Introduction 1 Introduction Michel Weber and Anderson Weekes We introduce this volume with a brief preview of its overall concerns (Section I), followed by a précis of the individual contributions (Section II) and an overview of the most important literature with a similar or related focus (Section III). The preview will show that this is not a collection of specialty scholarship, but a volume rightly intended for the broadest possible learned readership. The uniqueness of its approach is tempered by the generality of its concerns. The précis then situate each contribution in the larger context of the book’s philosophical and interdisciplinary ambitions, while the last section situates the book in the broader context of today’s intellectual landscape, where a growing body of literature reinforces its cause without anticipating its results. In this Introduction, we adopt the following conventions in referring to the chapters that follow. (1) Chapters are identified by authorship. Contributors’ proper names, including those of the editors, refer to their respective contributions to Parts II–V. Proper names do not reference the contributions to Part I, which resulted from collaboration (chapters 1 and 2) or consensus (chapters 3 and 4) between the editors. These chapters in Part I we refer to simply as the contributions of “the editors.” “Contribution(s) of the editors” does not refer their individual contributions in Parts IV and V. (2) Source and locus will not be given for quotations if they are taken from the chapters that follow. Unless otherwise indicated, all quotations in this Introduction are from the named author’s contribution to the present volume. Main Themes of the Book Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy was a protest against the compartmentalization of knowledge. A specialized subfield of philosophy focused 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 1 SP_WEB_Int_001-034.indd 1 8/12/09 2:02:29 PM 2 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 Michel Weber and Anderson Weekes on Whitehead interpretation is therefore something of a paradox. Given the daunting complexity of Whitehead’s writing, literal exegesis and historical scholarship aiming at an “immanent” interpretation of his thought have a continuing and obviously important role to play, but Whitehead himself would scarcely recognize such activities as his rightful legacy. A failure of Whiteheadians to be sufficiently Whiteheadian in this regard may well be the reason Whitehead’s ideas have seemed at times to be threatened with extinction and mostly available in fossil form. If this is changing, it is at least partly because outsiders are storming the museum. Straightaway this has opened vast avenues of new dialogue with unsuspected partners, to which this book bears witness. This volume brings multiple disciplinary perspectives to bear on Whitehead’s psychology (which, in a way, is his whole philosophy—a metaphysics of experience) in order to analyze it in terms of relevance to contemporary consciousness studies. Accordingly, we have gathered contribution from scholars whose areas of research are diverse and often do not include Whiteheadian process philosophy as a subfield of expertise, but whose own intellectual paths have led them to recognize an important kinship with Whitehead. The area of consciousness studies proves to be a busy intersection: a place where one can’t help but meet everything from metaphysics to psychotherapy. This is not happenstance. It reflects the nature of the beast we are tracking, and we have not shied from it. This accounts for both the broad scope of the volume and the diversity of its contributions. In important respects, this book complements David Griffin’s Unsnarling the World-Knot: Consciousness, Freedom, and the Mind-Body Problem (1998), which grew out of an interdisciplinary conference sponsored by the Center for Process Studies at the Claremont Colleges in 1994, “Consciousness in Humans, Animals and Computers. A Scientific-Philosophical Conference.” Bringing a Whiteheadian perspective to contemporary consciousness studies, Griffin effects a broad synthesis of the issues currently under debate and at the same time provides an excellent introduction to Whitehead’s psychology. We reverse directions. Bringing different contemporary perspectives (including Griffin’s) to bear on Whitehead’s psychology, we replace synthesis with analysis and highlight the richness and polyvalence of Whitehead’s ideas. Of particular concern to this volume is the role that Whitehead’s process philosophy can play in providing an interpretive framework for neuropsychology, and, conversely, the role that neuropsychology can play in providing an empirical model for Whitehead’s concept of process and an empirical confirmation of his theory of consciousness. According to Whitehead, consciousness is a process—a very specific kind of process that, despite its uniqueness, holds the key to understanding process as such. Consequently, a number of important findings of neuropsychology, some of them familiar, but some of them quite new and even startling, will figure decisively in these pages. SP_WEB_Int_001-034.indd 2 8/12/09 2:02:31 PM Introduction 3 The contributions to this volume can be grouped according to a number of shared themes. Several contributors (David Griffin, Katzko, Shields, Pachalska, and MacQueen, and the editors in Part I) show that some recognizably Whiteheadian issues are at stake in the current debates about consciousness and that Whiteheadian ideas can be exploited—sometimes in ways that Whitehead could not have anticipated—to advance the debate beyond some well-known sticking points. Two of the contributors (Rosenberg and Weekes) explore the curious connection Whitehead alleges between consciousness and causation. One author proceeds by a conceptual analysis of the structure of explanatory theories, the other proceeds phenomenologically, but they both lend support to Whitehead’s signature idea, refereed in chapter 4, that scientists and philosophers find consciousness very difficult to explain for the same reason that they have a problem understanding the nature of causation and the basis for induction: due to inherent constraints, the theoretical activity known as explanation tends to suppress the specifically processual aspect of becoming, which Rosenberg calls the receptive face of causation and Whitehead calls concresence. The argument in brief: By suppressing the dynamic aspect of becoming, explanatory theories render essentially processual phenomena inscrutable. The paradigm of an “essentially processual phenomenon” would be, according to Whitehead, experience, of which consciousness is only the most sophisticated (and deceiving) sort. Others (Verley, Weekes, and the editors in chapters 3 and 4) expand systematically on Whitehead’s scholarly critique of modern philosophy, which Whitehead casts almost entirely as a critique of its favorite concept, consciousness. But there are really three main themes that connect the contributions to this volume. First, running through all the contributions to this volume is the critical insight that consciousness is not the sui generis phenomenon it is usually taken to be—in philosophical and scientific discussion as much as in the everyday understanding informed by lay sensibilities. Closely related to this principal theme is a secondary theme that connects more than half of the contributions to the volume (David Griffin, Donald Redfield Griffin, Shields, Velmans, Rosenberg, Weekes, and the editors in chapter 4). It is the question of the distribution of consciousness in the natural universe. Approaching the question from very different angles, each of the contributors just named argues that consciousness (or something much more primitive, but in the same category) is more widely distributed than customarily supposed. At the opposite extreme from the assumed exclusiveness of human consciousness is the position usually referred to as “panpsychism.” In the contributions by David Griffin, Weekes, and the editors in chapter 4, Whiteheadian arguments for the universal distribution of some kind of extremely rudimentary (pre- or proto-conscious) experience are explored. In the contributions by Shields, Velmans, and Rosenberg, the possibility of such a distribution is supported with robust and original arguments that will give many readers pause. SP_WEB_Int_001-034.indd 3 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 8/12/09 2:02:32 PM 4 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 Michel Weber and Anderson Weekes The principal theme first: in different ways, each contribution to this volume seeks to relativize the concept of consciousness that is normally taken for granted. The reflective and attentionally focused consciousness that tends to be identified with consciousness absolutely belongs to a wide and multidimensional spectrum of conscious states—or, if someone insists on reserving the word consciousness for the particular apex of human experience that is reflective and attentionally focused (as, indeed, Whitehead allows), then we must say that consciousness belongs to a wide and multidimensional spectrum of experience, most of which is “unconscious” or only partially or obliquely conscious. (To know whether the word consciousness is being used in its broader or narrower sense, the reader of this volume will have to be attentive to contexts: we have not thought it appropriate to legislate uniformity in this matter on our contributors.) The point is that “paradigmatic” consciousness is only one of many kinds of consciousness/experience. Its isolation as a paradigm is the result of a variety of organic, psychological, social, and historical processes of development, refinement, and selection (some necessitated by survival and social existence, others contingent, but ossified as dogma). Its view of the world is therefore not absolute or final, but conditioned by these processes. Weber argues that everyday consciousness of the natural attitude is not an absolute given, but an artifact of socialized ontogeny. It results from the constraints of utilitarian and social rationalization that operate on the individual in mostly unconscious ways. Verley, Weekes, and the editors in chapters 3 and 4 expose important ways that the preferred concept of consciousness is an artifact of biases peculiar to the modern philosophical tradition. Pachalska and MacQueen and Schweiger et al. discuss varieties of consciousness revealed by brain pathology in humans. These varieties of consciousness differ markedly from the usual paradigm of reflective and attentionally focused awareness of objects qua objects. The authors argue, moreover, that these varieties of consciousness are not abnormal. On the contrary, they are the normal subphases in the moment-to-moment microgenesis of consciousness, with the qualification that they are abnormally exposed because pathology has arrested the microgenetic process at a preterminal phase of realization. Velmans also stresses ways that human consciousness results from and is conditioned by processes of refinement or selection operating on a spectrum of broader and more basic kinds of consciousness/experience. He goes so far as to suggest that what we normally think of as consciousness in humans may be the sophisticated result of a highly selective release from inhibition of what is in reality a pervasive and primitive kind of awareness intrinsic to all organic matter or even to all matter, period. In fact, the startling generality of this conclusion is something to which Rosenberg’s analysis of causality led him for reasons wholly unrelated to Velmans’ argument: there SP_WEB_Int_001-034.indd 4 8/12/09 2:02:32 PM Introduction 5 is, Rosenberg concludes, a primitive experiential aspect in every causal nexus, and that means in every event, period. Velmans wonders if the purpose of centralization in complex nervous systems isn’t to prevent overload by inhibiting this primitive consciousness throughout most of the system, allowing for a selective focus on information of critical relevance. The late Donald Redfield Griffin’s examination of consciousness in animals relativizes human consciousness in a more straightforward, if no less controversial way. Although he is mainly concerned with documenting ways that animals can be seen to have consciousness similar to ours, its wider distribution in the animal kingdom means that consciousness is a genus of which human consciousness is only a specific kind. Reflective human consciousness may indeed possess an epistemological privilege, but this is no longer something it can take for granted on the grounds that it defines and exhausts what consciousness is. Nor can we assume any longer that the minimum identity conditions of consciousness/experience are in any way obvious—and least of all obvious from self-conscious reflection or introspection in human beings. The secondary theme: Since the distribution of consciousness/experience in the universe bears in an obvious way on the relative or absolute status of “paradigmatic” human consciousness, the distribution question becomes another connecting theme in this volume. The distribution of consciousness/ experience cannot be divorced from the question of the minimal conditions for the existence of consciousness/experience. The more complex the conditions, the less distributed it will be. Conversely, the more distributed it is, the more the complexity of human consciousness must appear as the result of specialized constraints that exclude other, more basic kinds of consciousness/experience (or at least their foregrounded manifestation). The distribution of consciousness, alluded to by Weekes and the editors in chapter 4), is a thematic focus of contributions by David Griffin, Donald Redfield Griffin, Velmans, Shields, and Rosenberg, and it naturally leads to the hot-button issue of panpsychism, notoriously associated with Whitehead’s metaphysics. This special case of the distribution question brings us to the third unifying theme of our volume. The signature thesis of Whitehead’s metaphysics is that the core of actuality is always some kind of experience. Avoiding the misnomer “panpsychism,” David Griffin has aptly dubbed this thesis panexperientialism.1 It has long been common to dismiss Whitehead’s panexperientialism hastily on the grounds that it is patently absurd to suggest that things like rocks and toasters have experience or that subatomic particles are conscious. But this conflates panexperientialism with panpsychism. As Griffin shows in his contribution, these objections are misdirected. First, panexperientialism distinguishes between conscious and nonconscious experience (in the same way that Velmans, for example, distinguishes between very high-grade and very SP_WEB_Int_001-034.indd 5 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 8/12/09 2:02:33 PM 6 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 Michel Weber and Anderson Weekes low-grade “consciousness”). While all entities that are genuine individuals (including subatomic events) are postulated to have some kind of experience, only the most complexly organized of compound individuals have conscious experience. The simplest individuals, presumably Planck-scale units of nature, have an extremely rudimentary kind of “experience” that would consist in little more than a sensitivity or responsiveness to their environment that was not 100% predictable. Second, drawing on an important clarification made by Charles Hartshorne, panexperientialism distinguishes between compound individuals, such as organisms, which are genuine integral individuals and thus have a coherently unified experience, and merely cohesive aggregates (like rocks and toasters), which have individuals as their micro-constituents, but are not themselves integral individuals and as such have no experience.2 It is also important to keep in mind that, according to panexperientialism, individuals per se are momentary events and do not endure for more than the briefest possible duration. Enduring entities, such as electrons or psyches, are made up of many such durational individuals forming a temporal series that is cumulative and characterized by overwhelming similarity between any two consecutive members. Consequently, panexperientialism does not attribute a mind or soul to anything but enduring compound individuals.3 It is only the small differential of a momentary experience that panexperientialism attributes to every individual regardless of status—compound or simple, bound within a cumulative series or not. A number of contributors to this volume explore arguments, both logical and empirical, for taking panexperientialism seriously. Logical arguments of various types (metaphysical, transcendental, conceptual) are advanced by David Griffin, Shields, Rosenberg, and the editors in chapter 4. Empirical arguments must appeal to scientific evidence about the distribution of consciousness/ experience. Given the roughly inverse relationship between complexity and distribution of consciousness/experience, a number of contributors take up the critical question that unavoidably arises in this context and that any serious assessment of Whitehead must address: how far downscale in complexity of organization can types of individuals be found that still appear to have some kind of experience? As Thomas Nagel has put it, “if one travels too far down the phylogenetic tree, people gradually shed their faith that there is experience there at all” (Nagel 1979, 168). David Griffin alludes in summary form to the growing range of evidence available on this important topic. Three of our contributors, Donald Redfield Griffin, Velmans, and Shields, observing a division of labor naturally suggested by their respective areas of expertise (biology/animal ethology; psychology/neuropsychology; philosophy/physics), examine empirical evidence that is in many cases startling. Of course, as an empirical question, how far downscale in organizational complexity experience goes is something that could be answered only indirectly, SP_WEB_Int_001-034.indd 6 8/12/09 2:02:34 PM Introduction 7 by inference from decisive clues. As Donald Redfield Griffin notes, prejudices on this question are likely to disguise themselves as disagreements about the criteria for validly inferring the existence of consciousness/experience in other life forms. Donald Redfield Griffin and Velmans both dispatch a number of specious objections to less-than-human consciousness simply by insisting that the same standards of interpretation we apply to other human beings be applied to other organisms: similar behavior and similar brain anatomy and physiology cannot be relevant in the one case and not in the other. Regarding how far down the scale of complexity experience goes, David Griffin notes that Descartes set the cutoff point right below human beings, but that natural science has been pushing it down ever since—animal ethologists pushing it as far down the phylogenetic tree as bees, biologists as far down as single cell organisms or even as far as bacteria or DNA, and some physicists right down to the Planck-scale units of nature. In this light, panexperientialism looks like a position toward which empirical science is tending all by itself under the weight of the evidence. But it is also a position increasingly under reassessment for strictly philosophical reasons. Part of the reason for this volume is the fact that this slighted position is beginning to garner mainstream consideration. As the deadlock between dualism and materialism in consciousness studies becomes more tiresome, appreciation for the important differences between the less plausible panpsychism and the more plausible panexperientialism grows. To many, panexperientialism is looking more and more like a viable via tertia (or “third way”). And we note last that an answer to an important objection to panexperientialism also emerges from this volume. The demand is rightly made: what other meaning can “experience” possibly have than the experience human users of language are readily familiar with in themselves? Consequently, if the concept of experience is attenuated and generalized so that it no longer designates what human speakers normally mean in one language or another, how can it mean anything at all? If the experience of a bacterium or an electron is totally unlike ours, what point is there in calling it experience at all? It seems that we are either saying something obviously wrong or not really saying anything at all. A great deal of empirical research into the distribution of experience in the universe is addressed in this volume, and it suggests a much wider distribution than is traditionally conceded. But our contributors also show that within its own compass human experience is rich and multiform enough to supply the semantic Rosetta Stone needed to talk meaningfully about these nonhuman manifestations of experience. By noticing that even human experience encompasses kinds of awareness that fall far short of the lucid, objectifying consciousness of the well-socialized adult, we can free ourselves from the conceit that consciousness as such must be narrowly construed as SP_WEB_Int_001-034.indd 7 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 8/12/09 2:02:35 PM 8 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 Michel Weber and Anderson Weekes something uniquely human (Weber, Weekes, and the editors in Part I ). If there is, even within human consciousness as we experience it now, the vestiges of qualitatively distinct kinds of consciousness corresponding to each evolutionary stratum of our brain (Pachalska and MacQueen and the work of Jason Brown they draw on), then there is no reason to think that we do not share these more basic forms of consciousness with those species that have only the more primitive brain formations. If human consciousness passed through more primitive stages in its own evolution, if it passes through cumulative phases in the recovery from unconsciousness, if it passes through distinct phases in the early motor development of the individual and its subsequent socialization, if it passes through a nested hierarchy of phases as it emerges moment by moment from the neural activity of the brain (Schweiger et al., Weber, and the literature they reference), then it makes no sense to deny that we have any criteria for generalizing an attenuated concept of consciousness beyond human experience. The important question that remains open is not whether, but how far the concept of experience can be meaningfully generalized. In order to set the individual contributions to this book in the context of its overarching themes, the editors supply the following précis. As for the arrangement of the contributions, the editors hoped to order them in a way that would allow each to benefit the most from being read in the sequence settled on, but to some extent the order is unavoidably arbitrary, and each contribution does, in fact, stand on its own. Précis of the Contributions David Griffin not only provides a lucid, jargon-free overview of Whitehead’s theory of consciousness, but he also manages to bring it directly into the arena of current debate. The fact that there are conceptual common denominators allowing for a meaningful, if virtual debate between Whitehead and contemporary theorists may surprise many who have, perhaps understandably, stumbled at the outset over Whitehead’s dense and idiosyncratic language.4 Griffin enlarges on an idea very important to Whitehead: that the philosopher may not deny in theory what she presupposes in practice. Griffin notes that this fallacy involves what Apel and Habermas call a performative contradiction: asserting something that violates the conditions of possibility of making the assertion in question.5 Accordingly, Griffin elaborates four criteria having to do with the conditions of the possibility of theorizing. These performatively undeniable facts Griffin calls ideas of “hard-core common sense,” and any adequate theory of consciousness must account for them: the idea “that conscious experience exists, that it exerts influence upon the SP_WEB_Int_001-034.indd 8 8/12/09 2:02:35 PM Introduction 9 body, that it has a degree of self-determining freedom, and that it can act in accord with various norms.” It’s obvious how a statement such as “Consciousness does not exist” involves a performative contradiction,6 but a statement such as “Consciousness is merely an epiphenomenon” runs afoul of performative consistency, too. If the uttered statement means what the speaker intended, then it must be conceded that her mind has had an effect on her body. If the statement was affirmed because the speaker thought it was true, then she must have had the freedom to let herself be motivated by an ideal such as truth.7 Griffin takes a broad survey of the important players in current debates and finds that the discussion remains boxed in by the traditionally dominant paradigms of reductionist materialism and Cartesian dualism. Assessed against his four performative criteria, neither of these positions is acceptable. Materialism runs afoul of all four, and dualism runs afoul of all but the first. The contemporary debate is therefore framed by what amounts to a false dilemma. The overlooked third option or tertium quid would be a naturalism that was not reductionistic or, by the same token, an interactionism that was not dualistic. According to Griffin, Whitehead’s position meets this requirement: “With dualists, Whitehead agrees that consciousness belongs to an entity—a mind or psyche—that is distinct from the brain, and that genuine freedom can, partly for this reason, be attributed to conscious experience. With materialists, Whitehead shares a naturalistic sensibility, thereby eschewing any even implicitly supernaturalistic solution to philosophical problems, and, partly for this reason, rejects any dualism between two kinds of actualities. Like materialists, in other words, he affirms a pluralistic monism. He thereby regards consciousness as a function of something more fundamental. And yet he, like dualists, rejects the reductionism involved in functionalism as understood by materialists.” What makes this tertium possible is Whitehead’s theory of experience as the core of actuality. In other words, panexperientialism is uniquely qualified to avoid the pitfalls of the materialism-dualism dichotomy. This yields an essentially transcendental argument for panexperientialism: an argument based on performative consistency as a condition of the possibility of conscious activity. Griffin alludes to two subsidiary arguments, as well. For one, he notes the trend in empirical science to cast the net of experience more and more widely. In the absence of a sufficient reason to draw a hard line at a particular point (as Velmans discusses in his contribution, as well) a prima facie presumption of validity should be granted to the logical extrapolation of this trend. For another, Griffin (like Velmans) notes the difficulties that arise once we draw such a hard line. It creates a discontinuity and a dualism difficult to square with the theory of evolution. Griffin even makes the case that panexperientialism alone can explain how consciousness could arise in the SP_WEB_Int_001-034.indd 9 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 8/12/09 2:02:36 PM 10 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 Michel Weber and Anderson Weekes course of evolution. This is no bluff since he charts the intervening phases that would lead to the gradual or staggered evolution of consciousness from the unconscious or merely incipient intentionality of experience in its most rudimentary shape. But Griffin stresses that his most important argument is the transcendental one: that only panexperientialism can satisfy the four performative criteria he sets out. Michael Katzko offers us a complementary survey of current debates on consciousness, looking especially at three influential philosophers who strongly disagree with one another: David Chalmers, Daniel Dennett, and John Searle. On the surface it would seem that the positions of these three philosophers have relatively little in common, but Katzko argues that they share fundamental presuppositions. This becomes evident when we examine how each philosopher construes the problem he thinks a theory of consciousness is obligated to solve. In each case the problem defining his objective is essentially the same: the difficulty of understanding how the physical could possibly give rise to the mental. (Notice that the question is essentially about causation.) The answers they and many others in the literature give to this question are to be sure quite different. Some answer that it’s not possible: either because there’s really no such thing as the mental or because the mental isn’t caused or created by the physical at all, even if it always somehow corresponds to it. Others answer that it’s possible, but as yet incomprehensible, or that it’s possible, but inherently incomprehensible, and so on. But all these solutions start from the same conception of the problem. Katzko sees them as so many attempts to make a virtue of necessity—having uncritically embraced false dilemmas bequeathed to them by the seventeenth century, contemporary philosophers have no choice but to countenance one side or another. As a whole, the contemporary discussion takes it for granted that what we need to do is rethink our understanding of the mental in order to render its relation to the physical unproblematic. The homogeneity and one-sidedness of the contemporary discussion becomes evident when we compare Whitehead’s philosophical conviction that what we need is a new concept of the physical. Why after all should our concept of the mental do all the accommodating, especially when the concept of the physical to which accommodation is demanded was discredited by physics a century ago? (In this connection Shields rightly speaks in his contribution of a “cultural lag.”) Looking at the contemporary debate with the eyes of a clinician, Katzko sees a disordered discourse, hamstrung by arbitrary and unacknowledged limitations. Using Whitehead’s framework of concepts to make this diagnosis, he shows how the operative concepts of the current debate (mind, the physical, intentionality, qualia) illustrate many of the fallacies described by Whitehead (misplaced concreteness, simple location, vacuous actuality). SP_WEB_Int_001-034.indd 10 8/12/09 2:02:37 PM Introduction 11 The common denominator of these fallacies is the methodological mistake of commencing investigation with abstractions to which one subsequently attempts to reattach what was left out by appealing to other abstractions. The alternative is to begin inquiry with the complete context of the concrete experience in which theoretical investigation operates (including such things as what the investigation presupposes “in practice”), seeking from the outset a generalization that is inclusive rather than exclusive. Whitehead agrees with thinkers such as Bergson, James, and Bradley that prereflective experience is characterized by an unbroken wholeness to which reflection must always do justice. Whenever analytic abstractions precind8 from this wholeness and treat the world as a set of typological isolates that can be recombined to “explain” concrete phenomena—which the reader will recognize as the resolutive-compositive method that inaugurates modern thought—it will subsequently be difficult, not to say impossible, to understand how things are nevertheless interconnected in nontrivial ways. Katzko shows how well the now popular concept of intentionality illustrates this problem. It reflects an attempt to reattach the contextuality and relatedness that was left out of “mind” when it was conceived as a kind of substance to begin with. And whenever it is supposed, for example, that the “content” of experience does not entail the existence of the “external” world, the mind (or consciousness) is being treated, at least implicitly, as an autonomous entity—that is, as a substance. Whitehead does not deny the great practical and technological triumphs of the resolutive-compositive method, but he thinks it contributes little to philosophical understanding. It is not possible to explain concreteness—what Aristotle called tode ti—as a collocation of abstractions. The task of philosophy is therefore not to explain the concrete by means of the abstract, but to explain how abstractions arise from the analytic partitioning of concrete experience. Katzo shows how the partitioning of experience preferred by the current debate, lacking a self-conscious methodological grounding in the holism of prereflective experience, is often an arbitrary throw-back to platitudes of the seventeenth century. The late Donald Redfield Griffin’s contribution goes a long way toward assuaging the uneasiness noted by philosopher Thomas Nagel that “if one travels too far down the phylogenetic tree, people gradually shed their faith that there is experience there at all” (Nagel 1979, 168). Griffin does not make the specifically Whiteheadian distinction between conscious and unconscious experience, although he does not rule it out either.9 Defining consciousness as “subjectively experiencing feelings or thoughts,” he shows that accumulating evidence strongly suggests that many species of animals have consciousness. His discussion touches on apes, parrots, dolphins, and bees. Griffin suggests that evidence of animal consciousness is routinely ignored because of an overriding philosophical prejudice “that there is no SP_WEB_Int_001-034.indd 11 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 8/12/09 2:02:38 PM 12 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 Michel Weber and Anderson Weekes conceivable way in which valid, objective evidence about conscious experiences of other species can ever be obtained.” With regard to species very unlike our own, the prejudice takes the stronger form that conscious thinking simply could not be possible. The result is a double standard, where something naturally accepted as evidence of conscious thinking in the case of humans is dismissed in the case of animals. Griffin reviews evidence from neuropsychology, fieldwork in animal ethology, and experimental work where animals have been trained to communicate. The evidence from neuropsychology is arresting. Human consciousness does not appear to be associated with any neural structure or function unique to the human brain, but rather with widely distributed, but coordinated activity engaging large areas of the brain. There is no obvious reason why activity of this sort must be limited to brains of the highest complexity. In any case, the close similarity between animal and human nervous systems “means that there is no inherent reason why animal brains cannot produce conscious experiences.” But there is also positive neuroscientific evidence of animal consciousness, at least in monkeys. Just as the phenomenon of blindsight in humans has been used to clarify the important difference between registering and responding to information from the environment, on the one hand, and being conscious of it, on the other, so, too, the evidence of blindsight in monkeys warrants a similar interpretation. Furthermore, the discovery of “mirror neurons” in monkeys suggests that they sometimes entertain possibilities, thinking about behaviors they could or would like to perform. If this interpretation is correct, it has important consequences. It is very hard (maybe impossible) to understand counterfactual ideation as information processing or as stimulus-response conditioning, and Griffin draws very near to Whitehead’s technical understanding of consciousness when he suggests that mirror neurons, in providing evidence that monkeys sometimes think about what is not the case, but possible, provide evidence of consciousness. There is, moreover, direct evidence that monkeys are conscious when attentionally focused on what is the case. It is commonly claimed that monkeys, while they may “know” many facts that are important in their lives, do not know that they know them. Reflexivity is thus taken to be a necessary condition of consciousness that monkeys supposedly lack. However, an ingeniously designed experiment demonstrates that monkeys are able to know whether they have remembered a particular piece of useful information and to optimize their strategies for getting food in light of this higher-order knowledge. It cannot be stressed enough how close Griffin’s discussion of consciousness in monkeys comes to Whitehead’s very abstract analysis of consciousness. For Whitehead, experience is conscious in one of two basic cases: (1) when we “feel” the absence of a difference between a thing and SP_WEB_Int_001-034.indd 12 8/12/09 2:02:38 PM Introduction 13 the description it satisfies or (2) when we “feel” the difference between a thing and a description it doesn’t satisfy. To take an arbitrary example (the old cat and the mat), the verbal transcription in the former case would be the cat is on the mat; in the latter case, the cat is not on the mat. But the cat is on the mat is actually abbreviated. Something logically irrelevant, but psychologically crucial has been left out. The verbal analogue of the consciousness that the cat is on the mat would have to reflect the actual state of affairs as the absence of a (potential) difference between the thing indicated and its description: the cat is not not on the mat. In other words, ideation cannot be conscious unless it involves a counterfactual element. The counterfactual element is denied, but the unrealized possibility of its truth is what makes consciousness of facts possible. To be conscious of a fact is to “experience” that the possibility of its falsehood exists, but is not realized (note that what is experienced is therefore a proposition). Such an experience is possible, according to Whitehead, because there is, in addition to the physical element that supplies the basis of experience, a purely mental element that supplies the necessary modal and logical functions.10 In the case of Griffin’s monkeys, they apparently understand that their recollection could be wrong (possibility), but are confident in specific cases that it is not wrong (unrealized possibility), and in other cases they understand that they no longer recall or that the recollection is no longer reliable. In the former case, where error is the unrealized possibility, they are conscious of knowing. In the latter case, where knowledge is the unrealized possibility, they are conscious of not knowing.11 Griffin makes his strongest case on the basis of animal communication. He asks only that we accept as evidence of consciousness in animals what we take as evidence of consciousness in humans. Even conceding a single standard, however, many will deny that animal communication has the requisite parity: it is not symbolic, lacks semantic content, and lacks displacement. (“Displacement” means “convey[ing] information about something displaced in space or time from the situation where the communication takes place.”) Let the reader note that we are here talking about the “decisive clues” alluded to earlier that would warrant an inference from patent behavior (in this case: communication) to the existence of consciousness, which is necessarily something latent. The decisive features communication must have to warrant such an inference appear to be (1) a symbolic character, (2) semantic content, and (3) displacement. For it is precisely the prominence of these three features in human communication that compels us to view it as expressing subjective experiences, and these three features, so it is alleged, are conspicuously absent from animal communication. But, in fact, these features are attested. The alarm calls of vervet monkeys convey specific semantic information about the types of predators, not just emotional arousal, and the famous “waggle SP_WEB_Int_001-034.indd 13 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 8/12/09 2:02:39 PM 14 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 Michel Weber and Anderson Weekes dance” of honeybees displays all three critical features. The waggle dance is an elaborate symbolic code, specific enough to convey precise semantic content that is displaced, flexible enough to serve multiple purposes (e.g., finding the best nectar or finding the best location for a new hive), and it involves an extensive exchange of information among dancers leading through reciprocal adjustments to a final group decision. Griffin concedes that most examples of animal communication, such as the alarm calls of the vervet monkeys, are indeed examples of direct reactions to the current situation in which the animal finds itself, whereas humans “often think and communicate about past occurrences or what may happen in the future.” Consciousness is strongly associated with displacement for the same reason it is strongly associated with counterfactual ideation. It is hard to see how sensitivity and responsiveness to what is not present could be a matter of unconscious information processing or stimulus-response conditioning. Finding displacement in the communication of social insects therefore poses significant challenges to conventional assumptions about consciousness. George W. Shields makes skillful use of the methods and resources of Analytic philosophy to argue for panexperientialism, thereby disarming some of its most self-confident critics—Anglo-American philosophers who think panexperientialism violates basic sureties of logically rigorous and scientifically informed analysis. Sophistication in formal logic and command of hard science often make Analytic criticism formidable. Shields meets this criticism on its own terms, presenting formally rigorous arguments and hard empirical evidence in favor of panexperientialism. The first part of his paper focuses on logical and philosophical arguments for panexperientialism. Shields examines what panexperientialism means and proposes the following as minimal criteria: that every genuine individual has a physical presence in space-time and is related internally to its environment.12 Whitehead’s analytic unit of experience—the prehension—is therefore an internal relation. Following Hartshorne, Shields argues that internal relations translate logically into strict implications. From this analysis he infers what the denial of panexperientialism amounts to: an ontology of exclusively external relations and a logic of entirely open possibilities. There would be no restrictions on the conjunction or separation of individuals in this world (this is what is meant by “open possibilities” in this context). The only necessity would be the completely symmetrical logical necessities of identity and noncontradiction. Shields is happy to continue the strain or argument begun by David Griffin when he analyzed the idea of performative consistency in terms of “hard-core common sense.” Shields calls “assumptions which we presume in our practice universally or nearly universally” “deep protocols of common sense” and under this rubric extends Griffin’s list to include four more items: SP_WEB_Int_001-034.indd 14 8/12/09 2:02:40 PM Introduction 15 “that (1) our experience as temporally conceptualized into ‘past,’ ‘present,’ and ‘future’ is coherent; (2) the act of remembering is in principle not the same as the act of imagining; (3) causal influence is objectively real; and (4) a ‘skeptical solipsism of the present’ is false.” Shields presents what he calls a “reduction to pragmatic absurdity” by showing that the external relations ontology violates these four common sense commitments. Since the relation between any two events is wholly external and contingent it becomes impossible to understand how the present could have anything to do with the past. A present event, such as the act of remembering the past, would necessarily be independent of anything that actually happened in the past, undercutting the concepts of “past,” “memory,” and “causal influence” at one stroke and sealing present consciousness hermetically in the present moment. Panexperientialism, by accepting internal relations, avoids these difficulties. Shields notes that panexperientialism also avoids the cardinal problems typically afflicting materialism and dualism, namely, the emergence of qualia out of matter and the possibility of the mind acting causally on matter. Shields considers and rebuts in some detail six objections raised against panexperientialism: (1) that it implies that things like rocks have thoughts (only it doesn’t), (2) that it implies that the behavior of the elementary constituents of matter would not be predictable through their physical properties alone (only they aren’t), (3) that elementary particles are completely identical whatever their past histories and thus could not have any interior states (only they aren’t and so could), (4) that attributing any kind of feeling, however qualified or attenuated, to micro-constituents of matter violates the linguistic protocols for meaningful use of terms such as feeling (but not just the concept of feeling is generalized—the criteria for its attribution are generalized as well, yielding predicates such as “openness to the environment” or “internal relatedness,” which are still “psychological” predicates without being strained usage), (5) that any adequate physicalism must be tantamount to epiphenomenalism (but epiphenomenalism cuts against physical science because it is anti-evolutionary, implying that “animals and humans evolved with persistent natural selection of entirely superfluous mental entities”); and (6) that the existence of unproblematic forms of emergence, such a liquidity from molecules, shows that proto-experiential “elements” are not needed to explain the emergence of the experience we are familiar with (but experience is unlike liquidity in the relevant respect because the latter is a kind of emergence that can be understood and predicted from its antecedent elements, while experience notoriously cannot). The second part of Shields’ paper looks at arresting empirical data in support of panexperientialism. In pushing down the lower threshold of “conscious” experience, Donald Griffin got us to social insects. Velmans, arguing that even single cell organisms might have some kind of phenomenal SP_WEB_Int_001-034.indd 15 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 8/12/09 2:02:41 PM 16 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 Michel Weber and Anderson Weekes awareness, got us to the very bottom of the phylogenetic tree. Shields, drawing on startling but well-confirmed empirical findings, provides the final turn of the screw that anchors experience in the Planck-scale units of nature. He cites first the phenomenon of neuroplasticity. Although it had long been dogma that the brain is hardwired once and for all in early childhood, recent research has documented ongoing alterations in the adult brain, including the growth of new neurons, as a result of sensory and cognitional input. Important to Shields’ argument is the remarkable discovery that the brain’s plasticity is susceptible to clinical manipulation. Attentional therapies, involving such exercises as “observing” undesirable thoughts and emotions in an impartial manner and then refocusing attention repeatedly on alternative thoughts, have not only been shown to work, but PET scans have now revealed alterations of the brain’s neural system corresponding to the behavioral changes. Shields argues that this is just a special case of the weird but documented quantum phenomenon known as the “Quantum Zeno Effect,” where observation increases the probability that a given quantum state will not change: “the more frequently and rapidly you observe a physical system in a certain selected way, the more you ‘lock in’ a certain physical state of the system.” The power of attentional therapies to decrease the probability of unwanted thoughts and emotions would thus result from “locking in” the alternatives by repeated ideational exercises. Shields’ appeal to quantum mechanics is not entirely speculative since, as he points out, the release of neurotransmitters is regulated by processes so microscopic that quantum mechanical principles do indeed apply. The provocative conclusion is that attention to one’s own thinking, like the observation of experimental setups, has the power to alter the probability that one rather than another superimposed wave function will be actualized. This kind of “top-down” causal influence is precisely what Whitehead’s panexperientialism is designed to explain. Shields doubts that classical materialism can make any sense of these phenomena at all.13 Max Velmans also takes up the critical question of how far downscale in complexity types of individuals can be found that still have some kind of experience. Velmans approaches the question in the context of a larger question about the evolution of consciousness. Which sorts of entities are thought to have consciousness determines to a large extent when consciousness must have evolved and what biological refinements to the evolving organism are specifically responsible for it. Velmans notes that theories about the distribution of consciousness range from the ultraconservative (only humans have it) to the extravagantly libertarian (everything has it—panpsychism). While ultraconservative theories traditionally drew their support from theology, more contemporary versions “are based on the supposition that higher mental processes of the kinds unique to humans are necessary for consciousness of any kind.” Velmans is skeptical not only of these ultraconservative views, but SP_WEB_Int_001-034.indd 16 8/12/09 2:02:42 PM Introduction 17 ultimately of any degree of conservatism on this point. He examines a variety of rationales for the claim that consciousness depends on brain complexity or higher order cognitive processes and argues that “[s]uch views confuse the necessary conditions for the existence of consciousness with the added conditions required to support its many forms.” While Velmans ultimately endorses the “extravagantly libertarian” view, it must be noted that his vocabulary does not strictly conform to the usage of Whitehead or contemporary Whiteheadians. Although he does distinguish between conscious and unconscious information processing (and elsewhere [2000] between conscious and unconscious mind), he does not make the terminological distinction between conscious and nonconscious experience or between panpsychism and panexperentialism. Nevertheless, he makes nearly equivalent distinctions by stressing the widely differing degrees of complexity manifested by the forms that consciousness takes: from mere feeling to conceptually articulated consciousness of self and world. At the lowest extreme, consciousness in Velmans’ acceptation is tantamount to Whitehead’s nonconscious experience. Accordingly, the form of panpsychism he advocates is very close to panexperientialism. This becomes evident when we revisit his distinction between conscious and unconscious information processing in light of his final reflections on the nature of focal-attentive consciousness. As we discuss below, Velmans marshals an arresting reason why unconscious information processing may simply be information processing in which a diffuse, primitive consciousness has been suppressed. So in the end, feeling may well be a naturally occurring feature of all biological processes, which regulate themselves through information extracted from their internal and external environments. Velmans advances two principle arguments against conservative distribution theories. First, following a tradition that includes Thomas Huxley and Charles Sherrington, he points out that conservative distribution implies a discontinuity theory of evolution. At some point consciousness must “appear [ . . . ] (out of nothing) through some random mutation in complex life forms that happen[s] to confer a reproductive advantage.” Typically, it is thought that consciousness is linked to the evolution of the neocortex. However, there is nothing unique to cortical cells that might be responsible for consciousness. Indeed, as Sherrington observes, cells in the frog embryo destined to be brain can often be replaced with others, such as skin cells from the back, and still develop into brain. This leaves us with the assumption that consciousness must have something to do with neural organization. But the strong evidence for the gradual evolution of the human brain makes it unlikely that consciousness sprang fully formed at any point in the brain’s slow accretion of structural/functional complexity. Velmans’ second argument against conservative distribution theories is, by contrast, so untraditional that it upends conventional objections to SP_WEB_Int_001-034.indd 17 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 8/12/09 2:02:43 PM 18 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 Michel Weber and Anderson Weekes panexperientialism. Velmans brings neurophysiology and phenomenology together in a startling way. He reminds us that a great number of the synapses in the brain must be inhibitory. Otherwise the nervous system would be in a constant state of universal excitement after the first signal. At the same time we know that consciousness would be impossible if the vast amount of simultaneous information streaming in to the mind/brain were not limited and filtered down to something that it could manageably attend to.14 From this Velmans infers the possibility that consciousness may be a naturally occurring feature of all neural representations. However, the more complex the nervous system, the more necessary it would be to inhibit consciousness of all but the most important information to prevent overload and confusion. In this case, rather than adding something to unconscious representations to make them conscious, attention15 would correspond to a highly selective release of consciousness from inhibition. The implications of this argument are dramatic. As Velmans notes, cognitive psychology has demonstrated that most human information processing takes place unconsciously. Naturally, this leads cognitive psychology to seek the specific conditions that distinguish conscious from unconscious processing. It asks, in other words: why does consciousness emerge at some particular threshold in the mind/brain’s cognitive functioning? This question is perhaps no less vexed than the question of the threshold at which consciousness emerges in the course of evolution. Both questions presuppose a discontinuity: on the one hand, a discontinuity in the evolution of consciousness (a diachronic discontinuity), on the other, a discontinuity in the distribution of consciousness (a synchronic discontinuity). The synchronic discontinuity takes two forms. There is the discontinuity between organisms that do and those that do not have consciousness, and, within the nervous system of organisms that do have consciousness, there is the discontinuity between conscious and unconscious processes. These two kinds of synchronic discontinuity are closely related. Without having to make any particular assumptions about the relation between organic processes available to consciousness and organic processes that result in consciousness, we can nonetheless say it is only because consciousness does not extend (in either sense) to the vast majority of organic processes in our own brains and bodies that we resist the idea that very similar processes in other life forms might be conscious (in either sense). But if what human beings normally experience as consciousness is only the selective release of an aboriginally pervasive consciousness from its systemic inhibition in complex nervous systems, then unconscious information processing would not be different in kind from—that is, discontinuous with—conscious processing. Unless specifically inhibited, a kind of rudimentary “consciousness” would attach to all organic information processing. Neither SP_WEB_Int_001-034.indd 18 8/12/09 2:02:43 PM Introduction 19 at some point in evolutionary history nor at some level of neural activity would consciousness come into being de novo. Of course this rudimentary consciousness would not involve attention or any kind of reflective, objectifying, or thematically motivated awareness. It would be a diffuse, nonconceptual, nonobjectifying, and nonreflective feeling of qualia—just the sort of experience Whitehead calls “unconscious” and generalizes to all events in nature. On this telling, discontinuity—the abrupt emergence of consciousness from something unconscious—would be an illusion arising from attentional consciousness, the necessary flip side of which is the suppression or exclusion of diffuse consciousness. The highly restricted access of our own consciousness to what it’s like to be a living organism then leaves us in a poor position to appreciate what we have in common with less complex forms of life. We see how this argument leads to a new opening in the vexed problem of the evolutionary value of consciousness. It would not be consciousness, but complexity of information processing that confers a reproductive advantage on certain organisms in certain environments. Such complexity would go hand in hand with increasing complexity of the attendant consciousness. But increasing complexity in the nervous system would actually become counterproductive for the organism unless the attendant consciousness of all but a narrow selection of the increasingly diffuse aggregate experience embraced in this complexity was suppressed, thus yielding our familiar attentionally focused consciousness as well as the illusion that it is the addition of something altogether new on top of an otherwise unconscious cognitive processing. For Velmans, an evolutionary account of human consciousness is therefore possible, but only by upending the way the question is usually posed. It would not be consciousness so much as its suppression that under certain circumstances confers a selective advantage. Attentional consciousness evolves when diffuse consciousness begins to pose a selective disadvantage. We should note in passing how close this comes to Whitehead’s thesis that complexity of experience, which he calls width and depth through harmony and intensity, requires a great deal of the data actually given to an entity to enter into its experience only negatively, that is, as something excluded, suppressed, diminished, or transmuted. This unanticipated turn of the argument stands Thomas Nagel’s reservations on their head. What needs to be explained is not how there possibly could be simple phenomenal consciousness at the low end of the phylogenetic tree, but why it is lacking throughout most of the nervous system of organisms at the high end. “[P]henomenal consciousness (of any kind) might only require representation. If so, even simple invertebrates might have some rudimentary awareness, in so far as they are able to represent and, indeed, respond to certain features of the world.” Empirically, it is as yet SP_WEB_Int_001-034.indd 19 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 8/12/09 2:02:44 PM 20 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 Michel Weber and Anderson Weekes impossible to rule out even more remote seeming possibilities: “If the ability to represent and respond to the world, or the ability to modify behavior consequent on interactions with the world are the criteria for consciousness then it may be that consciousness extends not just to simple invertebrates (such as Planaria) but also to unicellular organisms, fungi and plants.” The upshot of the continuity theory of the evolution of consciousness is essentially panexperientialist: “In the cosmic explosion that gave birth to the universe, consciousness co-emerged with matter and co-evolves with it. [ . . . ] On this view, evolution accounts for the different forms that consciousness takes. But, consciousness, in some primal form, did not emerge at any particular stage of evolution. Rather, it was there from the beginning. Its emergence, with the birth of the universe, is neither more nor less mysterious than the emergence of matter, energy, space and time.” Gregg Rosenberg also focuses on the case for panexperientialism, but he takes a very different approach from our other contributors. In a precisely executed analysis of the semantic structure of explanatory theories and of causality in particular, Rosenberg surprises us with an altogether original argument for panexperientialism. Rosenberg observes that Whitehead’s panexperientialism is “a reaction to the void created by his rejection of Vacuous Actuality,” which he explains with admirable lucidity: “A Vacuous Actuality would be a fundamental reality that is purely structural and quantifiable, with no intrinsic nature of its own that escapes the formal description of a pattern. The rejection of Vacuous Actuality amounts to the assertion that the entities of fundamental physics, for instance, are more than mere dynamic quantities, mere information structures in the vacuum. It is the rejection of the now popular information-theoretic ‘It from bit’ view for understanding the essential nature of the physical world.” Rosenberg notes that the rejection of Vacuous Actuality and the endorsement of panexperientialism by process philosophy look on the surface “like positions of insight, or even faith, not sufficiently motivated by argumentation.” The purpose of his paper “is to put more argumentation in place to support the rejection of Vacuous Actuality and the panexperientialist reaction to that rejection.” Rosenberg begins with a logical analysis of different kinds of relations. He is especially interested in the kind of relationships that define the explanatory structure of scientific theories. He illustrates how they are typically conceptual relations in which the relata mutually presuppose one another. For example, in economics, goods and services are things that consumers and producers barter. But consumers and producers are, in turn, simply people occupying distinct positions in the system of bartering goods and services. In biology, a heritable characteristic (gene) is one that parents pass from their generation to the next, but a parent is an organism that passes SP_WEB_Int_001-034.indd 20 8/12/09 2:02:45 PM Introduction 21 along its genes. Rosenberg argues that such circularity is logically harmless and metaphysically possible only because the relationships are in these cases carried by items individuated by properties external to the circular relation. The roles of the two players in a game of checkers, for example, are defined in a circular way because they presuppose one another, but their distinction is possible only because they are carried by a difference that is not circular, namely the difference between the colors of the pieces. This leads Rosenberg to identify one kind of circularity as merely contrastive, like “on” and “off ”—just as the players in a game of checkers are sufficiently defined simply by stipulating that they are different from one another. Here each term is defined by nothing more than the negation of the other. Another kind of circularity he calls compositional because the items presuppose one another in a positive way as components of each other’s natures. He proposes that causality exhibits this kind of circularity, involving a nexus between effective properties, which can determine an event to happen, and receptive properties, which allow such determination to happen. To prevent them from being logical impossibilia, both kinds of relations, contrastive and compositional, need carrier properties external to the circles they define. It may be that these external properties are internal to some other, more fundamental circularity, but ultimately there must be carriers external to any circularity. Rosenberg thus throws light on the hierarchical order of the sciences familiar since Comte, which corresponds to twentieth-century expectations of reduction. Rosenberg mentions the following sequence: economics, sociology, psychology, ecology, and biology, chemistry, physics. The circularity of the higher science is carried by properties external to the circularity of that science, but internal to the circularity of the more fundamental science. This leads Rosenberg to the critical question what the ultimate carriers are. We needn’t agree with the reducibility thesis of the unified science program to agree that physics will be the lowest order science in this scheme of grounding. Physical reality in space and time is what finally individuates the operative terms of the higher sciences. So Rosenberg poses the pointed question: what carries the circular relations that define physics? These carriers must have several interesting properties. “What the world needs from a carrier of physics are properties whose being would be extrinsic within every such system and yet which still have the requisite internal relations to one another. For physics, we need ultimate carriers. The properties best answering to this description are best thought of as properties that are intrinsic tout court. A property whose categorical nature is extrinsic within every system of properties is simply one whose being is intrinsic at least partly to itself, rather than to its contextual relationships. That is, it is a property that we cannot understand in purely systematic terms without leaving something out.” At the same time, in order to be “carriers of the effective properties described by physics, these intrinsic SP_WEB_Int_001-034.indd 21 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 8/12/09 2:02:46 PM 22 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 Michel Weber and Anderson Weekes properties must have internal contrasts with one another that mirror the features and relations of physical properties: patterns of distinctness, variations in magnitude, and relations of compatibility, incompatibility, and requirement.” Rosenberg suggests that the most plausible candidates for the role of such ultimate individuals are the much talked about qualia. On the one hand, they have identities that are noncontextual (the subjective feel of lavender is knowable only through itself and is not implied by any facts of physics). On the other hand, they have definite logical and quantitative relations with one another (such as mutual incompatibility or intensity differences). This leads Rosenberg to his provocative thesis about the identity of the “ultimate carriers” of causation: “Things in the world are natural individuals if, and only if, they are experiencing phenomenal individuals.” If, as seems plausible, the only thing that could be external to every context was something that was at least partly “internal to itself,” then we have a strong reason to believe that “self ” is a meaningful and indispensable predicate of the ultimate bearers of relations in the world. Rosenberg does not pursue his line of thought in this way, but his logical analysis of a property which is “external tout court” in terms of “internal to itself ” seems already to lend credence to Whitehead’s concept of the ultimate constituents of the world as “actual occasions” understood as possessing an incipient reflexivity or selfhood. There is something self-referential about them by dint of an experience, however attenuated, of self-enjoyment, which implies a modicum of being-for-self happening privately in an interior world. If this argument holds, then we could say that just as Shields gave the panexperientialist argument a last turn of the screw, Rosenberg gives the response to the classic objection to panexperientialism a last turn of the screw. For we have specified the criteria that will allow us to generalize the concept of experience not only to other forms of life without losing the semantic justification for calling it experience, but also, beyond what are normally considered to be organisms, to inorganic nature: experience is the entry of something at least partly internal to itself into an internal relation with something other than itself. We have, furthermore, identified compelling logical and metaphysical reasons for making such a generalization. Maria Pachalska and Bruce Duncan MacQueen point out that the science most qualified to elucidate the mind-body problem and consciousness in particular is neuropsychology, but that the requisite interdisciplinary collaboration between neurology and psychology has largely stymied because the dominant view of brain function in the neurosciences makes a theory of consciousness impossible: “A modular mind/brain made up of discrete processors shuttling bits of data back and forth does not need to be conscious in order to do its job. If computers were to become conscious they would by the same token cease to be useful as computers, and if we conceive of SP_WEB_Int_001-034.indd 22 8/12/09 2:02:46 PM Introduction 23 our brains as organic computers, as is fashionable nowadays, then the same applies to them.” Proposing microgenesis as a more promising paradigm in neuropsychology, they provide a straightforward and largely nontechnical overview of the microgenetic theory of consciousness developed by Jason Brown (New York University Medical Center). Brown draws equally on Whiteheadian process thinking and acute clinical observations of brain pathology. According to microgenetic theory, mind-brain states such as consciousness arise as a rapid volley of overlapping waves of activity that can be measured in milliseconds. Drawing inter alia on Paul MacLean’s theory of the “triune brain” (MacLean 1967 and 1991), microgenetic theory proposes that each wave originates from a core in the anatomically deepest and phylogenetically oldest parts of the brain, the brainstem formations we share with reptiles, and radiates outward through the limbic system (paleomammalian brain) to the cortex (neomammalian brain), and finally to the neocortex of the specifically human brain. Because neurologists tend to think of consciousness as a phenomenon of the cortex, it becomes difficult to understand how consciously initiated activity, supposedly originating in the neocortex, can be integrated with activity originating in the “reptilian” brain stem, where the stimulus-response arc is closed with extreme rapidity. Although the authors don’t quite say so explicitly, this integration problem is none other than the “mind-body problem.” It is crucial to understand that on Brown’s model nothing is initiated in the cortex—what arises there is always a modification of activity already begun. Corresponding to each of the three evolutionary levels reflected in brain anatomy is a wholly functional brain: the outer/later functions are parasitic on the inner/older ones they enclose, but not vice versa. Thus, all processing of stimuli or other response activity originates in the brain stem. The limbic system and the cortex, each in turn, have only the power to sculpt what has already commenced. Depending on the functional/anatomical level at which the cycle of activity is closed, it manifests as reflex (brainstem), emotion (limbic system), or discriminating and objectifying consciousness (cortex, neocortex). But since the cycles are slower the farther out they are from the core, the higher brain functions require the interruption of the faster inner cycles in order to allow the activity initiated in the reptilian brain to be prolonged and shaped by the emotional loading of the limbic system, or for the limbic brain response to be further prolonged and channeled through the more refined constraints of the neocortex. One is reminded of Bergson’s thesis that perception is a kind of interruption of action or the prolongation of its incipience, making its enhancement by memory possible. For Brown, each higher function is an enhancement made possible by the disruption or retardation of the more primitive function. SP_WEB_Int_001-034.indd 23 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 8/12/09 2:02:47 PM 24 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 Michel Weber and Anderson Weekes A number of thorny problems in cognitive psychology, such as the binding problem or the murky relationship between cognition and emotion, can be elegantly solved by this analysis, which is supported by extensive pathological data. But it must be stressed that Brown’s fascinating analysis implies a concept of consciousness very different from the acceptation common in the current literature: “Consciousness is not purely a cortical phenomenon [. . .] but emerges precisely from the process of evolution, passing from an undifferentiated core, through an animist dream world, to a world of self and objects. It is the whole process, not its just endpoint, that constitutes and creates consciousness.” Avraham Schweiger, Michael Frost, and Ofer Keren also advance Brown’s idea that consciousness is the moment-to-moment product of nested phases of realization, corresponding roughly to the nested evolutionary strata of the brain just described. But they adopt a broader perspective to argue for the process view of consciousness. The authors focus on comparing the development of consciousness at different time scales: phylogeny, ontogeny, and microgeny (the process that sustains consciousness from moment to moment). They note that regardless of scale the same pattern characterizes the process through which consciousness develops. In each case the process unfolds from the global unity of a diffuse whole to the differential individuation of an objectified diversity. Schweiger et al. then show how pathological data on the stages of recovery from coma are consistent with Brown’s theory of microgenesis and reflect the same pattern of development on a time scale slow enough to be easily detected. Furthermore, their analysis supports Whitehead’s idea that consciousness as we usually think of it is a late-phase development preceded by phases of more primitive experience, which we could, using language not found in their paper, call pre-, proto-, or perhaps demi-conscious, depending on the level of development. Their analysis also supports the Whiteheadian idea that consciousness is a refined, high-level manifestation of a very basic and pervasive type of process that structures nature at all levels, forming nested hierarchies in which higher levels of process incorporate and recapitulate the lower ones. They note that the process view of consciousness is opposed to “the current zeitgeist in cognitive science, according to which phenomenological appearances of objects/events represent properties of ‘reality.’” If consciousness unfolds through developmental stages, at each stage “reality” will have a different cast to it, none of which have the right to displace the others and lay claim to exclusive reality. Michel Weber undertakes a process-oriented phenomenology in order to analyze the normal, everyday consciousness of the “natural attitude.” Weber’s approach to consciousness is mainly influenced by James and Whitehead. James insisted that the focal consciousness of everyday existence is not the only kind of consciousness. For one thing, it is always enveloped by a fringe SP_WEB_Int_001-034.indd 24 8/12/09 2:02:48 PM Introduction 25 of unthematic awareness whose own irremediable vagueness is essential to the clarity and effectiveness of focal consciousness. For another, it is only one of a number of alternate possible states, each with its own cognitive value. Weber brings one of Whitehead’s deepest intuitions to bear on these insights of James’. According to Whitehead, permanence and flux (including both arising and perishing) are the two most important features of the world that metaphysics must account for, and, accordingly, worldviews can be classified in terms of the distribution and relative importance they accord to each. We can imagine a sort of spectrum, with Parmenides (Everything is permanent) at one end and Heracleitus (Everything flows) at the other. Substantialism is the view that accords metaphysical primacy to permanence. Weber suggests that substantialism is defined by a rigid metaphysical reading—inspired by everyday consciousness—of the principles of Aristotelian logic (Law of Identity, Law of Non-Contradiction, Law of Excluded Middle). Accordingly, substantialism manifests itself in psychology as the assumption that consciousness is also a thing defined by these three laws. Weber argues that this has the unfortunate effect of absolutizing consciousness in its normal and everyday manifestation to the exclusion of the fringe and alternative modalities that exercised James. For it forces us to assume, first, that consciousness is a thing with a fixed identity—an identity that is, moreover, clear and distinct. Second, it forces us to assume that consciousness must—on pain of contradiction—be this thing and nothing else (here we may glimpse part of the rationale for the modern prejudice that consciousness must be all and wholly conscious, through and through). Third, it forces us to assume that there is nothing remaindered or intermediate between consciousness, so understood, and what is unconscious in the sense of dead or inanimate. The implication of this is that normal consciousness is the only kind of consciousness there is. In the context of Weber’s Whiteheadian reflections on permanence and flux, clinical evidence from psychotherapy and hypnosis (to say nothing of religious experience or “mind-altering” drugs) that normal consciousness does not exhaust what consciousness is militates against substantialism in psychology and points the way toward process paradigms that allow consciousness to enjoy a more fluid reality. Weber is mainly engaged by the third assumption (that something is either normal consciousness or simply unconscious). He argues that what normally counts as empirically or phenomenologically “given” consciousness is an artifact of instrumental, linguistic, and social rationality. An alternative—more provocative—title for his paper might have been “The Social Construction of Consciousness.” He seeks to relativize the normally absolutized concept of everyday consciousness by exposing the machinery that leads to its construction as a stable thematic nucleus within a rich and ever-flowing multidimensional experience. Through an iterated process of abstraction in SP_WEB_Int_001-034.indd 25 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 8/12/09 2:02:49 PM 26 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 Michel Weber and Anderson Weekes which the more thematic features of consciousness are peeled away to reveal the less thematic, but more fundamental ones, Weber arrives at a kind of map of the tacit dimensions. His analysis is organized by the hypothesis that the two faces of consciousness, public and private, are isomorphic in structure so that each element in the cartography of the one corresponds like a mirror image to a similarly embedded element in the cartography of the other. But he also argues that the corresponding elements are interdependent. Consequently, what stabilizes privately as “consciousness” (but is really just normal consciousness) cannot be independent of what is established socially as sane or rational consciousness. Once normal consciousness is exposed in its relativity it is possible to appreciate its important contributions to our cognitive life without building a metaphysics around it. Xavier Verley examines the concept of consciousness native to early modern philosophy and the dialectical consequences it brings on itself as a result of its logico-metaphysical prejudices. He supports Whitehead’s view that a peculiar emphasis on consciousness led modern philosophy into the quagmire of solipsism and that an appropriate valorization of memory is the only solution. According to Whitehead the characteristic problems of modern philosophy result from a set of false assumptions and persistent fallacies ultimately running deeper than its fascination with consciousness. While a cause of the problem of solipsism, the modern concept of consciousness is also a symptom of more fundamental errors. Verley referees the deep fallacies of modern thought that Whitehead saw as the most damaging: the logical primacy ascribed to the subject-predicate form of the proposition, the metaphysical primacy ascribed to the universal-particular and substancequality dyads, and the Aristotelian principle that a primary substance is always a subject, never a predicate. Whitehead opposes to these characteristic assumptions of modern thought a novel set of principles intended on the one hand to avoid the pitfalls of the philosophy of consciousness and on the other to ground a new philosophy of organism. Verley’s contribution provides a concise overview of Whitehead’s critique of Descartes, Locke, Hume, and Kant, and along the way he names and elucidates the numerous fallacies and counter-principles Whitehead invokes in this critique, showing how consciousness gains its prominence from these fallacies and loses its prominence by their correction. Verley answers the question: how is it that consciousness emerges as the substance or form of the subject in modern philosophy? He notes that Descartes’ peculiar meditation on himself has the effect of substituting for the “me” (that inhabits the world through its body and inhabits time by inheriting the past reality of things) the “I” (that is the subject of doubt and the agent of mental acts). Thinking becomes the fundamental type of mental act, and a judgment, executed by the will in the present moment, becomes SP_WEB_Int_001-034.indd 26 8/12/09 2:02:50 PM Introduction 27 the way the subject is supposed to (re)establish a relation to its body, its habits (including its personality and character), the world, and the past. The self is thus defined by a relation to itself, rather than by a specific kind of relation to the world. Once the self is reduced to the consciousness it has of itself in the instant, consciousness itself is confined within this solipsism. What is gained is modest: the self ’s certainty of being itself in the instant of reflection. What is lost is nothing less than sanity and common sense. Descartes’ seeming return to good sense at the end of his meditations to the contrary, all that has been lost cannot be recovered. If time is not physical inheritance, then the “me” will have no ontological inertia. The “I” must remain locked in the solipsism of the present moment and—just as Descartes in fact teaches—only God will have the power to weld together the successive instants of time. The self will remain dispossessed of good sense because it will never be anything more than the “I” grasping after its unobtainable “me.” The integrity of the “I” and the “me” is only possible through memory, where perception of the past is understood not as presentation of the past, but as a prolongation of it. In this case, perception is a physical inheritance that is felt (from the past), not “represented” (in the present). This establishes a real continuity of the “I” with the evolving world and the “me” it includes. One important consequence of this valorization of physical inheritance is that consciousness and the “I” it likes to foreground become inessential aspects of experience. Thus, just as starting with the “I” led to the idea of consciousness as the form or essence of the subject, starting with the “me” leads to consciousness being denied such a privileged status. Anderson Weekes takes advantage of a provocative discussion occurring in the Journal of Consciousness Studies to bring an ancient philosophical problem into contemporary focus and to show how Whitehead thought he solved it. The skeptical critique of causality advanced at one point or another in every major philosophical tradition received strong endorsement and indirect empirical support in a paper by Eleanor Rosch on the psychology of explanation. M.C. Price subsequently applied her results to the specific problem of explaining consciousness. Price argues that the prospects for solving the mind-body problem cannot be any greater than the prospects for solving the old riddle of causation. After all, what we are looking for is the mechanism by which the body gives rise to, causes, the mind or consciousness. We are, in effect, looking for the necessary connection Hume claimed could never be found between any two distinct things. If the idea of necessary connection between distinct things is unintelligible, as Rosch and the skeptics contend, then the mind-body problem must be unsolvable. Weekes contends that Whitehead’s thinking, from Process and Reality to Modes of Thought, is immersed in this problem and that Whitehead offers a breathtakingly original solution that may not deserve our allegiance, but SP_WEB_Int_001-034.indd 27 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 8/12/09 2:02:51 PM 28 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 Michel Weber and Anderson Weekes deserves closer scrutiny than it has received. After refereeing the arguments of Rosch and Price and placing them in a large historical context, he examines Whitehead’s doctrine of “perception in the mode of causal efficacy” and its own historical pedigree. Whitehead wants to claim that the experience of causation is so fundamental as to be pervasive and undeniable. Supposing this is true, the question becomes aggravated: if causation is pervasive and undeniable, how can it be so elusive that its reality has escaped those observers who were most avid about finding it? According to Whitehead, the answer has to do with the nature of consciousness. On the one hand, consciousness—if not by nature, then at least when it is seeking knowledge—is objectifying; on the other hand, consciousness always involves a performative dimension that cannot be objectified as such, but is nevertheless always experienced. The two most important aspects of this performative dimension are time and the animal body, and what they reveal, according to Whitehead, is the causal emergence of “immediacy of self-enjoyment” (i.e., “mind”) out of what is past and already “second hand” (i.e., “body”). However, when anything tacitly lived or performed (performed “in the first person”) is objectified, an unwitting substitution occurs. Because we assume parity between objectifying an object and objectifying the self, we think we have captured the intended actuality in the focus of our objectification, just as we would a live specimen, which doesn’t cease to live simply because it is subject to observation. But in the case of objectifying one’s own performance, what is found at the focus of objectification is never the intended actuality, but a representation that is precisely lacking the character of performance. Thus, since objectification renders the actuality of causation (as opposed to the “representation” of it), like anything else performed or tacitly lived, invisible, objectifying consciousness obscures the process of its own emergence and cannot help but wonder where in the world it came from. Far from being that thing whose true nature is fully revealed in self-objectifying reflection, objectifying consciousness is always a stranger to itself. By the same token, objectifying consciousness deprives itself of the only possible means to understand causal connection. Valorizing the performative dimension of consciousness thus allows Whitehead to offer an original solution to the mind-body problem as well as to the causation problem in its most general form: the question, namely, “How are synthetic judgments a priori possible?” Weekes stresses that Whitehead’s account of causation and of consciousness in its bearing on the issue of causation is essentially phenomenological. In light of this it is remarkable that there has not been more intercourse between process philosophy and Phenomenology. Having at least some goals in common, they could benefit from mutual adjustment and critique. Weekes has set this process going by tightening up Whitehead’s loosely conceived analyses SP_WEB_Int_001-034.indd 28 8/12/09 2:02:51 PM Introduction 29 with sharply defined concepts borrowed from the Phenomenological tradition (performance, objectification) and by using Whitehead’s decisive critique of modern philosophy as a template to isolate the critical failure in Husserl’s Phenomenology that led him absurdly to a form of absolute idealism. Related Literature This volume fills a noticeable gap in the literature. Given the importance accorded to the concept of consciousness in modern (and contemporary) philosophy and the originality of Whitehead’s critique of consciousness-centered philosophy, it is surprising that there is so little literature devoted to the exposition and development of Whitehead’s theory of consciousness. A brief overview of the most closely related literature will highlight the unique ambitions of the present book. Craig Eisendrath’s The Unifying Moment (1971, reissued 1999) is a comparative exposition of the psychologies of William James and Whitehead. Besides being a James-Whitehead comparison, Eisendrath’s book is quite different from ours in that it aims to be a faithful and clarifying exposition. Ours is partly an exposition, but more importantly a development and application of Whitehead’s ideas that dovetails with contemporary research and discussions, taking advantage of work that has appeared only in the last ten to twenty years. Furthermore, Eisendrath’s book looks synoptically at Whitehead’s psychology and devotes only a few pages to the specific topic of his theory of consciousness. We have already mentioned David Griffin’s Unsnarling the World-Knot (1998), a broadly conceived exposition of Whitehead’s psychology that directly engages the contemporary literature in consciousness studies. Griffin offers a Whiteheadian critique of current leading theories, arguing specifically that they fail to solve the mind-body problem. Griffin’s book is not, however, focused specifically on Whitehead’s theory of consciousness, and while his treatment of Whitehead is not limited to exposition, it is largely a defense rather than a development of Whitehead’s ideas. Griffin’s contribution to the present volume picks up here his own book left off. He recapitulates the main arguments of his Unsnarling the World-Knot and brings them to bear specifically on Whitehead’s theory of consciousness. Jason Brown’s Mind and Nature (2000) is a work in metapsychology that applies Whitehead’s process philosophy to neuropsychology. The result is a Whiteheadian process theory of consciousness that is empirically supported by extensive clinical data. Brown’s erudition can be daunting. Drawing on an extensive philosophical literature, he valorizes the phenomenological insights of British Idealism and Buddhist psychology to delineate SP_WEB_Int_001-034.indd 29 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 8/12/09 2:02:52 PM 30 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 Michel Weber and Anderson Weekes the distinctive challenges that a theory of consciousness must meet, and in proffering process philosophy as the foundation of a theory adequate to the challenges, he draws on a lifetime of experience in neurology. We are very pleased to be able to feature in our collection the contribution by Pachalska and MacQueen, which presents an overview of Brown’s ideas that presupposes no specialized knowledge of medicine or neglected areas of intellectual history and will be readily accessible to scholars in process philosophy and consciousness studies. Ralph Pred’s Onflow (2005) is an ambitious book. He argues, first, that certain ideas of William James, John Searle, and Whitehead can be exploited to generate a phenomenology of consciousness that is unprecedented in its nuance and accuracy. Second, he argues that Whitehead’s metaphysical categories provide an adequate theoretical model of consciousness and, conversely, that consciousness adequately described illustrates a concrete application of Whitehead’s metaphysical categories. Finally, he argues that Gerald Edelman’s neurobiological theory of consciousness can be read consistently as a physical interpretation of this model and hence as a physical explanation of the phenomenology. There are a number of themes common to our book and Pred’s (the phenomenology of consciousness, causation, and the neurobiological realization of a Whiteheadian process theory of consciousness), but the treatment in each case is different. Pred exploits Edelman’s neurobiological theory of consciousness to show that a neurobiological interpretation of his Whiteheadian theory of consciousness is possible. Our book looks to the neurobiological theory of Jason Brown, rather than Edelman, to show that a Whiteheadian interpretation of neurobiology is possible and why it is philosophically promising. Pred looks at the phenomenology of the stream of consciousness, in particular at its actional context. Phenomenologically, our book looks at the performative presuppositions of conscious experience, especially in relation to the nature of time and temporal experience. Pred looks at what the stream of consciousness tells us about causation. Ours looks at what the structure of explanatory theory tells us about causation. These differences in treatment lead directly to the topics featured in our volume that fall outside the purview of Pred’s work: panpsychism, nonhuman consciousness, consciousness as organized on a continuum of complexity, causation per se as a form of experience. This brings us to two last books deserving mention, dealing not with consciousness but the single issue of panpsychism: D.S. Clarke’s Panpsychism and the Religious Attitude (2003) and David Skrbina’s Panpsychism in the West (2005). The appearance of these two monographs could not be more timely for our own project. Both books complement ours insofar as they help bring the topic of panpsychism into the mainstream. Each has sections discussing SP_WEB_Int_001-034.indd 30 8/12/09 2:02:53 PM Introduction 31 Whiteheadian and process philosophy panpsychism, situating it in a wide historical or critical context. Clarke’s monograph is a sophisticated and hard-hitting defense of panpsychism. Clarke has a strong command of the Anglo-American tradition of analytic philosophy and builds his case entirely with the methods and insights of this tradition, which prides itself on its rigor and no-nonsense sobriety. The fact that panpsychism can be cogently argued with the tools of the tradition most inclined to scoff at it guarantees it a seat at the discussion table. Skrbina’s book is a survey of panpsychism from the pre-Socratic philosophers up to the present day. His thesis is that panpsychism has, until the twentieth century, always been one among well-respected mainstream philosophical positions. Its frequent present day characterization as the fringe position of an idiosyncratic few he shows to be false. The most compelling part of Skrbina’s exposition is his treatment of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, where he documents panpsychist thinking, especially among respected natural scientists, with a degree of prevalence so widespread that even its present supporters will be taken by surprise. The cumulative weight of his documentations makes it difficult to deny the seriousness of panpsychism as a philosophical position. In a final chapter, Skrbina attempts a comprehensive catalog of arguments for and against panpsychism, which takes full cognizance of the arguments of process philosophers. Notably, however, our book contains at least one argument for panpsychism (arguably more) that is entirely new and therefore absent from Skrbina’s survey. Notes 1. Griffin suggested this terminology as early as 1977. See Griffin’s “Whitehead’s Philosophy and Some General Notions of Physics and Biology,” in Cobb and Griffin 1977, 122–134. 2. See Hartshorne’s “The Compound Individual,” in Northrop et al. 1936, 193–220. 3. The concept of an “enduring compound individual” is of course found in Whitehead, but his terminology is more cumbersome than Hartshorne’s. Whitehead speaks of a “socially ordered nexus” with a single “regnant” occasion, and to indicate the perdurance of its order over time he speaks of a “personally” ordered social nexus. 4. The list of the first-rate philosophers who have been put off by the immersion in abstract categoreal thinking required by Process and Reality would be quite long, the best-documented case being perhaps Hans Jonas (1986). 5. This fallacy, identified already by Socrates, has been beautifully highlighted by Arendt in her Life of the Mind. SP_WEB_Int_001-034.indd 31 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 8/12/09 2:02:54 PM 32 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 Michel Weber and Anderson Weekes 6. Let us remember that the point of James’s famous 1904 paper “Does Consciousness Exist?” was not to deny the existence of consciousness, but to insist that it was a function rather than some special kind of thing ( James 1912, 1–38). 7. As Whitehead remarks, “Scientists animated by the purpose of proving that they are purposeless constitute an interesting subject for study” (FR 16). 8. In Scholasticism “precision” (praecisio) designates abstraction that excludes whatever it does not expressly include. “To precind” is always to form an abstraction by exclusion. 9. In his book Animal Minds (1992) he does makes a similar distinction between purely “perceptual consciousness” and the “reflective consciousness” of human beings (7–8). 10. As summarized here, Whitehead’s theory of consciousness may seem to have the peculiar implication that one cannot be conscious of necessary truths. Whether this is implied is a moot point since Whitehead does not believe there are any strictly necessary propositions (MT 90–95). 11. Since this appears to be a case where Whitehead’s abstruse speculations have a clear relevance to experimental science, we should perhaps draw this out as explicitly as possible. Let us, for the sake of didactic simplicity, define belief minimally, as behaviorism would, as a disposition to behave in a certain way and say that a belief is true when the behavior does or would lead to satisfaction of the relevant desires. Then we can say that the monkeys’ beliefs appear to be conscious because their behavior appears to be influenced by the following: the possibility that their belief may be wrong; the confidence in some cases that it nevertheless is not wrong; the lack of confidence in some cases that it is not wrong. But there is nothing in sense experience corresponding to such things as possibility, negation, or contingency. Unless we can succeed at the unlikely prospect of describing the monkeys’ behavior as the result of operant conditioning alone, it seems that we must admit that in addition to having conditioned dispositions to behave in certain ways (“beliefs” as here defined), they also have consciousness of these dispositions. Otherwise we leave unaccounted for how they go on to develop more sophisticated dispositions to behave that seem to result at least in part from the modalities of counterfactual ideation and logical negation. 12. If we concede that the reductio arguments advanced by Shields (and Weekes) prove that experience must be internally related to its environment, we still have an interesting question to settle: whether this is a sufficient or only a necessary condition of experience. Certainly not sufficient, since not every strict implication is a case of experience. By adding the condition of having physical space-time presence, has Shields produced sufficient criteria for experience? This seems prima facie implausible. However, a case can be made that the only way something with physical space-time presence can be internally related to its environment is by experience. Weekes in his contribution attributes this very position to Whitehead, pointing out that for Whitehead when experience/concresence is terminated; what is left are items that are only externally related. Only as long as something is still in the act of experiencing an object can the former be internally related to the latter. On the other hand, if Shields’ two criteria are found to be too lax to constitute a sufficient condition of experience, then Rosenberg’s contribution can be seen to take the next SP_WEB_Int_001-034.indd 32 8/12/09 2:02:54 PM Introduction 33 step, isolating a very plausible candidate for the missing constraint: that which experiences must have a nature that is at least partly “internal to itself ” (see pp. 20–22 above). It is very possible, however, that Whitehead would have regarded Shields’ and Rosenberg’s respective formulations as logically equivalent on the grounds that nothing with space-time presence could be partly internal to itself without being internally related to its environment and vice versa. 13. The editors note that Stuart Hameroff ’s concurrence on this point can be found in the first volume of the WPN Studies, Searching for New Contrasts (Riffert and Weber 2003, 61–86). 14. Peirce, Bergson, and James seem to have expressed this idea first. It also plays an important role in Whitehead. 15. James’ understanding of the role of attention in shaping consciousness has obvious relevance here. References Arendt, Hannah. 1978/1971. The Life of the Mind. 1-vol. ed. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Brown, Jason W. 2000. Mind and Nature: Essays on Time and Subjectivity. London and Philadelphia: Whurr Publishers. Clarke, D.S. 2003. Panpsychism and the Religious Attitude. Albany: State University of New York Press. Cobb Jr., John B., and David Ray Griffin, eds. 1977. Mind in Nature: Essays on the Interface of Science and Philosophy. Washington, DC: University Press of America. Eisendrath, Craig R. 1971. The Unifying Moment: The Psychological Philosophy of William James and Alfred North Whitehead. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Griffin, David Ray. 1977. “Whitehead’s Philosophy and Some General Notions of Physics and Biology.” In Cobb and Griffin 1977, 122–134. Griffin, David Ray. 1998. Unsnarling the World-knot: Consciousness, Freedom, and the Mind-body Problem. Berkeley: University of California Press. Reissued 2008 by Wipf and Stock Publishers, Eugene, Oregon. Griffin, Donald Redfield. 1992. Animal Minds. Beyond Consciousness to Cognition. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Hanlon, Robert E., ed. 1991. Cognitive Microgenesis: A Neuropsychological Perspective. Springer Series in Neuropsychology. New York: Springer-Verlag. Hartshorne, Charles. “The Compound Individual.” In Northrop 1936, 193–220. James, William. 1912. Essays in Radical Empiricism. New York: Longmans, Green, and Co. Jonas, Hans. 1987. “Wissenschaft als personliches Erlebnis.” Conference given on the 15th of October 1986 in Heidelberg. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht. MacLean, Paul D. 1967. “The Brain in Relation to Empathy and Medical Education.” Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 144:374–382. SP_WEB_Int_001-034.indd 33 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 8/12/09 2:02:55 PM 34 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 Michel Weber and Anderson Weekes MacLean, Paul D. 1991. “Neofrontocerebellar Evolution in Regard to Computation and Prediction: Some Fractal Aspects of Microgenesis.” In Hanlon 1991, 3–31. Nagel, Thomas. 1979. Mortal Questions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Northrop, F.S.C. et al. 1936. Philosophical Essays for Alfred North Whitehead. February fifteenth, nineteen hundred and thirty-six. London: Longmans, Green, and Co. Pred, Ralph. 2005. Onflow: Dynamics of Consciousness and Experience. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Riffert, Franz G., and Michel Weber, eds. 2003. Searching for New Contrasts. Whiteheadian Contributions to Contemporary Challenges in Neurophysiology, Psychology, Psychotherapy and the Philosophy of Mind. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Skrbina, David. 2005. Panpsychism in the West. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Velmans, Max. 2000. Understanding Consciousness. London/Philadelphia: Routledge. SP_WEB_Int_001-034.indd 34 8/12/09 2:02:56 PM Process Thought 35 Part I Setting the Stage Part I consists of four chapters. In the first chapter, we introduce the Whitehead Psychology Nexus (WPN) and its scholarly mission. We briefly illuminate the background, motivation, and orientation of the present volume of the WPN Studies before addressing ourselves to some fundamental questions of terminology and method that bear on the heuristic approach to be found in these pages. Consciousness, we claim, is a phenomenon that resists anything but an interdisciplinary approach, while Whitehead-inspired process thinking offers an integrative heuristic that can bring coherence to multidisciplinary studies. We situate our approach in relation to some recognizable coordinates: empiricism, radical empiricism (in James’ sense), Phenomenology (in Husserl’s sense), empirical science (with special reference to neuropathology and abnormal psychology), and critical doxography (which remains relevant to the extent that early modern European philosophy defined the phenomenon that we still refer to as consciousness). These preliminary remarks we follow with three introductory chapters dealing with the background and context of Whitehead’s philosophizing. These chapters form a whole, but can also be read and appreciated separately. In turn, these examine (a) Whitehead’s place in twentieth-century philosophy, (b) the origin of our Western concept of consciousness and the history of “consciousness” as a topic of European philosophical reflection, and (c) Whitehead’s renegade approach to this venerable topic. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 35 SP_WEB_Ch01_035-056.indd 35 8/12/09 2:03:04 PM 36 Michel Weber and Anderson Weekes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 SP_WEB_Ch01_035-056.indd 36 8/12/09 2:03:04 PM Process Thought 37 1 Process Thought as a Heuristic for Investigating Consciousness Michel Weber and Anderson Weekes Background, Motivation, and Orientation of the Present Volume of WPN Studies The Whitehead Psychology Nexus (WPN) is an international scholarly society that takes its immediate mandate from issues important to contemporary philosophy and psychology, but seeks creative (possibly daring) solutions, drawing its inspiration from the process-oriented thinking that emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, which includes the thought of Henri Bergson, Charles Sanders Peirce, and William James, but is most closely associated with the organic philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947).1 WPN promotes dialogue and is not shy of controversy. The present volume of the WPN Studies places consciousness at the focus of disciplinary cross-elucidation. It taps leading researchers and theorists in the study of consciousness and Whitehead scholars to explore an interface between process thinking and the burgeoning field of consciousness studies. The rationale for such a project has at least two facets worth mentioning by way of introduction. They have to do with the state of an educated debate that seems, first, unproductive and peculiarly burdened by its deep modernist origins and, second, marked more by disciplinary rivalry than interdisciplinary synthesis. A good part of what fuels the current boom in consciousness studies is the robust progress of cognitive psychology and neuroscience toward reaching consensus explanations of just about anything except consciousness. Psychology, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence have produced many astonishing results and upset many old beliefs. Nevertheless, it remains controversial what implications these discoveries have for a general theory 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 37 SP_WEB_Ch01_035-056.indd 37 8/12/09 2:03:05 PM 38 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 Michel Weber and Anderson Weekes of consciousness. Despite hopes that empirical research and computational modeling would constrain theory, consciousness (to judge from a literature in which the most cited figure continues to be Descartes!) is a topic that still lies wide open to speculation. Indeed, the literature is fond of noticing that the contemporary discussion is defined by the same set of theoretical options that became established in early modern philosophy, ranging from materialism to epiphenomenalism to various forms of attribute or substance dualism. Even idealism remains on the table if we include the extreme forms of social and linguistic constructionism, where the world-creating subject of traditional modern philosophy is replaced by the world-creating language or social praxis. In short, it seems that scholarly debate has not so much reached an impasse as remained at one reached in the seventeenth century. Given the massive effort currently invested in research and debate, the lack of progress toward a general (and generally accepted) theory of consciousness begins to make consciousness look like a kind of twenty-first-century Philosopher’s Stone, whose hidden nature seems to hold the key to the greatest mysteries, but continues to elude us. This situation explains one part of the rationale for the present volume. A philosophical intervention in the consciousness debate that does not take for granted the same assumptions that define and limit traditional approaches should not be unwelcome, especially if the goal is a more positive accommodation with empirical research than is achieved by many current models of consciousness. For example, an objection to functionalist models that will emerge from discussions in this volume is that they imply that consciousness per se has no evolutionary or even any cognitive value. If this assessment is correct, it is easy to see why empirical research in biology or psychology has had relatively little impact on the construction of theoretical models of consciousness and why the philosophical debate continues to be exercised by ideas that predate the very existence of psychology and biology as sciences. Because it provides ways to understand how consciousness has cognitive and evolutionary value, process thought has attracted the attention of a number of researchers whose work is featured or discussed in this volume. Due to its continuing dominance within the discipline of cognitive psychology, functionalism looms largest over those who seek to reject it. In fairness, then, we should, here at the outset, give the reader some idea of the sorts of arguments and provocative suggestions she can expect from the later chapters of this book. How do our authors propose to deal with the vexed problem of the evolutionary value of consciousness, and why do we claim that this topic poses an insuperable problem for functionalism? Consciousness could confer a selective advantage only if it enhanced an organism’s ability to survive, allowing it to adapt better or more flexibly to its environment. But the computational paradigms of cognitive science SP_WEB_Ch01_035-056.indd 38 8/12/09 2:03:05 PM Process Thought 39 have led us to the following impasse: any function, even biological ones, can in principle be executed mechanically; consequently, consciousness cannot be necessary to the performance of any function. In fact, any function consciousness appears to perform (unless perhaps it can do something “supernatural”) is superfluous since the underlying neural architecture is ipso facto already sufficient to enable this operation, leaving consciousness with no possible role to play. This conclusion follows directly from the computational understanding of a “function.” It is therefore impossible for conscious as such to have any function. What this finally means is that consciousness is not the sort of thing that could be selected for in the course of evolution: an evolutionary account of consciousness is impossible. At the point where cognitive scientists arrive at the insight (as David Chalmers does; see 1996) that consciousness, whatever it is, cannot have any function or survival value—at this point we might want to step back and ask if we haven’t taken a wrong turn. Since the conclusion follows inexorably from the computational paradigm according to which any function is by definition Turing machine computable, other ways of understanding neurocognitive function may prove to be well worth looking in to. Neuropathology makes it clear that consciousness depends on the functional architecture of the brain, as damage to specific areas of the brain correlates with specific impairments of consciousness. But some of the phenomena of neuroplasticity adduced by Shields in his contribution (specifically, those that appear to result over time from the deliberate control of one’s attention) suggest that the functional architecture of the brain is also, in part, dependent on consciousness! It is easy to see that neuroplasticity is something that could confer an evolutionary advantage, as it would allow for more adaptive behavior. But if, at least in some cases, neuroplasticity depends in part on consciousness, then these are cases where consciousness itself confers a selective advantage. It is certainly possible that the intervention of consciousness in the evolution of an individual brain’s plastic infrastructure could turn out to be illusory—just a case of the brain affecting itself according to a predetermined neurofunctional program in which consciousness plays no causal role. But this is hardly a foregone conclusion. Although it is often asserted as fact, it is by no means clear—and certainly not clear a priori—that any function the brain performs could indeed be achieved computationally (Putnam 1992). And even if a given function could be achieved computationally, it is not necessarily the case that it is achieved computationally. The role of quantum indeterminacy in synaptic activity (also discussed by Shields) and the peculiar causal role the “observer” plays in the collapse of the probability wave function (and hence in the calculation of further probabilities of synaptic activity) suggest a functional role for consciousness that does not fit neatly into the framework SP_WEB_Ch01_035-056.indd 39 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 8/12/09 2:03:05 PM 40 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 Michel Weber and Anderson Weekes of computationalism, and this suggests one way that consciousness might confer a selective advantage. Drawing on ideas of Karl Popper, David Griffin’s contribution will suggest another way that consciousness might confer an evolutionary advantage: consciousness allows an organism to conduct thought experiments, that is, to try out possible strategies for survival without exposing itself to real risks, by imagining what their differential outcomes might be. The critical element here is counterfactual ideation. In effect, the organism poses the question: if I were to do such and such, then what? Behaviorism almost certainly cannot explain counterfactual ideation (it needs rather to deny its existence). What about cognitive science, behaviorism’s heir to the mechanistic agenda in psychology? It seems unlikely that strictly computational functionalism, which is only interested in a program that generates real outputs from real inputs through real operations, could provide what Hilary Putnam (1992) calls a “perspicuous representation” of this peculiar process—the cognitive process of counterfactual ideation—and if it cannot, then we would have another good candidate for a neurocognitive function that confers an evolutionary advantage, but is not (and possibly cannot be) a computational function. Now the question may be raised: what does that have to do with consciousness? Is there any reason why such a neurocognitive process must be conscious, seeing that most neurocognitive processes are not? Regardless of the conclusion one ultimately draws, here is a point where Whitehead’s ideas could stimulate productive debate in contemporary cognitive science, for Whitehead claims—to a rough approximation—that counterfactual ideation is precisely what consciousness is. There is no need to add something to such a process to make it conscious, and nothing could be removed that would render it unconscious. If Whitehead is right about this, then Donald Redfield Griffin is entirely justified in his contribution to see evidence of counterfactual ideation in monkeys as evidence of consciousness. For their part, Pachalska and MacQueen offer a comprehensive theory of brain function that is noncomputational. Consequently, in their account of consciousness as an activity or function of the brain, no conflict with evolutionary biology need arise. In fact, their account is altogether evolutionary. According to the model developed by Jason Brown, brain function in humans organizes progressively over three levels, corresponding to the evolutionary strata of the brain (brain stem, limbic system, and cortex, which correspond to the reptilian, paleomammalian, and neomammalian brains). Activity occurs in a dense volley of overlapping waves that radiate from the phylogenetically oldest and anatomically deepest part of the brain, the brain stem, toward the youngest and outermost part, the neocortex. Consciousness is not so much the property of a system in a steady state, as something the brain brings about, moment by moment, through a microgenetic process (measured in SP_WEB_Ch01_035-056.indd 40 8/12/09 2:03:05 PM Process Thought 41 milliseconds) that must unfold over all three levels. Continuity of phenomenal consciousness results from the overlapping waves of microgenesis. Because this theory of brain activity is holistic, not modular, consciousness cannot occur at higher levels of activity without being implicated in some way at lower levels. Consciousness is only refined at higher levels; it does not arise de novo. This puts the question of the evolutionary value of consciousness in an entirely different light. Consciousness is not something purely cortical that attends to or even commandeers functions that are already executable unconsciously. Consciousness is integral to function because it is the overall unity of function that can be realized at one of three levels: wakefulness (facilitating globalized, essentially reflexive responses), emotion (facilitating more differentiated and purposeful responses), and articulated perception (facilitating separation of self from a world of enduring, independent objects). A distinct kind of consciousness thus correlates with each level of activity, and its evolutionary value lies in the discriminating response to the organism’s environment that it facilitates, with a higher, more adaptive degree of discrimination arising in the outer, more evolved strata. Most important, the higher functions do not supplant the lower ones: we do not cease to be awake because we feel emotion, or cease to feel emotion because we enjoy articulated perception. Rather, the higher functions build on the lower ones, incorporating them as more basic phases in their own genesis. Since microgeny recapitulates phylogeny, the value of consciousness is nothing less than the cumulative value of the organism’s adaptive evolution. As with the radical theory of consciousness advanced by Velmans in his contribution to this volume, so too with microgenetic theory: what needs explaining is not so much how or why consciousness arises at the highest levels of brain function, as why it appears largely absent from lower levels of functioning. According to Brown’s model, primitive functions appear unconscious because they no longer occupy the terminal point in the moment-tomoment microgenesis of consciousness. They have been reduced (through a kind of neoteny of microgenesis) to early and incomplete phases in the genesis of a more complex and differentiated consciousness. They recede from foreground to background, becoming the global backdrop presupposed by the more sophisticated function. It follows that they remain present in higher consciousness vestigially, even if this is not obvious from the phenomenology of normal consciousness. The crucial contribution of primitive brain functions to higher consciousness is precisely what breaks to the surface in the neuropathological symptom. Depending roughly on the depth of the brain lesion along the radius from brainstem to any point on the cortical surface, the genesis of normal conscious behavior is interrupted at a more or less primitive phase. SP_WEB_Ch01_035-056.indd 41 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 8/12/09 2:03:06 PM 42 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 Michel Weber and Anderson Weekes Deeper lesions cause more global pathologies; more superficial lesions, closer to the brain’s outer shell of gray matter, cause more specific and localized pathologies. What appears to be a deficit, however, is really the abnormally exposed competence of a more primitive level of information processing. Disturbed behavior does not replace normal behavior. Rather, the normal process through which conscious behavior comes about is derailed before completion, exposing a less differentiated competence than expected, but a competence nonetheless—one that informs normal consciousness and without which normal consciousness would be impossible. For example, the patient sees the word cat, but reads it as dog. It is not by accident that the categorization is correct (four-legged domestic animal). The disrupted ability to fully differentiate meaning exposes the ability to categorize as a more primitive and independently functioning competence. What neuropathology shows, then, is that the importance of a competence’s contribution to consciousness is inversely related to how noticeable it is. The more fundamental the competence, the more removed it is from the foregrounded differentiation of conscious attention. It is not categorically unconscious, but its presence in normal consciousness is so global and diffuse that its noticeability is pathological. Reminiscent in some respects of Kurt Goldstein’s (1995) application of the categories of Gestalt psychology to biology, this model leaves no berth for functionalist theories that would deprive consciousness per se of cognitive function or survival value. It has the advantage of being an empirical theory, based not on an a priori conception of what a physically instantiated function “must be,” but on neuroanatomy, evolutionary biology, and neuropathology. Even if further research should leads us back to a more modular understanding of brain function, Velmans in his contribution offers a coherent account of how consciousness could evolve—and how, in particular, diffuse consciousness could evolve into attentional consciousness—without having to be directly subject to natural selection. In sum, while computational paradigms are hard pressed to assign any evolutionary value to consciousness, the present volume offers no less than four arresting possibilities. If nothing else, this fecundity demonstrates that models based on a Whiteheadian process approach can be a valuable heuristic in developing an evolutionary account not just of the brain, but even of consciousness. Another reason for approaching the study of consciousness from a Whiteheadian organic or process thought perspective has to do with the unique complexity of consciousness as an object of study. For a single object of study, consciousness lies at the intersection of an unusual number of disciplines—many of them are represented by contributions to this volume, which draws on philosophy, psychology, psychiatry, psychotherapy, zoology, SP_WEB_Ch01_035-056.indd 42 8/12/09 2:03:06 PM Process Thought 43 neurobiology, neuropathology, and even physics. This disciplinary polyvalence tells us something about the complexity of consciousness. Any attempt to approach consciousness from one discipline alone is bound to result in a reduction both obvious and unacceptable to the other disciplines. Indeed, for this reason many of the individual contributions to this volume are themselves interdisciplinary in perspective. But once we acknowledge the disciplinary polyvalence of our topic, we face an important philosophical question, one that was uppermost in Whitehead’s mind in defining a continuing role for philosophy in the age of empirical science and its multiple specializations. If consciousness can be understood only through the convergence of many different kinds of knowing, then the old problem of the one and the many comes back as a methodological challenge: How are the different approaches to be coordinated? How do we ensure that the convergence of so many perspectives results in a coherent model? How do we resolve conflicts between their different presuppositions—and in a nonreductive way? Whitehead’s process philosophy was animated by this problem. The contributors to this volume are not all “process philosophers” or even Whitehead specialists, and by no means do they share a single point of view. However, they do share the conviction that dominant, mainstream approaches to the study of consciousness, whether philosophical or empirical, have failed to integrate the relevant perspectives in a way that does justice to important evidence—indeed, that these approaches lack an appropriate framework that would allow them to do this. Lacking such a framework, each of these dominant approaches may come up short in different ways, but their shortcomings reflect a common failure to integrate diverse perspectives. This was Whitehead’s diagnosis of the intellectual scene of his own day, and the situation does not seem to have changed. Our contributors’ sympathies with Whitehead come from the shared sense that his philosophical theories, right or wrong, were a painstaking and often insightful response to the same limitations that still hamper contemporary philosophy and psychology. The disciplinary rivalry alluded to above illustrates this point. In its most acute form this rivalry takes shape as a conflict between scientific and humanistic outlooks, each contesting the primacy of the other. In this case, the failure to integrate relevant perspectives seems obvious. There can be no denying that here we still see the disconnection between different disciplinary approaches that Whitehead deplored. It results from a long-standing stalemate, the origins of which can be traced to the seventeenth century (Descartes’ substance dualism, Spinoza’s attribute dualism, Leibniz’s preestablished harmony, or the contrasting roles played by perception and reflection in the British empiricists) and to Kant, who cast the problem in the form it has since retained. Kant tried to resolve the tensions between the two domains by separating them from one another (Weekes 2003, 347–366). As SP_WEB_Ch01_035-056.indd 43 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 8/12/09 2:03:06 PM 44 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 Michel Weber and Anderson Weekes though they were squabbling children who resented sharing, Kant established rigid boundaries, giving each of them nonoverlapping domains of safe space, forbidding them, in effect, to talk to one another. As any parent knows, this solution is only temporary: ultimately the world is something we all must learn to share. The insularity of different domains of discourse that nevertheless bear on the same topic is a problem more than ever now that the children are grown up. Whitehead is famous for having constructed a solution to the philosophical problems he diagnosed that seems highly artificial. How much of this intricate construction is useful is a matter for debate. However, all of our contributors agree that Whitehead’s motives are sound and that his critique of modernity is especially relevant to the issues currently under debate in the consciousness literature. But they also agree that at least some of Whitehead’s constructive proposals can and should be rehabilitated and brought to bear on this topic. This may turn out to be the needed expedient to enable theories of consciousness to profit from a positive accommodation with the historical and phenomenological evidence valued by humanists and the empirical research valued by scientists, both of which must be integrated if we are to move beyond speculations of the seventeenth century that still control so much of the discussion. In short, although our contributors do not agree on how much of Whitehead’s approach can be endorsed without significant reconstruction, to a greater or lesser extent they all exploit aspects of Whitehead’s “categoreal scheme” because they share the conviction that the conceptual and analytic framework of Whitehead’s process philosophy offers the outlines of something that mainstream approaches often lack: a promising schematic for assessing and integrating the full range of evidence relevant to the nature of consciousness. As noted, the diversity of evidence includes not just the results of empirical research. To be exact, it includes two other important sources: the uncontrolled, but ubiquitous evidence of everyday experience and the evidence to be found in the history of philosophical opinions about consciousness. Of course, philosophical opinions cannot be taken at face value any more than the conceits of everyday experience, but in both cases an adequate theory of consciousness must be able to make sense of prevailing opinions and reconcile them with an accurate phenomenology. The hermeneutic principle here is the Aristotelian one that includes “opinion” among the phenomena that an adequate explanation must “save”: if things are not as they seem, to philosophers or ordinary folks, there nevertheless must be a good explanation why things seem to them other than they are. In sum, the contributions to this volume use a broadly conceived process framework to draw on three sources of evidence about consciousness, often confronting one with another: empirical research, phenomenology, and philosophical doxography. SP_WEB_Ch01_035-056.indd 44 8/12/09 2:03:07 PM Process Thought 45 Methods and Definitions Since we have yet to define our terms or set specific methodological constraints, we should say a few words in advance about how we understand phenomenology, how empirical research and doxography will bear on our investigation, and above all what we mean by consciousness. By “phenomenology” we mean a methodologically self-conscious procedure of description, which takes as its object not the way things are thought to be “in themselves” or independent of any particular manner of access, but the way they appear in experiential real time in some actual mode of givenness: for example, how something is given (appears) to vision, or hearing, or memory, or the imagination. It is a difficult phenomenological question how some things we obviously experience are actually given—the animal body, for example, or mathematical certainty. It is a very difficult phenomenological question whether some things are given at all—for example, the reality of the past or the external world. And, it is a matter for phenomenological description if some things are habitually imbued with phenomenological misinterpretation—a possibility Whitehead was not alone in seeing. We also use “phenomenology” to designate the object of phenomenological description—the same way “psychology” can mean not only the clinical science of the way people think but also the typical or characteristic way a particular person or group of people thinks. Thus, for example, we refer below to the “phenomenology of certainty,” meaning: how certainty appears to the consciousness experiencing it (second meaning of phenomenology). Describing this appearance yields (at least some of ) the specific experiential conditions under which something can be given as certain (first meaning of phenomenology). It will become clear as we proceed, but let us note at once that our understanding of phenomenology differs from that of its best-known practitioner, Edmund Husserl. Nothing in the preceding description presupposes the specifically Husserlian method of the epoché. Unlike Husserl, we are not convinced a priori that the transcendent reality of the empirical world is not something that could appear to us as a primitive phenomenological datum, that it must be something consciousness “constitutes.” Consequently, we do not see the epoché as a precondition of successful phenomenological description. We must look to how things are actually given, yes; but we need not assume in advance that their existence depends on their givenness. To avoid confusion, therefore, we will always capitalize “phenomenology” and its cognates when we have in mind the more specific interpretation of phenomenology made famous by Husserl and lease as lowercase our own more general use of the term, which seeks not to prejudice the answer to this important philosophical question.2 SP_WEB_Ch01_035-056.indd 45 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 8/12/09 2:03:07 PM 46 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 Michel Weber and Anderson Weekes One of the most important targets of phenomenological description is the everyday world of ordinary experience and social existence—what Husserl calls the life-world. Because it is pragmatically and performatively presupposed by everything we say and do, it constitutes in some sense a transcendental condition. The significance of this kind of pragmatic presupposition is of course far from obvious (not to say controversial) and requires elucidation. Description of how the life-world is given and how its givenness is habitually understood (i.e., how it seems to be given in discursive reflection if this is different from how it is actually given in immediate experience) must form one part of such an elucidation. An idea that Whitehead shares with Husserl is the implicit or nonthematic way in which the life-world is actually given, as well as the elusiveness of this fact. This has important methodological implications that might be brought out best if we briefly compare Husserl and Whitehead, for both philosophers came to this discovery unwillingly. Husserl originally thought of Phenomenology as a way to transform philosophy into an exact science: “reduced” to pure phenomena, the world of experience could be handled in a precise and rigorous way on the model of the mathematical theory of manifolds. Husserl eventually abandoned the idea of philosophy as rigorous science, saying famously that the “dream was dreamed out” (Husserl 1969, 508). He did not abandon the idea of a foundational stratum of experience that Phenomenology could access and assess, but only the idea that it could be fixed like a specimen in formaldehyde, delineated with morphological exactitude, and rendered conceptually without ambiguity. It is clear from Husserl’s fantastic comments on Manifold Theory in the “Prolegomena” to his Logical Investigations (1900) that this had been his ideal of scientific rigor, and the fact that just a few years later he describes the methodology of his new science, “Transcendental Phenomenology,” in similar terms lets one know that Manifold Theory was his original paradigm for Phenomenology. Similarly, Whitehead was intoxicated at first with the idea that a mathematically formal analysis of the world, what he later calls “morphology,” could be the epistemologically recovered foundation of our knowledge and experience of the world.3 But in the years following the publication of his three great works on the philosophy of natural science (PNK, CN, PRel) he comes instead to the opposite conclusion—that the decisive and indispensable foundation of experience is everything that morphology leaves out! Like Husserl, he became convinced that what is fundamental always has the character of background, horizon, or tacit presupposition: “The necessities are invariable, and for that reason remain in the background of thought, dimly and vaguely” (MT vii). But this means that what is “foundational” in experience is incapable of focal objectification and must be accessed indirectly. This same realization led Husserl to his method of indirection or SP_WEB_Ch01_035-056.indd 46 8/12/09 2:03:07 PM Process Thought 47 “questioning back from the pre-givenness of the life-world” (Husserl 1969, Part III A, 105–193). Whitehead advocated a similar kind of questioning back to find fundamentals. His philosophy looks to the “presuppositions of language rather than its express statements” (MT vii) and to the “generalities which are inherent in literature, in social organization, in the effort towards understanding physical occurrences” (MT 1). Philosophy’s “ultimate appeal,” he says, “is to the general consciousness of what in practice we experience. Whatever thread of presupposition characterizes social expression throughout the various epochs of rational society must find its place in philosophic theory” (PR 17). This explains the stress Whitehead lays on the fundamental importance of “unscientific” sources of information such as poetry, religion, or collective anthropological experience. The evidence they provide is indirect, but indispensable. Because this indirection is the manner in which the life-world is actually given, we do not hesitate to call its description phenomenological. What do we mean by consciousness? Because some of the proposals that follow, both in these introductory chapters contributed by the editors and throughout the book, are highly unorthodox, it bears stressing at the outset that the consciousness we—the editors and the contributors—seek to circumscribe, understand, or explain is the same one that is at stake in the current debates in philosophy and psychology. We share in the large consensus of opinion that sees consciousness as the qualitative feel of an experience impressed with such hallmarks as unity, intentionality, reflexivity, perspectivity, and personality. But we seek more vigorously than some of our colleagues to find explanations of consciousness that preserve the phenomenology of these features of our experience. Also like other parties to the consciousness debates, we understand the phenomenon targeted in this standard description to be the consciousness experienced (post-infancy) by any “normal” human being. However, “abnormal” consciousness is by no means irrelevant to our inquiry. On the contrary, a great deal can be learned about normal consciousness from the altered or diminished consciousness consequent to trauma or impairments (e.g., neuropathology, psychopathology, coma, catatonia, anesthesia, intoxication), to say nothing of states of consciousness that are clinically normal yet marginalized in the usual understanding of normal consciousness (e.g., sleep, fatigue and duress, yogic meditation, religious and aesthetic experience, consciousness at its lowest thresholds, implicit or nonobjectifying consciousness, animal consciousness). This explains the prominence given in this volume to findings of empirical research, on the one hand, and to phenomenology, on the other. Empirical research teaches us about states of consciousness that fall outside the compass of clinically normal consciousness (or outside the compass of human consciousness in the SP_WEB_Ch01_035-056.indd 47 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 8/12/09 2:03:08 PM 48 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 Michel Weber and Anderson Weekes case of animal studies), while phenomenology teaches us about modalities of normal consciousness that are often omitted (suppressed or overlooked) in the lay, scientific, or philosophical descriptions. Among the contributors addressing the former topic, Schweiger et al. focus explicitly on what can be learned about normal consciousness from the stages through which consciousness passes during recovery from coma; Weber looks at clinical experience with mental illness, Pachalska and MacQueen at brain pathology, Shields at meditation and attentional therapy, Donald Griffin at experiments assessing consciousness in animals, Velmans at the assumed biological and evolutionary thresholds of consciousness, and so on. Addressing the latter topic, several of our contributors draw attention to implicit or performative aspects of ordinary consciousness that are easy to ignore or even to deny precisely because they are normally operative without being thematic. David Griffin, Shields, and Katzko look at the implicit performative presuppositions of objectifying, theoretical consciousness; Verley, Shields, and Weekes examine the implicit performative conditions of time consciousness and memory, Weber looks as the implicit social aspects of rational consciousness. In this circumspection we are radicalizing a fundamental precept of Whitehead’s; it is well known but worth quoting again: In order to discover some of the major categories under which we can classify the infinitely various components of experience, we must appeal to evidence relating to every variety of occasion. Nothing can be omitted, experience drunk and experience sober, experience sleeping and experience waking, experience drowsy and experience wide-awake, experience self-conscious and experience self-forgetful, experience intellectual and experience physical, experience religious and experience sceptical, experience anxious and experience care-free, experience anticipatory and experience retrospective, experience happy and experience grieving, experience dominated by emotion and experience under self-restraint, experience in the light and experience in the dark, experience normal and experience abnormal. (AI 226) The motive for this broad approach has its roots in an insight of William James: Some years ago I myself made some observations on this aspect of nitrous oxide intoxication, and reported them in print. One conclusion was forced upon my mind at that time, and my impression of its truth has ever since remained unshaken. It is that our SP_WEB_Ch01_035-056.indd 48 8/12/09 2:03:08 PM Process Thought 49 normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness, definite types of mentality which probably somewhere have their field of application and adaptation. No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded. How to regard them is the question—for they are so discontinuous with ordinary consciousness. Yet they may determine attitudes though they cannot furnish formulas, and open a region though they fail to give a map. ( James 1902, 387–388) The lesson Whitehead took from James was perhaps more sober, but daring nonetheless. It becomes possible to dismiss a vast amount of evidence about ourselves and the world as “unscientific” or “not really empirical” simply by restricting what counts as cognitively relevant consciousness to states that are in fact exceedingly rare: We [. . .] objectify the occasions of our own past with peculiar completeness in our immediate present. We find in those occasions, as known from our present standpoint, a surprising variation in the range and intensity of our realized knowledge. We sleep; we are half-awake; we are aware of our perceptions, but are devoid of generalities in thought; we are vividly absorbed within a small region of abstract thought while oblivious to the world around; we are attending to our emotions—some torrent of passion—to them and to nothing else; we are morbidly discursive in the width of our attention; and finally we sink back into temporary obliviousness, sleeping or stunned. Also we can remember factors experienced in our immediate past, which at the time we failed to notice. When we survey the chequered history of our own capacity for knowledge, does common sense allow us to believe that the operations of judgment, operations which require definition in terms of conscious apprehension, are those operations which are foundational in existence either as an essential attribute for an actual entity, or as the final culmination whereby unity of experience is attained? (PR 161) The present volume carries forward Whitehead’s program of developing a more adequate understanding of normal consciousness by attending to SP_WEB_Ch01_035-056.indd 49 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 8/12/09 2:03:08 PM 50 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 Michel Weber and Anderson Weekes occurrent states that are excluded by normal consciousness or marginalized by our usual understanding of normal consciousness. To the extent that it only radicalizes the bias inherent in normal consciousness, philosophical and psychological reflection attempts to “epiphenomenalize” these normally excluded or marginalized states. This is closely related to the modern tendency, noted by (among others) Dewey and Heidegger, to think of consciousness as a spectator. Probably because it is reinforced by the phenomenology of (epistemic) certainty, this tendency is still palpable in much of the literature on consciousness. Certainty about the characterization of an object attaches to consciousness at the moment of optimal focus and peak acuity. Consciousness at this moment is indeed very much like a dispassionate spectator. Its attitude is fact-oriented, which means that it is objectifying and theoretical, possessed of acute self-consciousness and analytic attention. The question is whether this particular delineation of consciousness—which consciousness arrives at because it is indeed in this state when it goes looking for itself and what it is—captures its base form, its “essence” so to speak, representing a sort of “pure consciousness” presupposed by its other forms.4 If so, then all other forms would constitute so many modifications of this fundamental sort of consciousness: attenuations, perturbations, accretions, distortions, etc. This has been the implicit (or even explicit) position of the mainline tradition of modern philosophy. It should perhaps not surprise us that consciousness, seeking certainty about what consciousness is, ends up by identifying itself with the limited certainty it can have. Like Bergson, Whitehead thinks that consciousness as it has come to be known and come to understand itself in the sharp delineation that it owes to modern European thought yields a filtered, straitened, and truncated experience. In its notion of scientific objectivity, European philosophy unwittingly canonized as normative and definitive an extreme idealization of that way of experiencing the world that allows us to maximize our power over nature: above all, to exercise power with algorithmic certainty. As a result, information from other modalities of experience (which certainly occupies a great part of our consciousness, even if it cannot or normally does not take pride of place at the objectified focus of attention) was—and still is—devalued. It is customarily assumed that the information provided by marginal and alternative modalities of consciousness, to the extent that it differs from what normal consciousness does or would disclose directly in otherwise similar circumstances, is simply normal content degraded by “subjectivity” (inattention, suboptimal function, dysfunction, emotions, prejudice, etc.). Such modalities are seen as offering nothing of objective value that could not become the focus of deliberate and thematizing attention, resulting, moreover, in an experience of greater cognitive value. In other words, the nonpreferred modalities of consciousness are treated as “deficient modes” of SP_WEB_Ch01_035-056.indd 50 8/12/09 2:03:08 PM Process Thought 51 an assumed normative state, which, uncorrupted, possesses (would possess) the world as a crystalline cognitum. We are tempted to say this modernist prejudice is refuted by Impressionist and post-Impressionist painting, to say nothing of the magical phenomenology of writers such as Proust or Virginia Woolf, which discovers in every banality a suppressed ontological nimbus, an unsuspected abundance of detail overflowing the thing of “normal” consciousness and indispensably qualifying how the thing exists. What these works of art do is make directly available to normal consciousness the information that would otherwise remain unthematic, marginal, and fleeting. The fact that they reveal so much important information that conditions normal consciousness without being directly available to it is the reason they astonish us. If they exposed nothing more than a degraded form of something perfectly accessible to normal consciousness, they would not, as they so often do, seem like revelations. It goes without saying that when marginal information is revealed in this artificially direct way to objectifying consciousness, it is no longer performing its proper function, which explains why it is art rather than life. But it also explains how an artwork can be more or less “true” even though it is entirely fictional. As a mapping of the marginal onto the focal, it can be more or less faithful, even if such a focal objectification of the marginal is impossible in the real performance of an activity and its execution necessarily an exercise in make-belief. In short, marginal information possesses a preeminence that is unique to its marginal status, and far from being the degraded content of (a possible) direct normal consciousness, it is only through the degradation of its preeminent function that it can ever be turned into the content of direct normal consciousness. Degradation of precisely this kind is characteristic of artistic representation, and we might go so far as to say that here lies the cognitive value of art. (A question that does not belong to the compass of this investigation, but certainly to its horizon, is whether religion does not perform a function similar to art. It makes directly available to normal consciousness something that is otherwise necessarily marginal in one of two ways: it can be directly available to consciousness, but only in extreme and exceptional states of consciousness; or available to normal consciousness, but only indirectly, remaining fugitive and implicit, despite being somehow fundamental.5) Whitehead rejects these modernist prejudices. To name one of his reasons: a significant consequence of these assumptions is none other than the famous mind-body problem. As we will detail in the last chapter of Part I, the world as disclosed to “normal” consciousness is a medium in which consciousness of any sort could not arise and cannot exist. How then consciousness is related to this medium that excludes it becomes the greatest of philosophical puzzles. SP_WEB_Ch01_035-056.indd 51 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 8/12/09 2:03:09 PM 52 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 Michel Weber and Anderson Weekes Needless to say, no philosophical discussion can avoid presupposing normal consciousness. The question is whether we shall do this uncritically, accepting the narrow interpretation of normal consciousness bequeathed to us by modern philosophers along with their assumption that it is uniquely cognitive. One very Whiteheadian aim of this volume is to find out and critically assess just what we are thereby presupposing. We need to know, above all, what such a presupposition excludes. The fact that we must begin with normal consciousness does not mean we have to remain there. Whitehead thinks that marginal experience offers an opportunity to circumscribe a very different concept of subjectivity than the one we are accustomed to—a weak subjectivity, which is only faintly like the strong subjectivity of consciousness. If he is right, it may turn out after all that consciousness is the Philosopher’s Stone. For if we can find within consciousness (or at its fringes), in its liminal, implicit, or fugitive states, or in states deviant, weakened, or disturbed on normal accounting, the vestige of a world differently disclosed and no longer incompatible with the existence of consciousness, then we can use consciousness against itself to transmute the false show of objectivity into something possibly less transparent, but probably more real. If what we lose is the transparency of the world dear to normal consciousness, what we gain is the meaningfulness of that world. Whitehead thinks this process of transmutation, which after all is just a biological critique of normal consciousness, is indeed possible and that it reveals to us a world urged on from countless centers of weak subjectivity, whose evolving interactions are the course of nature alive with possibilities. This is a nature in and from which the coming-to-be of the strong subjectivity of consciousness is no longer impossible. If the epiphany of such a world flickers in the meditations of philosophers or in the margins of everyday experience, it might be better described not as a transmutation, but as a reversal—however brief, partial, or unstable—of the transmutation already wrought upon the world by normal consciousness.6 The dramatic implication for psychology, however, is that clear and distinct consciousness requires elucidation from more primitive (and usually marginal or transmarginal) forms of awareness, not the other way around. With these comments we hope to have clarified not only what we mean by consciousness, but also the role played in our investigations by the various sources of evidence on the nature of consciousness. Because contemporary theories of consciousness, like the contemporary self-understanding of ordinary consciousness, owes so much—so much that Whitehead rejects—to the intellectual accomplishments of modern European philosophy, it is necessary for us to take account of this influence doxographically and critically. Verley’s and Weekes’ contributions, which look at early modern figures and Whitehead’s critique of them, fall in this category, while David Griffin, Katzko, and Shields bring this doxography up-to-date with the current literature. SP_WEB_Ch01_035-056.indd 52 8/12/09 2:03:09 PM Process Thought 53 To some extent the critique of modern philosophy and its contemporary legacy can be an immanent one, assessing their success in terms of their own goals by their own criteria. But ultimately we must question the validity of the phenomenology they presupposes. To do this, we must have recourse to a description of conscious experience that is not hamstrung by modern ideology. The Phenomenology of Husserl fails on this account, while the radical empiricism of William James presents a promising alternative. Several of our contributions make use of a description of everyday experience in tune with Jamesian radical empiricism. The result is the critique of modern and contemporary accounts of consciousness implicit in David Griffin’s appeal to “hard-core common sense notions,” in Shields’ “deep protocols of common sense,” and in the descriptive account of memory deployed by Shields, Verley, and Weekes. The agreement between Shields and Weekes on this point is noteworthy given the wide differences in their backgrounds and in the figures they examine. Shields approaches Whitehead from a generally Analytic perspective and focuses his critique on Russell and current Anglo-American literature; Weekes approaches Whitehead from a generally continental perspective, focusing his critique on early modern philosophy and Phenomenology. If phenomenology brings us to the margins of consciousness, empirical research on abnormal consciousness brings us to what is normally beyond the margins, but nevertheless always there, shaping the contours and coloring the content of normal consciousness. In their contributions, Schweiger et al. and Pachalska and MacQueen argue that these normally transmarginal modes of experience are not so much an alternative to normal consciousness as its concealed foundation. They are simply the lower tiers in the substructure of normal consciousness, which have become directly exposed because the genesis of normal consciousness finds itself arrested at a preterminal phase. In other words, the clinical presentation of abnormal consciousness gives descriptive phenomenology unique access to the genetic process by which normal consciousness comes to be. Notes 1. For an overview of process philosophy, see Rescher 1996 and 2000, Weber 2004 and Weber and Desmond 2008. The term “process philosophy” appears to have been coined by Bernard Loomer (1949). 2. What Husserl calls phenomenology is more specific than our definition because Husserl has already taken a decisive position on the question of the givenness of transcendent things. As transcendent, Husserl believes, they are not given—he seems to regard this not as a phenomenological finding, but as a sort of analytic truth: if SP_WEB_Ch01_035-056.indd 53 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 8/12/09 2:03:09 PM 54 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 Michel Weber and Anderson Weekes transcendent, not given, if given, not transcendent. In Husserlese: Erlebnisse (lived experiences) are ipso facto immanent, and the act of meaning, which interprets (apperceives) some of them as the appearances of transcendent things, is equally immanent, ergo etc. Husserl thinks it is a non sequitur to suppose that one of the things capable of being given to a description that makes no assumptions about the independent being of objects might be . . . the independent being of objects! It follows from this initial commitment that any description that does not, for the sake of methodological purity, deny the independent existence of objects is ipso facto unphenomenological. (For reasons that cannot be addressed here, Anglophone readers of Husserl are unlikely to recognize in this précis the philosopher they think they know.) There is, however, no need to exclude a priori the possibility of transcendence being given, and it will be licit to admit transcendence as long as we can describe its particular manner of givenness. Perhaps it is not given; perhaps its givenness is phenomenologically impossible, but this is surely not a logical impossibility. The important upshot of these differences between Husserl and us is that properly phenomenological statements for Husserl will always be “transcendental” statements—statements about the unworldly Absolute Consciousness—while properly phenomenological statements for us could very well turn out to be ordinary empirical statements—statements about things given to consciousness, but not dependent on consciousness, or about consciousness itself insofar as it is given to itself, but not dependent on its own self-givenness. It is only so as not to prejudice these questions in advance that we must reach for the word “phenomenology” at all. Otherwise, “precise empirical description” would do just fine. This and other differences between a Whiteheadian and a Husserlian phenomenology are broached in chapters 4 and 15. It should be noted that Husserl has no monopoly on phenomenology. It was practiced by Brentano, Stumpf, Hodgson, Bergson, Bradley, James, Mach, and many others. Perhaps none of these figures qualify as Phenomenologists, but all of them are phenomenologists. 3. This parallelism is not coincidental. Both Whitehead and Husserl had been stimulated by the seminal paper of Riemann’s, “Über die Hypothesen, welche der Geometrie zu Grunde liegen,” which first introduces into mathematics the abstractly defined multidimensional manifold, to develop the idea of a deductively generated formal ontology/meta-theory of theoretical models. See Husserl’s Formal and Transcendental Logic, § 30 (1981, 81–82) and Whitehead’s early Treatise on Universal Algebra (UA 13). 4. For example, Hans Thomae: “That this ‘actual individual totality’ [of consciousness] indicates an actual reality [Wirklichkeit] can only be demonstrated by pointing to the particular experience of self-observation [Selbstbeobachtung]. Thus, we can only point to self-observation and the inner reality it grasps if we want to make the factual existence [Tatbestand] of this totality in someone else’s thinking the logical subject of judgments regarding its characteristics. But precisely in this way this concept reveals itself as the description of a thoroughly concrete reality [Tatbestand] to which all other ‘modes,’ ‘forms,’ or varieties of consciousness are to be reduced” (1940, 540). 5. This is a recurring theme in William James’ Varieties of Religious Experiences: “Rationalism insists that all our beliefs ought ultimately to find for themselves articulate grounds. Such grounds, for rationalism, must consist of four things: (1) SP_WEB_Ch01_035-056.indd 54 8/12/09 2:03:10 PM Process Thought 55 definitely statable abstract principles; (2) definite facts of sensation; (3) definite hypotheses based on such facts; and (4) definite inferences logically drawn. Vague impressions of something indefinable have no place in the rationalistic system, which on its positive side is surely a splendid intellectual tendency, for not only are all our philosophies fruits of it, but physical science (amongst other good things) is its result. [. . .] If you have intuitions at all, they come from a deeper level of your nature than the loquacious level which rationalism inhabits. Your whole subconscious life, your impulses, your faiths, your needs, your divinations, have prepared the premises, of which your consciousness now feels the weight of the result; and something in you absolutely knows that that result must be truer than any logic-chopping rationalistic talk, however clever, that may contradict it. This inferiority of the rationalistic level in founding belief is just as manifest when rationalism argues for religion as when it argues against it” ( James 1902, 73). 6. Note that besides being the fabled process sought by alchemists, transmutation is also a category in Whitehead’s metaphysical scheme of basic concepts having to do with the emergence of aggregate effects—such as the qualitative continuity of passively displayed appearances—from the activities of a manifold of discrete micro-constituents. References Brown, Delwin, Ralph E. James Jr., and Gene Reeves. 1971. Process Philosophy and Christian Thought. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill. Chalmers, David. 1996. The Conscious Mind. New York: Oxford University Press. Goldstein, Kurt. 1995/1934. The Organism. New York: Zone Books. Griffin, David Ray. 1998. Unsnarling the World-Knot: Consciousness, Freedom, and the Mind-Body Problem. Berkeley: University of California Press. Reissued 2008 by Wipf and Stock Publishers, Eugene, Oregon. Husserl, Edmund. 1969. Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die Transzendentale Phänomenologie. Eine Einleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie. 2. Auflage. Haag: Martinus Nijhoff. Husserl, Edmund. 1981/1929. Formale und transzendtale Logik. Versuch einer Kritik der logischen Vernunft. 2. Auflage. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag. James, William. 1902. The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature. Being the Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion Delivered at Edinburgh in 19011902. New York: Longman, Green, and Co. Loomer, Bernard MacDougall. 1949. “Christian Faith and Process Philosophy.” The Journal of Religion 29:181–203. Reprinted in Delwin et al. 1971, 70–98. Putnam, Hilary. 1992. Renewing Philosophy. Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press. Rescher, Nicholas. 1996. Process Metaphysics: An Introduction to Process Philosophy. Albany: State University of New York Press. Rescher, Nicholas. 2000. Process Philosophy: A Survey of Basic Issue. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. SP_WEB_Ch01_035-056.indd 55 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 8/12/09 2:03:10 PM 56 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 Michel Weber and Anderson Weekes Thomae, Hans. 1940. “Bewusstsein und Leben: Versuch einer Systematisierung des Bewusstseinsproblems.” Archiv für die gesamte Psychologie 105:532–636. Weber, Michel, ed. 2004. After Whitehead: Rescher on Process Metaphysics. Frankfurt/ Lancaster: Ontos Verlag. Weber, Michel, and Will Desmond, eds. 2008. Handbook of Whiteheadian Process Thought. Frankfurt/Lancaster: Ontos Verlag. Weekes, Anderson. 2003. “Psychology and Physics Reconciled: Whitehead’s Vision of Metaphysics.” In Searching for New Contrasts: Whiteheadian Contributions to Contemporary Challenges in Neurophysiology, Psychology, Psychotherapy and the Philosophy of Mind, Franz G. Riffert and Michel Weber, eds., 347–374. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. SP_WEB_Ch01_035-056.indd 56 8/12/09 2:03:11 PM Whitehead as a Neglected Figure 57 2 Whitehead as a Neglected Figure of Twentieth-Century Philosophy Michel Weber and Anderson Weekes The world of academic philosophy knows Whitehead as a brilliant but eccentric figure, outside the intellectual mainstream, whose ideas are not often taken seriously. Any worthwhile assessment of Whitehead’s intellectual contributions must have something to say about this state of affairs. But first we should note that the characterization is not altogether true anymore. The unexpected developments in physical theory that launched the twentieth century, because they challenged so much of our “default” metaphysics, invited philosophical exploration from the start, even if the results were often greeted with skepticism. Like the philosophical ideas of de Broglie, Bohr, or Heisenberg (and like the more daring ideas of Pauli and Wigner), Whitehead’s ideas emerged in this early period of skeptically received speculative ferment. Unlike most of his contemporaries, however, what Whitehead championed was a full reconciliation of physics with common sense (Weekes 2003, 347–365).1 Despite his profound knowledge of mathematical physics, this deference to naïveté cast him at once as an outsider in an intellectual world defined by the preeminence of modern physics. But the scene has changed. Prominent figures in the hard sciences are now actively promoting the rapprochement with humanistic outlooks that an earlier generation mocked as unscientific.2 This is due in part to a growing sense of urgency, but in part as well to growing confidence that theoretical models in physics are close to the level of sophistication required to breach the fortress of the mind and reconcile with naive common sense (Weekes 2003, 366–370). Attempts to harvest the remarkable developments of twentieth-century physics for insight into traditional philosophical problems such as free will or the mind-body problem remain highly controversial, but have clearly taken a quantum leap in respectability since the early 1980s.3 By the same token, 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 57 SP_WEB_Ch02_057-072.indd 57 8/12/09 2:03:27 PM