Hartshorne
Chapter 2. Panpsychism and Science by Sewall Wright
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Mind in Nature: the Interface of
Science and Philosophy by John B. and David R. Griffin Cobb, Jr.
Part 3: The Primacy of Mind
John B. Cobb, Jr. is Professor of Theology at the School of Theology at Claremont, Avery professor of Religion at Claremont Graduate School, and Director of the Center for Process Studies. David Ray Griffin teaches Philosophy of religion at the School of theology at Claremont and Claremont Graduate School and is Executive Director of the Center for Process Studies. Published by University Press of America, 1977. This book was prepared for Religion Online by Ted and Winnie Brock.
Chapter 2. Panpsychism and Science by
but mankind constitutes such an infinitesimal portion of the cosmos that the physical scientist may for the moment ignore it in his difficult task of finding the basis of cosmic order.
The humanists and social scientists can adopt the same commonsense philosophy while concerning themselves solely with the activities of human beings.
The biologist is continually in trouble. The objects of his study range from a class of molecules that have the basic self-duplicating property of living things, through cells which suggest purely physical systems,
through animals which give increasing evidence of having minds, to human beings in whom streams of consciousness seem to involve continual choices of action, at the opposite pole from control by
impersonal laws of nature. The zoologist cannot escape the problem of the relation of matter and mind.
Implications of Physical Science
Let us compare further the two kinds of knowledge which must somehow be reconciled in a unified philosophy of science. While the physical scientists have not yet arrived at a fully satisfactory account of the most elementary particles, they have acquired precise knowledge of the hierarchy of entities starting from proton, neutron and electron, through atom and molecule, to objects of our own order of size for which the precision of the laws of mechanics have made possible the extraordinary achievements of technology. Beyond this comes the detailed knowledge of the surface of the earth of the geologist, the astronomer’s knowledge of the sun and planets, stars in general, our galaxy and the array of galaxies, leading again to the fringes of knowledge in cosmological studies.
The dominant philosophy of physical science since the time of Galileo, with some wavering in the present century, has been that of the famous dictum of Laplace:
An intellect which at a given instant knew all the forces acting in nature and the positions of all things of which this world consists -- supposing the said intellect were vast enough to subject these data to analysis -- would embrace in the same formula the motions of the greatest bodies in the universe and those of the slightest atoms;
nothing would be uncertain for it, and the future, like the past, would be present to its eyes.
Streams of Consciousness
In marked contrast is the kind of knowledge provided to each person in his own stream of consciousness. At any moment this has a focus, but one which shifts continually, now on perception of the outside world, now on a memory which has somehow been stored out of mind (perhaps for many decades), now on an emotional state, now on a toothache, now on construction of an abstract pattern of thought, now on
communication with others, but again and again on the often painful process of choosing among courses of action, and then of acting.
Nothing could contrast more than the precise determinism of our knowledge of the external world when pains are taken to control conditions, and the fitful character and apparent freedom of choice of the stream of consciousness.
The latter, nevertheless, is obviously the primary reality. The former is wholly derived from bits of the streams of consciousness of many
observers and is restricted to those aspects which can be communicated.
It can be stored best in books, but actively exists only in minds, within which it appears to consist of a set of rather pale second-hand
deductions. Its restriction to the so-called primary properties of matter (location in space, changes in this, and association of matter with forces describable in turn only by changes in location) contrasts with the
richness of the stream of consciousness. Colors and sounds are reduced to wavelengths; sensations of heat and cold are reduced to readings on a thermometer; taste, smell, feel are ignored in precise formulations.
It now turns out, moreover, that even position in space is not absolute but relative to circumstances of the observers, each of whom has his own private four dimensions of space and time for locating events.
Apparently exact agreement is possible only because communication is restricted to observers who are not moving relatively to each other at velocities of more than a minute fraction of the velocity of light.
Moreover, all of this common knowledge of the so-called primary
properties is based on measurements in terms of units: centimeter, gram, second, with operational definitions which are recipes for voluntary actions. Reality clearly consists primarily of streams of consciousness.
This fact must take precedence over the laws of nature of physical science in arriving at a unified philosophy of science, even though it must be largely ignored in science itself.
Statistical Laws of Nature
In my own case, I started as a student with the usual conviction that biology, and science in general, requires a rigorously deterministic viewpoint. I still, indeed, hold this viewpoint in practice, but with a radical revision of the philosophical implications of science. My
deterministic viewpoint in zoology was somewhat disturbed by reading Bergson in 1912, but not for long. What really made over my thinking was reading (in 1914) Karl Pearson’s Grammar of Science (published in 1892), and a book, The Origin and Nature of Life (1912), by the
biochemist, Benjamin Moore. Curiously enough the philosophic position that I arrived at was not held by either and was vigorously opposed by Pearson.
What I derived from Pearson was a different attitude toward what I then considered the absolute laws of nature. He treated them as merely
condensed descriptions of how things are observed to behave, no different in kind from statistical laws describing human behavior, such as the law of supply and demand or the regression of marriage rate on the volume of trade.
Another idea that he firmly implanted was the uniqueness in principle of every event:
The causes of any individual thing thus widen out into
unmanageable history of the Universe. . . It is useful to remember how essentially the causes of any finite portion of the Universe to the history of the Universe as a whole.
Thus it is not possible to deal deterministically with single events.
Science can only deal with classes of more or less similar events and thus is necessarily statistical.
The Physical and Biologic Hierarchies
From Moore, I derived a vivid appreciation of the importance of the hierarchic structure of existence. The crucial point was that a living
organism is more comparable to a molecule or atom among inanimate things than to a mere unorganized aggregation of materials like a stone.
Conversely a molecule or atom might seem much like a little organism if we could observe the incessant activity which the physical scientists now attribute to them.
These ideas and others seemed to me to point to dual-aspect
panpsychism as the simplest synthesis, in spite of the opposition of Pearson to any metaphysical speculation and Moore’s ignoring of the issue.
I must admit that I have not found many scientists who appreciate its simplicity. The only member of the faculty of the University of Chicago with whom I discussed it during my long stay there who at all shared this viewpoint was Charles Hartshorne of the Philosophy Department, who had arrived at it along an utterly different route. Among zoologists, much the closest in viewpoint seems to be Bernard Rensch, who
probably also arrived at it along a different route.
Matter and Mind
There have been several different views of the relations between matter and mind. It is impossible, as brought out by Berkeley and Hume, to disprove solipsism, the view that the observer’s stream of consciousness is all that exists. Most babies, however, probably learn within a week or two after birth that they are subject to combinations of unwished-for sensations of such consistency as to indicate something real. With the later dawn of self-consciousness, they learn that there are others with streams of consciousness like their own who can be communicated with.
I should emphasize here, to avoid what seems to be a common misunderstanding, that the term ‘consciousness’ by no means necessarily implies self-consciousness.
Primitive peoples are said to share the animistic viewpoint that all things are more or less like human beings in their capacities for spontaneous action. At a later cultural stage a sharp distinction is usually made between two kinds of existence which, it is supposed, may occur separately as mindless matter and as disembodied mind but, at least in man, in an association of body and soul. It is usually thought that this is indissoluble in life but that the soul persists after death without
communication with the living. The spiritualists, including some scientists, however, believe that communication with disembodied
spirits is a real phenomenon. The regularity with which supposed evidence has been shown to be fraudulent, as well as the difficulty of reconciliation with natural science, has led most persons to profound skepticism.
Modern science has developed in the main under the concept that nonliving matter is wholly mindless and is subject to completely deterministic laws of nature. A good many scientists have held, however, that there is some vital principle in all living things, not
necessarily mind, which is absent in nonliving matter. The list of leading recent biologists who have been vitalists includes Hans Driesch, S.H.
Jannings, Ralph Lillie and Edmond Sinnott. Bergson developed his philosophical system around the concept of an elan vital.
Most scientists as well as most nonscientists have probably assumed that the higher animals, at least, have minds; though some, no doubt, have followed Descartes in considering all living beings other than man as mere automata.
The prevailing trend in biology, however, has been away from vitalism and any causal influence of mind on the course of events, toward a complete reduction to the principles of physics and chemistry. Jacques Loeb was the leader in America at the beginning of this century in insisting on the exclusion of all but physico-chemical explanations in biology. The limit of this trend would seem to be complete materialism, the denial of mind as a category of existence. This, however, is an
absurdity. Mind, even though denied any role in the inexorable course of events, must be retained at least as an observer.
Emergence of Life and Mind
If the nonliving world is completely devoid of mind and if, as it seems necessary to believe, there was a time when no life could have existed, living beings must either have had a supernatural origin or have been developed somehow from nonliving matter. Linnacus accounted for the origin of all species of plants and animals by separate creation.
Lamarck, by advocating evolution, pushed creation back to a possible single origin of life.
The apparent gap between nonliving and living has now been bridged by nucleic acids, a class of polymeric organic molecules composed of a succession of small units (nucleotides) of four sorts, the order of which
determines an indefinitely large number of different specificities. The latter is also true of the proteins (composed of 20 kinds of amino acids).
They are the principal component, other than water, of all living forms, but the nucleic acids alone have the remarkable property of being capable of duplicating their patterns, whatever they may be, from small molecules in their medium. They may be considered living molecules.
They can evolve by duplication of their specificities as of the new type if, by any accident, they undergo a change (or mutation). They, as genes, are the units of heredity. They determine the synthesis of protein
molecules of the most diverse specificities according to a code in which succession of three nucleotides determine one amino acid. The essential identity of the code in the most diverse organisms is strong evidence for a single origin of life on earth.
Nucleotides and amino acids are substances which, there is reason to believe, could have been formed, and polymerized into nucleic acid and protein respectively, under certain conditions on a lifeless earth. The origin of living organisms from lifeless matter is thus a reasonable hypothesis.
This brings us back to the question of the origin of the mind. Lloyd Morgan (1933; cf. Wright 1935) treated the origin of mind in the course of evolution as a phenomenon of the same sort as the emergence of a new organ or physiological capacity. A new organ, however, involves nothing more mysterious than differential growth, leading for example to an outpocketing from flat tissue that turns out to be useful and can be further elaborated. Similarly, loss, addition or rearrangement in a protein molecule may enable it to bind other molecules in such a way as to catalyze a new metabolic process. Emergence of either of these sorts, however surprising their consequences, poses no serious philosophical difficulty. Emergence of mind from no mind at all is sheer magic. We conclude that the evolution of mind must have been coextensive with the evolution of the body. Moreover, mind must already have been there when life arose and indeed must be a universal aspect of existence -- still assuming that mind cannot arise from nothing.
The emergence of mind in the course of individual development from the fertilized egg presents a similar problem and one that is an everyday occurrence instead of a single event in the remote past. It would appear that the mind of a human being must develop from something of the nature of mind in the fertilized egg and, back of this, in the separate germ cells and in the nucleic acid molecules.
Panpsychism
As already noted the living cell, because of its tightly organized
character, is more comparable to a molecule than to a mere aggregation of matter. It may be thought of as a supermolecule composed principally of C, H, O, N, P and S. Multicellular organisms, including man, are in turn not mere aggregations of cells, but so tightly organized that they may be considered super-super-molecules, ultimately with properties which are wholly those of the component atoms in the very complex combination. The arguments from continuity require the presence of mind in cells and, back of this, in molecules, atoms, and all that exists.
This can be looked at in two ways: According to dualistic panpsychism, matter and mind are two modes of existence which are universally associated. In the philosophy of Spinoza such an association was a necessary consequence of his identification of God and the universe and his conception of extension and thought as two of the attributes of God.
This dualistic panpsychism is not quite the same as monistic panpsychism, according to which mind and matter are merely two aspects of the same reality: as it is to itself and as it seems to other minds with which it interacts.
FIG. I/3.2 GRAPHIC HERE
If A and B represent two minds, largely private, but nevertheless capable of interacting directly or indirectly: A perceives certain regularities in its stream of consciousness which it ascribes to an external reality, B; but, as it does not enter into B’s stream of consciousness, it in general tends to consider B as merely an
unconscious source of disturbance, i.e., as matter. B similarly deduces matter, A, from the interaction with A’s stream of consciousness.
Each is aware of many such external realities and these are perceived to have interactions with each other which can be arranged in a coordinate system consisting of two dimensions of direction in addition to one of remoteness. The order of succession of events provides a fourth
dimension, time.
In certain cases, the behavior of external matter is of such a nature as to indicate the presence of a stream of consciousness, another mind, with
which varying degrees of communication become possible. In still other cases, the external reality parallels the internal so completely as to
compel identification as a peripheral aspect of the observer himself, his own body. In most eases, however, there is no indication of any mind and the objective world thus seems to consist largely of mindless matter.
Under the dual-aspect view, the objective world of natural science with its hierarchies of physical and biological entities must exactly parallel an inner world of mind. Because of the flowing character of the latter, parallelism should be sought not in matter as mere mass and occupation of space, but rather in the incessant action which modern physics finds in its units; the wavelike properties of proteins, neutrons and electrons, photons and its other elementary entities, down to Planck’s quanta as the ultimate known units of action. At a higher level is the incessant action within molecules, including nucleic acid and protein. The metabolic activities within a cell, and its activities in relation to other cells may be considered the external aspects of the cell’s stream of consciousness.
Introspection throws some light on the matter in the case of the multicellular organism. My own stream of consciousness obviously includes that of only a minute portion of my cells at any time. In a considerable part of the time (in dreamless sleep) it does not exist, although the cells continue their activities. When it does exist, it focuses now on one thing, now on another, the external aspects of which are the integrated activities of different but overlapping sets of cortical neurons which come successfully into dominance. That there is any unity in the stream of consciousness indicates that those of separate cells fuse. They cannot be the windowless monads of Leibniz.
The store of memory, carried along out of mind in ways that are the object of active research, undoubtedly contributes most, by activation of its components, to the unification, except in the rare cases in which two independent stores are built up, giving the basis for dominance at
different times of one or the other of two personalities.
When we pass to the next higher step in the biologic hierarchy, the social organism, we at once perceive a difficulty. We speak of the ‘spirit of America,’ but it is difficult to think of this as anything but a figure of speech. It can, indeed, exist only as a feeling of consensus in the minds of separate individuals.
Choice and Determinism