,
which allowed for the creation of new species with new capacities.
It is thus non-sensical to assume that a pre-historic primate was
spontaneously invaded by the ‘meme’. Complexity in itself cannot
produce conscious experience if one accepts the laws of evolution.
The only acceptable notion is that even the most miniscule amoebic
ancestor of ours must have had some form mental attributes
(Clifford, 1874/1868).

Conclusion

Thus, it is plausible to assume that the universe is conscious in

some way we cannot comprehend fully but which quantum
mechanics and metaphysics may elucidate eventually. This is not
the least bit more unreasonable, in my opinion, than postulating
consciousness in another human being. Also, I feel that
panpsychism does not need to draw on anything otherworldly or
magical in order to be believable, since the world unknown to us is
sufficiently profound and transcendent enough.

I have attempted to show that panpsychism accepts the

reality of nature and evolution but also that it does not instill in the
physical world any exaggerated qualia. After all, why could a soul
not be a very fundamental and humble entity? And why should a
combination of the elemental units, which hold consciousness, not
be able to give rise to higher forms of consciousness in everything
from the amoeba to the human (Hartshorne, 1950).

I will not close my mind to other solutions for the problem of

integration, which, considering all the bold mistakes on the path
from dualism to panpsychism, seems a wise thing to do. However,
at this point panpsychism is more appealing to me than
emergentism and, on a side-note; I also find its ethical implications
wiser. Emergentism still clings to the subtle but prideful desire to
attribute to human experience something that differs fundamentally
and qualitatively from the rest of the known universe. Thus,
emergentist theory seems to accentuate human self-importance just
as arbitrarily as Descartes did, albeit with a more enlightened and
developed frame of reference (Skrbina, 2005 & 2006).
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