the possibility of intimacy
Jane O'Grady
This is an edited version of the paper presented to the Philosophical Society's 2009 Conference in honour of the British philosopher, Timothy Sprigge.
Timothy Sprigge has never really been a contender in the mind-body contest. Although it was Sprigge who first reminded us that physicalist reductionism leaves out what is essential to consciousness ? that there is something it is like to be or feel a certain way ? it is Thomas Nagel who is famous for having popularised that insight.
Perhaps partly because he failed to use graphic images like Nagel's bat and Searle's Chinese Room, Sprigge's contribution to the philosophy of mind may have been underestimated. Mainly, though, this neglect is due to his total disregard of neuroscience, cognitive science or computer analogies. Sprigge's panpsychist transcendental idealism disdains these things because it makes consciousness the starting-point.
As Descartes had done, it could be said, except that, unlike Descartes, it makes consciousness not just the starting-point but everything. Panpsychism argues that all physical stuff contains consciousness, whether potentially and incipiently or actually. Transcendental idealism argues that all physical stuff is ultimately non-physical.
That is all rather broad-brush, but this is a broad-brush account - I want to argue that physicalists are unintentionally Cartesian, and not just in the obvious way ? being unable properly to dispense with the non-physicality of the mental ? but in effectively assuming a unitary, rather than plural, starting-point. Even prior to contemporary physicalism, the whole trend of metaphysics was to pay insufficient attention to subjectivity and, still less, to inter-subjectivity, the intermeshing of different consciousnesses (which is precisely what Sprigge's panpsychist transcendental idealism puts foremost). Metaphysics, until very recently, has gone into decline, and 'physicalists' begin with the immediate-physical, dispensing with attempts at an account of reality as a whole.
Yet effectively they start from the same standpoint as the Pre-Socratics - looking out upon a world that is supposedly uncharted by the senses or by reason, and wanting to know what reality is like objectively, as if it could be known irrespective of us. By asking, 'What is the world made of? What is the One underlying the Many?', Thales and his successors set up a distinction between appearance and reality; and this distinction involved an implicit dualism, a split between whatever does the appearing (and being real) and whatever it is that is appeared to.
The question about the nature of reality inherently contained questions ? which were articulated even before Plato ? as to how far and how accurately, if at all, reality can be known. The early philosophers may have failed to notice the knower at first, but were soon forced to acknowledge a dichotomy between knower and known, and that there is a problem of what can count as knowledge.
Wanting to know what the world is like objectively, independent of observation, soon led them to swing round and look at the knowing subject, which, in a strange reversal, became, with Descartes, the most certain, because most known, thing.
Problems about the nature of knowledge and the capacity to know still prevail in epistemology, but, when doing anything like metaphysics or philosophy of mind, the naturalistic way of doing philosophy tries to flatten the knower back into the known.
Contemporary philosophy starts at the opposite end from Descartes ? with objective, physical things, instead of with the lone, or the collective-human, knower. The picture of reality as a whole is now rarely sought for, and it is the immediate-physical that is now the starting-point and certainty, the mental that is debatable, with Descartes often fingered as the guilty party for having introduced it in the first place. Just as Descartes had a problem with the external world, contemporary philosophers have a problem with the 'I'; in fact, mostly, they dispense with it. In the now-misnamed philosophy of mind, they concentrate instead on mental processes, which they proceed to argue are actually nothing but brain processes or behaviour.
According to the famous Turing Test, the criterion for anything (organism or machine) to count as a thinking thing is whether it is able to produce audible or visual symbols that persuade a human observer that it can think. This has the intended upshot that there is no reason why computers should not count as thinking things, as well as the often-added corollary that the human mind should itself be regarded as a sort of information-processor or computer. For what else, demand some advocates of this human-computer view, do we ever do, with humans any more than with computers, than observe output -- behaviour and speech?
What we require from the computer-computer is simply that it responds automatically and appropriately ? which is all we get in the human-computer anyway. Rather than arguing the toss in each case, said Turing, 'it is usual to have the polite convention that everyone thinks'.
As to the 'inner' workings that actually produce the product, alongside the cognitive science trend goes the avid pursuit of neuroscience, and the flourishing of identity theories. And although more inward-looking, identity theories are ultimately just another form of the human-computer, output-is-all theories. Since they can at best establish only the correlation of a brain process with reports, or behavioural evidence, of certain mental processes, they can ? in fact, need -- to disregard or even deny the qualia, the 'quiddities', the 'what it is like' to be or feel something.
But do not those who seek to either disparage or repudiate qualia and 'intentionality' actually presuppose what they disparage and/or repudiate? Don't they inadvertently begin from a Cartesian position? A frequent criticism of Descartes is that he fails to notice that just by using language, and inviting his readers to undertake a process of doubt similar to his own, he is presupposing from the outset not only other consciousnesses similar to his, but also a common conceptual system. He unwarrantedly assumes that reality is inherently mapped and cut along certain joints; if not pre-packaged for input by human senses at least accessible by means of mathematical and other inferences. In other words, he doesn't start from a level playing-field of the total doubt of a lone knower but has already smuggled in other knowers and a public world of shared, or easily shareable, categories and concepts. Yet 'physicalism' commits a similar sleight of hand. It inadvertently smuggles in an observer, an 'I' - something that perceives and organises the information, and has the context and key to interpret the symbols produced by the artefact or person, or inherent in the biological stuff.
The Turing Test criterion for whether something thinks is (as said above) whether an artefact or organism persuasively counts as producing what seem to be spontaneous, self-engendered responses. But this persuadability criterion assumes (to borrow one of Descartes' formulations of the cogito argument) that there is, in principle anyway, something to be persuaded; as well as in the first place basing the whole test on a model drawn from folk-psychological (i.e., common sense) notions of human autonomy. The observer in the Turing Test is supposed to be a putative, dispensable counterfactual like Descartes' evil demon (a prop in a hypothesis), but in fact is as ineluctable as Descartes' I.
Without an observing consciousness, how would the stuff of the physical world, or the computer-human output which is part of it, even be information? Physicalism assumes, because it needs, the subjective consciousness it denies.
Surely these 'physicalists' are being disingenuous. Yet the source of their being able to overlook the unacknowledged observer lies in the way metaphysics, from the Pre-Socratics onwards, has always been done.
The Pre-Socratics assumed a single dichotomy, a uniformity of perception even before they articulated the notion of perceiving. And so too did Descartes, whose lone I was an Every-I, and yet whose Every-I was a lone I - a single viewpoint, just as the Pre-Socratics' (implicit) viewpoint had been collective.
The individual outlook that became the starting-point for philosophising was so naked and uncluttered as to apply uniformly to all humans irrespective of gender, race and any of the other categories we now set up as primary. Thus the stuff of reality devolved into a two-fold distinction, between I/we and It - the stuff that the lone or collective knower peers into or at.
Descartes could make the 'peerer' single because he did not yet face any of the difficulties for individual and cultural knowing that post-19th century relativism (which in fact his subjectivity would lead to) would introduce. Whatever the truth of relativism (!), the only thing it has definitely got right is the essential fact of there necessarily having to be, in any assertion of truth or objectivity, somebody's viewpoint on the whole.
How, though, do many viewpoints co-exist and how do they communicate? The whole trend of metaphysics has been to downplay inter-subjectivity, the intermeshing of different subjectivities.
There are actually two splits, not just one ? a split between the knower and the known, and a split between the knower and other knowers, who are only ever at best partly known. Once the knower/known distinction is set up, there is not only the problem of how to bridge the gap between consciousness and material stuff (I ? it), but that of how to bridge the gap between my consciousness and other people's (I ? thou). Our view of reality has to accommodate not just subjectivity and objectivity but also multiple subjectivities.
If subjectivity is not lone or joint, how do different subjectivities exist? Where? And how do they interact? Are other knowers part of the outside stuff that I am trying to know about, or (like me, the lone knower) separate from it as knowers? Are other people just enclosed in my net of consciousness, opaque to me, static objects for me to be aware of? Are they warring world-containers - one solipsism clashing with another; as they are for the Romantic poet whose 'all-feeling' is violated by the human figure struggling up the mountain towards him, or as they are for Sartre, for whom 'the Other' is an affront? Or aren't they rather, as Emanuel Levinas and Timothy Sprigge see them, the basis of knowing?
It is not just into a physicalist view of reality that other minds fit uneasily, but into that of Descartes and representative realism. In the chronology of argument, they only make an appearance after the problem of the external world is sorted out, and they are then simply slotted in, usually as some sort of deduction from the physical, to be inferred from observable stuff and behaviour. They are treated as an afterthought and, in philosophy after Descartes, one of the most boring of philosophical problems.
But they are a problem, and one that persists even with attempts by idealism to heal the mental/physical breach. Berkeley proclaimed it ridiculous to imagine 'the absolute existence of unthinking things without any relation to their being perceived'. Objects can only be what we perceive by sense, 'and what do we perceive besides our own ideas or sensations; and is it not plainly repugnant that any one of these or any combination of them should exist unperceived?'
But (without God) Berkeley's subjective idealism could sound like a sort of solipsism ? individual consciousness swallows the world, as it were, in a giant Möbius curve. It is as if the invisible, taken-for-granted 'I' is outside the picture looking in, and the world is what the 'I' observes. Wittgenstein said (in the Tractatus) that if he wrote a book called The World as I found it, he would have to include his body, and that the thing that 'alone could not be mentioned in that book' would be the subject I, for 'in an important sense there is no subject Ö The subject does not belong to the world: rather, it is a limit of the world.'
In fact, says Wittgenstein:
'Ö solipsism, when its implications are followed out strictly, coincides with pure realism. The self of solipsism shrinks to a point without extension, and there remains the reality co-ordinated with it'.Which would be fine, for the early Wittgenstein and for what Berkeley initially seems to be saying, except that how does another person's I' fit into a shared world? In this collective solipsism or this collective objectivity, what about the other limits of the world (or should that be 'of other worlds')? Subjective idealism is too subjective to accommodate the world and other minds. It wouldn't work, any more than 'The Matrix' would. Supposedly such a brilliant portrayal of representative realism, the film's virtual reality premise is surely unfeasible, since it would be impossible for the sense-data of the various trapped brains to produce, share, and interact in, a communal world.
Bishop George Berkeley is inconsistent. He on different occasions asserts that ideas are 'within' and 'without' (that is 'outside') the mind, which ultimately turns out to be a necessary inconsistency. 'Within' suggests the same sort of body-bounded dualism as Descartes, which in turn requires a communal space for the body-enclosed minds to inhabit.
Whatever is said, by either Descartes or Berkeley, about the mind not occupying space, the only way my mind is discrete from yours and his is that it is indeed 'within', somehow enclosed in a body; and this also ensures the privacy and privileged accessibility of its thoughts. Presumably, for Berkeley, any mind is enclosed in a cluster of ideas, ideas which other minds perceive. As other minds, we each have what Berkeley calls a 'notion' of someone else's mind. This, to all intents and purposes, involves a process similar to Descartes' of inference from bodies and behaviour to minds, an inference gleaned from the physical.
As a 'spiritual substance', Berkeley's mind is in a sense more substantial than the ideas that enclose it (the body), but, insubstantial or not, the ideas surely need to exist in a shared, public space. Which in fact (for all the initial exciting fanfares of a mind-dependent reality) it ultimately turns out they do, ideas being outside as well as within. Berkeley was, after all, an Anglican bishop, and he believes literally in the Genesis account of creation, as he says in the Third Dialogue.
Moses mentions the sun, moon, and stars, earth and sea, plants and animals: that all these do really exist, and were in the beginning created by God, I make no questionÖ. Upon reading therefore the Mosaic account of the Creation, I understand that the several parts of the world became gradually perceivable to finite spirits, endowed with proper faculties; so that whoever such were present ['present' where?], they were in truth perceived by them.So God did indeed create the world and its objects, and God keeps these objects/ideas in existence -- not separately for each person, like a sort of virtual reality, but in a public sort of way. In a public sort of space, too, or where would the finite spirits be 'present'?
For Berkeley's system to work, his 'ideas' do in fact need to be both within and 'without' [outside] the mind. Or rather, in his world-view there are two sorts of ideas. One sort of idea is outside the individual mind - Philonous invites Hylas to call ideas in this category 'things' if he wants to, and agrees that they have 'a real existence'. They are enduring, objective things of which we have our own individual subjective perceptions.
The other sort of idea is in the individual mind. It is the subjective perception of the more objective other sort of idea - Philonous calls ideas in this category ectypes (of the archetypes that exist outside the human mind, in God's mind). So, ultimately, Berkeley's idealism does coincide with realism (as the early Wittgenstein puts it), but with a sort of 'dualistic realism' (which the early Wittgenstein did not have in mind). And Berkeley unintentionally preserves the mind-thing gap that he was attempting to abolish, even if things, for him, are less thingy than in usual dualisms - archetypes in God's mind of which human minds have ectypes.
For Berkeley, there are things which are independent of the human mind, even if dependent on God's mind. And the human-mind-independent stuff is one sort of idea; while human perceivings of that sort of idea are themselves another sort of idea.
Berkeley's idealism, whatever its pretensions, seems to amount to nothing more than dualism - there being two types of thing in the world, perceiving stuff and perceived stuff; and a correspondence between them. And the perceiving stuff is not joint, collective or inter-penetrating. Mental substances are cut off from one another, each bounded by (solid) ideas.
Berkeley, like Descartes, neglected, as his physicalist successors neglect, the human aetiology of knowledge, that the way we become aware of the world and of the human conceptualisation of it is through the mediation of adults, primarily our mothers. Babies surely have a sense of other people, their emotions, etc, and interact personally and emotionally before they have a sense of things. They are introduced to the world, as they are humanised, by the adults around them. The first dichotomy is that of I-Thou, not I-It.
And so we return to Sprigge. He was annoyed and baffled by physicalism. To argue that there is no reality besides the physical, he wrote, was understandable for the Greek atomists, Hobbes and other philosophers, but for philosophers living after Descartes, or after the correct understanding of Descartes, it is 'wilful blindness', a 'blindness to lived experience'. It was from 'lived experience' that Sprigge's philosophising sprung.
To argue, as he does, that there is 'a single divine consciousness within which an inconceivably vast number of streams of finite experience interact and interweave' might seem whacky and out of joint; might seem in a way to go backwards even from Descartes.
Yet at the Edinburgh conference on Sprigge, panpsychism, at any rate, was said to be gaining ground as a feasible position on the mind-body problem. 'How do you know that it is you that thinks and not the World Soul that thinks through you?' asked Hyperaspistes in the Fifth Objection to Descartes' Meditations.
Sprigge said that panpsychism 'bids us recognize that what looks forth from another's eyes, what feels itself in the writhing of a worm, ..is really that very thing which, when speaking through my lips, calls itself 'I'. I would argue that Sprigge's position is an advance on Nagel's bat and Searle's Chinese Room.
These arguments, like many against reductive physicalism, share an assumption of the position they are attacking: they reduce the human mind to a lone, discrete perceiver or set of perceivers - the single or joint active observers of, and agents in, a passive reality. Whacky though it is, Sprigge's panpsychist idealism gets us beyond the collective solipsism of so much metaphysics which fails to do justice to the way human minds interact.
Conference details and links to all the Papers here