The Unexpected Comeback of the Conscious Universe - Pt. I
Panpsychism strikes back, but stumbles
This and some of the following parts of the series entitled “Unexpected Comeback of the Universe,” are partial excerpts from the book “Spirit calls Nature,” with amendments and extensions. This worldview, and what I will later call the “integral cosmology,” is largely inspired by the spiritual vision of the 20th century Indian mystic and poet Sri Aurobindo. The present outline, however, will present it in a more accessible and reduced version for the broader public. On my side, I will complement Sri Aurobindo’s ‘cosmology’ with comments and insights from 21st-century science. However, one thing should be clear, the theory of universal consciousness presented here, isn’t "appealing to authority" but rather pours out of my strong feeling that this is indeed the most integral and coherent metaphysical worldview that we actually have and that best aligns with modern science.
Modern scientific research tries to explain the emergence of consciousness, mind, and life in embodied biological organisms, with their mental properties, cognition, and behavior, the sense of selfhood and subjective feelings, and their purposeful, willful, and intentional action, by an exclusive naturalistic, mechanistic and materialistic approach. Science compares living entities starting from mindless, lifeless, conscious-less, purposeless, and intentionless phenomena like self-organizing units driven by homeostasis, genetic mutations, natural selection, and adaptation. From this perspective of nonlinear dynamical systems theories, an organism is a system that makes use of its bodily and physical/energetic resources to solve survival and persistence-related problems, autonomously adapting to an ever-changing environment. According to this worldview, the different forms of biological agency emerge due to a complex interaction with the environment, the sense of self arises due to a homeostatic equilibrium with it, and an individuated system self-realizes as an adaptive non-linear complex feedback control system, in terms of evolutionary and developmental biology. The aim is to explain all life with its different forms of biological agency in purely mechanistic and functional terms in analogy with artificial intelligence, robotics, autopoiesis, neural mechanisms, and other extended and more complex types of processes and machinery supporting agent behavior.
While there has been a partial (though, far from complete) shift from a reductionist bottom-up to a more holistic top-down whole-organism approach, where one sees the whole organism rather than its parts, or from a strictly Turing-machine-like computational perspective to a wider notion of non-computable (eventually quantum) forms of cognition, or from the role of organisms as passive to active participants in evolution, nevertheless, the common denominator of all these modern theories is that they do their utmost to render superfluous any non-naturalistic and non-physical principles to explain life, mind, and all forms of biological agency. The (more or less unconfessed) ultimate aim is to finally expunge any non-material and metaphysical conjectures, and the hope is that they will never again play a role in scientific explanations.
Yet, no common ground exists in defining what exactly life, mind, intelligence, will, and agency in organisms pursuing goals are supposed to mean beyond our first-person subjective intuition and experience, and what counts as such, be it in biological or artificial systems. Why and how Nature builds psychological agents starting from something that we suppose has nothing psychological is a persistent mystery.
My claim is that all these theories while having some potential of furnishing functional insights into life, eventually with some practical application in medicine and biology, will, however, not succeed in telling us what life, mind, and consciousness are. I claim that all these naturalistic approaches to the more fundamental aspects of life and cognition in Nature will meet the same destiny as Ptolemy’s epicycles, or, to make a more recent example, the end that now is experiencing superstring theory in physics: Thousands of scientists working for about three decades on something that turned out to be a complicated human abstraction that has nothing to do with reality.
The same will happen for the questions pertaining to the true nature of life, mind, consciousness, and the whole multi-dimensional psychological nature we observe in the living kingdom, and first and foremost perceive in ourselves. I believe that, when it comes to the deeper philosophical questions, all the present efforts nowadays so in a fashion and that appeal to neural networks, genetics, natural selection, non-linear complex systems, autopoiesis, enactivism, emergentism, and who knows what other naturalistic attempts to cram our multidimensional nature into a one-dimensional reality, will remain empty buzzwords without real explanatory power and, eventually, even obscure and confuse further the already muddy waters of a physicalist worldview that refuses to progress further and look beyond its self-imposed boundaries.
What we need now, is not an even more complicated system of epicycles that save at any cost our present materialistic belief system, but a wider perspective, and a different way of seeing the world, Nature, and ourselves. Physicalism succeded in answering the ‘how-questions,’ and allowing us to build impressive technologies, but utterly failed in bringing us closer to answering the ‘why-,’ and ‘what-questions’ of the more existential quests that ask for meaning and the true nature of reality.
It is time to give metaphysics a serious chance. A metaphysics that is not based on religious beliefs or abstract philosophical speculations but rather a worldview that looks forward to a post-material paradigm in harmony with science.
The main theme I will pursue here is, first, that of reviewing some of the few ideas based on an ontology that posits consciousness as the fundamental primitive, and some cosmic theoretical frameworks where our psychological identity is a ‘selection’ or ‘projection’ of a universal consciousness. Later, my conclusive critical assessment will point out how all these are going in the right direction but fail to deliver the full picture that Nature is trying to convey to us. Finally, I will extend them to an evolutionary and multi-dimensional perspective that will embrace a more comprehensive and complete metaphysical outlook complementing and transcending them all.
In this letter, I will begin by briefly explaining why panpsychism is experiencing a new renaissance.
“The stream of knowledge is heading towards a non-mechanical reality; the Universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine. Mind no longer appears as an accidental intruder into the realm of matter; we are beginning to suspect that we ought rather to hail it as the creator and governor of the realm of matter—not, of course, our individual minds, but the mind in which the atoms out of which our individual minds have grown exist as thought.”
Sir James Jeans, “The Mysterious Universe,” (1931)
A clear symptom that shows how Western metaphysics is rediscovering its own roots is the revival of old metaphysical worldviews like philosophical idealism, pantheism, panentheism, panpsychism, various forms of dualism (e.g., substance dualism or property dualism) and further modification, extensions or developments of them (e. g., dual-aspect monism or Russellian monism). This is, among other things, determined first and foremost by the failure of neuroscience and the philosophy of mind to furnish a credible account of the nature of consciousness.
From the 1980s to the turn of the Millennium, the rapid advances of neurosciences made almost all scientists confident that the mind-body problem and the hard problem of consciousness would have soon found a resolution inside a physicalist paradigm. According to this belief, it is only a matter of time, and the progress of the diagnostic and imaging tools, coupled with brain mappings and the exponential capacities of computer simulations, would have led us to the insight into the nature of phenomenal consciousness. The vast majority believed that this was going to happen inside a philosophy adherent to material monism, which would finally have dispelled any dualistic temptation.
As I have elucidated elsewhere, the opposite turned out to be true. The lack of any tangible progress and the failure of the modern neuronal approach to the problem of consciousness is now slowly but steadily becoming ever more visible. There are even good reasons to interpret neuroscientific evidence itself as pointing against a strict naturalistic interpretation of mind and consciousness. Though this new information is still largely ignored because of ideological reasons, this lack of progress is convincing some scientists and philosophers of mind that the purely naturalistic viewpoint can’t be exhaustive and needs to be revised. To a lesser degree but, perhaps, as a non-negligible factor, some were also influenced by skepticism towards neo-Darwinism as the ultimate paradigm for a materialistic non-teleological account of evolution.
At any rate, a growing dissatisfaction towards physicalism as the ultimate word in the studies of consciousness and evolution is growing among intellectuals as well as in the academic ranks. While it is still the dominant view, the idea that a strict mechanistic and intellectual understanding of the world and Nature is the only pathway to truth is becoming increasingly unconvincing. What was once an almost insignificant intellectual minority has now grown into a visible splinter group, though still not a majority, let alone a homogeneous representation. Nevertheless, it is to be expected that as time passes, the alternatives to physicalism will become more vocal and will receive more attention and recognition, reaching a critical mass that, at some point, will make ignoring it an impossibility.
Panpsychism Strikes Back, but Stumbles
This led to a revival of interest in panpsychism. Philosophers like Leibniz, Spinoza, and Whitehead already expressed a panpsychist view in one form or another, according to which everything is fundamentally a form of consciousness and/or mind. In this view, raw inert matter—a stone, a molecule, an atom, or an elementary particle—has some primitive form of primordial conscious experience. For example, a particular version of panpsychism, called ‘micropsychism’, conjectures that even an elementary particle, such as an electron, has—or rather is—an elementary form of consciousness which presumably, whenever it interacts with other particles, has an inner experience or some form of primitive awareness. Its aggregation with other particles, like nuclei made of protons and neutrons, into atoms and molecules first, then by a combination of cells into living organisms, formed, by successive and cumulative stages of evolution, increasingly complex and conscious lifeforms. Panpsychism conceives, therefore, of the emergence of consciousness as a cumulative aggregation of elementary conscious mental units, sort of ‘psychic atoms’, leading to an increasingly self-aware entity by a bottom-up process.
This, however, does not mean that the panpsychist believes that an object composed of different parts, like an engine, a car, or an airplane, has a mind of its own or is an entity having a subjective experience. Throwing together a number of stones won’t lead to something with a more complex and evolved form of mental and experiential content. Also, connecting and interrelating different objects with specific functional tasks like memory chips and a CPU with other electronic devices does not make a computer more conscious than any of its parts. However, the fact is that we know to be conscious mental beings made of organs, which are made of cells, organelles, macromolecules, molecules, atoms, and, finally, elementary particles which have been assembled in a specific type of hierarchical complexity by means of an evolutionary process of aggregation. Thus, the panpsychist contends that there is some complexity law that, by complicated mutual dynamical interactions and interrelations among the single units, allows for a growth of consciousness that is somehow proportional to the number of units and the complexity of the organism they constitute. This latter viewpoint is called ‘constitutive panpsychism’.
Though panpsychism is still a reductionist understanding of consciousness, it is nonetheless the first step away from the purely materialistic perspective insofar that it reverts the paradigm: Not matter, but mind or consciousness must be posited as fundamental. The hard problem of consciousness is so avoided from the outset.
Over the last decades, this view has been revitalized as a possible alternative to orthodox physicalism. Most notably, panpsychism has been reconsidered in its different forms by modern leading philosophers in the field, like Thomas Nagel, Galen Strawson, David Chalmers, and Philip Goff.
However, panpsychism, does not come without drawbacks. The most notorious issue is illustrated by the so-called ‘combination problem’: How does a combination of a myriad of fundamental experiential entities yield the familiar human conscious experience? Why is this happening at all?
There is no apparent reason to believe that combining low-level forms or elementary microscopic experiences (think, for example, of Leibniz’s monads) should result in a unified high-level form of experience and cognition. Even if we contend that only some specific types of combinations lead to high-level forms of consciousness (combining microchips does not make a PC conscious, but, somehow, combining billions of neurons does), this still does not explain why a particular functional combination, however complicated, special, and unique, results in a mind and a conscious subject that is, in all respects, very different from the sum of the elementary experiences from which it is supposed to arise. Or, to put it in terms of the so-called ‘subject combination problem’: How do several micro-subjects combine to yield a single macro-subject?
A famous formulation of the combination problem was given by William James who made the following observations:
“Take a sentence of a dozen words, and take twelve men and tell to each one word. Then stand the men in a row or jam them in a bunch and let each think of his word as intently as he will; nowhere will there be a consciousness of the whole sentence. We talk of the ‘spirit of the age’ and the ‘sentiment of the people,’ and in various ways, we hypostatize ‘public opinion.’ But we know this to be symbolic speech and never dream that the spirit, opinion, sentiment, etc., constitute a consciousness other than, and additional to, that of the several individuals whom the words 'age,’ ‘people,’ or ‘public’ denote. The private minds do not agglomerate into a higher compound mind.”
William James, “The Principles of Psychology” (1890)
So, panpsychsim stumbles. The combination problem will find a solution in cosmopsychism. But, before getting there in the next letter, I will ‘fly over’ other modern paradigms emerging in the academic world, such as the ‘cellular basis of consciousness model’ of Arthur Reber, ‘biopsychism’ of Evan Thompson, ‘reflexive monism’ of Max Velmans, and ‘analytic idealism’ of Bernardo Kastrup.
Or…
Thank you for reading my work!
Wonderful overview, very helpful.
I love the simplicity of the diagrams for theism, pantheism and pantheism.
Next you need to post a diagram for Purna Advaita, Integral Nondualism!