It would be conceit and folly to attempt a counterattack on a philosophical movement when one's exposure thereto/knowledge thereof consists of little more than one article in one popular philosophy magazine. As luck would have it, I am both egotist and eejit, and thus just the woman for the job. Hurrah! And...Onward:
Panpsychism: the belief that pans have consciousness. (Also the belief that colanders, cheese-graters, paring knives, and salt-cellars have consciousness. And salad bowls. And tapas dishes. And the grains of rice you put in the salt cellars to keep the crystals from congealing like Lot's wife. And everything else.)
Before laying into the demerits of panpsychism, I suppose it would only be sporting to say a thing or two about its, well, its non-demerits. Spoonful of sugar and all that, even if the sugar isn't quite sweet enough to merit the unprefixed affirmative.
- Panpsychism isn't physicalism. That's something. The panpsychist doesn't reduce everything to physical entities and processes. So your average panpsychist is one-up on Empedocles and Anaximenes and...let me see...Hippasus of Metapontum. The panpsychist's world isn't all a confluence of Earth, Wind, and Fire (no disrespect to Thales and his water-water-everywhere monism; it just doesn't jive with Mr Maurice White's horoscope).
- Panpsychism recognises that something-coming-from-nothing is a hitch in the ontological giddy-up. The notion that consciousness can arise out of non-consciousness is tricksy and rightly deserves more consideration than physicalists have afforded it.
- Panpsychists likewise acknowledge that entities are more than what they do. A pan is not simply a bundle of behaviours "brought about by mass, spin, charge, etc." There must be "more to [a pan] than what it does; and according to panpsychism, mass, spin, charge, etc, are, in their intrinsic nature, forms of consciousness" (Goff).
- Panpsychism adds quaint heft to one's notion that one's potted cactus is genuinely, subjectively happier on the left side of the mantelpiece than on the right side. Come on, admit it: you know full well your cactus wants to be by the photo of Great Aunt Clara and the misshapen pencil-pot you paid £50 too much for at a Cotswold pottery kiln.
Grand. Now for the quibbles:
Who needs panpsychism when you've got idealism?
Goff argues that "common sense intuition" must prevent us from sweeping consciousness under a singularly physicalist carpet, but surely that same "common sense intuition" should shield us from sweeping matter under a singularly mental one. Naturally, the panpsychist will protest that he hasn't swept the carpet under the carpet, that he never does any sweeping, that he doesn't even own a broom (in which case you can get him on charges of intellectual slobbery). The panpsychist is going to argue that he has, on the contrary, tread the middle path and reconciled the Scylla of substance-dualism with the Charybdis of physicalism. But, really, methinks the panpsychist does protest too much. For if one is going to redefine all "mass, spin, charge, etc" as "forms of consciousness", one really hasn't done much more than Anaxagoras, who, as Aristotle tells it, "avails himself of Mind as an artificial device for producing order, and drags it in whenever he is at a loss to explain some necessary result" (Metaphysics I.IV.5). Anaxagoras was less philosophically crude than the aforementioned Hippopotamus of Megapondus, granted, but that's not exactly an achievement you'd want to frame and put up on the wall: "I hereby certify that Mr. Pan Psychist is less primitive than a pachyderm".
I think it in my fingers, I think it in my bones
If all the world is busy ruminating, right down to one's individual electrons and subatomic charges, does that mean one's body really does have a mind of its own? Does my stomach think different thoughts than I do? Do my digestive fluids likewise have a separate subjective experience to my stomach (do my digestive fluids, ahem, digest)? And do the enzymes therein have a different experience yet again to said fluids? That would give a whole new pith to Melville's "Hell is an idea born of an undigested apple dumpling".
There is something tantalising about the prospect of my atoms being philosophically at odds with myself. It's a charming image; I'm tempted to let it go unquestioned if only to allow myself the pleasure of debating with my knees. Yet, sigh, I can't shake the problem of pluralities. It's one thing to say an electron has consciousness, but what of two electrons together? Do the duo have a combined consciousness independent from the individual consciousnesses of the electrons which comprise them? Or are the two consciousnesses blended into one single superconsciousness? If that's the case, though, where does the blending end? At a universal consciousness that subsumes all things? Then how is it I feel my subjective experience to be individual and limited? Do individual elements go on having individual subjective experiences while the larger matrices thereof have larger, more complicated ones? What then determines which groups of individual elements will give rise to a new, more expansive consciousness?
The physicalist can get away, more or less, with a physical monism by maintaining that a pan isn't really a pan at all, but simply a bunch of fundamentally identical bits-and-pieces (subatomic energy packets or whatnot) distributed in certain arrangements in space and time. The physicalist's premises are flawed as your average Greek Hero, no doubt, but there is some coherence in his argument's form. The panpsychist hasn't even that advantage. For the panpsychist, as best I can fathom him, would seem to want to say that a pan has its own consciousness, and that said pan's consciousness is subjectively different from the consciousness of the atoms that comprise it. Yet this leaves the mystery of how the pan's consciousness arose as resolute and inscrutable as if its consciousness arose out of nothing, for the pan's consciousness is not, in this model, simply an illusion brought about by indivisible bits-and-pieces of consciousness hanging out together in the same spatio-temporal arena (as the pan was in the physicalist reduction). Even if the panpsychist was content to say that the pan's consciousness was an illusion, and was reducible to subatomic consciousness-packets (or something like that), he's going to run up against the problem of how those consciousness-packets produce the illusion of pan-consciousness.
I know you are a reductionist, you said you are a reductionist, but what am I?
Panpsychists do not simply declare animal and human consciousness a sacred mystery which must have arrived by magic. Instead, they try to explain animal and human consciousness in terms of more basic forms of consciousness: the consciousness of basic material entities, such as quarks and electrons. It is true that consciousness itself is not explained in terms of anything more fundamental: the basic consciousness of basic physical entities is a fundamental postulate of the theory. But there is no reason to think that science must always follow the most reductionist path. (Goff)
Let's untangle that, shall we?
- Animal and human consciousness are not sacred nor the product of magic. Jolly good. Nice to see religion (the sacred) and superstition (magic) being leagued together as per usual. Sign of the times, I guess: it's a lonely day in the Apologetics aisle if I'm not rubbing shoulders with a Wiccan; Crowley and Kierkegaard have never been closer bedfellows.
- Consciousness is to be explained by the basic consciousness of basic material entities. Lordy. Okay, so I assume basic here means, what, smallest? Least complicated? The most reduced? The most basic material entities Goff mentions are, after all, the poster-children of material reductionism (namely, quarks and electrons). Thus, consciousness is to be explained, presumably, by its most reduced form as manifested in its most reduced material counterparts.
- You can't reduce basic consciousness to anything more fundamental than basic consciousness. Well, quite, otherwise presumably it wouldn't be "basic" consciousness. Tautology taken on board. No infinite-regress reductios allowed.
- Out of left-field comment on science being non-beholden to reductionism, a comment which, by its placement, is naughtily positioning itself as a conclusion, despite actually being a non-sequitur. Goff describes panpsychism in reductionist terms, then says "not all science needs to be about reduction, folks." One might as well say "all omelettes require breaking eggs; but one doesn't have to break eggs to make a nutritious breakfast." Both statements ("omelettes require breaking eggs" and "nutritious breakfasts don't") might well be true; both might have subject-matter in common; but the one doesn't follow from the other, and to make it seem as if it did would be intellectual chicanery. So, tsk-tsk Goffum. Tricksy habitses.
But, enough for now. I'm off to the store to buy me some thinking milk.
 |
| Panbrainism. |
