Tag Archives: William james

How can panpsychists sleep?

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sleepOUP Blog has a sort of preview by Bruntrup and Jaskolla of their forthcoming collection on panpsychism, due out in December, with a video of David Chalmers at the end: they sort of credit him with bringing panpsychist thought into the mainstream. I’m using ‘panpsychism’ here as a general term, by the way, covering any view that says consciousness is present in everything, though most advocates really mean that consciousness or experience is everywhere, not souls as the word originally implied.

I found the piece interesting because they put forward two basic arguments for panpsychism, both a little different from the desire for simplification which I’ve always thought was behind it – although it may come down to the same basic ideas in the end.

The first argument they suggest is that ‘nothing comes of nothing’; that consciousness could not have sprung out of nowhere, but must have been there all along in some form. In this bald form, it seems to me that the argument is virtually untenable. The original Scholastic argument that nothing comes of nothing was, I think, a cosmological argument. In that form it works. If there really were nothing, how could the Universe get started? Nothing happens without a cause, and if there were nothing, there could be no causes.  But within an existing Universe, there’s no particular reason why new composite or transformed entities cannot come into existence.  The thing that causes a new entity need not be of the same kind as that entity; and in fact we know plenty of new things that once did not exist but do now; life, football, blogs.

So to make this argument work there would have to be some reason to think that consciousness was special in some way, a way that meant it could not arise out of unconsciousness. But that defies common sense, because consciousness coming out of unconsciousness is something we all experience every day when we wake up; and if it couldn’t happen, none of us would be here as conscious beings at all because we couldn’t have been born., or at least, could never have become aware.

Bruntrup and Jaskolla mention arguments from Nagel and William James;  Nagel’s, I think rests on an implausible denial of emergentism; that is, he denies that a composite entity can have any interesting properties that were not present in the parts. The argument in William James is that evolution could not have conferred some radically new property and that therefore some ‘mind dust’ must have been present all the way back to the elementary particles that made the world.

I don’t find either contention at all appealing, so I may not be presenting them in their best light; the basic idea, I think is that consciousness is just a different realm or domain which could not arise from the physical. Although individual consciousnesses may come and go, consciousness itself is constant and must be universal. Even if we go some way with this argument I’d still rather say that the concept of position does not apply to consciousness than say it must be everywhere.

The second major argument is one from intrinsic nature. We start by noticing that physics deals only with the properties of things, not with the ‘thing in itself’. If you accept that there is a ‘thing in itself’ apart from the collection of properties that give it its measurable characteristics, then you may be inclined to distinguish between its interior reality and its external properties. The claim then is that this interior reality is consciousness. The world is really made of little motes of awareness.

This claim is strangely unmotivated in my view. Why shouldn’t the interior reality just be the interior reality, with nothing more to be said about it? If it does have some other character it seems to me as likely to be cabbagey as conscious. Really it seems to me that only someone who was pretty desperately seeking consciousness would expect to find it naturally in the ding an sich.  The truth seems to be that since the interior reality of things is inaccessible to us, and has no impact on any of the things that are accessible, it’s a classic waste of time talking about it.

Aha, but there is one exception; our own interior reality is accessible to us, and that, it is claimed, is exactly the mysterious consciousness we seek. Now, moreover, you see why it makes sense to think that all examples of this interiority are conscious – ours is! The trouble is, our consciousness is clearly related to the functioning of our brain. If it were just the inherent inner property of that brain, or of our body, it would never go away, and unconsciousness would be impossible. How can panpsychists sleep at night? If panpsychism is true, even a dead brain has the kind of interior awareness that the theory ascribes to everything. In other words, my human consciousness is a quite different thing from the panpsychist consciousness everywhere; somehow in my brain the two sit alongside without troubling each other. My consciousness tells us nothing about the interiority of objects, nor vice versa: and my consciousness is as hard to explain as ever.

Maybe the new book will have surprising new arguments? I doubt it, but perhaps I’ll put it on my Christmas present list.

Consciousness – a stream?

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flowAn interesting piece from Evan Thompson on the ‘stream of consciousness’. The phrase is probably best known now as the name for a style of modern literary prose, but it originates with William James. Thompson compares James’ concept of a smoothly rolling stream with the view taken by the Buddhist Abidharma tradition, which holds that closer consideration shows the stream to consist of discrete parts.
Thompson quotes two pieces of experimental evidence which broadly suggest the Abidharma view is closer to the truth. Experiments conducted by Francisco Varela on the young Thompson himself suggested that perception varied in harmony with the brain’s alpha waves, although it seems the results have not been successfully replicated since. The other study related to the ‘attentional blink’ in which a stimulus rapidly following another is likely to be missed. It seems successful attempts by the subjects were accompanied by a kind of phase locking with theta rhythms; certain meditative techniques of mindfulness improved both the theta phase locking and the ability to perceive the following stimulus.
Overall, Thompson concludes that conscious perception isn’t smoothly regular, but comes in pulses. Perhaps we could say that it’s more like the flow of a bloodstream than that of a river.
Still, though – is consciousness actually continuous? Suppose in fact that it was composed of a series of static moments, like the succeeding frames of a film. In a film the frames follow quickly, but we can imagine longer intervals if we like. However long the gaps, the story told by the film is unaffected and retains all its coherence; the discontinuity can only be seen by an observer outside the film. In the case of consciousness our experience actually is the succession of moments, so if consciousness were discontinuous we should never be aware of it directly. If we noticed anything at all, it would seem to us to be discontinuity in the external world.
It’s not, of course, as simple as that; there are two particular issues. One is that consciousness is not automatically self-consciousness. To draw conclusions about our conscious state requires a second conscious state which is about the first one. We’ve remarked here before on Comte’s objection that the second state necessarily disrupts the first, making reliable introspection impossible: James’ view was that the second state had to be later, so that introspection was always retrospection.
This obviously raises many potential complications; all I want to do is pick out one possibility: that when we introspect the first and second order states alternate. Perhaps what we do is a moment of first-order thinking, then a moment of second order reflection on the moment just past, then another moment of simple first-order thought and so on; a process a bit like an artist flicking his gaze back and forth between subject and canvas.
If that’s what happens, then it would clearly introduce a kind of pulse into our thoughts. This raises the curious possibility that our normal thoughts run smoothly, but start to pulsate exactly when we start to think about them. The pulse would be an artefact of our own introspection.
The other issue is more fundamental. Both James and the Abidharma school apparently assume that our thoughts seem to come in a continuous flow. Well, mine don’t. Yes, at times there is a coherent narrative sequence or a flowing perceptual experience, but these often seem like achievements of my concentration rather than the natural state of my mind. At least as often, things pop up unbidden, stop and start, and generally behave less like a flow and more like one damn thing after another. It’s noteworthy that the stream of consciousness in literature is not characterised by smooth logical development, but by a succession of fragmentary ideas and perceptions, a more realistic picture in many ways.
However, reflecting on a train of thought afterwards we can sometimes see links that we didn’t notice before. Several of our thoughts which seemed unrelated all bear on a particular anxiety or concern, say; scarcely a novel phenomenon in either psychology or literature. Hypothetically we might guess that our conscious moments are indeed part of a coherent stream, but one which includes important unconscious or subconscious elements, If we could see the whole process it might make fine logical sense, but all we get are the points where the undulating serpent’s back breaks the surface.
Neither of those issues disturbs Thompson’s modest conclusion that there is a kind of pulse on the surface of the stream; but there is deep water underneath, I think.