The Unexpected Comeback of the Conscious Universe - Pt. IV

A critical review of contemporary theories of universal consciousness

Note: To appreciate better this fourth part, please read the previous Part I, Part II, and Part III.

In the previous three parts, I explained the reason why, despite the triumphs of modern materialism, some metaphysical models of universal consciousness are experiencing an unexpected comeback. In this part I will take a birdseye view and consider them all together in their strengths and weaknesses. In the next post, I will begin to outline an extended model that does not contradict them but rather complements and extends them integrating them inside an evolutionary paradigm by resorting to a first-person approach.

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If I indulged particularly in these modern forms of idealistic and post-material theories, blending out other proposals coming from various fields of the modern philosophy of mind^[1], it was because, in some respects, they came closest to the integral cosmology I will outline later.

Thompson’s idea of biopsychism, or the CBC model and the CBE theory—that single cells are endowed with a mental or conscious experience, engaged with an informational exchange with the environment, and which admit, at the same time, that their aggregation leads to a sentient subject—are an interesting hypothesis.

A New Approach to Creativity - Enactive Cognition (?) Evan Thompson. Source: link.

However, these theories are about processes all the way down, and that do not even begin to tackle the hard problem of consciousness. While panpsychism, reflexive monism, cosmopsychism, analytic idealism, and panspiritism posit consciousness as fundamental a priori and, therefore, don’t have to explain phenomenal consciousness in the first place, biopsychism and the CBC/CBE approaches take a step back into the direction of physicalism. The question is why the dynamics of a self-regulatory, self-individuating system, however complex, networked, informational, interacting with—and adapting to—the environment, should become conscious. Sentience is posited as an almost magical property that emerges once certain structural or dynamical conditions of a systemic organization are met. These theories posit consciousness as an emerging property from material processes. There is no real distinction between these speculative views and the physicalist approach other than the size and scale where sentience is supposed to emerge first. While the physicalist postulates consciousness as emerging from the dynamics of a neural network, they assume it to emerge from the autopoietic and enactive processes. Matter remains fundamental, and consciousness a derived epiphenomenon as well.

Moreover, its solution to the combination problem doesn’t sound satisfactory. It only shifts it from the elementary particle to the cell, adding boundness and self-individuation as necessary but sufficient conditions to create a sense of subjectivity. This raises the question of why the combination of cells constituting a brain instantiates the totality of our phenomenal experience and sense of subjectivity, while the liver, the heart, or a limb does not?

These discrepancies do not emerge from a cosmoidealist perspective. For example, Velmans’ self-knowing universe or Kastrup’s intuition that a cosmic dissociative process is at the base of the subjective individuation and that our subjective experiential sense-mind contents are a ‘redux’ of something having a cosmic dimension is in line with the mystic tradition of Eastern philosophies.

A positive aspect worth noticing is that analytic idealism and panspiritism are not affected by the ‘mind-body interaction problem’ of mental causation. The interaction problem between an immaterial mind and matter only arises if we conceive of mind or consciousness as purely unphysical and matter as an unrelated purely physical substance. If one posits a priori this assumption, one is automatically forced to face a paradox, namely, the question of how a completely unphysical entity can interact with a material substance and maintain a causal relationship with it, such as that of determining our brain states. Most physicalists see this as the ultimate and conclusive argument that definitely refutes any form of alternative thinking. But if we take into account that matter is simply another form of consciousness, the different ‘aggregation state’ of the very same ‘substance’, rather than thinking of matter and consciousness as essentially two different things, this dual-aspect monism offers itself as a solution to the interaction problem. We will take a look at this aspect later again.

Nonetheless, I believe that these are still too-simplistic models of reality and that we will extend and amend them in a more complete and integral cosmology.

For example, Velmans’ approach does not go much beyond a modern reformulation of Kant’s idealism, in a more optimistic form, and the idea that we are the differentiated parts of a One-being. The latter is a point of view reminiscent of Eastern traditions. Something to welcome in the Western philosophy of mind but that does not go beyond the already known either.

While, I contend, Kastrup’s monistic idealism (all is mental), which sticks at misplaced principles of parsimony, imprisons itself in a one-dimensional theoretical framework that tries to capture a multidimensional reality. The most evident stumbling block is the semantic, or at least linguistic conflation between mind and consciousness, which I consider a serious fallacy hampering deeper insights, as I discussed in a previous post. This is a fatal flaw that prevents one from progressing and looking further. It is like Alice in Talbot’s ‘Flatland’ novel, who tried to determine all the properties of a 3D-spherical surface in terms of the circles she observes appearing in her intersecting 2D surface on which she lives. In these regards, the exclusively idealist approach is questionable. The fact that we perceive everything physical in terms of mental phenomena on our 'screen of perceptions’ raises the question of whether this authorizes us to conclude that everything must be mental? The fact that we perceive, at our evolutionary stage, which is the stage of mind, everything through the mind does not imply that everything is mental.

Moreover, while Kastrup’s approach solves the combination and decombination problem, it raises the question of how Mind at Large could form the first metabolic system from raw insentient matter in the first place? According to this model, before the formation of the first metabolic unit, namely, a biological cell, there was no mind or consciousness at work on a spatially and temporally localized scale. There was only an instinctive Mind at Large without dissociated discrete centers of self-awareness. How can mere instinctive impulses create such an amazingly complex, efficient, and self-reproducing thing like a living cell? A cell is a much more complex object than the most sophisticated supercomputer, airplane, rocket, or spaceship. Supercomputers, airplanes, rockets, or spaceships don’t self-assemble themselves by mere instincts, let alone reproduce. And it is implausible that this could happen even after 13.8 billion years of instincts. This issue is reminiscent of the combination problem: One can’t see why and how putting together gazillions of mechanistic instincts, no matter how much time passes, should supposedly lead to anything creative and cognitively more developed other than yet another blind super-instinct.

If we don’t embrace a panpsychist view which could, in principle, make a bottom-up ‘abiogenesis’ —the theory of the origin of primordial life from non-living matter—plausible, and where we conceive of some consciousness locally at work meddling with macromolecules in a primordial soup and leading to the appearance of the first biological cell, what then led to life’s appearance?

But the point in question does not regard only the origin of life; rather, it regards its whole evolution, from the first eukaryotic cell to the full-fledged human. It is hard to believe that a purely instinctive and blind will without any form of intelligence could master an evolutionary process with such a fantastic complexity, leading to such an incredible variety of lifeforms. This is a huge explanatory gap in Kastrup’s theory.

The only alternative the author can think of is to fall back to the purely naturalistic perspective of material microscopic and macroscopic processes driven by genetic and natural random selection principles. That would be a rather disappointing outcome for a theory that was supposed to get rid of a physicalist account of phenomena and processes. Because then, one wonders, why should we posit a universal or cosmic mind in the first place?

Abiogenesis: The origin of sentient and mental life from insentient, unconscious, and lifeless matter?

Instead, the shortcoming I see in panspiritism is that it distinguishes between fundamental consciousness, mind, and matter as three ontologically distinct entities. But with these ontological distinctions, it steps out of a strictly monistic view without explaining how and why they came into being. Moreover, panspiritism does not furnish an understanding of the mechanism by which individuality, the subject, or the soul emerges. If it is generated by an inflow of the spirit in a complex material structure—that is, a living organism that canalizes it—should we then suppose that by the body's dissolution, no subject, or soul, or whatever psychic individuality, will survive? Taylor also posits matter as the necessary ingredient for mind to come into existence. Is fundamental consciousness just a state of ‘mindless’ pure being and pure passive existence without any form of intelligence? Then, again, as in the case of analytic idealism, here, the evolutionary aspect of life would remain an unexplained mystery unless one falls back to a purely mechanistic neo-Darwinian conception of evolution.

This is what vitiates analytic idealism and panspiritism. These are theories that fixed their attention too much on resolving the hard problem of consciousness but lost sight of the evolutionary emergentist dimension of life and consciousness—something which is naturally harmonized in an integral cosmology, as we shall see later.

Nevertheless, these new metaphysical trends in the modern Western philosophy of mind are to be welcomed because they undoubtedly constitute a leap forward compared to a narrow-minded physicalism. Probably they constitute only a first step, a beginning from which we can expect new developments. I feel they still need to be detailed and amended better, they come nevertheless as fresh air and as a new hope that might help humanity go beyond the void conceptions that modern materialism still imposes on our minds and hearts.

This ends my pinpointed tour of some of the intuitionally inclined philosophies of Western civilization. It reflects more a personal and subjective selection and preference of the author and is by no means a representative or exhaustive overview. It certainly had no pretension of doing justice to such a complex and deep subject. Nevertheless, hopefully, it was a useful selection. It aimed to pick out, here and there, some of the intuitional aspects of the ancient and modern philosophies that reveal its more intuitional or phenomenological, and eventually also spiritual character that, in the modern, strongly materialistic-oriented worldview, are at best ignored or, worse, have been long forgotten.

In the next posts, we will widen our scope beyond the mind to an evolutionary perspective of consciousness and its related cognitive layers within an expanded paradigm that extends those we have seen so far. This will finally allow us to acquire the grand vision and synthesis we are seeking.

Or…

Thank you for reading my work!

Go to Part V

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[1] Such as consciousness research inspired by the Asian tradition, especially the Advaita-Vedanta; see, for example, Miri Albahari's take on 'perennial idealism'. - M. Albahari, "Perennial Idealism: A Mystical Solution to the Mind-Body Problem," Philosopher's Imprint, vol. 19, no. 40, 2019.