Organisms such as our own bodies are largely mindless but our human lives are wall-to-wall mindful. So, while we must engage with the natural world because that is where we have come from and, as organisms, we are part of it, we do so from an increasing distance. We are increasingly insulated from natural forces not only because nature inside and outside of us is to some degree pacified but also because we interact with it via numerous mediators and are separated from it by many layers of the human world. The layers of insulation can be lost at any time. We can trip over and be broken like any other material object. We are fastened to a living organism and share its fate. Such salutary reminders of our lowly estate make the fact that knowledge and understanding – sense-making – which are central to our distance from the natural world and the life of the organism, are precisely what we need to account for. Naturalism highlights, rather than defuses, the mystery of “Man as the sense-making animal”. The efficacy and hence apparent validity of the sense we make is particularly extraordinary in view of the kind of creatures humans are: metaphysically chimeric and epistemologically messy embodied subjects.
It is to the human subject we shall now turn.
Addendum 1 The anthropic principle
There is an alternative approach to internalizing the relationship between the sense-making mind and the world that is made sense of that seems yet more tough-minded than evolutionary epistemology because it originates not from biology but from physics. Its key notion is the anthropic principle (AP).48
The AP is succinctly defined by Brandon Carter, with whom it is most closely associated: “What we can expect to observe must be restricted by the conditions necessary for our presence as observers”.49 The strong version of this principle is that “The Universe (and hence the fundamental parameters on which it depends) must be such as to admit the creation of observers within it at some stage”.50 The principle is a response to the startling fact that the conditions under which life – and hence conscious life, and the sense-making mind – is possible are highly restricted. If certain physical constants were different by an order of 1 in 100 billion, matter would not dominate over anti-matter and elements such as carbon (which are essential for all forms of life that we are aware of) would not have been possible. We should not, however, so the argument goes, be surprised at this fine-tuning of the universe because it is precisely what we would expect. If the universe were not so ordered as to support life, including the life of physicists who observe it, there would be no observers. That the observed universe is one in which observers are possible is hardly astonishing. If there are physicists, the universe, therefore, must be so constructed as to enable physicists to emerge, flourish, go to university, and make sense of the universe.
The fine-tuned universe becomes even less surprising – so the argument continues – if we accept a particular interpretation of quantum theory, which proposes vast numbers of universes parallel to the one in which we live. All possibilities are realized but the one we observe is the one in which observers are possible.
This endeavour to deflate the mystery of sense-making has many flaws. It leaps over the specific conditions that not only make life possible, but also human life possible, and the intellectual history of mankind leading up to making physicists possible. To connect this very particular history with the fine-tuning of the universe through the specific values of constants is as absurd as (for example) the argument:
F = ma therefore magna carta was signed in 1215
The laws of nature, with their finely tuned constants, are a necessary condition of the kind of world we live in and the kind of “we” that live in it but they are not a sufficient condition of either.
The anthropic principle is not so much an absurdity as a tautology; or an attempt to get a result – humanity – out of a tautology; out of the assertion that if the universe, characterized by its constants, were not such as to enable life in the form of physicists to emerge then the universe would not have been disclosed to physicists. Given that it has been disclosed to physicists, it must be such as to be able to sustain the form of life called “the physicist”. But this does nothing to close the gap between the picture of the universe as an almost boundless waste composed largely of insentient matter, energy, fields, space and time and the scientific mind that can conceive it and seem to make progress in comprehending it. It says nothing that bears on the fact that the universe seems to be disclosed in, or to a minute part of the universe – namely humanity represented by the community of physicists. Even less does it illuminate the mystery of the partial comprehensibility of the world and the gradual apparent progress towards more complete understanding.
In summary, while the universe we observe necessarily has a history that led up to observers and that history must have been regulated by fine-tuned laws that ultimately delivered observers, this does not delegitimate surprise. Our surprise simply widens from the truism that the observed universe has properties that permit the emergence of observers to the fact that there is a universe that is observed.51
Addendum 2 A note on Russellian monism and panpsychism
At the heart of Quine’s endeavour to naturalize knowledge is the assumption that our understanding of the world ultimately arises from stimulation of our nervous system giving rise to sense experience. The latter is essentially identical with neural activity in certain parts of the brain.52
The problems with this view begin at the ground floor – with sentience, perception, and ordinary everyday knowledge – long before we get to understanding the world. Neural activity supposedly associated with consciousness does not look like the elements of consciousness. As has often been pointed out, there is nothing like the experience of red in certain discharges in the visual cortex. The gap seems greater when we think of objects that are experienced as being “over there”, distinct from ourselves as subjects, distinct from experiences. And the gap is greater still when we come to memories of things that are past – things that are present to us but explicitly no longer present – or knowledge of facts, such as that the Battle of Waterloo took place in 1815.
These problems are compounded by the fact that neural activity that is supposed to be identical with consciousness (such as in parts of the cerebral cortex) is not fundamentally or even strikingly different from neural activity that most certainly is not (in most of the rest of the brain and spinal cord). Nevertheless, the variant forms of neural theories of consciousness seem to some to be the key to the naturalization of knowledge and to closing the gap between world and mind and (apparently) making the mystery of our capacity to comprehend the world less mysterious.
Russell argued that the difficulty of understanding how something as apparently utterly different from experiences as nerve impulses could be in reality identical with them originates in the fact that objective observation does not give us the nature of material events.53 We can get to know the causal relations and the mathematical structure of matter but not its intrinsic nature.54 And this restriction applies equally to those instances of matter that are brain states. What we learn of them through neuroscience does not tell us what they are in themselves. To know what they are in themselves you would have to be them. And we are our nerve impulses (or at least some of them). Since we are them, we find they are experiences; or we experience them as experiences.
It is this that justifies Russell’s seemingly counter-intuitive claim that a physiologist observing a brain is seeing not the activity in the examined brain – which is observed from without – but his own experiences, that is to say his own nerve impulses, which are experienced from within. What we directly know is our own brain activity which gives us only mediated access to external objects and hence to the objective knowledge that ultimately leads to the science of the brain.
For Russell, the argument opens the way to a broader neutral monism in which mind and matter are simply aspects of a more fundamental stuff that is neither. It does not, however, help us to solve the epistemological problem of c
ognitive advance and science or even the less ambitious problem of understanding the relationship between neural activity and consciousness. If all stuff has mind as one of its aspects, what is special about the brain such that it – and not say rocks and trees – is aware of a world in virtue of being aware of itself? The mind-like aspect of things seems to be spread too promiscuously to require something as specific as a brain to manifest itself.
There is also another danger: neuro-solipsism. If all that I know is activity in my brain, then the sense that I know a world out there populated with things and people, must be an illusion. This conclusion has been drawn by several contemporary philosophers who have denied the reality of intentionality. Alex Rosenberg, for example, argues that, if it is neural activity, “consciousness is just another physical process. If physical processes cannot by themselves have or convey propositional content [i.e. aboutness], then consciousness can’t either”.55 All we know is our own neural activity and so there are no true (or false) perceptions, beliefs, or thoughts. It should be obvious that, if Rosenberg’s theory were true, it could not be stated because nothing, including Rosenberg’s arguments has “aboutness” or propositional content. Even if it could be stated, there would be no point in doing so. In fact, it is of course a belief “about” something, putatively based on knowledge of stuff outside of Rosenberg’s own head, and propagated to minds other than his own.56
According to neutral monism “mental” and “physical” are two ways of presenting the fundamental stuff of the universe, or in which the fundamental stuff of the universe may present itself. The stuff is in itself neither mental nor physical. This is a half-way house to panpsychism, which has recently had a revival. It, too, has arisen as a radical response to the difficulty of understanding how material events such as neural discharges can underpin or be conscious experiences, once their distinct and different natures are acknowledged.57 Panpsychists claim that consciousness is present throughout the natural world so that the smallest things have very basic kinds of experiences. As an advocate of the theory Philip Goff puts it, “an electron has an inner life”.58 The macroscopic consciousness of organisms such as birds and beasts and people like you and more is built up out of these elementary constituents. What the consciousness of these constituents would amount to and how the consciousness of each of a vast assembly of such constituents would throw in their lot with billions of others to generate an agreed upon continuous, world-supporting viewpoint of a macroscopic conscious being is entirely obscure. This is the so-called combination problem.59 Equally, or even more, obscure is why this happens in some beings and not others; in people, for example, and not pebbles, mountains, toe nails or kidneys.
This objection applies with particular force to a variant of panpsychism termed “cosmopsychism”, proposed to address the combination problem.60 Cosmopsychism argues that it is a mistake to begin with the “smallist” assumption that the primary components of consciousness are to be found at the level of microscopic constituents, so that we have to account for how they throw in their lot with each other to make up a macroscopic mind, a viewpoint. Rather, it is the universe as a whole that is conscious: “the one and only fundamental individual is the conscious universe”.61
While this may address the problem of tiny bits of conscious stuff working together to produce macroscopic conscious entities, it does not explain a) how it is that some entities are conscious and others are not; b) how among conscious entities, some (e.g. philosophers) are more conscious than others (e.g. oysters); c) and how conscious beings such as you and me have distinctive viewpoints on the conscious universe and particular contents of consciousness. As regards c), it looks as if the combination problem has been replaced by the “disaggregation” problem of how Mind becomes minds. It is reminiscent of the challenge that Kant’s transcendental idealism faces in accounting for individual minds and their specific contents, which seems crucially dependent on the spatiotemporal location of a particular (organic) body.
The consciousness of a conscious universe would be either a consciousness of everything (impossible to imagine) or a consciousness of nothing given that there would be nothing outside of its consciousness to be conscious of. In either case, cosmopsychism overlooks the fact that the intentional relationship is local and has to be justified – otherwise it has no target and amounts to mentality without object.
If standard panpsychism responds to the problem of getting a full-blown conscious subject together in a world that seems largely insentient, cosmopsychism makes it impossible to understand how the world is divided into seemingly conscious and unconscious bits and how consciousness is distributed between many distinct and largely independent conscious individuals. Panpsychism ironically falls foul of the danger that, if the relationship between mind and body, or more specifically knower and known, were too cosy, then there would be no objects of knowledge and no painful, laborious process of acquiring knowledge. Either everything, or nothing, would be known already.
Goff’s defence of Panpsychism – that no other theory can account for the relationship between mind and brain, and can take the reality of experience seriously – is rather analogous to the “God of the gaps” argument. An “ontology of the gaps”, perhaps. Some advocates of panpsychism also argue that, not only is there no other plausible response to the mind-body problem but that ideas that have once been thought crazy are now conventional science, so they should be taken seriously. I am reminded of Groucho Marx: “They said Newton was mad and he was a genius; they said Einstein was mad and he was a genius; and they said my Uncle Louis was mad – and he was”.
CHAPTER 5
The escape from subjectivity
We have set aside two explanations as to how we can comprehend (at least in part) a world that so vastly outsizes us. The first (Kantian) explanation is that this is possible because the comprehended world is folded inside the comprehending mind. This, however, leaves the problem of accounting for the sense of a world outside of the mind of which we have incomplete knowledge. If extra-mental reality is a featureless noumenon, then we must find within ourselves the difference between what we feel we are and what we feel we know. The experiencable Other loses its opacity and, indeed, its otherness. It is difficult, moreover, to understand how the Kantian transcendental subject fails to be all-powerful, if it creates the context (the world) in which it both exerts its power and experiences its limitations. The opposite explanation that the mind is attuned to the world as a matter of biological necessity – the mind is wrapped in the natural world – proves equally flawed as an attempt to deflate the mystery of the comprehensibility of the world. There is nothing in biological processes that seems able either to generate mind or to account for its putative value as a condition of enhanced replicative power. Besides, if there is only nature, then the fact that mind is “about” nature remains unexplained. Organisms, as part of nature and subject to its laws, do not seem to have the wherewithal to generate the kind of distance explicit in intentionality. The determined attempts to eliminate intentionality by many philosophers committed to naturalism is striking testimony to this. Moreover, in both Kantian idealism and the various forms of naturalism, the gradual, laborious acquisition of explicitly incomplete knowledge is equally without explanation. The problem of the intelligibility of the world returns with an added force when we consider the nature of the being – the fallible human subject – that comprehends the world.
The cognitive progress of humanity is typically presented as being characterized by, and dependent upon, progressive escape from the subjectivity of the knowing subject. Minds, it seems, understand the world only by overcoming some fundamental aspects of themselves. The very idea of objectivity is rooted in subjects’ insight into their own unreliability. The “merely subjective” gives place to the coolly objective. The path to objective truth is opened up when individual human beings and mankind “get themselves out of the way”. By this means, we access a new kind of reality which not only lies beyon
d the world construed according to wishful thinking, or even as the thwarting, obstructing stuff out there that requires our will to shape or lies beyond our scope to do so – but also beyond immediate or even delayed or mediated appearances. As individual subjects, we see what-is from a certain, necessarily partial, necessarily limited viewpoint – the front of the house not the back, the table not its atoms, the locality not the totality. And even collectively, everything we experience is ultimately mediated by subjects, with their quadruple lenses of sense organs, biological needs, historically determined interests, and symbolic systems.
It would be absurd to attempt to do justice to our (partial) awakening. Here, however, are a few steps in any story of our emancipation from individual, cultural and species subjectivity:
a)
If we ever start out as a bubble of sentience or a cloud of sensations we soon rise above this. At the heart of “objectivity” is the sense, acquired early in development, that the world is populated by items, notably objects, that have an existence independent of our experience of them. Objects have intrinsic properties, and modes of interaction with other objects, that belong to them not to us. There are things about objects that are there to be found out: they have a hiddenness, that the infant enquirer reveals by lifting them up, turning them round, shaking them, banging them on the side of the cot, dropping them on the floor, tearing them apart. Such are the modes of primitive interrogation of the material world.
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