Pan-Psychism: Absurd On the Face of It. Yet How is it Any More Absurd Than its Alternative?

Pan-Psychism is the view that nature, out there in the world and away from one's own mind, is conscious on some fundamental level. On this view apples, humans, blades of grass, and rocks might be said to be similar in at least one regard-- they are all conscious. This is not to say that a rock has the same consciousness as a blade of grass or a human being, but nonetheless there is some kind of consciousness present in them all.

To many, Pan-Psychism is absurd on the face of it. It does not seem reasonable to assume that a rock is conscious. It is reasonable to assume that other humans are conscious because the person making this very judgment in the first place would be human and see a likeness between other human beings and her or himself. There is little that is similar between a human being and a rock. In fact, one glaring similarity is that a dead, unconscious person behaves an awful lot like a rock. Therefore, inductively, rocks are like dead people. They are without consciousness. There is nothing necessarily problematic about considering that a rock might really be conscious in some limited way, but doing so is unnecessarily fanciful on the part of the asserter, as in order to do so one has to move away from any experience of the matter and into pure speculation.

This would be the conclusion to reasonably draw were there not profound problems with the alternative to Pan-Psychism. I say alternative in the singular because I know of no other alternatives that can come close to working out, or fitting with experience and science as we know it. If there are other alternatives, they need to be brought to my attention.

The alternative is that, simply put, there is conscious matter and there is unconscious matter. Within this framework, it furthermore turns out in light of chemistry that the the same basic components that assemble together to make up conscious matter also make up unconscious matter. The same elements and chemical reactions present within conscious matter can also take place, on a piece by piece basis, as unconscious matter. In otherwords, there is no chemical (no life-only chemical) that is only present in a living person and never present in a dead person or in the "unconscious" world.

Therefore, it is the unconscious bits, elements, atoms, or chemical reactions (or some combination of any or all of them) that give rise to consciousness. The details have yet to be worked out, but this does not matter. The basic ontology looks like this: there is an x such that x is unconscious and there is a y such that y is unconscious and there is an x+y, which are those very same unconscious separate components, x and y, such that x+y is conscious. A conscious state emerges when x and y come together. Separately, x and y are unconscious.

On this view there is an entity that poofs into and out of existence, namely consciousness. Whence does it come? Is there a spring of consciousness that the unconscious world connects with and, at times, invokes? Is there no spring of consciousness so that consciousness springs from nothing? Does nothing spring something? Does something blot out to nothing once more, when the y motions itself one monad more to the left of x? Does it return when the y scoots one monad back to the right?

There is one further issue that calls to be addressed--who gets to experience this conscious state? If x+y is an excruciating pain, then does x feel the pain? Does y? Do both of them feel pain as one singular perspective that sort of hovers above the two? Do none of them feel pain and a perspective, like consciousness to begin with, is invoked as if from out of an aether?

On the face of it, unconsciousness matter becoming conscious matter is something that were are used to hearing. It does not seem absurd in our culture. It is only in investigating further its implications that reveals that the position poses steep problems. Pan-psychism, on the otherhand, faces no such problems.

On Tying Together Activities

"How any given tone is understood, then, has at least as much to do with what people make of it as with the physical properties of sound itself" (World Music Traditions and Transformations, Michael B. Bakan 3)

How to account for this? How can the same arrangement of notes mean completely different things between two people?

A person is a holism of activity, meaning that multiple aspects of the world and the organizing of that world occur simultaneously. Music itself is an activity of listening and of anticipating movements in sound.

If there is a sudden car crash nearby, it is always made somewhat amusing if the car crash happens to take on the rythm, beat, and timbre of a known and popular dance or pop song, just out of the sheer coincidence of it. As the crash occurs, anyone attuned to the song will anticipate the progression of the song as soon as the sounds are noticed moving that direction. Of course, a person who has not built up the anticipatory structure will just hear a series of clanks and bangs.

But, for the central question here, what makes music become attached to other activities, such as the same music that is in a religious ritual happens to be played, in a nother culture, during a T.V. advertisement of burgers and fries? Despite being the same sounds in both cases, what is it that makes the sounds takes on two distinct meanings in two different cultures?

As persons are a holism of activities, the learning of a song (the activity of listening) and the learning of a central religious ceremony (the activity of walking and dressing a certain way) will occur simultaneously--the disposition to anticipate a certain progression of sounds and to walk and dress in a particular way is the same disposition. Neurologically (to not resist becomming outdated (years ago I should have said 'genetically')), the structure in the brain that is built for the song will be tied to and built with the structure of the rest of the activity involved in the religious ritual. The notes anticipate not just a further succession of notes (which is itself a disposition) but all the other dispositions tied in with anticipating those notes, religious or siitting on the couch craving burgers. It's even clear that what ties all activities together is itself one, holistic disposition.

Just Your Perception, Man.

Recently reading Chalmer's Character of Consciousness I was struck by one of those enigmas that sends question marks rising to the furthest reaches of outer space--those enigmas of purely philosophical discourse
that are brought up so quickly that its assumptions are blinked over. The notion is that one could see an X that is, in reality, an o.

Reality here will mean the world as it is in-itself, independent of our practices of accessing it.

I see an X; is it really an X or simply my perception of an X that is really an O?

The best way to do this would be to examine the grounds or conditions necessary for saying that X is perceived and is not real (or not a part of reality as it is in-itself). If no conditions can be found, then one does not merely perceive, but accesses the world directly.


1. An 'X' is not really an X when there is an independent reality behind that 'X' that has nothing to with 'X'. Let me make a picture using my keyboard where < represents the perspective of a person, such as with his or her sight:


< Xo;~';'/?#]'[/~~/


See all of that junk after the 'X'? That's the chaotic objective world that we can never know and that does not cause X (in this particular model). But wait, what is also in that picture? Isn't it the X itself?


What else could it possibly be? Were it anything else, it would be placed in front of the X relative to the individual's perspective, and the individual would no longer see an X, but would see what's in front of it, and we would be interrogating the reality of that entity instead. It should be obvious from this illustration that the X is not any less a part of 'objective' reality than all of the stuff behind it that is hidden from perception. They are all equally a part of reality as it is in-itself, but the perspective merely lacks the ability to see through the X and to the rest of the junk behind it. This can be looked at coherently in any mixture of the following two ways: the X is hiding the rest of reality but is not any less a part of that reality, or the perspective is not wide enough or does not have the conditions necessary to see the rest of reality.

2. An 'X' is not really an X when there is an independent reality behind that 'X' that, in part, causes 'X'. Another keyboard drawing, only this time include '<--' to mean 'causes' where 'X<--o' means 'o causes X':

< X<--o;~';'/?#]'[/~~/

Here, we clearly see o causing X. Of course, the individual only sees the X and not the o that is causing it. Does this place the X outside of reality as it is in itself? If I put the Jack of Hearts in my hand and hold it up to your face so that you cannot see my hand, does that remove the Jack of Hearts from the world just because my hand is what caused it to be in front of your face? No. In the same way, just because there is a hidden causal element behind the X does not remove the X from reality as it is in-itself.

3. This is not very necessary for the purposes of my argument, but another common view-point should at least be addressed--all of 'objective' reality causally interacts with one another which then causes your percepion of X:

< X<--o<--;<--~<--'<--;<--'<--/<--?<--#<--]<--'<--[<--/<--~<--~<--/

The implications are the same as 2, except that behind my hand that holds up the Jack of Hearts there is also an arm and that that arm also covers up a body and eanything else that causes the card to be placed in your vision.

Conclusions: The world as we experience it is the world as it is in-itself, even if it is a limited view of that world.

Other Conclusions: Representationalism places an arbitrary distinction between the representation and what is represented. It should be clear that, at the very least, making the world in-itself as a represented virtual-reality construct in a person's mind does not help in the philosophical investigations about drawing the line between the 'who' and the 'what.'



Next: The Brain Must Also Be a Representation.

Next next: Where Consciousness (What representationalism tries to explain) Properly Belongs.

Part I: Subjectivity and Objectivity: Where the Line Is Arbitrarily Drawn

I'm going to take this slow in order to work out the bugs that will no doubt pop up. I'll give one example here and then wait for an obvious counter argument, I hope, and then address that counterargument. By that point I might be able to develop more clearly the glimpses of a new theory of minds, brains, and consciousness along with what the dividing lines should be between the 'who' (Subjects)and the 'what' (objects).

In the history of physics, Maxwell was the first to theorize that light had a wave-like property. Hertz later revealed the frequencies of the electromgnetic spectrum, which included visible light. It became clear from research in this field that light, with color, corresponded with a wavelength.

All of this research is of interest to philosophers, bringing up questions about what is perceived and what the nature of an independent, objective reality is, if there is one. The widely held view by philosophers of perception today as well as people in general living in a technologically advancing society is that of assigning sensations such as that of the color yellow as being not intrinsic to an object itself, but rather as something that becomes added onto the object by ways of a neuronal process, or by way of something mental that ascribes properties like color on to the object.

With the discovery that the color yellow also exhibited a wavelength came the seeming support that experienced color is simply something that our brains (or selves, or minds) add on to the object, or to the world. The object in 'objective' reality, it is maintained, is a wave and nothing more. One has from this conclusion the worldview that the independent world is a swirl of numbers, waves, and parabolas.

This view is, at the very least, prejudiced. When light is seen to have an accompanying wavelength, one sensation (seeing a wavelength) is merely replaced for another (seeing the color yellow).Revealing that light had a wavelength merely gave it a new dimension that was not typically experienced, but could be shown to exist by careful manipulation.

The obvious questions that should be asked are what current paradigm or way of thinking about ourselves makes it so easy to put 'color' in our heads, but not the 'wavelength'? What model of our brain, or of reality for that matter, makes the notion unlikely that a color, like yellow, could be an essential part of the world? What makes it so that wavelengths could exist independent of our existence, but not yellow?

What sees “change”?

If we conceive of our selves as a pack of neurons, ones which guide our thoughts, then even this conception of ourselves is itself a thought, one conjured up by the pack of neurons. Is thought an illusion? But how can one say that the very method by which you arrive at your conclusions is itself an illusion? Are conclusions an illusion? The all or nothing materialist must eventually take the entire world either as being an illusion or as being entirely comprised of thought, in which case the all or nothing materialist is now an idealist.

If one’s thoughts about being a neuronal structure is itself another thought, then thoughts seem to be primary for experience and any conceptions of reality that might happen outside of experience. What cannot be reduced to thought?

Some things cannot be reduced to thought. I have had times, such as when I got knocked unconscious, that I blacked out and had no thoughts. Another time, I was put under anesthesia and was completely in the dark for a good five hours. These seem to be experiences of inexperience, when all is black and nothing. But is it really nothing? It is true that there are no thoughts in such experiences, and yet are there experiences? Even this experience of darkness is seen later on as having been an experience of darkness, which was outside of thought, by a comparison with ongoing present experience.

How can this comparison with present experience be assessed? Can it be formalized or put into a model? The objective here is to lay the conditions from which precisely “change” of any kind could be assessed, from which a comparison between past and present could be made. This is where language gets tricky and mistakes are made. Are we saying that the past gets held up and examined, and then the present gets held up and examined, and the difference between the two is figured out? This must be the case, but the past must be understood properly as something taking place in and not desituated from the present itself. The experience of recalling the past does not take place in the past, but in the present. What, then, could be a distinction between the past and the present-- would they not be the same? We want to say that the present is a current experiencing. Many think that this easily solves the matter until the past is also realized to be a present experiencing, and that any further distinction between the two seems impossible. The past becomes yet one more aspect of human existence that must be an illusion, along with free will and the self.

One way to distinguish between the past and the present is to invite a dualistic conception. Any notion of the self that actually is a self and not an illusion and that is in a world that is actually a world and not an illusion, is necessarily dualistic. The dualism of a self in a world is that of an outer coming in and an inner going out. The world shows up as the coming in of raw sensory data at the same time that we ourselves show up as directing ourselves toward that sensory world. It is in this directing-toward that sensory inputs are internalized and show up as thoughts directing over that internalization. Thoughts never direct over the sensory world coming in, but only over senses already internalized. This internalization becomes indistinguishable from memory.

We look over our lives in this internalization as a changing of desires, reasons, callings, experiences, and so on. Yet, had we really existed, or experienced, as such a being and nothing more, we simply would have experienced one desire at one time and another desire at another time, without any ability to step back and assess that any change has occurred. This stepping back from where one could see one’s life as change is a crucial move, one that must be accounted for. For the no self theorist, this is easy--change is an illusion, or, is a vague mental faculty that gives a ‘sensation’ of having changed. Again, the whole world must necessarily become an illusion. However, if one looks at change as something knowable and reasonable, one arrives back at an immovable self as the one possibility for this knowledge.

For now, though, let's attempt the task of making a provisional model that can assess change. The following conception should be uncontroversial given recent breakthroughs in neurology. If we take the neuronal structure of the brain to be that accumulation of the outer coming in (the sensory neurons) as well as thought going out, reinforcing, and directing this structure (the motor neurons, which also coordinate and change the structures of the brain itself as studies in cognitive therapy and neural plasticity have recently shown), then the comparison, as far as it takes place within the brain, is a comparison between some inner going-over structures. In comparing any two aspects, there must necessarily be another aspect that does the comparing. How does this other aspect compare? Does it combine the two? This alone won’t do the trick. Combining the two aspects merely creates an averaging of the two aspects into one, which then becomes an average experience somewhere between what the two structures had while apart, and this cannot be reliable. To see how this cannot be reliable, imagine a comparison of event A that experienced surfing on the beach with that of event B that experienced jury duty. An averaging of the two would not be reliable at best and would be complete nonsense at worst. Yet, even given that these two come together and give a coherent account, what change has been experienced? Two events have become one event that is then streamlined into experience and this ability to observe that a change of experience has occurred is still unaccounted for. What model of experience could be made that prevents experience from becoming experienced as a mere fluid change that does not have the comparing vantage point from which one can say that indeed the experienced has changed?

Invoking any third aspect that can assess change as itself being a neuronal structure seems untenable. Given two aspects that do not combine, but hold their differences separate to a third aspect, how does this third aspect exist as something other than an a priori vantage point of taking the two, distinct aspects as they are themselves, while remaining unmoved by those aspects from which to aquire a relative view of change?

A common view might hold that computers are already able to do this task. After all, don’t computers change according to what’s on the screen and are always moving their memory around their stationary hardware? Even if computers were conscious of all the folders and tasks we perform on them, they would still have this very problem of seeing that they have ever changed--it would be a completely streamlined experience for them.

Take opening multiple folders on a desktop, for example. When I click on the web browser, the software of the operating system, which is on the hard drive and is in control of the rest of hard drive which it itself is not on, maps out which part of the hard drive will be read for the processor to move it on to the RAM and move the pictures on the screen to display the web browser. I now click on a folder, and a folder is opened in the same way and now covers the web browser. The conscious computer now feels its RAM becoming cramped and perhaps even feels pressure on the web browser from the folder on top of it. Does the conscious computer know that it has changed? No, the computer has only streamlined from one motion to another with no faculty for knowing its previous states. RAM is called, Random Access Memory, yet the computer cannot be said, even if it were conscious of our using it, to have remembered anything beyond a present happening.

It might be tempting to look to a super computer of the future and to see it as knowing that it itself has changed, but this temptation does not come from our knowledge of computers and their abilities as logical systems that move from one task to the next, but rather the temptation comes from our vantage point of already having the ability to assess change as change from a fixed vantage point of the self, and from our inability to step off of this vantage point in order to see what the difference is.

Aristotle's Virtue Ethics: Is There Only One Right Way?

"Failure is possible in many ways, but success is possible in only one." --Aristotle

Is there just one right answer for success? This sounds correct as an intuition or as a general rule. In any skill, such as hammering a nail, there is an indefinite list one could make of the things that the hammerer could do wrong: the hammerer could miss the nail, hammer sideways and bend the nail, hammer too hard and put a dent in the wood after, hammer to softly so that the nail never goes in, etc. As a skill, hammering accords with the doctrine of the mean as well: in order to hammer correctly, one should not have excess nor deficiency of force, one should find the right weight distribution from which to hold the hammer and have it work efficiently, one should hit the hammer to the nail at one point of contact, neither too far one way or another, and at the right angle, etc. In the small skill of hammering, there seems to be little room for interpretation about the right thing to do. With building in general, however, or, even more broadly, architecture, there seems to be much more to be said about what the right thing to do is. On the same neighborhood block with the same terrain and foundations, many houses are built with differing floor plans, landscape designs, and colors. There does not seem to be one correct way only to build a house. If there were, architecture as an art would end because a master of architecture would always determine what the one way to build a house was for any given parameter, and were there many similar foundations and parameters, the same houses would go up. Architects, like many artists, prefer variety. Success is not one answer, but many possibilities. A master architect will make the most of the possibilities such that his or her structure will be the definition of excellence for that lot, and will be defined by his or her apprentences as the one correct thing to do. But this does not change that the architect could have gone in a completely different direction from the outset and could have still made such a defining structure in some other way. Simmilarly, It does not follow that when the master architect happens to build upon another lot of the same parameters, he or she will not build a completely different structure that will then define excellence. And so, while intuitively there are so many more wrong acts than right acts, there may be, for a true master of a skill, an indeterminite number of right acts as well, though admittedly probably not as many as wrong acts.

This holds true for virtue. In social situations, there are many acts one could make that would make him or her look petty, trivial, boorish, or just insane; and a limited number of actions that would make him or her look respectful, witty, and intelligent. And yet, it is not clear how limited the latter is. Being witty is just about finding a creative or unexpected outlook and uncovering that outlook in a creative way. The creative way cannot be just any way: it cannot be too esoteric as to be not understood, yet it cannot be too exoteric as to make the listener think that anyone off of the street would have understood. And yet, even for all of the ways that being witty can go wrong, it does not follow that there is just one way to be witty in a given situation. A master of conversation would make use of all possibilities, and which ever one happened to facilitate one possibility in a particular situation, the conversationalist would use it to his or her advantage.

Compatibilism is Nonsense: W.T. Stace's distinction between free acts and unfree acts is like picking between aspects of a Necker Cube

The compatibilist philosopher W.T. Stace defines free will as follows: "[Free acts] are all caused by desires, or motives, or by some sort of internal psychological states of the agent's mind. The unfree acts, on the other hand, are all caused by physical forces or physical conditions; outside the agent." Free will for Stace becomes a dualism of inward states and outward conditions.

Stace brings up one example of a borderline case (a case that could be free or unfree) as being a thug who threatens to shoot you unless you give him your wallet. In giving your wallet, did you act freely? You did if you apply the definition, Stace says, because your action was caused by your fear of death. However, Stace futher says that most people would say that you acted under compulsion because the gun "at your forehead [was] so nearly approximated to actual force that we tend to say the case was one of compulsion. It is a borderline case." After this example, Stace strangely drops his examination of borderline cases altogether.

It is not that there are boarderline cases that is or would be a problem for Stace's definition. The problem is when every supposed paradigm case, such as going hungry in the desert or signing a waiver by police force, is taken to be a paradigm case (of being unfree in the examples I just gave) because it is not examined with the same scrutiny Stace uses for his one example of a boardeline case. Because an action has been shown to be compatibilist free does not mean that it has been shown not to be compatibilist unfree. I take that same scrutiny Stace uses in the borderline case to show that there are no paradigm cases to be found, only borderline cases.

If I am at Carl's Jr. and I have only fifty cents, I can only get one cookie, and not a hamburger I want. I get the cookie. For Stace's definition, this is clearly an action caused by outward conditions. A free action must be caused by inward states. I am at Carl's Jr. I am hungry. I have only fifty cents. Something bigger and meater would be better, like that hamburger, but I will get the cookie and see if that satisfies some of the hunger. I could keep my fifty cents, but I'm hungry. I get the cookie. For Stace's definition, this is clearly an action caused by inward states. And so, which apect, the inner or the outer, caused this action? Stace might argue that this is another borderline case. Yet, which action could be said to be apart from both inward states and outward conditions, where one and the other could not be made an explicit part of that action like aspects of a necker cube?

Perhaps Stace had in mind another concept for what makes an action free or unfree that is not contained in the definition that he provided. Perhaps the distinction shouldn't be the inward vs. outward, but my desires vs. my undesires.

In this case, I do not desire to type up this paper. However, I desire a good grade. Why do I desire a good grade, isn't it just a letter and a number? On second thought, I don't desire a good grade per se, but recognition, and this grade might help me get that. Not likely, a lot of people get good grades, what's so recognizable about that? That's true, getting a good grade is not that recognizable, and could even make one miss out on other life-enriching.Yet, I see that I don't desire a good grade so much as I despise a bad grade. And so, I don't desire a bad grade and I don't desire typing this paper at the same time that I desire typing this paper and I desire getting a good grade. I don't mean to appear as if I'm merely playing a language game here; However, it should be clear that any action now has aspects of both desires and undesires. I desire to type this paper because I desire a good grade, I desire to learn, I desire to get work done, etc. At the same time, I don't desire to type this paper because it is difficult, it is late, I am tired, etc. A distinction between desires and undeasires is crucial for my alternate conception of Stace's definition here because acts done when the person does not desire them are unfree and ones done when the person wants to do them are free. A person starving in the desert does not desire to go without food and is therefore acting unfreely. A robber with plenty of food goes to rob a bank because he doesn't desire living a less-than-luxurious lifestyle, and is therefore acting unfreely. Stace says that determinists still a have moral responsibility to put robbers in prison because Stace does not desire being robbed, and is therefore acting unfreely. If every action can be seen as a product of both a desire with an accompanying undesire then Stace's distinction about free an unfree acts is meaningless, as both are an aspect of every action like aspects of a necker cube.

Let's look at one more distinction between free and unfree acts that Stace might have meant when he made his definition. An action is free when it is caused by an agents beliefs and desires and an action is unfree when it is caused by another's beliefs and desires.

Let's examine a robbery. A cashier is held at gunpoint and told to hand over the money in his register. For the cashier's part, nothing about his desires or beliefs caused the gun to be pointed at him. The gun is there due to desires outside of the cashier, namely those of the robber. The cashier desires that he live. The cashier opens his register and hands over the money.

The way that you tell that the cashier is not acting on his own desires is that, without the robber and his desires that point his gun at the cashier, the action of the cashier handing over the money would never have occured. The action of the cashier is unfree. The action of the cashier would have been different if it were not for the robber's desires. However, at the same time, the The way that you tell that the cashier is acting on his own desires is that, without desiring to live (such as if the cashier were suicidal), the action of the cashier handing over the money would never have occured. The action of the cashier is free. The action of the cashier would have been different if it were not for the cashier's desires.

An example need not be so drastic as this. The cashier had desired a job and so had applied to become a cashier, and so his action to do so would have been different had he desired instead to remain unemployed. However, his action to apply for this job also would have been different were it not for the desires of the founder of the business to open up shop. And so, was the cashier's action to apply at this particular job free or unfree? This distinction suffers the same problems as the other two, namely that both aspects are a part of every action like aspects of a necker cube. The problem with this last distinction, in particular, becomes clear when we take another's desire over an agent as causing an action as being something apart from what that agent also desires, namely to follow (or even not to follow) what the other person desires.

One further example may show glimpses of the problem with distinguishing betwen free and unfree acts. Let's look at the robber again with any of the previously mentioned distinctions that one cares to use. The robber desires more money and so robs the cashier. Clearly, this is a free act, as the robber's actions are caused by his motivations for more money. However, the robber is compelled to use a gun because of the cashier's desire to keep his job and not just freely give money to strangers. Clearly, had it not been for the cashier's desire to keep his job, the robber would not have acted with a gun. The robber's action is unfree. This may sound morally reprehensible, but that is not the subject of this argument. What's so strange is that Stace mentions as his borderline case such a robbery, then admits that it is one example of a borderline case, that the definition is still sound for most other actions, and then drops the subject altogether, not caring to take an ordinary example or another of his previous examples in oder to see if they would hold up to such distinction.

Every action has both aspects of inward states, or desires, coupled with outward conditions, undesires, or another's inward states. Therefore, every action is both free and unfree, and Stace's distinction is meaningless.