Panpsychism; A New Materialism To Embed Ethics
And Communism In Earth's Near Future
(Undergraduate Dissertation, Spring 2018)
Introduction
This dissertation aims to critique three philosophers, one of whom is renowned more as a physicist, in order to understand some arguments for, and against, panpsychism. Chapter One focuses on Galen Strawson,[1] who represents a pro-panpsychism position. Chapter Two focuses on Daniel Dennett,[2] who is anti-panpsychism from a functionalist position.[3] Chapter Three focuses on the empirical outcomes and theoretical notions of the physicist and philosopher David Bohm.[4] Bohm utilises a particularly philosophical and ethical approach alongside his mathematical theorems, and it is the former rather than his mathematical formulae that appear in this dissertation.[5] I have chosen a physicist with philosophical leanings because, if one is attempting to critique links between the so-called mental and the so-called material, the empirical data of science, flawed as much of it no doubt is, has been a large factor in defining what constitutes the material since the Renaissance. This approach is also consistent with Strawson’s commitment to materialism, and Dennett’s materialism utilising, in particular, the science of biology, neuroscience, and computer science/AI.
My work does not seek to prove panpsychism, but it does suggest that to ignore its claims is lazy philosophy, and bad science. It is also bad ethics, as the form of panpsychsim quantum entanglement suggests necessarily has ethical implications, which I shall explain later. An ethics from panpsychism will therefore form a subtext within this dissertation.
What, however, do I mean by panpsychism and materialism? The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy states:
“Panpsychism is the view that mentality is fundamental and ubiquitous in the natural world.”[6]
Whilst materialism, which Stanford also calls physicalism, is defined as:
“…the thesis that everything is physical, or as contemporary philosophers sometimes put it, that everything supervenes on the physical.”[7]
Within this dissertation then, mentality will be seen as material, physical. There are however other terms that could have been used instead of panpsychism, and I shall outline some of these, together with an explanation of why panpsychism is the favoured term. These are pantheism, panentheism, panexperientialism, or even Deleuze and Guattari’s panmachinism.
Pantheism and panentheism are rejected because the old guy with a beard reappears, polarising us within (predominantly masculine) tradition and interpretation to such a degree that the debate continues along unhelpful lines. I do not believe God, YHWH, Allah, or Brahma can help this debate more than they can hinder it, and thus they are rejected. Panexperiantialism is more useful. It suggests that every thing is capable of “feeling” an experience; water, rocks, quarks, leptons, neutrinos, cows, humans, aliens; but it does not necessarily suggest that those experiences communicate with each other. It is therefore highly fragmented, and devoid of the communicative and entangled implications of quantum theory. Panpsychism, constructed with the “psyche” or mind of course, suggests communication through that notion of mind. Panmachinism is promising in that it ruptures the urge for comfort a transcendental God would provide, but the term “machine” can imply certain deterministic limitations.[8]
All the terms are necessarily flawed; perhaps, with much irony, “intra-communicative teleological implicate and explicate evolutionary multiple-branching necessities in localised and non-localised non-deterministic performatives” gets closer, but I recognise my term is doomed before even attempting to fly. The word “consciousness” appears many times in this dissertation also, and it too is a word in need of some clarification, because many people use it in many differing ways. The etymology of the word is Latin, conscire, with a meaning of being aware. However, the Latin origin favours mutual awareness, rather than single subject awareness. It will be useful therefore to explain what Strawson, Dennett, and Bohm mean by their use of the term, to forward manage points of convergence or divergence.
By consciousness, Strawson means “experience of any kind whatsoever,”[9] as he succinctly put it in the New York Times. Dennett is less clear on what consciousness is, but very wordy on what it is not. It is not, for example, qualia (raw feels or “what’s it like”-ness).[10] Neither is it centrally located in the brain.[11] Dennett’s view, as we will see, is that “Multiple Drafts”[12] of sensory data are arranged in competing and cooperating patterns in the brain to give a coherence to what we call experience or consciousness. Dennett thus appears as something of a functionalist and an eliminitavist, although neither would in fact preclude the effects of panpsychism, more its definitions. For Bohm consciousness includes, at the very least, thought, feeling, desire, and will,[13] yet it cannot be comprehended for him without reference to an “implicate order, together with reality as a whole.”[14] This comment will become clearer in Chapter Three.
Whichever definition we settle on (or don’t!), it is clear the ability to self-reflect and ask from a reasoned standpoint what consciousness is is a key part of what consciousness is, even if the word itself were to be finally eliminated as having no, or a very different, meaning. Even in that eventuality, an eliminitavist is still (probably) left with something. We cannot therefore conclude an absolute working definition for consciousness, but I would suggest we don’t necessarily need one. This may seem like an odd statement, but utilizing processes of falsification, we can say that this “something” we do not know how to describe appears to be in an intimate relationship with other “somethings” of uncertain definitions, and we can monitor their relationships regardless of those definitions, noting other “somethings”, again regardless of definitions, in the process. This is, in fact, a remarkable similarity between Dennett and Bohm, as we shall see, and in fact the abstractions Dennett favours I will argue support a more scientific approach than he has at his disposal, which Bohm provides. However, we start with Strawson.
Chapter One
Galen Strawson
This chapter will analyse Galen Strawson’s position that panpsychism is material, physical. In fact, he states: “I take physicalism to be the view that every real, concrete phenomenon in the universe is…physical.”[15] From this, he concludes that “all mental goings on are concrete phenomena.”[16] He contends that philosophers such as Daniel Dennett “are prepared to deny the existence of experience,”[17] or even Quine comparing “belief in physical objects to belief in the gods of Homer.”[18] Strawson is therefore at odds with the eliminativism he confers upon Dennett and Quine, whilst remaining a committed materialist. He makes a very clear distinction between physicalism and what he calls “physicSalism, the view – the faith – that…all concrete reality can…be fully captured in the terms of physics,”[19] and this tendency he postulates as the legacy of Descartes, in fact Descartes’s “greatest mistake.”[20] As a result, Dennett, and others, lie “in thrall to the fundamental intuition of dualism…that the experiential and the physical are utterly and irreconcilably different.”[21] I don’t read Dennett as a dualist, which Chapter Two will demonstrate, but there is certainly a large flaw in seeing mind and matter within a dualist arrangement. It implies that mind is transcendental, rather than made of the same “stuff” as matter. It will be useful to hold in view the possibility that both mind and matter are extensions of an as yet undefined order, that some other “stuff” lies behind both matter and mind. I believe Dennett’s work implies this, and Bohm’s work explicitly states it. For the purposes of this dissertation this other “stuff” will still be regarded as matter, although it may not possess the mechanical determinism often associated with current definitions.
Strawson makes three claims consistent with, to him, conventional substantive assumptions on the nature of matter.[22] These are that there is a plurality of ultimates; that everything is constituted from ultimates; and that the universe is spatio-temporal in its fundamental nature.[23] By ultimate he means that which cannot be reduced further. It is very possible to dispute all three in my opinion, for there is no evidence for ultimates, and certainly no evidence that any such ultimates are fixed rather than fluid. Therefore the manner of constitution of everything from them is also in question. A spatio-temporal universe is comforting to a confused humanity, but string theory and quantum theory suggest that our sense perceptions only reveal the four dimensions of a spatio-temporal universe, when there could be eleven or more, far stranger than we care to think about. Spatio-temporality is then, itself, a possible extension from these dimensions rather than an ultimate in itself. That statement alone leads to the possibility that conventional understandings of mind and matter simply do not go far enough, because we defer (quite genuinely and with little or no malice) to our sense perceptions of time and space. This process, either consciously or unconsciously, creates habits of description within time and space rather than habits of description outside those limitations.
However, rewinding somewhat, Strawson uses the three claims above to define the argument a “physical reductionist”[24] uses rather than affirm his own allegiance to it. Inverting this reductionist argument, Strawson then posits panpsychism as “realistic physicalism…the only possible form,”[25] and says the belief non-experiential matter combines to create experiential matter is “a commitment to something…for which there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever,”[26] as well as “the wholly unnecessary (and incoherent) burden of brute emergence…otherwise known as magic.”[27] For Strawson then, this “plurality of ultimates” must be panpsychic in order for any notion of mind to emerge. Some form of mind must be everywhere in order for a mind to be anywhere.
Strawson’s intellectual frustration is therefore that we do not enquire of the consciousness of matter, from the simple assumption (which must owe more than a slight debt to the separation of mind and matter after Cartesian dualism) that it cannot be conscious in the first place. Quoting the physicist Arthur Eddington, if our readings of atoms are “a schedule of pointer readings…attach(ed)…to something…inconsistent with thought…we…can discover nothing as to (their) nature.”[28] Eddington continues “the pointer readings of my own brain…are attached to a background of consciousness.”[29] Therefore, our background for realising our brains are conscious is the awareness of that consciousness itself. If our instruments of physics do not enquire of the consciousness of that which they measure, then they cannot, in turn, suggest consciousness in the measured object. The ramifications of this statement will be clarified later with my chapter on David Bohm. In brief, for now, quantum physics postulates, and even shows, that observers and the observed interact; are inter-relational. This suggests a form of consciousness in the observed object.
Strawson quotes Eddington again, that “physical stuff has, in itself, a nature capable of manifesting itself as mental activity.”[30] In other words, it is a latent or proto-consciousness, a potentiality for consciousness, which exists in all matter that in turn allows some matter (ie us) to experience consciousness. He finds the logic of experience (our consciousness) emerging from the non-experiential (non-conscious matter) incoherent. Not content with one salvo aimed at reductionists, Strawson continues by stating their belief to be something like:
“Consciousness properties…are emergent properties of wholly and utterly non-conscious, non-experiential phenomena. Physical stuff…is indeed a wholly non-conscious, non-experiential phenomenon…Ultimates in themselves are wholly non-conscious, non-experiential phenomena. Nevertheless, when they combine in certain ways, experiential phenomena “emerge”.”[31]
To my mind, the claim that matter is dead, non-conscious, is not incoherent. Dennett in the next chapter says something similar, and his argument coheres enough functionally and observationally. Bohm’s arguments in Chapter Three however go significantly further functionally, observationally, scientifically, politically, and ethically. It is also the politics of non-conscious matter v the conscious human that I find problematic. The ramifications of positing that it is merely the human who possesses consciousness (or advanced consciousness if we factor in the seeming consciousness of some non-human entities), with the likely addendum of “and some humans are more conscious than other humans/species”, would find an easy journey to an end point of ugly totalitarianism. Consciousness is abused to valorise culture or civilisation, and the alleged absence or alleged deficit of these qualities is repeatedly used to justify acts of harm. Many supposedly rational arguments for a consciousness deficit have been utilised in the modern period to justify slavery, racism, and sexism. Their echoes resound across many forms of present-day “othering” and vilification. Strawson’s argument is elegant, but not without detractors from within his own book (having invited seventeen philosophers and scientists to respond), as well as having a confused relationship with science himself (as previously mentioned, he takes issue with “physicSalism”, as he calls it, whilst simultaneously quoting an enormously influential physicist, Arthur Eddington, in his own defence). I shall focus on the alternate views of two contributors to his book, W G Lycan and Fiona Macpherson.
Lycan takes two approaches, the first being that Strawson’s predicates are flawed. He states that Strawson leaps from a predicate of “the nature of (real) experience cannot be specified in wholly non-experiential terms”[32] to the conclusion that anyone who attempts to do so denies experience. It is true, Lycan agrees, within itself. That would logically follow. But his contention is that the initial predicate is not a fact, but a “highly contentious philosophical claim”[33], and therefore the conclusion is equally flawed. However, as I have already stated, this still leaves an eliminativist with something, and that something begs explanation. Lycan then continues that even if there is absolutely no evidence against panpsychism, there is no “scientific evidence”[34] for it. The evidence of the communications quantum entanglement generate however would cast significant doubt on his claim.
Macpherson disputes Strawson in a way that points to Bohm, by stating that the concepts of concreteness, physicality, and fundamental science have changed drastically in the last two hundred years from notions of absolute solidity to present-day notions of predictability[35] (modern physics is less about objects being actually solid and more about predictions of outcomes from probabilities). Or, to put it another way, she takes issue with Strawson using 18th Century terminology for 21st Century debates. However, her larger issue is that physics itself (again pointing to Bohm) is unreconciled. The two theorems that make sense of the micro- and macro- universes (quantum theory and relativity) contradict each other,[36] although they both work extraordinarily well in real world situations (the micro of quantum theory makes this computer and your smartphone work, whilst the macro of relativity makes satellite navigation and landing people on the moon work, for example).
To summarise Strawson’s views, he is very much a materialist. His argument is that materialism is incoherent without panpsychism. In fact, materialism without panpsychism, for Strawson, is magic. Superstition. The idea of brute emergence of consciousness from non-consciousness he finds implausible. However, his arguments are shaky on science, and I believe he has misunderstood Dennett by claiming Dennett is a dualist, who in turn I believe has missed the “Eureka” possibility of his own work. We are also a little stuck within word-meanings and understandings of scientific evidence. Interestingly, as already stated with the conflicting definitions of consciousness in the introduction, we do not need to define what something is in order to witness its effects. This is the position of Dennett, to follow, and in many ways the position of Bohm thereafter. However, each will generate entirely different outcomes, with the burden of evidence, I will argue, favoured towards Bohm at Dennett’s cost.
Chapter Two
Daniel C. Dennett
To lead on from Strawson, Daniel Dennett is also a committed materialist. In this chapter I shall first of all present his views on panpsychism, and then critique his explanation of consciousness from his book “Consciousness Explained”. I shall then enquire whether his materialism, which he states is a version of functionalism,[37] is missing its logical endpoint; namely, that panpsychism, as explained via Bohm’s theorems, illuminates Dennett’s arguments far more than detracting from them.
In a lecture at Edinburgh University last year (2017), Dennett made the following statement on panpsychism:
“It seems to me that the main flaw with panpsychism is that it doesn't even address the hard question - "and then what happens?" Okay, so every photon and electron and atom and grain of sand in the world is conscious - so what?
Or my way of putting this - I asked David Chalmers, I said: "Okay, I understand your view of panpsychism. I have an alternative view and I want you to tell me what follows from your view that doesn't follow from mine: 'pan-niftyism'. Everything is nifty. Every atom, every electron, every photon, every subatomic particle in the whole universe is nifty - now what?"
So what? I mean, the trouble with panpsychism is that it doesn't seem to have any content. What predictions follow from panpsychism? None. So it's a sort of "throw-away" view, it seems to me. So I throw it away.”[38]
It is very clear then, that no matter his sarcastically humorous tone, Dennett does not and cannot exclude panpsychism, but he does discount any relevance it may possess. Dennett opens the preface to Consciousness Explained[39] by stating:
“My first year in college, I read Descarte’s Meditations and was hooked on the mind-body problem. Now here was a mystery…Now, after 30 years…I think I’ve made some progress. I think I can sketch an outline of the solution…”[40]
This is a bold claim, but benefits from his later statement:
“I’m sure there are still plenty of mistakes…and I hope they are bold ones, for then they will provoke better answers by others.”[41]
Utilising neuroscience, AI, biology, and analytic philosophy, we are then shown his conclusions from “an odyssey through many fields,”[42] thankfully interspersed with moments of humour to soothe the besieged reader through nearly 500 pages of dense, yet erudite, argumentation. I previously stated that Strawson’s belief Dennett lies in thrall to Descartes is mistaken. Dennett to my mind is specifically arguing against mind-matter dualism, believing that the mind follows predictable material passages rather than immaterial or transcendent pathways, and that dualism is not helping enquiries into the mind to mature. Strawson and Dennett share more in common than they realise.
Taking issue with what he calls The Cartesian Theater[43] as our traditional model of understanding consciousness, situated in a “first person perspective…which I describe in a monologue…counting on us to agree.”[44] Dennett then proposes a “Multiple Drafts”[45] alternative model using a methodology of a “third-person perspective, in which only facts garnered “from the outside” count as data.”[46] To validate his Multiple Drafts model, he states:
“What is wrong with Cartesian dualism...is not that Descartes chose the pineal gland…as the locus of interaction with the mind, but the very idea of such a locus…”[47]
This statement acts as Dennett’s rationale for introducing his key claims. These are that consciousness can be explained via analogies to computers, in particular advanced AI that passes the Turing test (a computer can think, Turing proclaimed, if it can regularly beat a human being in the “imitation game”),[48] that there are various parts of the brain that contribute to the “sense” of consciousness we experience (hence Multiple Drafts – cooperating and competing biological structures within our brains that add up to what we call consciousness), and a worthwhile and entertaining place for philosophical zombies and zimboes.[49] A philosophical zombie (see footnote 49 for zimbo):
“is or would be a human being who exhibits perfectly natural, alert, loquacious, vivacious behaviour but is in fact not conscious at all, but rather some sort of automaton.”[50]
I shall focus first on computers and AI. In the early 1960s, the robot Shakey was developed at Stanford Research Institute.[51] Via his programming and a televisual “eye”, Shakey was able to differentiate boxes from pyramids.[52] However, the point Dennett makes is that to achieve this, Shakey had cooperating and competing subsystems to enable the box/pyramid distinction. There was no robotic pineal gland pulling everything together. There was a line semantics[53] programme that utilised the binary language of 0 and 1 to recognise the lines and shadows specific to boxes or pyramids, via subprocesses that were “stupid and mechanical”[54] and had no need to understand why or what they were doing.[55] However, the outcome was a recognition of a box or pyramid. In brief, Shakey exhibited signs of consciousness, and Dennett moves on to imagine crossing Shakey with another real “character” from AI, SHRDLU,[56] which (who?) would answer actual questions. I prefer to imagine them having a love affair rather than a heartless cross-breeding programme, but I am a Romantic of course. Dennett does not state that this is how human consciousness works, but rather that this is a form of material and mechanised intelligence that mimics consciousness. This is his entry into categorising human consciousness neuroscientifically as a process loosely akin to AI, whilst leaving the possibility very wide open for even more advanced AI (such as the developments from 1960s Shakey to 2018’s offerings) to appear ever more human-like. To further define his Multiple Drafts model, he states:
“…all varieties of perception…are accomplished in the brain by parallel, multitrack processes of interpretation and elaboration of sensory inputs. Information entering the nervous system is under continuous “editorial revision”…like the motion of…heads…edited out early in the processing from eyeball to…consciousness.”[57]
In fact, this editing process is highly susceptible to being duped. This is part of Dennett’s explanation for hallucinations, optical illusions, the effectiveness of a magician’s misdirections, and even why we consider consciousness a mystery (because we use our first person experience to convince ourselves and others of our experiences rather than an external third person verifier, as previously mentioned). I do not disagree with much he has said (notwithstanding, and via his own invitation as per footnote 41, that others will refine and revise). Our neurobiology does indeed work in ways that he has outlined, with an ever-increasing body of material knowledge since Dennett’s book was published. In fact, one of the most renowned neuroscientific institutes for ongoing consciousness research is in Brighton; The Sackler Centre at Sussex University.
The issue with Dennett is that which he hasn’t said. He has given us a great lecture on neurobiology and computers, but he has not enquired of the sub-atomic processes that build these clearly material, solid, visible things. He has stopped short of asking what a deeper scientific explanation of panpsychism could look like, and how that could inform the notions of zombies, humans, cockroaches, or robots. He has failed to see that panpsychism has a science behind it, and he has therefore been highly selective in choosing some science to justify his philosophy, whilst ignoring more. For example, his very “Multiple Draft” model was conceived after the Pribam-Bohm holonomic brain model (see Chapter Three). Yet the holonomic brain is an even more sophisticated example of information storage and usage that cannot be conceived without recourse to quantum physics, entanglement, and therefore mass communication across sub-atomic particles. Dennett’s work is elegant and informative, yet ridiculously limited scientifically. If one relies on the sciences, and in this particular case it is biology for his explanation of human consciousness, one needs to remember that biology is the beautiful and expansive combinations of chemical processes that create this dance of life, in all its vivid, conflicted, confused, glorious, multiplicitous, and multicoloured extensions. Biology seems to emerge from chemistry. Chemistry in turn seems to emerge from physics. And physics has an awful lot of interesting, and indeed troubling for many, things to say on panpsychism.
Chapter Three
David Bohm
If one is seeking material and expansive explanations of consciousness from a scientific background, one could do a lot worse than a theoretical physicist with close professional and personal associations to Oppenheimer and Einstein. One who chose to leave the USA because of his Marxism[58] rather than collude in the witch-hunts of McCarthyism. One who, in 1980 (the same era Derrida was achieving full ascendancy), was able to “question the role of language in fragmenting philosophic thought”[59] as he:
“develops a theory of quantum physics which treats the totality of existence, including matter and consciousness, as an unbroken whole.”[60]
Bohm was therefore both a Marxist and a physicist. His commitment to understanding materialism led him to uncover theories showing that current definitions of matter and consciousness are both somewhat lacking. At the same time, his work suggests plausible alternatives. Hence my statement earlier that Dennett’s science does not go far enough. It stops just when it should be asking further questions. For Bohm, the evidence points towards a unity of plurals, a holism of multiplicities. However, it is vitally important to state that Bohm’s version of wholeness is drastically different from any Platonic version of ideals or forms, or indeed the mechanistic and discrete outcomes from Cartesianism. His theories are fundamentally far more fluid and queer, and their comments on language, borderlessness, and harmony within seeming incoherence have significant ethical outcomes, which this chapter elaborates.
Bohm makes a case that the “mechanistic approach was greatly encouraged by the development of the photographic lens,”[61] but that this approach, expressed via the “Cartesian grid”[62] has led us into problems in stepping back from “old notions of order.”[63] The ability to fragment and measure objects beyond the ability of the human eye has led us “to believe that eventually everything can be perceived in this way.”[64] Indeed, the idea develops from this that “there is nothing that cannot also be conceived as constituted of such localized elements.”[65] However, it must be remembered that Bohm is an authority on both the mechanistic and quantum views of physics, which “directly contradict each other.”[66] In quantum theory for example, “two entities, such as electrons, which initially combine…and then separate, show a peculiar non-local relationship.”[67] Regardless of their distance, they in fact communicate with and affect each other instantaneously, beyond and outside the mechanistic predictions of relativity. Some other quantum phenomena that belie relativity are that “entities, such as electrons, can show different properties (e.g., particle-like, wavelike, or something in between)”[68] or “movement is in general discontinuous…(implying also that an electron, for example, can go from one state to another, without passing through any states in between).”[69] His outcome from these contradictions is progressive:
“What is very probably needed instead is a qualitatively new theory, from which both relativity and quantum theory are to be derived as abstractions, approximations, and limiting cases.”[70]
Fortunately for us, Bohm presents just such a new theory, although in his humble manner he asks for us to test and falsify it (his mathematical formulae lie outside the scope of this dissertation), rather than his descent from Olympus or Sinai egoically with “The Truth”. The implicate order is described as “everything is enfolded into everything,”[71] via “the hologram.”[72] The explicate order would be our perceptions of discreteness, separation, outsideness, borders. However, the explicate order itself is open to further unenfoldment as our consciousness evolves. Assuming we do not destroy ourselves, our consciousness travels further into the implicate order (a very Hegelian turn) via the ongoing projects of society, community, philosophy, science, and political connectedness. The hologram motif is useful in that it extends the concepts of optics and lenses already alluded to, yet it continues them beyond their customary bias of fragmentation, incompleteness. A hologram is a reproduction of an entire image from but a fragment of that image. In other words, it is everything that image can be, from but a small portion of itself. Instead of our perception being simply the fragment then, the fragment shows the whole, and in fact contains it, enfolds it. The ramifications of this for consciousness and panpsychism are astounding. If the entirety of something is encoded within a fragment, for example, there is no reason why the evolutionary potentialities of, say, a butterfly, are not in communication with the evolutionary potentialities of a tiger. It is, to my mind, a highly accessible explanation of William Blake’s “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is: Infinite.”[73] Notwithstanding Blake’s problematic usage of the term “man”, which Bohm also employs, it is important to note that he separates “every” and “thing”. He is not saying that the totality of everything is infinite. That has been said countless times by countless people. He is saying that every thing is infinite. To use Bohm’s terms, therefore, the totality of existence is enfolded within my finger, your house, her garden, etc. The intra-communication and inter-relationality of every thing with every thing is total. Not only does this present an argument for the universe being efficient in its data relays, which would satisfy Dennett for example, it also opens space for further investigations into, amongst others, Jung’s Collective Unconscious, and it has profound ethical ramifications. However, Bohm writes that these are ever-evolving and fluid totalities, divorced from rigid Enlightenment absolutism:
"…harmony is seen to be possible only if the world view itself takes part in an unending process of development, evolution, and unfoldment”[74]
Now that we have seen Bohm’s reasoning, how does he specifically relate it to consciousness? He suggests that “the implicate order applies both to matter…and to consciousness,”[75] that they are in “relationship”[76] and there is “some notion of a common ground.”[77] The implicate order, then, can be understood as “the immediate and primary actuality”[78] whilst the explicate order can be “derived as a particular, distinguished case of the implicate order.”[79] From his work with Pribam,[80] he elucidates that our brains store information “on a given object or quality…not…in a particular cell or localized part…but…the information is enfolded over the whole. This storage resembles a hologram in its function.”[81] This augments and supports Dennett’s Multiple Drafts model, whilst also going further. Bohm is sympathetic to how our perceptions are coloured by discreteness, separation, fragmentation. If “memory…is recurrent, stable, and separable”[82] then our attention focuses “very strongly on what is static and fragmented.”[83] However, quantum physics demonstrates, as previously stated, non-local communications and the discontinuity of movement, rather than the mechanistic and relativistic outcomes of “a point event.”[84] Accordingly, Bohm proposes that the basic elements of matter and consciousness be regarded as a “moment”[85] that “cannot be precisely related to measurements of space and time, but rather covers a somewhat vaguely defined region…extended in space and has duration in time.”[86] In fact, the notion provides an entirely novel way of looking at (even resolving) Zeno’s paradoxes, as Bohm himself notes.[87] If time and space aren’t quite what we imagine them to be, then our terms of reference for Zeno’s paradoxes are somewhat flawed. We have fallen into a category error, as Ryle would say.
We see then that Bohm presents an account of the relationality between consciousness and matter (in fact, they are not entirely distinct or separate within the implicate order but act and appear as such within the explicate order) that is consistent with quantum theory. Quantum physics of course cannot be discounted; one moves from physics to chemistry and from chemistry to biology or neuroscience. As stated earlier, what Dennett leaves out is that which compromises his reasoning. His materialism doesn’t go far enough. Quantum theory, like critical theory, queer theory, neuroscience, philosophy, and politics will all (assuming humans stick around long enough to do so) evolve and modify into newer theories which themselves will modify and evolve. But it is significantly real enough, via evidence based assessments, and therefore Bohm’s concepts shout loud for further investigation. Dennett doesn’t appear to discount panpsychism as a possibility, but he does give it a “so what” factor. The “this what” reply is that panpsychism satisfies Occam’s razor within Bohm’s physics. I have previously stated that his mathematical theorems lie outside of this dissertation, yet his analyses of their meanings is as presented herein.
Comments on Ethical Ramifications
Bohm states “the notion that the one who thinks is…completely separate from and independent of the reality that he thinks about is of course firmly embedded in our entire tradition.”[88] He is also wise enough to note that although so-called Eastern philosophies deny this, in everyday life it is as prevalent as elsewhere[89] (we currently have a Buddhist Nobel Peace Prize winner heavily implicated at best, fully responsible at worst, for the atrocities in Myanmar. It takes a lot more than a philosophy of holism and intra-connectedness for a politics of the same to be a lived reality). He is aware that to conceptualise reality and consciousness as an unbroken whole may never be resolved ultimately,[90] but perceives a general problem of fragmentation of human consciousness. One of his wisest comments, for me, is that the outcomes of our thinking that things are inherently fragmented (particulated, atomised) are that the distinctions of race, nation, family, profession etc[91] lead us to defend our own wants against those of others. I do not see a better way of currently demonstrating this than the fragmentation and polarisations created by Trump, Putin, Brexit, Syria, and Myanmar. There are over 200 nations in the world. By definition, if I am not of your nation I am outside your legally accepted citizenry, outside your borders and boundaries, although certain privileges may be extended to me. If we think of the totality as a sum of independent fragments, our mind will fall into this as a worldview, and we will, of course, maintain fragmentation. Worse, in times of extreme economic distress, such as the post-Financial Crash era from 2007/8, our suffering finds an easy scapegoat in “the other”. Again, Trump and Brexit bear this out on many levels.
Bohm states that science is demanding a new, non-fragmentary world view, because the current notions of independent parts do not work well in modern physics.[92] Indeed, he even extends the ramifications of fragmentation to grammar:
“it is pointed out that the subject-verb-object structure of modern languages implies that all action arises in a separate subject, and acts either on a separate object, or else reflexively on itself…we then enquire whether it is possible to experiment with new language forms in which the basic role will be given to the verb rather than to the noun…both in form and in content, the language will be in harmony with the unbroken flowing movement of existence as a whole.”[93]
He notes that the Latin word “mederi” means to cure, yet is based on a root meaning to measure.[94] The words moderation and meditation share the same root.[95] We now use the word measure to classify divisions and sub-divisions of units. What originally had a healthier, holistic bias now has a heavily fragmented, particulated bias. He relates measure to proportion and ratio,[96] noting that the Latin word “ratio” is that which the word “reason” is derived from.[97] He also notes however that the move away from “measure” as holistic was already underway in Ancient Greece,[98] but far more interestingly observes that in Sanskrit (the Indo-European language groups “fragmented” into Sanskrit and Greco-Latin as migrations occurred) the root for measure, “matra,”[99] also provides the word “maya”, meaning illusion.[100] Hence, the Greeks and Romans took measure to mean reality, whereas cultures speaking Sanskrit and its derivatives took that meaning as “in some way false and deceitful.”[101] Forms, ratios, proportions and reason “are regarded as a sort of veil, covering the true reality, which cannot be perceived by the senses.”[102] In Bohm’s view, this is an explanation for why our heritage tends towards science and technology, via our commitment to measurability, whereas in Sanskrit cultures the tendency is towards religion and philosophy, via the notion of immeasurability.[103] It is an interesting and well-made point, although, as previously noted, in everyday life both cultures exhibit immense social tensions and hideous practices. However, only technology discovers atomic weaponry. Let us not forget Bohm worked on The Manhattan Project. How much his conscience troubled him from his work on atomic weapons is not known, but it is clear he regarded an ethics of non-fragmentation as vitally important in order to move beyond the tensions we currently experience through our enactment of bordered and competing nations. Bohm’s Marxism itself would have entailed Internationalism rather than nationalist sympathies, consistent with the holistic worldview he proposes.
Undoubtedly for Bohm, “reality and consciousness are related,”[104] yet his argument, both philosophical and mathematical, leads him to:
“regard even this ground as a mere stage…a proposal…not…an assumption about what the final truth is supposed to be, and still less as a conclusion concerning the nature of such truth….both the world as we know it and our ideas about it may undergo unending processes of yet further change”[105]
It is vitally important in Bohm’s thinking that a continuing process of development[106] underpins our notions of reality, cosmology, and evolution, and that our notions, as they develop, are “merely some sort of improvement”[107] over what we already have. It goes without saying that in order to enjoin this ongoing process, it is somewhat important that the human species enacts its wishes in an ethical and political environment that doesn’t destroy its ability to do so. In fact, in order to conduct ever-burgeoning research, larger societal and resource-distribution superstructures are required. It seems fairly obvious that if these are enacted from competing, fragmented economies that the technological outcomes of the research will favour weaponry to protect or enhance the competitive dominion, whereas from a cooperative, holistic, quantumly entangled and panpsychic approach not only would humanity benefit, but a recognition of my entanglement with you, and my entanglement with a worm, or a rock, or a lake, or a tiger, would allow a holistic ethics a better statistical chance of benefitting the entire ecosystem and biosphere of the planet we depend on. That the sub-atomic particles in me are in communication with the sub-atomic particles not only of you, or of the other species on Earth, but, by definition, via the non-local communication of any sub-atomic particle with any other across (potentially) all time and space.
To conclude on Bohm, his investigations into materialism include mastery of relativity via his close associations with Einstein, whilst his major contributions have been in the field of quantum physics. His research has led him to the conclusions that an underlying holistic order, the implicate order, supervenes on or contains an explicate order, which itself is constituted of such notions as time, space, matter, and consciousness (which in the implicate order are not distinct). However, this notion of wholeness for Bohm cannot be separated from ethical, political, or societal concerns. In fact, to even attempt to separate them would be to fail to understand their significance entirely.
Conclusion
The title of this dissertation is “Panpsychism: A Materialist Argument for its Existence.” Galen Strawson, Daniel Dennett, and David Bohm are all materialists. Strawson argues that panpsychism is an inevitable and logical requirement of materialism (physicalism), otherwise the emergence of consciousness (which he takes to be real and therefore material) from non-consciousness should be regarded as magic. An impossibility. He is however very light on detail as to how panpsychism would be constituted. He is heavy on argumentation but light on empirical data. Dennett is against notions of panpsychism, sarcastically dismissive of its possibility and its significance. Unlike Strawson however, Dennett is dense with empirical data gleaned from neuroscience and computer science to demonstrate what consciousness is. His view is that the Multiple Drafts model of sensory data arranged in competing and cooperating systems in the brain gives us what we call consciousness. Upon closer inspection it is not drastically different from the appearance, or mimicking, of consciousness in robots and AI. He is therefore anti-Cartesian in that he sees no mind-matter separation. Bohm is a scientist. A physicist who draws philosophical and ethical conclusions from his work. I would argue his commitment to materialism is at least as profound as Strawson and Dennett, if not more so, as a result of his Marxism. Drawing on the non-local communications of quantum particles, and their discontinuous states, Bohm shows a system that suggests the mental and the material are not only of the same form, but that they are in constant communication within an implicate order. Every thing is enfolded into every thing. This is achieved via the hologram, and it should be noted again that Dennett’s Multiple Drafts model of the brain was preceded by the holographic brain conjecture of Bohm and Pribam. Who is most coherent? Who seems to have an argument that submits more easily to Occam’s razor – the panpsychists or the non-panpsychist?
Just over a year ago, on the 31st of January 2017, Southampton University released the following statement:
“A UK, Canadian and Italian study has provided what researchers believe is the first observational evidence that our universe could be a vast and complex hologram…Scientists have been working for decades to combine Einstein’s theory of gravity and quantum theory. Some believe the concept of a holographic universe has the potential to reconcile the two. I hope our research takes us another step towards this…”[108]
The notion that reality is drastically different from our three-dimensional (plus time as the fourth dimension) certainties is nothing short of revolutionary. The human is decentred. We are part of an extraordinarily strange (and quite, quite beautiful) enfoldment and entanglement that our organic senses struggle to conceive and perceive. If space refers and defers to a one- or two-dimensional hologram at a deeper level, what, we ask, does that do to time? Time itself is also called into question, decentring us even more. Surely, we say, time only travels in one direction? That is a law of thermodynamics, of entropy, of certainty. Time, for Bohm, is an extension, a particular manifestation in the explicate order from a greater holism within the implicate order.
On the 9th of November 2017, just five months ago, a team from the Federal University of ABC in Brazil demonstrated that by affecting quantum spin they could reverse entropy,[109] in effect having a cold thing heat a hot thing (not vice versa as per our usual expectations). This was a real world, micro- and macro- result. If entropy is reversed, time is decentred. If time is decentred, quantum effects take on even greater significance (note that the above-mentioned reversal of entropy is conditional upon quantum states). The instantaneous communication, effect, and potentially infinite inter-relationality of quantum systems then make panpsychism, or whatever more fitting word we eventually choose to describe it, a simple extrapolation.
But what I find most interesting is that these findings do not lead to a supernatural, transcendent, mystical realm, rather they lead to a far more verdant and fertile field of enquiry into materialism. Dennett closes this enquiry off. His understanding of matter is limited. Strawson appears to be on a more useful track, but falls down on useful evidence. Only Bohm has argued how concepts such as panpsychism necessarily make sense within empirical data, whilst panpsychism alone must be seen as only one of the hitherto metaphysical notions that Bohm’s work can shed light on materially. Evolution, natural selection, teleology, chance, chaos, and order can be continually revisited in light of his material findings and theorems. But the final word on Bohm is political, or at the very least ethical. His concerns that the fragmentations arising from the Greco-Roman worldview have taken us towards languages that struggle to cohere, philosophies that struggle to see beyond measure and separation, or heavily technological war-based competing nations, appear borne out by our own observations.
The actual and metaphorical lenses of Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton shaped so much of Enlightenment thinking, via discrete separateness and atomisation as absolute and universal truths, but we are now able to see that reality is far stranger, multi-directional, fluid, creative, and queer than those “truths” admitted. If, however, our existence is so fundamentally linked to the existence of everything else we have ever encountered, the ethical outcome needs to be of maximum respect, humility, and care as much as the necessities of our existence can afford it.
Bohm’s implicate order is necessarily panpsychic, and it also necessarily points to an ethics of inter- and intra-dependance, responsiveness, and awareness as rational and logical conclusions. It is communistic; a communism of awareness and respect. It is libertarian; the unity is represented via the pluralities. Enfolded within each of us, via the explicate and implicate order, is as much meat-producing cow and rational, “supreme” human, as much man and woman, yin and yang, quantum and relative, binary and non-binary, infinite and nothing, dancer and thinker. To consign capitalism’s excesses to history, the cultural shock of decentring the human needs to be enacted. Once our reluctant populace understands that the old certainties were myths, and the new evidences allow communion and connectivity, communism can finally become the liberator it was always supposed to be. All hierarchies are questioned, because no hierarchy is independent of all the parts it touches and is touched by.
Physics, philosophy, politics, and ethics resolve into themselves, and we will no longer translate philosophy as the fetishistic
“love of wisdom” we have inherited from the fragmented measurements of Greco-Roman antiquity,
but closer to Levinas’s “Wisdom of Love in the service of Love.”[110]