Commentary on Galen Strawson

Catherine Wilson Commentary on Galen Strawson

The ancient philosopher Anaxagoras (500–428 BCE) wondered how hair could be made from what was not hair, and flesh from what was not flesh. He concluded that the ‘seeds’ of everything were in everything, and his defiantly nonreductionistic theory of mind was ridi- culed by the atomist Lucretius as follows: If we cannot explain the ability of each animate being to experience sensation without attributing sensation to its constituent elements, what are we to say of the special atoms that compose the human race? Doubtless they shake and tremble with uncontrollable laughter and sprinkle their faces with dewy tears; doubtless they are qualified to discourse at length on the structure of compounds, and even investigate the nature of their own constituent atoms. (Lucretius, 2001, p. 59) Lucretius in turn found emergentism unproblematic: [S]ince we perceive that the eggs of birds change into live chicks, and that worms come seething out of the earth when untimely rains have caused putrefaction, it is evident that the sensible can be produced from the insensible. (Lucretius, 2001, p. 58) Galen Strawson sides with Lucretius on the question of hair and flesh, but with Anaxagoras on the question of mind. He asserts that the real physicalism to which he subscribes entails that the basic constitu- ents of the physical world, though not entities like tables and chairs, have experiences. According to Strawson, it is not necessary to have a brain to have experiences; some physical things that exist outside of and are not identical with living creatures, must have experiences too. I take his argument to comprise a thesis and two conditionals. The thesis is that explanans and explanandum need to share properties and characteristics for there to be explanation at all. The first conditional

Journal of Consciousness Studies, 13, No. 10–11, 2006, pp. 177–83

Copyright (c) Imprint Academic 2010 For personal use only -- not for reproduction 178 C. WILSON is that if there are experiences, they must be explicable. The second conditional is that if we can’t in principle explain how the brain gener- ates experiences, the brain can’t be a necessary condition of experience. It follows, according to Strawson, that there are sub-brain experiencing entities that permit or necessitate the emergence of experiences. I am not sure why the sub-brain experiencing entities are identified with ultimate particles; there is no separate argument for this that I found in Strawson’s text, but I leave this objection aside. In this comment, I will attempt to bring some historical perspective to this issue to show that Strawson’s Anaxagorean micropsychism, while not impossible, is unlikely and is not entailed by real physicalism. It conflicts with some of the most exotic, as well as some of the most popular views about consciousness on record, including the views of Descartes, Kant and also Spinoza and Leibniz. Historically, defenders of ‘thinking matter’have been concerned to show that, even if atoms could not think, suitably organized congeries of them could do so. The possibility of thinking matter was much discussed after the publication of Descartes’s Meditations, with its claim to have demon- strated the existence of incorporeal thinking substance. Long before Locke ventured the seemingly timid, but actually rather inflammatory suggestion in the second edition of the Fourth Book of his Essay that we could not know that matter could not think, critics of Descartes urged an open-minded stance, for example, the authors of Objections VI. ‘[S]ince we do not know,’ they said, ‘what can be done by bodies and their motions, and since you confess that without a divine revela- tion no one can know everything which God has imparted ...howcan you possibly have known that God has not implanted in certain bodies a power or property enabling them to doubt, think, etc.?’ (Descartes, 1985–1993, VII, p. 421). The author of a notorious anti-Cartesian broadsheet circulating in Holland proposed that thought and extension were modes of a single substance. This single-substance position was explicitly developed by Spinoza. Other critics thought Descartes’s restriction of experiences to humans was arbitrary and implausible. Leibniz in turn developed that line of thought. Spinoza and Leibniz might at first appear to be natural allies for Strawson. However, nei- ther Spinoza nor Leibniz sanctions the view that physical particles are or even might be conscious. Spinoza insisted against Descartes that we cannot conceive of disembodied minds: ‘An idea that excludes the existence of our Body cannot be in our Mind, but is contrary to it.’ (Spinoza, 1985, I, p. 500) He did not treat the question of the distribution of consciousness in the

Copyright (c) Imprint Academic 2010 For personal use only -- not for reproduction COMMENTARY ON GALEN STRAWSON 179 universe directly, but he seems to have ascribed thoughts of an intellec- tual, conceptual type only to God (identical with the totality of extended substance) and to humans, and to have ascribed experiences and feelings only to humans and animals. He took a definite anti-Car- tesian stand in referring to the lusts and appetites of insects, fish and birds (Spinoza, 1985, I, p. 528). Though Spinoza failed to say why one had to be a certain kind of ‘finite mode’ to possess consciousness, or even what kind of finite mode one had to be, he implied that one had to be a fairly complex entity of a certain degree of maturity. Some human bodies, he thought, possess very little by way of consciousness: He who, like an infant or child, has a Body capable of very few things, and very heavily dependent on external causes, has a Mind which considered solely in itself is conscious of almost nothing of itself, or of God, or of things. On the other hand, he who has a Body capable of a great many things, has a Mind which considered only in itself is very much conscious of itself, and of God, and of things. (Spinoza, 1985, I, p. 614) Spinoza is accordingly best read as an ordinary physicalist who thinks that human and animal minds depend on their brains, and as an unusual ‘macropsychist’who considers the entire corporeal world as a divine thinking subject. It is hard to see him as an Anaxagorean micropsychist. With Leibniz, the case is more difficult. Leibniz’s famous ‘mill’ argument, though not identical to Strawson’s, appeals similarly to the inexplicability of experience by reference to the combined effects of non-experiencing entities in interaction: We must confess that the perception, and what depends on it, is inexpli- cable in terms of mechanical reasons, that is, through shapes and motions. If we imagine that there is a machine whose structure makes it think, sense, and have perceptions, we could conceive it enlarged, keep- ing the same proportions, so that we could enter into it, as one enters into a mill. Assuming that, when inspecting its interior, we will only find parts that push one another, and we will never find anything to explain a perception. And so, we should seek perception in the simple substance and not in the composite or in the machine. (Leibniz, 1989, p. 215) So Leibniz claimed that, because there are experiences and because experiences cannot be generated by complex machines, perception must pertain to the simple. There must be monads, unextended, simple, indivisible entities, with perception and appetition. Leibniz was a panpsychist in the sense of believing that everything that is a real, individual thing, and not an entity by convention, has experiences.

(For Leibniz, a table or chair is no more a single, real, individual thing than a salt-and-pepper set, or, for that matter, a knife and a fork.) Monads are not, however, like Strawson’s ultimate physical constit- uents. First, they are not physical — everything the natural scientist encounters in the physical world, said Leibniz, is complex and divisible. Second, they are supposed to give rise to the phenomenal world of extended bodies, and Strawson says that the emergence of extension from nonextension is incoherent. The monads are metaphysical and are the basis of an incoherently articulated emergentist account. Therefore, in insisting on them, Leibniz disqualified himself as a Strawsonian real physicalist.

II Leibniz however held another version of panpsychism that has given commentators headaches because it does not seem to fit with the monadological theory. This version is well worth considering, because it suggests that the ultimate physical particles do not as a matter of fact have experiences, though, for all we know, they could. Leibniz’ other version of panpsychism adopts Spinoza’s anti- Cartesian dictum that there are no experiences that do not belong to living, organic bodies. Additionally, there is no lower limit to the size of organisms. Everything that exists is either an animated organism, and itself a federation of smaller animated organisms, or an entity by convention composed of such organisms. Though Leibniz’s theory has been judged unacceptable for centuries, it is in some ways less problematic than Strawson’s, insofar as Leibniz supposed that a power of autonomous change — ‘appetition’ always accompanied the power of ‘perception’. Here is another passage from the Monadology that has special relevance to that point: I...takeforgrantedthateverycreatedbeing,andconsequentlythe created monad as well, is subject to change, and even that this change is continual in each thing ...Itfollowsfromwhatwehavejustsaidthatthe monad’s natural changes come from an internal principle, since no externalcausecaninfluenceitinternally...Onecancallallsimplesub- stances or created monads entelechies, for they have in themselves a certainperfection...;theyhaveasufficiency...thatmakesthemthe sources of their internal actions, and, so to speak, incorporeal automata. (Leibniz, 1989, p. 215) To a biologically-minded philosopher, this dual ascription of perception and agency makes a good deal of sense. Aristotle pointed out that there is no use having senses if you cannot move, for, if you could

Copyright (c) Imprint Academic 2010 For personal use only -- not for reproduction COMMENTARY ON GALEN STRAWSON 181 perceive and feel but not move, you would be powerless either to escape painful stimuli or to approach objects that appeared beneficial. Your senses would have no function, and there would have been no reason for frugal Nature to have endowed you with them. If ultimate particles do not approach, avoid, interact with and defend against other objects, they do not need senses. If they are simply knocked about by other particles, or undergo whatever the subatomic equiva- lent of being knocked about involves, they do not need senses. They don’t have to react and respond to a life-world. To this point, someone sympathetic to Strawson might reply that ultimate particles are not objects of natural selection and do not undergo embryogenesis. Accordingly, giving them useless experiences might not be expensive in terms of basic energetics — they might have them just ‘by chance’. Ultimate particles in that case might passively experience some features of the world, while the changes in their micro-experience if any would be due to whatever forces operate at that level, not to their own micro-exertions or micro-appetitions. But what would their experiences be like? If the ultimate particles are not alive and self-moving, their experiences are most easily conceived as resembling those of disembodied Cartesian selves — presumably restricted to pure mathematics or pure conceptual thought without visual imagery. Alternatively, someone sympathetic to Strawson might insist that animation, the capacity to initiate changes in the universe by moving oneself — is, like consciousness, an emergent phenomenon that must exist in ultimate particles. How else could agency emerge from some aggregation of physical stuff lacking agency? According to this line of reasoning, we should conclude not only panpsychism, but full pananimism. I can imagine Strawson resisting this elaboration of his theory. Animation, he might respond, is a phenomenon like life; it can be explained as emerging from chemical and physiological processes. Animal activity can be understood to emerge from something similar — namely, chemical activity; and, as he points out, many seventeenth-century philosophers, including Descartes, thought it possible to explain life, though not consciousness ‘mechanically’. Life is also relatively easily conceived as emergent from a nonliv- ing substratum, because we are now thoroughly familiar (as our ancestors were not) with many entities that ‘aren’t quite there yet’ where life is concerned, like viruses, prions and antibodies, and also with certain kinds of automatic machines. Similarly, an entity can be not quite there yet when it comes to agency. Many animals, for

Copyright (c) Imprint Academic 2010 For personal use only -- not for reproduction 182 C. WILSON example, seem to have some modest ability to control themselves and to decide what to do, but human ‘autonomy’ can achieve spectacular results in this direction. Consciousness, however, seems resistant to explanation because it seems impossible to have something on the way to an experience that isn’t quite there yet. So, we may not need to ascribe animation to micropsychic particles; at the same time, a real physicalist shouldn’t rule it out. The fact that we can explain animation as an emergent phenomenon of complex chemical structures can’t by itself entail that ultimate particles don’t have animation; my ability to explain P by Q doesn’t imply that P couldn’t come about elsewhere in some other way without Q being involved. And, since animation has always been found, as far as our experience reaches, together with consciousness, there is good reason to think, on inductive grounds, that if ultimate particles are conscious, they are animated too.

III To conclude, Strawson’s version of panpsychism is historically un- precedented, though his arguments for it bear some resemblance to Leibniz’. Though Strawson maintains that his argument is not epistemological and does not concern the limits of our current under- standing but the limits of what is truly possible in nature, it is hard to see why it is impossible that what one needs for there to be experiences in the universe is a brain made of insentient molecules put together in a certain way — and that’s all. Perhaps we have no models in natural science for the emergence of experiencing creatures from the states and activities of unexperiencing physical entities, but it is hard to see why the nonexistence of available models entails that this cannot happen. The claim that real physicalism not only permits but entails micropsychism invites us to ask, in a Humean spirit: which is more likely? That some things happen in a way that seems impossible but is in fact only incomprehensible to me? Or that subatomic particles have experiences somewhat like mine, and are probably animated to boot? Another version of real physicalism — more modest and more tenable by Humean empiricist criteria — would depart from the observation that we do not know, as the anti-Cartesians of the seventeenth century maintained, what physical entities by their own pow- ers, without the addition of souls or mental substance, can bring forth. At the same time, we have good reason to think that experiences only occur in living creatures with nervous systems, that are products of

Copyright (c) Imprint Academic 2010 For personal use only -- not for reproduction COMMENTARY ON GALEN STRAWSON 183 natural selection and that are able to move and to interact with the world. This is not the conclusion of a deductive argument, and it pos- sesses only high probability, not certainty; but, as Kant repeatedly pointed out, one cannot expect certainty about ultimate entities from a priori reasoning. It is meanwhile suggested by the kinds of deficits that occur in people whose brains are damaged, deficits that do in fact help us to understand what it is like to be ‘not quite there yet’as a conscious entity. This other version of real physicalism also falls out of a more general scientific conception of the world that is the outcome of the tendency to de-ascribe consciousness, purpose, intention and mentality to entities that are not, in the vernacular sense of the word, animals.

References Descartes (1985–1993), Philosophical Writings, ed. and trans. J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff, D. Murdoch and A. Kenny (3 vols., Cambridge: Cambridge Uni- versity Press). Leibniz (1989), Leibniz: Philosophical Essays, trans. Roger Ariew and Daniel Garber (Indianapolis: Hackett). Lucretius (2001), De rerum natura, trans. Martin Ferguson Smith (Indianapolis: Hackett). Spinoza (1985), The Collected Works of Spinoza, trans. E. Curley 2 vols. (Prince- ton: Princeton University Press).