Process Panpsychism and the Explanatory Gap
Nathaniel F. Barrett
11. Introduction
Panpsychism seems to be enjoying a minor resurgence within mainstream analytic philosophy of mind.1
Although it is too soon to tell where this resurgence is leading, it may yet provide a much-needed impetus to philosophical debates about consciousness and the mind-body problem. Since 1974, when Thomas Nagel’s essay “What is it like to be a bat?” provided an influential analysis of feeling as “what it is like to be something” and argued that this elusive subjective quality is what makes the mind-body problem hopelessly intractable, analytic philosophers of mind have entrenched themselves on either side of an “explanatory gap” that divides functional or causal theories of mind from subjective accounts of conscious experience. On one side, hard-nosed physicalists deny that feelings are real or that they are worthy of our attention; on the other side, feelings are defended by treating them as special, non-causal properties and thereby sequestering them from the rest of nature. Compared with such rigidly opposed alternatives, renewed attention to the basic claim of panpsychism — that feeling is ubiquitous in nature — is a sign of progress.
However, from the perspective of process philosophy, this development is a mixed blessing. On the one hand, the reconsideration of panpsychism is a sign that philosophical discourse is opening up to alternatives that were once dismissed as “extravagant” (McGinn 539). This is a good sign for process philosophers who wish to engage a wider audience. On the other hand, recent analytic conversations about panpsychism are typically framed in ways that leave most metaphysical assumptions in place, and thus remain as distant as ever from process philosophy.
A crucial distinction between process and analytic versions of panpsychism has to do with the way in which the latter have framed the mind-body problem in terms of distinct kinds of properties (see e.g. Strawson or Chalmers). It is commonplace in philosophy of mind to discriminate basic properties of things or events in nature — phenomenal, physical, functional — and then argue about the relationships that hold between them: identity, reduction, emergence, supervenience, etc. Most importantly, the “explanatory gap” that constitutes the “hard problem” of consciousness is typically conceived as an irreconcilable difference between phenomenal properties and all others. These phenomenal properties are the feelings that constitute “what it is like” to be something; in their most notorious guise, they are known as
1
qualia. The panpsychist position within this analytic framework asserts that phenomenal properties are ubiquitous in nature. Let us call this position “property panpsychism,” as the “psyche” with which it deals is simply a class of properties defined variously as “qualitative,” “phenomenal,” or “experiential.”
On the physicalist side of analytic philosophy of mind, critics are right to wonder if property panpsychism has done anything for our understanding of consciousness as a natural phenomenon. It seems to have bridged the ontological chasm of the explanatory gap without adding much in the way of explanation. The weakest form of property panpsychism replaces a situation in which special properties attach to an arbitrarily small subset of things in nature with a situation in which special properties attach to all things in nature. But if anything this solution only amplifies the mystery of qualia: differences that make no difference. Such differences are no less mysterious (and no less arbitrary) for being ubiquitous in nature.
In contrast, process panpsychism makes no special distinctions between properties in nature: it claims that all properties are “experiential” or “qualitative.” Moreover, for process philosophy, feelings are not properties of any kind; rather they are the perspectives of actual entities, which are conceived as processes constituting themselves in relation to the rest of the world. Alas, with statements like this last one, the chasm between process philosophy and mainstream analytic philosophy begins to yawn… is there no way to bridge these conversations?
Perhaps a full understanding of how feeling is understood within process philosophy cannot dispense with the arcane terminology developed by Whitehead in his masterwork, Process and Reality. The “extravagance” of process panpsychism is not just its claim that feeling is ubiquitous in nature; it is the way feeling is understood within a radically different metaphysical framework. Nevertheless, I believe that the emphasis of process philosophy on the perspectivity of feeling holds out a promising alternative for understanding the function of feeling within conscious systems, and that some of this promise can be articulated with a minimum of jargon, in ways that are surprisingly close to some of the arguments put forward by Thomas Nagel in his influential paper of 1974.
Accordingly, this paper is concerned with closing two explanatory gaps. The first is the chasm between process philosophy and mainstream analytic philosophy of mind, for which property panpsychism is the dominant way of construing the hypothesis that feeling is ubiquitous in nature. The second is the gap between “third-person accounts” of consciousness, including both neurological and functional accounts, and phenomenal or “first-person accounts.” This second gap is the so-called “hard problem” on which property panpsychism makes so little progress. Can process panpsychism do better?
conscious or not, as well as the “something more” that eludes all attempts at exhaustive description, phenomenal or functional. Process panpsychism affirms that every perspective has a qualitative character, and this character can be analyzed in terms of distinct qualitative properties. But taken separately, these properties are not feelings; they are abstractions from feeling, which is ineluctably perspectival, relational, and complex. When the special “what it is like” of feeling is reified as special properties whose only purpose is to provide qualitative character, functional accounts of feeling are precluded by the very definition of what feeling is. Alternatively, if qualitative character necessarily entails perspectival relations to the world — that is, relations of differential importance and clarity — then functional accounts may connect with phenomenal accounts without discounting the “something more” of feeling.
2. Perspectivity and the Particularity of “What It Is Like”
This main section revisits Thomas Nagel’s seminal essay, “What is it like to be a bat?” in an effort to show how its topic, the elusive character of subjective experience, can be construed as a consequence of the particularity of all things rather than a consequence of special properties that are unique to consciousness. Nagel’s essay is chosen for two reasons: first, because of its wide influence on analytic philosophy of mind of the last three decades (see A. Freeman ix, 219-221; Churchland 402; Güzeldere 2, 36-8); and second, because Nagel’s early formulation of “what it is like” to be something contains a crucial ambiguity about perspectivity, or the role of perspective, that is often lost in later, crisper formulations (e.g. McGinn).
The crucial ambiguity is easy to state: is the perspectivity that distinguishes first-person from third-person accounts a matter of degree, and susceptible to approximation, or is it marked by boundaries of exclusive access to categorically distinct kinds of properties? Nagel’s essay is an enticing point of contact for process philosophy because his answer to this question is unclear. This lack of clarity, in turn, stems from Nagel’s failure to acknowledge two kinds of distinctiveness: the distinctiveness of particular identity (e.g. what distinguishes red from scarlet) and the distinctiveness of categorical identity (e.g. what distinguishes red from green). These aspects of identity overlap, and perspectivity entails both, but Nagel and those who have followed after him have tended to focus exclusively on the latter, so that the problem of consciousness is construed only as a consequence of categorically distinct properties.
and the like. Without addressing any of these issues, property panpsychism attempts to solve the problem of consciousness by asserting that its special properties are everywhere. As I have pointed out, this move fails to explain anything about what this special class of properties is doing in our universe. For the time being, I also will avoid discussing the relevant issues of identity and difference, but I hope nevertheless to show how consciousness can be made more tractable if we focus instead on the particularity of subjective experience.
“Perspectivity” is not, in fact, a process term, although it is quite at home in process discourse. It is a general term for what defines subjectivity, or “points of view,” over and against objectivity, and it emphasizes the epistemic rather than ontological aspects of problems related to consciousness. My use of it is derived from Güven Güzeldere’s helpful survey of philosophical debates about consciousness (24). In one section of that survey, Güzeldere boils down various expressions of the mind-body problem to the elusive character of “what it is like” to be an experiencing subject, a clear indication of Nagel’s influence (36-7). In addition, Güzeldere’s account of how this troubling factor leads to the explanatory gap clearly shows how differences of perspective can become reified as special properties. So, before we turn to Nagel’s essay, let us examine this process of reification step by step.
The starting point echoes the most basic claim of Nagel’s essay, that an experiencing subject has unique access to its own experience. Güzeldere calls this fact of unique access “epistemological asymmetry,” and according to his diagnosis it is the basic impetus behind contemporary analytic debates about consciousness (24-26). Epistemological asymmetry leads to the problems of perspectivity, especially the divide between “first-person” and “third-person” accounts of consciousness. Perspectivity, in this usage, entails that conscious subjects enjoy access to facts that are unique to their kind of perspective — note that this is a restricted sense of perspectivity. Next comes a crucial fork in the road as perspectivity gives rise to a division between causal and phenomenological characterizations of consciousness. Güzeldere diagnoses the impasse of current debates as a consequence of different “pre-theoretic attitudes” toward this dual characterization: those who follow a “segregationist intuition” argue that we cannot get from one characterization to the other. Thus, starting with epistemological asymmetry, the road to the Hard Problem of consciousness moves stepwise from epistemological asymmetry to radically disparate kinds of knowledge and the unbridgeable explanatory gap that lies between (44-5).
Considering how clearly Güzeldere has mapped these steps, it is curious that he thinks progress can be made if only we adopt an integrationist attitude
as a special kind of property that is only accessible to certain kinds of perspectives.
This, I suggest, is the legacy of Nagel’s influential essay. Although I have found a great deal of inconsistency in Nagel’s actual presentation, the gist of his argument appears to have convinced many analytic philosophers after him that the special character of consciousness is due to a property that is “super-added” to physical processes of the brain. For example, the vague “what it is like” to be a bat in Nagel’s argument is reduced to “property B” in Colin McGinn’s argument for the kind of radical perspectivity that closes us off from any causal or functional understanding of subjective experience (553).
The power of Nagel’s argument lies in its deceptive simplicity, which hides the crucial ambiguity stated above. First we are asked to admit that we do not know what it is like to be a bat. This seems undeniable. Less obvious, but still compelling, is the argument that our lack of empathy for bats would not be improved significantly by detailed knowledge of bat neurophysiology. Analogously, how could a Martian scientist ever know what it is like to be us? Thus we are led to the conclusion that all conscious beings have privileged access to a special class of facts: “what it is like” to be themselves.
Now the lesson to be gleaned from Nagel’s argument depends on how we interpret the exclusivity of the all-important “what it is like” factor: is it a categorical distinction or a matter of degree? Does it concern special properties or the particularity of properties experienced first-hand? Nagel himself is not able to hold to a consistent view. His initial discussion of the matter states that experience of what it is like to be something is what defines consciousness, and that this special something is “not analyzable in terms of any explanatory states,” thus pointing toward a radical construal of perspectivity (520). The force of the bat example is that echo location is supposedly so dissimilar from our own perceptual form of life that we can have no notion of what it is like to be a bat.
Readers may wonder if the experience of the blind contradicts this strong version of Nagel’s thesis. Nagel has thought of this possibility, and he counters that the experiences of blind and deaf people are as inaccessible to him as that of bats (521). He also argues that even the possibility of a gradual transformation into a bat would not allow him to approximate, from his current position, what it is like to be a bat (ibid.). But in an endnote, writing in what seems to be a much more speculative mood, Nagel admits:
when one moves to species very different from oneself, a lesser degree of partial understanding may still be available. The imagination is remarkably flexible. My point, however, is not that we cannot know what it is to be a bat. I am not raising that epistemological problem. My point is rather that even to form a conception of what it is like to be a bat…one must take up the bat’s point of view. If one can take it up roughly, or partially, then one’s conception will also be rough or partial (526).
Taken at face value, this endnote effectively explodes the strong version of Nagel’s thesis because it admits that there are no specially circumscribed
kinds of perspective that have exclusive access to certain kinds of facts. Once the possibility of a rough or partial conception of what it is like to be a distant species is admitted, the degree of approximation of what it is like to be something must become an empirical matter.
We are not quite out of the woods yet. In another endnote, Nagel clarifies his position yet again: the difference between degrees of approximation and hopeless inadequacy has to do with the difference between sympathetic and perceptual kinds of imagination. The sympathetic imagination utilizes our own special subjective experience to approximate other special points of view, while the perceptual imagination only allows us to imagine different kinds of external affairs (527). This statement should be the centerpiece of Nagel’s argument, as it seems to commit him to a more specific interpretation of the issue at hand: this version of Nagel’s thesis says that there really are two kinds of facts available to all subjects, “subjective” and “objective,” and never the twain shall meet.
appearance and objective reality, only in the case of knowing “what it is like” to be something, appearance is reality (522-23).
Let us hold Nagel to this admission of a spectrum between subjective experience and objective description and see where it leads. He says just enough about the spectrum to indicate that one moves away from appearance and toward the objective side by purging or eliminating phenomenal detail so as to approach a purely general description of the object in question. A precise and general description is the deliverance of scientific inquiry, and it is presumed to be the same no matter what species-specific subjective experience serves as the starting point (human or Martian).
From the perspective of process philosophy, there is nothing objectionable in the move from subjective particularity to objective generality except the tendency to assume that the latter is somehow more real than the former. Nagel exhibits this very tendency, but he is perplexed by the dilemma that it presses upon him: how can an objective description of consciousness eliminate its distinctive subjective qualities? The real problem, however, is that he has not clearly decided if the move from subjectivity to objectivity is an abrupt transition from one kind of property to another, or a gradual transition from concrete particularity to abstract generality.
Common ground between process and analytic perspectives emerges only if Nagel and his successors can be prevented from converting his intuition of a spectrum into a theory of absolute qualitative distinction between one kind of thing and another. As we saw above, Nagel refuses gradations with one hand and then grants them with the other. He admits this inconsistency, because to him the problem of consciousness really seems unique (524). What troubles Nagel so much is the fact that eliminative reduction of detail from what appears in consciousness seems to uncover more of the reality of so-called physical processes while it does precisely the opposite for consciousness itself. Now if Nagel were not such a committed realist he would drop one side of this spectrum. Fortunately, he grants factuality equally to “objective” and “subjective” characters. Unfortunately, the only way he can express the factuality of consciousness is to interpret it as a special quality that is unique to certain kinds of things.
Scattered throughout Nagel’s essay, especially the endnotes, are glimpses of a different interpretation, one that remains faithful to the gradations between different perspectives and to the spectrum between subjective and objective views of reality, and yet manages to uphold Nagel’s basic contentions: that a bat has privileged access to what it is like to be a bat, and that this “what it is like” factor is nontrivial. This alternative is enabled by careful attention to the relation between perspectivityand the particularity of feeling.
distinct elements of feeling. We approximate the perspectives of other animals just as we approximate the perspectives of other humans; the only difference is in the vagueness of our approximation. As Nagel points out in his endnotes, at best we can adopt only a very vague approximation of a bat’s point of view. But even the experiences of our fellow humans have vast reserves of particularity that elude us. When a troubled teenager screams at her parents, “You don’t know what it’s like to be me!” they might object, explaining that they were teenagers once and they can remember how it felt; or they might reflect on how things are different for the next generation or for this particular teenager. Though this example may not do it justice, there is a moral dimension to respect for the inexhaustible particularity of different perspectives. Nevertheless, respect for this particularity need not entail assertions of absolute difference. If the particularity of each perspective always exceeds description, that is difference enough. The key issue in every case is whether the particularity that eludes us is important.
Like the move from one subjective perspective to another, the spectrum between subjectivity and objectivity is also a matter of particularity, but in this case it involves the prescission (Peirce 2-3) of clean generalities from the particularity of appearance. Objective properties are general insofar as they hold across a multitude of perspectives: that is, objectivity is a matter of increased intersubjectivity rather than a simple elimination of subjectivity. In other words, objective properties are not categorically distinct from subjective properties, they are subjective properties purged of particularity. Accordingly, no purely “objective things” actually exist; that is, there are no actual entities constituted entirely of general properties.
The view of process panpsychism is that nonliving things also have subjective reserves of particularity that elude all attempts at description. There is no way to prove this empirically, of course; but neither do we have any evidence that scientific description replaces one kind of property (“subjective”) with another kind (“objective”). Instead, process panpsychism claims that when we convert the appearance of a so-called “physical entity” into scientific terms by the elimination of phenomenological detail, we are
extracting a general aspect of its identity. We are not converting from one kind of property to another, nor are we penetrating appearance so as to get at
more of what this entity really is; in fact we are disregarding most of the particularity of the entity as it appears to us.
We are not quite ready to contemplate “what it is like” to be a rock, but we are getting there. The next step is to consider what this expanded notion of perspectivity means for our understanding of the difference between conscious and nonconscious feeling. Perspectivity as a universal characteristic entails not only the particularity of subjective experience per se, but also the particularity that is important for subjective experience: what I call the “self-important” characteristics of a thing’s identity. Consider, for a moment, a rock as a coherent society of experiential occasions. A rock has some characteristics (say, a lattice structure of molecules) that figure prominently in its own enduring identity, and therefore in the experiences of its constitutive occasions, while other characteristics — though also belonging to the rock — hardly figure from moment to moment as long as they vary within certain parameters. Most scientific descriptions aim only at these “self-important” characteristics, and for rocks the clean generalities of physics will suffice. Obviously a person also has characteristics that are more or less prominent for his or her own enduring identity. The difference is that the depth of “self-important” characteristics that constitute enduring personal identity is so great that the generalities of any attempt at objective description seem hopelessly inadequate to what a person really is. Thus the perspectivity of a person seems to elude science in a way that the perspectivity of a rock does not.
Does science exhaustively describe “what it is like” to be a constitutive occasion of a rock? Alas, it does not. The reason that science falls short is that while scientific description eliminates all but the generally self-important characteristics of rocks, for the constitutive processes of rocks themselves the unimportant characteristics of enduring identity are still there, though relegated to a vague and trivial background. A nonliving perspective always includes an extra “something more” that scientific description omits. Fortunately rocks do not contain the kinds of feelings that can be hurt, or else they would feel slighted by the way science reduces their unique perspectives to bare generalities.
3. The Function of Vagueness and Triviality in Feeling
are incomplete, we need not reject all connections between feeling and function. What we want to know is not how to be sure that there are no zombies — intelligent beings without qualitative experience — but rather: what does our qualitatively rich experience have to do with our intelligence?
Process panpsychism indicates a way forward by understanding the “something more” of conscious feeling in terms of perspectivity rather than special properties. For process panpsychism, all feelings constitute a complex perspective for which a finite foreground of “self-important” features is defined against a vast but vague and trivial background. There is no definite boundary between foreground and background in feeling, except insofar as the self-important features of the foreground are relatively clear and distinct, while the features of the background are relatively unclear and indistinct. The difference in qualitative character between conscious and unconscious feeling, and also between the intelligence of humans and other things, is the depth of feeling that is clear and distinct (see Peirce 124-41).
Thus process philosophy registers Descartes’ claim that clear and distinct features of conscious feeling are important for thought (19, 70) while denying that these features are simple — that is, that they are fundamental, self-inherent properties. On the contrary, clarity and distinctness are the products of massive simplification and synthesis by which an overwhelming diversity is reduced to a foreground of self-important features. They are the products of a process by which differences are selected and organized with the aim of producing a maximally high-grade contrast.
“High-grade contrast,” as I am using it here, involves more than just intensity of difference. Whitehead’s term for intensity of difference is “narrowness” (111-12; cf. Neville 163-66). A simple, highly focused contrast — say between pure red and pure green — is an example of extreme narrowness. The complement of narrowness is “width,” which refers to the diversity of components that make up a unitary perspective or feeling (ibid.). High-grade contrasts involve combinations of narrowness and width; thus the example of the highly focused green-red contrast, though intense, is not a high-grade contrast. Conversely, an unfocused contrast of high diversity — a meaningless diversity in which all differences are trivialized, like the static of a television screen — attains width at the expense of contrast. At their extremes, narrowness and width are incompatible forms of low contrast; high contrast is the optimum compromise of narrowness and width. The depth of clear and distinct content in the foreground of conscious feeling is the result of high diversity combined with focused intensity so that differences are rich and meaningful.
blend into one common feature (111-12). For conscious experience, feelings of vagueness and triviality are often very close in texture. Think of how the trivial diversity of television screen static can be converted into a uniform, light-gray wash, or how the buzz of a noise machine can be heard as a comforting blanket of sound.
In fact, the conversion of diversity into vague uniformity is an essential aspect of the production of high-grade contrasts: this is how feeling constructs the dimension of narrowness. However, the simple conversion of diversity into vague uniformity produces narrowness without width. Thus the trick of producing high-grade contrasts — which seems to be rare in nature — is accomplished by complex patterns that organize differences into diverse clusters of relatively focused contrast.
The important point for present discussion is that while both triviality and vagueness can be understood as characteristics of low-grade contrasts, they also play important roles in the ongoing construction and reconstruction — that is to say, the ongoing evolution — of high-grade contrasts. This is the vital importance (functionally speaking) of vagueness and triviality for conscious feeling: without a background of vagueness and triviality, the self-important foreground of clarity and distinctness cannot exist; moreover, it cannot
expand and change. Triviality provides diversity that can be converted into greater narrowness of contrast by the selection of vague commonalities. Vagueness plays the opposite role: it contains reserves of determinable differences that can be mined for the production of greater width of contrast. For the perspective that constitutes any conscious feeling, vague and trivial aspects are present as a “something more,” a vast reserve of particularity that provides for the production of new clear and distinct features of subsequent conscious feelings. This is another key difference between conscious and unconscious feelings: for the former, a much greater degree of vagueness and triviality is accessible for future selection and determination as self-important elements of feeling.
With these points in mind, consider how the process panpsychist account of feeling registers a basic claim of functionalism — the multiple realizability of function — while refuting simplistic kinds of functional reductionism. In principle, the cognitive function of any given high-grade contrast of clear and distinct features within feeling can be captured by a finite functional description; in turn, this finitely describable function can be embodied by an indefinite number of differently structured systems. This is the multiple realizability of function. However, as described by process panpsychism, thought is not simply a serial succession of discrete functional states, but an evolutionary process by which successive states emerge not only from the most prominent (i.e. clear and distinct) aspects of previous states, but also from the vague, trivial aspects as well. As in all evolutionary processes, what was unimportant may become important over time.
The potential of vague and trivial aspects of feeling to become functionally important (as newly selected and determined high-grade contrasts) thus undermines the functionalist assumption that cognitive process can be reduced to a finite functional description. Because of its potential, the “something more” of feeling is functionally important for the development of conscious thought over time, and its potential role in the evolution of thought is practically — perhaps even theoretically — indescribable (Kauffman 135-9). The refutation of simple functionalism does not mean that consciousness is dependent upon large mammalian brains, but it does indicate the necessary condition that whatever systems support conscious feelings must have the capacity to evolve at fast timescales.
In closing, I would like to indicate briefly how this process view of consciousness can connect with other viewpoints in philosophy of mind and neuroscience.
The importance of vague and trivial feeling for a temporally extended account of perceptual experience is corroborated by the arguments of the philosopher Alva Noë. In his Action in Perception, Noë gives the lie to the common assumption that we perceive a detailed picture of our entire visual field all at once. It is true that we may experience a detailed picture of our visual field over time, but what we perceive at any given moment is a focus of high detail surrounded by a vague field of what Noë calls “virtual content” (66-7, 215-7). What distinguishes “virtual content” from mere fantasy is its potential for determination as a future focus of highly detailed perception. This dovetails nicely with the points just made above; moreover, if we expand Noë’s point about visual experience to include all dimensions of conscious thought, we can readily appreciate the general importance of the vague and trivial aspect of feeling.
marked by high degrees of complexity, where complexity entails high degrees of both the integrity and the diversity of participating neural populations (125-38; cf. Tononi and Edelman), corresponds neatly to the above discussion of how high-grade contrasts are produced by optimal combinations of narrowness and width. In addition, a neurological explanation of the evolutionary role of vague and trivial feelings for the ongoing process of thought is suggested by what Edelman calls the massive “degeneracy” of conscious neural activity (Tononi, Sporns, and Edelman).
As described by Edelman and Joseph Gally, degeneracy is the “ability of elements that are structurally different to perform the same function” (13763). This definition sounds a lot like multiple realizability; the subtle difference is that degeneracy is a characteristic of a single system of diverse elements, rather than a characteristic of multiple systems that are functionally equivalent. Because of its structural variability, a degenerate system has the
potential to evolve new functional capacities in response to changing situations. This is because its structurally different elements constitute a reservoir of neutral differences that can be selected for new kinds of functional relationship. Thus degeneracy is the structural basis of evolvability. Not surprisingly, Edelman and Gally have found ample evidence of degeneracy at every conceivable level of life (13764). And if Edelman is right about the massive degeneracy of conscious neural activity (13765), then he has indicated a possible neural correlate for the functional importance of the vague and trivial fringes of conscious experience.
The key point of connection in each of these instances is the treatment of consciousness as an evolutionary process. An oversight of many functional accounts, especially computational and information-processing theories, is that they too readily circumscribe the cognitive functions of the conscious mind. In a complex and changing world, it is obvious that one of the most useful functional capacities an organism can have is the ability to adapt on the fly. Conscious behavior exhibits this ability to a remarkable degree. This means that the conscious mind must have constant access to a vast “something more” that lies beyond its current functional repertoire.
constantly changing. This dynamism arises from the particularity of conscious feeling, in both its clear and distinct aspects and its vast reserves of vagueness and triviality. In contrast, property panpsychism, like the analytic framework from which it is derived, deals only in static properties whose particularity is of no consequence.
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Note
1
