Emergence vs Panpsychism

Regarding the mind/body problem there are two basic attitudes we might take:

1. accept that body and mind are so unalike that they have no relation to each other (or, what may amount to the same, terminally mysterious ones), or

2. seek somehow to coherently integrate them.

Dualism, which we addressed at a previous meetup, starts, at least, from the first attitude. Earlier, we talked about physicalism which offers a form of the second integrationist view. If we take the path of integrating mind and body, we are are left with a further choice:

1. explain how one emerges from the other---mind from matter (as in physicalism), or matter from mind (as in idealism or phenomenalism), or

2. accept that there is only one sort of thing and it is neither matter nor mind but gives rise to both. This last position is panpsychism.

Why might one be tempted by panspsychism? Mainly, because it is the only option left, assuming one is not inclined to dualism but also finds emergentism failing at being coherent. So to make panpsychism attractive to the monist we will address some of the problems with emergentism.

The emergentist challenge is to explain how the physical, something manifestly so different from the mental, can completely and enlighteningly explain mental experience. It is important that we keep our eyes on the explanandum, the mental---that is, insure that we do mean full mental experience without remainder and not physical events or processes that may seem correlated with mental ones. If we are merely explaining physical processes by others also physical, we may be doing something interesting, but we are not explaining the mental, unless, of course, we are eliminativists or thorough-going reductionists. These latter views we have discussed already.

The topic then will be to show how problems with emergentism can lead (non-reductionist) monists to panpsychism. A surprisingly large number of historically important philosophers, from some pre-Socratics to Spinoza to Bertrand Russell have flirted with panpsychism---whether they called it that or not. Among contemporaries, Galen Strawson is one of its most prominent exponents. He prefers to call it "panexperientialism." The idea is that, in some sense, experience of some sort is present "all the way down." How far? As far as anything else goes. Stop along the way and you are an emergentist. There must be something it is like to be a sock or a sub-atomic particle.

The terms of the dispute

Strong emergence is the idea that even if we had perfect knowledge of physics we would still be unable to infer anything about consciousness, experience, qualia, intentionality, semantic/normative attributions, etc., the specifically mental, in short. Out of a world of physical entities and processes, governed as such by physical laws, something utterly new emerges—experience, about which nothing can be deduced from the physical and its laws. This is a claim about what exists or happens in the world, hence, an ontological claim.

Illustration: Mary, the color scientist... (http://youtu.be/ERtHFw_fw9Y)

Weak emergence is the idea that everything, experience included, is the product of physical processes and laws, but that genuinely new “facts” emerge at certain levels of physical sophistication that—though determined to the extent any physical process is determined by physical laws—may nevertheless appear to us as surprising or novel and thus not deducible from the physical. The claim is that, given our constitutional limitations with regard to knowledge, much of reality will present itself as irreducible to physical laws, entailing that knowledge of the world will have to be couched in discourse other than that of physics, i.e., (perhaps) chemical, (perhaps) biological, psychological, sociological, etc. In other words, we will not be able to dispense with, even in principle, the more phenomenological sciences in describing the world. But that doesn't mean anything emerges in the world that isn't actually physical. This view is about what and how we can know and so is an epistemological claim. Some form of weak emergence may be the prevailing view among philosophers of mind at this time.

Panpsychism is the view that what there is in the world has physical and mental properties—all of it. At no point is there something that has no element of either. Nothing of a fundamentally different kind emerges from something else. That would be like pulling a rabbit out of an empty hat—a real rabbit and a real hat with no trickery—only more absurd (at least a rabbit and a hat are both physical). The claim is that strong emergence is a sleight of hand.

And the panpsychist claim against weak emergence is that it demeans the mental from the start. It offers no reason why we should be assuming that all at bottom is just physical. This contradicts the most certainly known fact of experience, namely, that we have it. The weak emergentist is in fact a reductionist.

The bottom line is then: either you are a reductionist, a dualist, or a panpsychist. Emergentism is either magic or a disguise.

Panpsychism, according to Thomas Nagel, has "the faintly sickening odor of something put together in the metaphysical laboratory." Nagel, a major contemporary philosopher, said this---even while offering an argument in its favor.

We may start out with this excellent ten minute audio interview with Strawson (http://philosophybites.com/2012/05/galen-strawson-on-panpsychism.html) for those who want to quickly get the gist of the claim.

On panpsychism:

The IEP entry is heavy on history: http://www.iep.utm.edu/panpsych/

A slightly more critical view at the SEP: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/panpsychism/

On emergentism:

David Chalmers spells out the difference between strong and weak forms of emergence: http://consc.net/papers/emergence.pdf

SEP: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/properties-emergent/