Panpsychism in the West Panpsychism in the West David Skrbina A Bradford Book The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England © 2005 Massachusetts Institute of Technology All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any elec- tronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher. MIT Press books may be purchased at special quantity discounts for business or sales promotional use. For information, please email [email protected] or write to Special Sales Department, The MIT Press, 5 Cambridge Center, Cambridge, MA 02142. The author’s email address is [email protected]. Set in Stone by The MIT Press. Printed and bound in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Panpsychism in the West p. cm. ISBN 0-262-19522-4 (alk. paper) 1. Panpsychism—History. BD560.P35 2005 41–dc21 2004056687 10987654321 dedicated to all those who seek alternatives to the mechanistic worldview Contents Acknowledgments ix 1 Panpsychism and the Ontology of Mind 1 1.1 The Importance of Panpsychism 1 1.2 Basic Concepts in Ontology and Mind 5 1.3 Background on Monism 8 1.4 Dualism and Interaction 12 1.5 Panpsychism Defined 15 2 Ancient Origins 23 2.1 Ancient Greece and the “Hylozoist” Tradition—The Pre-Socratics 23 2.2 Plato 34 2.3 Aristotle 45 2.4 Epicurus and the Atomic Swerve 51 2.5 Stoicism and the Pneuma 53 2.6 Remnants of Panpsychism in the Early Christian Era 58 3 Developments in the Renaissance (Sixteenth- and Seventeenth- Century Europe) 65 3.1 Transition to the Renaissance 65 3.2 Four Italian Naturalists: Cardano, Telesio, Patrizi, and Bruno 67 3.3 Gilbert and the Soul of the Magnet 76 3.4 Campanella and the Seventeenth Century 77 3.5 The Early Scientific Philosophers 81 3.6 Spinoza 87 3.7 Locke and Newton 91 3.8 Leibniz 95 4 Continental Panpsychism of the Eighteenth Century 101 4.1 French Vitalistic Materialism 101 4.2 Kant and Priestley 108 4.3 German Romanticism and the Naturphilosophie 112 viii Contents 5 Panpsychism, Mechanism, and Science in Nineteenth-Century Germany 117 5.1 Schopenhauer 117 5.2 Fechner 122 5.3 Other Scientist-Philosophers of the Age 126 5.4 A Survey of the Field 133 5.5 Nietzsche and the Will to Power 137 6 The Anglo-American Perspective 141 6.1 Anglo-American Panpsychism of the Late Nineteenth Century 141 6.2 William James 145 6.3 Royce, Peirce, and Other Sympathetic Thinkers 149 7 Panpsychism in the Twentieth Century, Part I: 1900–1950 157 7.1 Bergson and the Early-Twentieth-Century Panpsychists 157 7.2 Schiller 162 7.3 Alexander, Lossky, Troland, and Dewey 165 7.4 The Process Philosophers—Whitehead and Russell 174 7.5 Phenomenology 180 7.6 Teilhard de Chardin 182 8 Scientific Perspectives 185 8.1 Historical Arguments from the Scientific and Empirical Perspectives 185 8.2 Panpsychism in Early- and Mid-Twentieth-Century Science 188 8.3 Bateson 196 8.4 Recent Scientific Interpretations 198 8.5 Bohm and the Implicate Order 202 9 Panpsychism in the Twentieth Century, Part II: 1950–Present 207 9.1 Hartshorne 208 9.2 Developments in the 1960s and the 1970s 217 9.3 Mind in Nature: Panpsychism and Environmental Philosophy 223 9.4 Recent Thoughts, Pro and Con 235 10 Toward a Panpsychist Worldview 249 10.1 An Assessment of the Arguments 249 10.2 Opposing Views 255 10.3 Into the Third Millennium 265 Notes 271 Bibliography 291 Index 307 Acknowledgments There are of course many individuals, present and past, to whom I owe inspiration and gratitude. Those deserving special mention include Peter Reason, Brian Goodwin, Alan Rayner, and Chris Clarke. They offered sub- stantial encouragement when my ideas and research were still a work in progress. I also want to particularly acknowledge my long-time colleague Ken Brady and another great friend, supporter, and peerless source of inspira- tion, Henryk Skolimowski. Panpsychism in the West 1 Panpsychism and the Ontology of Mind 1.1 The Importance of Panpsychism The nature of mind has been an enigma since the beginning of recorded history. In many ways it is as much a mystery today as it was to the ancient Greeks. We now know much more than the Greeks did about the brain and human physiology, and we have intricate and detailed philosophical con- cepts, and yet we seem unable to reach any kind of consensus on what mind is or how it is related to the body or to matter in general. The enig- matic nature of mind is so pervasive and compelling that some current philosophers have given up on the problem, calling it intractable or unsolv- able in principle. The difficulties surrounding mind seem, at the very least, to call for a deep reexamination of the problem. Most current theorists carry with them two basic assumptions: (1) that mind is limited to humans and perhaps the “higher animals” and (2) that mind is somehow dependent on or reducible to the physical substrate of the human brain. (Others go to the opposite extreme and hold that mind is really a soul, something distinct from the body and fundamentally nonphysical; I will put this view aside for the moment.) Point 1 is usually taken for granted and rarely argued for. Point 2 implies a belief that there is something fundamentally unique about human and animal brains, and that they alone among all the physical structures of the universe can support mental processes. This second point is conceivably true, but no one has given a plausible account of why this might be so. Certainly there are unique physical characteristics of the human brain (the number and density of neural cells, the modes of input for sensory information, and so on) that most likely account for our uniquely human mental capabilities: our abilities to reason, to experience rich emotions and feelings, and to hold beliefs. But we have found nothing so unique as to alone account for the presence of a mind. What is at issue 2 Chapter 1 is not the nature of the uniquely human mental capabilities, but rather a general understanding of the phenomenon of mind in its largest sense. Many thinkers, past and present, have seen fit to challenge the above two assumptions. On the basis of their investigations of the natural world, they have viewed such assumptions as largely unfounded. For such thinkers there is no reason to limit mind to humans and (perhaps) higher animals; in fact, they have reasons—both intuitive and rational—to claim that mind is best conceived as a general phenomenon of nature. As such, mind would exist, in some form, in all things. This concept is called panpsychism. Panpsychism, roughly speaking, is the view that all things have mind or a mind-like quality.1 It is an ancient concept, dating back to the earliest days of both Eastern and Western civilizations. The term ‘panpsychism’, intro- duced by the Italian philosopher Patrizi in the sixteenth century, derives from the Greek ‘pan’ (all) and ‘psyche’ (mind or soul). The theological impli- cations of soul are largely set aside in the present work; at issue is the notion of mind as a naturalistic aspect of reality. Panpsychist theories generally attempt to address the nature and classes of things that possess mind and, perhaps more important, to address what precisely one means by ‘mind’. These two issues—the nature of things and the nature of mind—are, of course, central to many aspects of philosophy. Panpsychism, however, lies at a unique intersection of the two concepts, where mind is seen as fundamental to the nature of existence and being. If all things have mind, then any theory of mind is necessarily a theory about ontology, about the nature of extant things. Panpsychism is distinctive in two further ways. First, it is a unique kind of theory of mind. More correctly, it is a meta- theory of mind. It is a statement about theories, not a theory in itself. As a meta-theory, it simply holds that, however one conceives of mind, such mind applies to all things. For example, one could be a “panpsychist dual- ist,” holding that some Supreme Being has granted a soul or a mind to all things. One could be a “panpsychist functionalist,” interpreting the func- tional role of every object as mind, even if such a role is only to gravitate or to resist pressure. One could argue for a “panpsychist identism” in which mind is identical to matter, or a “panpsychist reductive materialism” in which the mind of each thing is reducible to its physical states. In fact panpsychism can parallel almost every current theory of mind. Nearly every concept of mind can be extended to apply to all things, whether living or nonliving. The only theories not applicable are those that deny mind alto- gether and those that argue explicitly that, because of some unique physi- ology, only biological organisms, or only Homo sapiens, can possess mind. Panpsychism and the Ontology of Mind 3 Such theories, though, are rare and unconvincing. In order to qualify as a complete theory, a panpsychist outlook must be complemented by a posi- tive theory of mind that explicitly describes how mind is to be conceived and how it is connected to physical objects. Some philosophers have expressed an intuitive belief that all things have minds, or that all are ani- mate, but then neglected to specify in detail a conception of mind that fits within this broad framework.