Abstract
There is a famous passage in chapter six of James’ Principles of Psychology whose import, many believe, deals a devastating blow to the explanatory aspirations of panpsychism. In the present paper I take a close look at James’ argument, as well as at the claim that it underlies a powerful critique of panpsychism. Apart from the fact that the argument was never aimed at panpsychism as such, I show that it rests on highly problematic assumptions which, if followed to their logical consequences, are just as inedible to contemporary critics of panpsychism as they are to its present-day supporters. Hence, a naïve employment of the argument, as a critique leveled by physicalists against panpsychism, is counterproductive and even self-defeating. After examining the metaphysical shortcomings undermining James’ position (as well as the hasty “refutations” of panpsychism based on it), I conclude with some reflections on what needs to be done in order to obtain a better perspective regarding the explanatory prospects of panpsychism as an alternative approach to mainstream physicalism in the study of conscious phenomena.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
In what follows I use ‘panpsychism’ and ‘panexperientialism’ freely and interchangeably. As far as I can see, none of what I argue for depends crucially on the precise labeling of this metaphysical alternative to standard physicalism. If the reader feels more comfortable with a particular labeling (e.g., ‘panprotopsychism’) he (or she) is welcome to do so to his (or hers) heart’s content.
James’ reluctant sympathy to panpsychism turned into full endorsement later on in his intellectual career (see Skrbina 2006).
Although James disapproves of the monadic theory of the mind as being too abstract and detached from experience, he concludes his discussion of it on a more positive note, asserting that “a theory which Leibnitz, Herbart, and Lotze have taken under their protection must have some sort of a destiny” (queryJames 1890/1950, 180).
The term ‘mind-stuff’ is due to W.K. Clifford (1878); James also associates the doctrine with the names of Fechner and Haeckel, while Clifford himself ascribes “the first statement of the doctrine” to Wundt (Clifford 1878, 67). As will be seen in the next section, James’ critique of MST was influenced by an earlier critique due to Royce (1881).
For more on James’ critique of these conceptual elements of MST see Henle (1990).
Hylozoism, a term first used by the 17th-century Cambridge Platonist Ralph Cudworth, is the view that life and mind are inherent in all matter. James uses this term here as a synonymous with ‘panpsychism’.
Noticeably, James’ arch-rival throughout much of the chapter (in particular pp. 151–158) is Herbert Spencer, even though Spencer himself was not even a true panpsychist! (He believed the simplest forms of conscious experience emerge with certain primitive neural ganglia). What makes Spencer an apposite target for James’ attack (apart from what seems like a personal disliking…) is the fact that his writing nicely illustrates the elementarism and parallelism which James so vividly resists (needless to say, Spencer’s parallelism did not stretch beyond the mental equivalents of the lowest level of the aforementioned primitive neural ganglia).
Like the ‘combination problem’, the ‘generation problem’ is a term coined by Seager (1995). Essentially, the problem is none other than Chalmers’ celebrated ‘hard problem of consciousness’ (Chalmers 1995), namely, the problem of explaining how process-configurations of insentient material elements may culminate in phenomenal experience.
It may be observed that James ascribes this last thesis not only to Royce but also to Hermann Lotze who, according to him, “has set forth the truth of this law more clearly and copiously than any other writer” (queryJames 1890/1950, 159).
Interestingly enough, James was rather skeptical with regard to the existence of any genuine bonds between material elements (see, for example, queryJames 1890/1950, 136).
The distinction between energy-wells and far-from-equilibrium systems is sometimes captured under a different terminology. Thus, von Bertalanffy (1968) emphasized the distinction between ‘closed’ and ‘open’ systems, while in Prigogine’s work the term ‘dissipative structures’ is often used as a synonym for ‘far-from-equilibrium systems’ while energy-wells are called ‘equilibrium structures’ (Prigogine 1978).
In addition, the fact that the “everlasting atoms” are now known to be neither structurless, nor changeless, combined with the holistic import of quantum mechanics and of quantum field theories, further undermines the plausibility of the contention that organization is illusionary and that only structureless atoms are real (I touch on this subject in Shani 2007; see also Bickhard 2000a).
Noticeably, such epiphenomenalism is against the grain of James’ ingenious defense of the causal efficacy of consciousness as expressed in particular in his critique of the automaton theory (in chapter 5 of the Principles of Psychology). As such, this result constitutes a problem for the overall internal logic of his position (nor would it be the first time such a problem occurs, for James was a man of many views and many positions, which, though ingenuous, are often hardly reconcilable with each other).
See James, ibid. I suppose that in making this controversial claim James must have had Hume on his mind. Earlier in the Principles of Psychology he says that “[a]s in the night all cats are grey, so in the darkness of metaphysics all causes are obscure” (James 1890/1950, 137).
Surprisingly, such confusion is generic. Thus, it is often the case that the fact (if it is a fact) that the existence of certain features (for example of intrinsic intentionality, or of semantically determined content) is evident in conscious experience is taken as a surrogate for a proper explanation of the theoretical possibility of such features (see Shani (2009a, b) for a criticism of Searle’s methodology along such lines).
Conditions 3–6 below are adapted, modulo some modifications, from Wimsatt’s illuminating discussion of aggregativity (see Wimsatt 1997).
In linear algebra, x and y are vectors whereas α is a scalar.
Internal relations are relations that are essential (viz. necessary) to one or more of the relata. If x is internally related to y, then it cannot be what it is without being so related. For example, the relation between being a husband and having a wife is internal, as is the relation between an angle external to a triangle and the two internal angles non-adjacent to it. By contrast, external relations are inessential for the identity of the relata; each term of the relation can retain its identity in the absence of the relation (e.g. a pebble may be in a box but being in the box is an external relation as both the pebble and the box can retain their identity in its absence). Clearly, combinatorial reversibility dictates that no parts of agglomerative sums are internally related.
An alternative way to describe the difference between a landscape consisting of interacting organized wholes and one populated with aggregates is to say that the former has a form, while the latter consists of a repeatable multiplicity of separate formless elements.
The link, I suspect, is this: qualitative novelty presupposes cohesiveness, hence non-separability, whence separability entails the absence of qualitative novelty.
This is being sourced from B. Jowett (Ed.), Politics.
One of the few things which James’ argument does show is that if a macro-system with a conscious mental life is constituted out of a multitude of micro-systems equipped with their own micro-experiences, and if these micro-experiences are instrumental in shaping the experiential character of the macro-system, then these lower-level experiences are non-transparent to the conscious perspective of the macro-system. In other words, one cannot access the consciousnesses of, say, one’s individual cortical neurons by reflecting on the contents of one’s unitary conscious experience. However (and again, pace Goff), I see no reason why transparency should be considered an adequacy criterion in the first place. It is perfectly coherent to assume that an emergent experiential whole is the result of a merging process in which the entity emerging from the merger lacks any privileged access to the mental lives of its constitutive micro-elements. Moreover, for transparency to be possible the constitutive micro-elements must retain their original identity within the whole (hence, to remain separable). As we have seen, there are reasons to suspect that this is often not the case.
As for zombies, the opacity of micro-experiences relative to macro-experiences also explains why it is possible to imagine that a physical duplicate of myself would not have had experiences similar to mine, or even any experiences at all—there simply is no way for us to consciously experience the internal connection between our own experiences and the experiences (if such there be) of, say, our cells and molecules.
References
Anderson, P. W. (1972). More is different: Broken symmetry and the nature of the hierarchical structure of science. Science, 177, 393–396.
Aristotle. (2009). In B. Jowett (Ed.), Politics. LA: Indo-European Publishing.
Barham, J. (2004). The Emergence of Biological Value. In W. A. Dembski & M. Ruse (Eds.), Debating design: From darwin to DNA (pp. 210–226). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bertalanffy, L. V. (1968). General systems theory. NY: Braziller.
Bickhard, M. H. (1998). Levels of Representationality. Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Artificial Intelligence, 10(2), 179–215.
Bickhard, M. H. (2000a). Emergence. In P. B. Andersen, C. Emmeche, N. O. Finnemann, & P. V. Christiansen (Eds.), Downward causation (pp. 322–348). Aarhus: University of Aarhus Press.
Bickhard, M. H. (2000b). Autonomy, function and representation. Special issue on: the contribution of artificial life and the sciences of complexity to the understanding of autonomous systems. Communication and Cognition—Artificial Intelligence, 17(3–4), 111–131.
Bickhard, M. H. (2004). The social ontology of persons. In J. I. M. Carpendale & U. Mueller (Eds.), Social interaction and the development of knowledge (pp. 111–132). Mahwah: Erlbaum.
Bickhard, M. H. (2006). Developmental Normativity and Normative Development. In L. Smith & J. Voneche (Eds.), Norms in human development (pp. 57–76). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bickhard, M. H., & Campbell, D. T. (2003). Variations in variation and selection: The ubiquity of the variation-and-selective retention ratchet in emergent organizational complexity. Foundations of Science, 8(3), 215–282.
Campbell, R. (2009). A Process-based Model for an Interactive Ontology. Synthese, Special Issue on Interactivism (Ed. M. Bickhard), 166, 3, 453–477.
Capra, F. (1996). The web of life: A new scientific understanding of living systems. NY: Anchor Books.
Carruthers, P., & Schechter, E. (2006). Can panpsychism bridge the explanatory gap? Journal of Consciousness Studies, 13(10–11), 32–39.
Chalmers, D. J. (1995). Facing up to the problem of consciousness. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2, 200–219.
Chalmers, D. J. (2002). Consciousness and its Place in Nature. In D. Chalmers (Ed.), Philosophy of mind: Classical and contemporary readings (pp. 247–271). NY: Oxford University Press.
Christensen, W. D., & Hooker, C. A. (2000). An Interactivist-constructivist approach to intelligence: Self-directed anticipative learning. Philosophical Psychology, 13(1), 5–45.
Clifford, W. K. (1878). On the nature of things-in-themselves. Mind, 3(9), 57–67.
Collier, J. D. (1988). Supervenience and reduction in biological hierarchies; Philosophy and Biology. In: M. Matthen and B. Linsky (eds.) Canadian Journal of Philosophy Supplementary Vol. 14.
Collier, J. D. (2008). A dynamical account of emergence. Cybernetics and Human Knowing, 15(3–4), 75–86.
Collier, J. D., & Muller, S. J. (1998). The Dynamical Basis of Emergence. In G. Farre & T. Oksala (Eds.), Emergence, complexity, hierarchy and organization, selected and edited papers from the ECHO III conference, acta polytechnica scandinavica, MA91. Espoo: Finish Academy of Technology.
de Quincy, C. (2002). Radical nature: Rediscovering the soul of matter. Montpelier: Invisible Cities Press.
Goff, P. (2006). Experiences don’t Sum. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 13(10–11), 53–61.
Griffin, D. R. (1998). Unsnarling the world knot: Consciousness, freedom, and the mind-body problem. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Healy, R. A. (1991). Holism and Nonseparability. Journal of Philosophy, 88(8), 393–421.
Henle, M. (1990). William james and gestalt psychology. In M. G. Johnson & T. B. Henley (Eds.), Reflections on the principles of psychology. Hillsdale: Laurence Elrbaum Associates.
Humphreys, P. (1997). How properties emerge. Philosophy of Science, 64(1), 1–17.
James, W. (1890/1950). The Principles of Psychology, Vols. 1 & 2. NY: Dover Publications.
Jantsch, E. (1976). Evolution: Self-realization through self-transcendence. In E. Jantsch & C. H. Waddington (Eds.), Evolution and consciousness: Human systems in transition. Reading: Addison-Wesley.
Kauffman, S. (1995). At home in the universe: The search for the laws of self-organization and complexity. NY: Oxford University Press.
Kauffman, S. A. (2000). Investigations. New York: Oxford University Press.
Laszlo, E. (1996). The systems view of the world: A holistic vision for our time. Cresskill: Hampton Press.
Nicolis, G., & Prigogine, I. (1989). Exploring complexity: An introduction. NY: W.H. Freeman.
Prigogine, E. (1978). Time, structure, and fluctuations. Science, 201(4358), 777–785.
Prigogine, E., & Stengers, I. (1984). Order out of chaos. New York: Bantam.
Rosen, R. (1991). Life itself: A comprehensive Inquiry into the nature, origin, and fabrication of life. NY: Columbia University Press.
Routh, J. I. (1965). Fundamentals of inorganic organic and biological chemistry. Philadelphia: W.B. Saunders.
Royce, J. (1881). “Mind-Stuff” and Reality. Mind, 6(23), 365–377.
Ruiz Mirazo, K., & Moreno, A. (2000). Searching for the roots of autonomy: The natural and artificial paradigms revisited. In CC AI: Communication and Cognition-Artificial Intelligence, 17(3–4), 209–228.
Russell, B. (1919). Introduction to mathematical philosophy. London: George Allen and Unwin.
Seager, W. E. (1995). Consciousness, information, and panpsychism. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2, 272–288.
Shani, I. (2006). Narcissistic sensations and intentional directedness. Cybernetics and Human Knowing, 13(3), 87–110.
Shani, I. (2007). The myth of reductive extensionalism. Axiomathes, 17(2), 155–183.
Shani, I. (2009a). The whole rabbit: On the perceptual roots of Quine’s indeterminacy puzzle. Philosophical Psychology, 22(6), 739–763.
Shani, I. (2009b). Representation and aspectual shape. Perspectives on interactivism, a special issue of New Ideas in Psychology (Ed. A. Levine). doi:10.1016/j.newideapsych.2009.09.007.
Skrbina, D. (2006). Beyond descartes: Panpsychism revisited. Axiomathes, 16, 387–423.
Steiner, P., & Stewart, J. (2009). From autonomy to heteronomy (and back): The enaction of social life. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 8, 527–550.
Stoljar, D. (2001). Two conceptions of the physical. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 62, 253–281.
Strawson, G. (2006). Realistic monism: Why physicalism entails panpsychism. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 13(10–11), 3–31.
Ulanowicz, R. E. (2000). Life after newton: An ecological metaphysics. In D. R. Keller & F. B. Golley (Eds.), The philosophy of ecology. Athens: University of Georgia Press.
Van Cleve, J. (1990). Mind-Dust or Magic? Panpsychism versus Emergence. Philosophical Perspectives, vol. 4, Action Theory and Philosophy of Mind, 215–226.
Várela, F. J. (1979). Principles of biological autonomy. New York: Elsevier.
Whitehead, A. N. (1925/1997). Science and the modern world. NY: The Free Press.
Wimsatt, W. C. (1997). Aggregativity: Reductive heuristics for finding emergence. Philosophy of Science, 64, 372–384.
Acknowledgements
Earlier drafts of this paper were read at the UKZN Spring Colloquium, Byrne Kwazulu-Natal, and at the philosophy department colloquium, University of Johannesburg. I thank the audiences of these meetings for their attendance and helpful comments.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
“If evolution is to work smoothly, consciousness in some shape must have been present at the very origin of things”. William James, Principles of Psychology Vol. I, 149.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Shani, I. Mind Stuffed with Red Herrings: Why William James’ Critique of the Mind-Stuff Theory Does not Substantiate a Combination Problem for Panpsychism. Acta Anal 25, 413–434 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-010-0095-8
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-010-0095-8