IV: Why
Should We Affirm Panexperientialism?
To see several reasons
for being dubious of the hitherto dominant view of nature’s fundamental
units is, of course, already to have some reason to move toward the
alternative form of realism, according to which they are not vacuous.
However, this idea may
seem so counterintuitive, especially to minds conditioned by over three
centuries of scientific and philosophical thought that has rejected this
idea, as to lead to some other view, such as idealism, phenomenalism, or
agnosticism.
Accordingly, it would
be helpful if there were also some positive reasons for affirming
panexperiential-ism, which, in my version anyway, involves the dual notion
that the genuine units of nature have both experience and spontaneity. I
will suggest four such reasons.
One reason follows from
the fact we human beings, with our consciousness and freedom, seem to be
fully natural, if in important respects exceptional, members of the
world. Our conscious experience is part of nature as much as anything
else; for one thing, it clearly (prohibiting dogma aside) interacts with
other parts of nature.
The most plausible
interpretation of our conscious experience, accordingly, is that it
provides us a unique insight into the very nature of nature: it is the one
place where we can observe what natural individuals are in themselves, as
distinct from how they appear to others. Unless there is some good reason
to prohibit it, then, we should generalize the results of our two-sided
knowledge of human beings—from within and from without—to all other beings
that appear to be true individuals, meaning those whose behaviour seems to
betoken an element of spontaneity, analogous to our own power of
self-determination.
Adopting this method
requires deciding, of course, just which dimensions of our own experience
are generalizable to which other beings. Self-consciousness and the
correlative anticipation of death, for example, seem to be limited
primarily to our own species. Moral experience (at least under some
construals) seems to extend a little further, and aesthetic experience
considerably further (do not birds seem to sing at least partly for the
sheer enjoyment of it?). How far down we would generalize “consciousness
itself (as distinct from full-blown self-consciousness) would depend
partly on the definition.
Whereas, like many
others, Chalmers (p. 201) seems to equate “experience” and “conscious
experience.” I reserve the latter for that relatively high-grade
experience in which contents are clearly discriminated and contrasted, at
least implicitly, with other possibilities not present. Consciousness, in
other words, involves negation, contrasting what is with what is
not. With this definition, probably only relatively few types of
individuals would experience consciously.
Sensory perception
would, of course, only be generalizable to beings having sensory organs.
Deciding which aspects of our own experience are generalizable to all
individuals would involve carrying out the suggestion by Nagel (1986,
p. 21) that we try to ascertain “subjective universals.” In any case,
carrying out the whole project is distinct from the first step, which is
simply to agree that, given our status as fully natural entities, we
should in some sense generalize our own experience to all other
individuals.
A second reason to do
this is that science, besides providing reasons to be suspicious of the
idea of vacuous actualities, has also given positive support to thinking
of all individuals as embodying spontaneity and experience. Whereas
Descartes denied experience to all earthly creatures except humans, some
leading ethologists now attribute it at least as far down as bees (Griffin, 1992).
Going much further
down, Stuart Hameroff (1994, pp. 97-9) has recently summarized a wide
range of evidence suggestive of the idea that single-cell organisms, such
as amoebae and paramecia, have a primitive type of consciousness (I would
say “experience”), mentioning as well a few respectable
scientists—including Sherrington and Darwin—who have accepted this
interpretation. Going still further, to the prokaryotic level, some
biologists have provided evidence for a rudimentary form of
decision-making, based on a rudimentary form of memory, in bacteria (Adler
& Tse, 1974; Goldbeter & Koshland, 1982). Furthermore, although DNA
molecules were originally pictured in mechanistic terms, more recent
studies have suggested a more organismic understanding (Keller, 1983).
Going all the way down,
quantum physics, as already mentioned, has shown entities at this level
not to be analogous to billiard balls, and, as Seager has stressed,
quantum theory implies that the behaviour of the elementary units of
nature can only be explained by attributing to elementary particles
something analogous to our own mentality (1995, p. 282-3; see also Bohm &
Hiley, 1993, pp. 384-7). Also relevant to the issue of spontaneity is the
convertibility of matter and energy: besides contradicting the early
modern view of matter as wholly inert, it at least allows the belief that
all individual events involve an element of internal spontaneity.
The physics of our
century, furthermore, has suggested that the ultimate units of nature are
(momentary) events, not enduring substances, and that these events are
temporal as well as spatial. The old view of matter as purely spatial
meant that, although matter was temporal in the sense that it endured
through time, it did not require any lapse of time but could exist in a
durationless “instant.”
That this is false is
suggested not only by quantum physics (Capek, 1991, pp. 135, 205, 211) but
also by relativity physics. By saying both that space and time are
results of spatial and temporal happenings, not preexisting containers,
and that they are inseparable, it seems to imply that the ultimate units
of nature are spatiotemporal events. The only way to make sense of
this, arguably, is to say that these events, like our own experience, have
an inner duration (even if it be only a billionth of a second or less).
Thinking of them as
having temporal as well as spatial extensiveness removes the main basis,
stressed by McGinn, for supposing them incapable of experience. Indeed,
it is arguably impossible to conceive of inner duration apart from
experience. In these various ways, in sum, recent science has given us
bases for overcoming the (Cartesian) assumption that experience and
spontaneity are not fully natural in the sense of characterizing the
elementary units of nature.
A third basis for
adopting panexperientialism is provided by our immediate experience of
nature, which is not, as I suggested earlier, to be equated with our
sensory perception of objects outside our bodies. Our most immediate
experience of nature is our experience of our own bodies. By this I mean
not our external sensory perception of it, as when we look at our hands,
but our inner experience of our body’s interaction with our conscious
experience. Nature observed in this way gives us reasons, both direct and
indirect, to suppose it to be permeated by experience.
An indirect reason is
provided by sensory perception itself when considered in terms of its
entire process, which involves a remarkable twofold fact.
On the one hand, the
body is a self-sufficient organ of sensory percepts: as we know
from dreams and hallucinations, the body need not be currently receiving
any causal influence from the outside world that corresponds to the
sensory percepts it produces.
On the other hand, our
waking sensory percepts generally do, in some important respects,
correspond to entities beyond our bodies.
Whereas the first point
undermines any naive realism, according to which sensory perceptions
result directly from the causal influence of exterior objects, the second
point suggests that the entities comprising the body’s sensory system are
capable of incorporating into themselves and then passing on aspects of
those exterior objects.
This observation
reinforces our earlier point, that these entities are evidently not
exhausted by their exteriors, but have an inside in which aspects of other
entities can be incorporated before being passed on. This “inside” could
well be that earlier suggested inner duration, a necessary condition for
supposing them to have experience.
Reflection upon the
interaction between our experience and our bodies provides another reason
to think of its components as analogous to our own experience. The
supposed absolute difference between mind and matter can be couched in
terms of the idea that the latter is, to use Whitehead’s (1967b, p. 49)
phrase, “simply located.” To ascribe simple location to bits of matter is
to say that they are just where and when they are, with no essential
reference to other spatiotemporal locations—in other words, to the past or
the future. This would make physical events different in kind from our
own experience, given its essential relatedness to both the past, which we
remember, and the future, which we anticipate affecting.
This Humean and
materialist notion that physical events are simply located—which has,
among other things, made the grounds for induction extremely
problematic—is rooted in the idea that sensory perception of the world
outside our bodies provides our best and only means for understanding the
nature of nature.
A less superficial
empiricism, however, leads to another view. Our own immediate experience
is internally constituted, in part, by its appropriation of influences
from our bodies. When someone kicks my shin, my experience is partly
constituted by the pain in my leg. The cellular activities in the leg,
therefore, seem to have a twofold existence: an existence in themselves,
there in the leg, and a subsequent existence in my experience. Likewise,
when I make a decision to reach down to grab my leg, that moment of
experience seems to have a twofold existence: first in and for itself and
then in the nerve cells that take the decision to the appropriate
muscles.
If my experience is
part of nature, furthermore, this mutual influence between it and my
bodily cells should be generalized. Cellular events, accordingly, would
not be merely externally related to other cellular events, as if causation
between them should be understood by analogy with billiard-ball impacts,
but each event would appropriate prior events into itself and then get
itself appropriated in future events.
Finally, we should
generalize this account of unit-events to all of nature. Just as we
interpret our bodies in terms of what we learn about nature by external
methods, we should interpret the rest of nature in terms of what we learn
from our immediate experience of our bodies. From the resulting notion
—the
(Buddhist and Whiteheadian) idea that all events are internally
constituted by their appropriation of aspects of prior events—it is a
short step to the conclusion that they must all have experience.
To move now from
indirect to direct evidence. Although we cannot, by looking inside our
bodily cells, see any experiencing, we can notice that they give every
possible sign of having some type of experience. We derive pains,
pleasures, and appetites from them. The natural interpretation,
forbidding dogma aside, is that we are feeling their pains,
pleasures, and appetites. Then again, on the assumption that entities
within our bodies are not different in kind from those without, we can
generalize some degree of experience to all units in nature, thereby
arriving at Whitehead’s description of nature as an “ocean of feelings.”
The essential point here is that this description, while involving some
speculation, derives more naturally from a correct phenomenology than the
alternative view. As Hartshorne (1991, p. 13) has put it:
The “ocean of feelings”
that Whitehead ascribes to physical reality is not only thought; so far as
our bodies are made of this reality, it is intuited. What is not intuited
but only thought is nature as consisting of absolutely insentient stuff or
process. No such nature is directly given to us.
A fourth reason to
adopt panexperientialism is that it is the one form of realism that allows
for a solution to the mind-body problem. That this is so is the burden of
the remainder of this essay. Before providing a sketch of my particular
form of panexperientialism, I will discuss some criteria for an acceptable
solution to the mind-body problem and the failure of dualism and
materialism to fulfil them.
Next
V: Some
Criteria and the Failure of Dualism and Materialism
David Ray Griffin Page