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3. Rediscovering the Soul of MatterIf the universe is “dead,” it tells no stories. And all our vast cosmologies are little more than fantasies, superlative myths we tell ourselves to make some sense that we are here at all. But what if the universe is itself a story? What could that mean, and how could we fit it into our science and philosophy? The universe is either already “dead” or it is meaningful. If it is “dead” in this sense of being wholly mechanical, without any intrinsic capacity for self-motion and feeling, then all instances of life and consciousness in the universe are ultimately insignificant evolutionary by-products. If this is true, then the universe would be essentially meaningless, it would be “absurd,” just as the existentialists said. All meaning would be contingent, created by minds that themselves arose by chance from the blind mechanical collisions of atoms in the void. When the brains that produced the minds died, all the meaning that they created would vanish with them. There would be no longer even pockets of meaning in an otherwise meaningless universe. The universe would just simply be. It would be for nothing. A universe that is for nothing is not about anything; it is a universe without a story. Technically, stories are the unfolding of meaning: They represent changes of states where the later states require reference back to their antecedents to complete their own being. More simply, stories require memory of what has happened, experience of what is happening, and anticipation of what is to come. All this requires consciousness. Stories reveal how things came to be the way they are. They tell of beginnings, and of middles, and, if they don’t always have endings, they point, and leave the way open. Stories are suggestive, rather than certain. Stories enact the process of creation, whereby actualities emerge from a pool of potential. They make explicit through becoming, the implicit fecundity of being. If the universe is “dead,” it tells no stories. The implication of this is that if the universe is not “dead,” if it is not simply a huge mechanical system running according to a handful of laws at work in a vast ocean of chaos, then it is in some sense “alive.” A more accurate term would be “sentient”—an inherent capacity for feeling or experience. In other words, to make explicit what is the main argument of this book, the matter of the universe, its raw “stuff” or substance, has within itself the essence of what we call “consciousness.” There is something about matter itself, some quality or property, some intrinsic principle, that moves matter from within, an automotive urge toward self-organization, evolution and complexity. In short, matter feels and moves itself. It doesn’t require external forces pushing and pulling it. Evolution, then, is not so much a story of a struggle between conflicting external forces impinging on matter and shaping it according to vagaries of environmental conditions. It is more a story of matter feeling its way forward toward ever-increasing complexity and higher levels of order and organization. Matter is adventurous. And in some very real sense, the story of this evolution is a story that matter tells to itself. It is a story in which matter communicates the details of its earlier, less organized stages, to its later more organized stages, so that each stage is meaningful—is full of meaning, full of reference to its antecedent conditions. Matter is full of information about its past, not just its causal past, but its evolutionary and holistic past—about its own structure and dynamics, about its process. Cells contain information about molecules, molecules contain information about atoms, atoms about quantum particles and fields. And the matter of brains contains information about all of these; and so the human mind can reflect on the history of matter and tell to itself the story of biological and cosmological evolution. The Intrinsic Narrative of MatterStories work because they create meaning. Human knowledge about the cosmos and our place in it is basically a story we tell ourselves. It is based on a narrative about how the world came to be the way it is. When telling children about the world, we call it a “story,” but when telling ourselves and each other about the world, we prefer to use more important-sounding terms such as “cosmology,” “ontology,” “metaphysics,” “paradigm” or, if we are a little less self-important, “mythology.” But they are all “stories” just the same. We are usually clear, however, that our ontological and cosmological stories are not the world, they are about the world. They are the ways we have of telling ourselves about the world, of representing it to ourselves as an unfolding narrative. But, we are sure, our stories are not the world itself. There is the world, and then, separately, there are our stories. And since our stories are separate from—only “about”—the world, they do not impact the world in any significant sense. The stories, after all, are only in our minds, while the world is “out there,” existing independently in the reality of physical space. Of course, this view of separate mind and physical nature is just as much a part of the story we tell ourselves—it is implicit in our modern Western ontology (the story of the nature of being) and cosmology (the story of the universe). In this book, I question that worldview, inherited from the founders of modern philosophy and science—notably, Bacon, Galileo, Descartes, and Newton. I propose, instead, a different story: a story that echoes the profound cosmological insights of an unsung sixteenth century genius, Giordano Bruno (1548-1600). Bruno’s cosmology was so radical, such a profound challenge to the supernaturally-ordained authority of the late medieval Church, that they burned him alive rather than risk having his heretical ideas about “intelligent matter” and an infinite, acentric universe corrupt other scholars and spread throughout Christendom. Had Bruno lived, and had his work not been placed on the Index of forbidden books, his radical view of the nature and relationship of matter and mind may well have established a very different philosophical foundation for the development of modern science. Instead, we got Descartes and his dualism of separate spiritual soul and mechanical matter. Bruno, however, was not the first to present a theory of “intelligent matter,” and he has had successors. The “new” postmodern solution to the mind-body problem has a very long lineage in Western thought. In fact, modern materialism can be shown to be a relatively recent and short-lived aberration. Besides Bruno, the long lineage of radical materialism, or panpsychism, can be shown to pass through Goethe, Leibniz, Paracelsus, and the Neoplatonists, all the way back to the beginnings of Western philosophy, in the thought of Presocratic philosophers, and even beyond to the shamanic-inspired cults of Orpheus, trailing off into the mythologies of pre-Indo-European neolithic and paleolithic cultures (see Chapter 00, “Panpsychism: A Long Lineage of Mind in Matter”). For instance, the “new story” I propose to tell has antecedents in the writings of early Greek philosophers such as Anaximander (c. 610-547 BCE) and Aristotle (384-322 BCE), and in our own century in the work of philosophers such as Alfred North Whitehead, Charles Hartshorne, and David Ray Griffin. A thoroughgoing and profound panpsychist metaphysics—a new cosmology—was worked out by Whitehead in Process and Reality. But I am proposing not just a different story about the cosmos. I’m proposing a story in which the narrative itself tells us that our cosmologies and ontologies do, very significantly, impact the world. It is a story that says our stories matter. In fact, it is a story that tells us our matter stories. Briefly, what I mean by this rather strange phrase is that there is something about the nature of matter itself—including the matter of our bodies—that is inherently the “stuff” of stories. Matter, we might say, has an intrinsic narrative. This view is radically at odds with the dominant modernist paradigm which conceives of matter as essentially, purely and simply, mechanical. According to this paradigm, only minds create stories, only minds possess meaning, only minds feel and pulse with purpose—and that all such mental activity is no more than an incidental by-product of the mechanical evolution of matter. I argue here that our cosmological and ontological stories certainly do make a difference in and to the world of nature. I argue that at the base of every ontology, cosmology, metaphysical system, and mythology is a narrative premise—a set of assumptions about the nature of reality that dramatically shapes the way we know and interact with the world. The Pathology of ModernismFollowing the founders of modernism, Bacon, Descartes, and Newton, the fundamental premise in contemporary cosmology is that matter, the physical world, is ultimately mechanical, devoid of any intrinsic sentience or feeling. One version of this story (dualism) tells us that matter (physical nature) is utterly distinct and separate from mind (sentience and subjectivity). Another version (materialism), the one most widely accepted today in science, tells us that what we call mind or consciousness (sentience, feeling, subjectivity) is an emergent phenomenon produced by otherwise intrinsically inert and insentient “dead” matter. In short, the modernist premise is: Matter is nonexperiential—devoid of intrinsic experience, consciousness, subjectivity, feeling, intentionality, and quality, and, therefore, of all intrinsic purpose, value and meaning. This metaphysical assumption—this fundamental narrative premise—has led to profound and dangerous consequences in modern Western philosophy, science, society, and in our personal lives. Specifically, it has generated a pathological relationship between humans and the rest of the natural world, and is responsible for the many major and pervasive crises of our times—including a sense of personal and collective alienation from nature, a widespread experiential dichotomy between body and mind, as well as worldwide ecological devastation, and social crises in economics, politics, business, health-care, and education, to mention some of the most obvious. In philosophy, it shows up as the perennial “mind-body problem,” the conundrum of how these two phenomena could ever interact. In science, it shows up as the complete inability of modernism to develop a true science of consciousness—a methodology for investigating the subjective domain (and not just objective models and physical correlates of mental processes). The modernist narrative premise of insentient, nonexperiential matter gives rise to a persistent theme common to dualism and materialism: that nature is mechanical, governed by universal physical laws (except, of course, where, according to dualism, these laws are mysteriously interrupted by the intrusion of non-physical minds). It is this ontological conception of insentient matter that forms the foundations of our modern Western cosmology and cosmogony, of a world created in a primordial big-bang, spewing forth a blazing plasma-radiation that , after eons of cosmic evolution, cooled and condensed into a universe of galaxies and stars. Nowhere in all of this was there anything resembling mind, or feeling, or point of view. The entire universe evolved according to a combination of blind chance events shaped by blind mechanical laws, utterly undirected, unknown, and unfelt. Life and consciousness eventually appeared much, much later—roughly 12 billion years later—only when conditions on a lump of rock and water circling one of the stars (and perhaps elsewhere) permitted the evolutionary processes to shape dead matter into sufficiently complex forms, such as cells, nervous systems and brains. Mind, in the dominant version of this cosmology (modern science), is merely an emergent evolutionary by-product of inert matter—an epiphenomenon. In another version of the modern universe story (modern philosophical and religious dualism), mind, psyche or soul is ontologically distinct from matter, existing in a separate domain. In either case—materialism or dualism—matter, the world of natural bodies from quarks to quasars, is by itself inherently and intrinsically dead. In later chapters, I will explore in detail how the various ontologies of dualism, materialism, and idealism attempt to solve the mind-body problem—how the universe can contain both consciousness and matter coupled together in a causally mysterious manner. For now, I will simply introduce the basic narrative premises (italicized below) of each of the three major ontologies (alternative cosmology stories), and say why they are problematic. Materialism: Only matter or physical energy are ultimately real. If (as is currently the case) science is anchored in materialism, the problem is to explain how “something” which has no mass, occupies no space and has subjectivity could ever evolve or emerge from something that was massive, spatial, and wholly objective to begin with. To achieve this feat—of getting mind from matter, subjectivity from objectivity—would require a miracle (the kind of miracle philosopher Colin McGinn meant by “turning the water of the physical brain into the wine of consciousness”). Dualism: Both matter and mind are real, but they are different substances, and exist separately. If, however, this “emergence problem” of materialism tempts us to switch to dualism. we would have an equally daunting problem. Dualists claim that consciousness exists independently and separately from matter—that it is a completely different kind of “stuff.” But if this were the case, we would be left with the unyielding problem of explaining how two mutually alien substances could ever interact. This, of course, was Descartes’ problem, and one that has never been solved. Dualism, too, requires the intervention of a miracle. Whereas dualism has been discredited by modern philosophical critiques, materialism has so far managed to evade a similar fate by generating a thick theoretical cloud cover which obscures the profound problems involved in the notion of mind emerging from matter. The Dream of IdealismIdealism: Only mind, consciousness or spirit is ultimately real. A third major cosmological alternative to scientific materialism and ontological dualism is found in many Eastern religious traditions, and as a kind of undercurrent running through the history of Western thought. It is a school of metaphysics known, variously, as “idealism” or the “perennial philosophy.” This ontology is hardly given serious attention these days in Western philosophy or science, yet it provides a way to overcome the deep problems with materialism and dualism. Here, the narrative premise flips materialism upside down and claims that consciousness is primary and universal, and that matter is either (a) merely an illusion (maya hypothesis) or (b) an emanation from spirit. According to absolute idealism, the nature of ultimate reality is spirit or pure consciousness, and the world of matter is an illusion, a sort of cosmic dream, what the Hindu tradition calls maya. However, though less problematic philosophically, maya-idealism nevertheless poses a major problem pragmatically. We just don’t live as though matter is an illusion, and we wouldn’t survive very long in the world if we treated all material objects (such as cars on the highway, or poisonous substances) as unreal “dream stuff.” Interacting with material bodies produces very significant consequences. Another version, emanationist idealism, is based on what I have called a “continuum ontology” (Harman & de Quincey, 1994). Here, the basic narrative premise is that the cosmos is structured according to a hierarchy of ontological levels, from matter, body, mind, soul, to spirit. It is an evolutionary hierarchy where higher levels emerge from and embrace their preceding levels, where matter is a sort of “condensed” physical manifestation or involution of spirit. What distinguishes this cosmology from the emergentist story of scientific evolution is that in the continuum ontology spirit is assumed to be the ground of being, whereas in modern science matter or physical energy is the ultimate reality; and also, unlike in the story of scientific evolution, the continuum ontology regards the various hierarchical stages as truly distinctive ontological levels, irreducible to each other. Emanationist-idealism is problematic because it runs the risk of reducing spirit to physics: If matter emanates from spirit and is real, then ultimately spirit itself must be, at least partly, intrinsically physical in some way—otherwise, it would amount to a miracle of producing something (real matter) from wholly nonphysical being. Believing in such a miracle is no more justified than believing in the materialist’s miracle of producing consciousness from matter. The Ontological ProblemAll of these cosmologies—dualism, materialism, idealism—at some point, need to offer an account of the presence in the world of mind and matter, and of their interrelationship and modes of interaction. As we’ve just seen, there are profound difficulties with all three major ontologies—dualism, materialism, and idealism. To summarize: the problem with dualism is: How two such fundamentally separate and distinct substances as mind and matter could ever interact? There is no conceivable way that “unextended,” ghost-like mind could ever exert an influence or cause an effect on solid, weighty, extended matter. The problem with materialism is different, though equally inconceivable: How could sentience and subjectivity ever emerge from wholly insentient and objective “dead” matter? No matter how complex pure objective matter becomes, it is inconceivable that objectivity could ever give rise to subjectivity or “interiority,” that “dead” matter could ever produce matter or minds that feel. If the universe is “dead” to start with, it stays dead. The problem with idealism is logically less severe, but nonetheless needs to be addressed: If all is spirit, and matter is ultimately illusion or manifestation of spirit, how do we account for the universal, commonsense and pragmatic supposition of realism—that the world is real in its own right (and not just a concoction of some Cosmic Mind or plurality of lesser minds)? Absolute idealism denies the reality of matter; its aim is transcendent—intended to take us away from living as embodied beings in the world. In emanationist idealism, matter is a consequence of the involution of spirit, it is produced by spirit. In this view, then, matter is effectively an epiphenomenon because reality, ultimately, is spirit. Thus, if we want to acknowledge that we are embodied conscious beings, embedded in a real embodied world, we need an alternative ontology and cosmology. The Fourth AlternativeFor decades, the key focus of my work in philosophy of mind has been an exploration of this mind-body problem, and of various solutions offered from schools of dualism, materialism and idealism. The fourth alternative I offer, radical naturalism. takes a radically different view of the mind-body relationship. Drawing on ideas from process philosophy—particularly the work of A. N. Whitehead and Henri Bergson—I argue that the major difficulty in the mind-body problem is not so much accounting for the nature of mind, or even its interaction with matter (although these remain problematic). The solution to the mind-body problem, I propose, following the process philosophers, involves a radical revisioning of our understanding of the nature of physical reality. In short, it is not mind that is the problem, but our limited conception of matter. We need a different starting point for our cosmology story. We need a new narrative premise, a revised ontology, if we are to successfully give an account of the world as it is, a world that contains both objective material bodies and subjective experience/consciousness in intimate relationship. All previous attempts to overcome the mind-body split—in philosophy, science, cosmology, and psychology—have failed to the extent that they have ignored or denied the essential sentience and sacredness of matter. The consequent desacralization of nature has had profound effects on how humans relate to the world (as planet and cosmic environment). The need for spiritual healing, which has become a deep longing characteristic of our age, will be satisfied only if we radically alter our understanding of and attitude to the deep nature of matter. In the alternative view, matter and consciousness are not separate “substances” but co-eternal, mutually complementary, realities. Matter and psyche always go together—all the way down. In Whitehead’s ontology, the basic ingredients of the world, whether atoms or quanta, are essentially “experiential events,” “moments of experience.” Matter, then, is the form that reality takes in response to the in-forming activity of psyche or consciousness. And this in-forming is intrinsic to matter; it is matter’s own interiority—its self-shaping dynamics. Some neo-Confucianist Chinese philosophers recognized this complementarity in medieval times in their concepts of ch’i (matter-energy) and li (organizing principle). In recent years much “new paradigm” literature has focused on the borrowed concept of ch’i, but its authors have typically ignored the other essential half: the li which is necessarily interior to ch’i. Radical materialism aims to restore the balance by focusing on the intrinsic self-organizing dynamic (li) of matter (ch’i). (See chapter 10, “Matter Stories, Stories Matter.”) Once we recognize the intrinsic interiority of matter, we acknowledge that matter, nature, and cosmos are themselves intrinsically meaningful, purposeful, and valuable. We recognize that nature or the universe is not “dead.” Healing the mind-body split, then, requires a radical reassessment of the fundamental nature of the cosmos. It requires that we respond to nature as intrinsically meaningful, knowing that matter carries within itself the story of the universe, and the unfolding narrative of creation. In this chapter, I have introduced the three dominant ontologies of dualism, materialism, and idealism—highlighting the problems in each. I also introduced panpsychism as a fourth alternative. In later chapters, I will examine all of these worldviews in more detail, focusing on different varieties, and will explore whether any succeeds as a coherent and comprehensive cosmology that can account for a universe “alive” with both consciousness and matter. But first, since so much of the confusion today about consciousness and its relationship to matter results from a lack of clarity about what we mean by these words, I will spend some time in the next chapter discussing what I mean when I use the key concepts such as “consciousness,” “matter,” and “energy.” |
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