Mind and Matter: Panpsychism, Dual-Aspect Monism, and the Combination Problem

By Jiri Benovsky

In this book, the author takes a stand for a variant of panpsychism as being the best solution available to the mind-body problem. More exactly, he defends a view that can be labelled 'dual-aspect-pan-proto-psychism'. Panpsychism claims that mentality is ubiquitous to reality, and in combination with dual-aspect monism it claims that anything, from fundamental particles to rocks, trees, and human animals, has two aspects: a physical aspect and a mental aspect. In short, the view is that the nature of reality is 'phental' (physical-mental). But this does not mean, according to the author, that rocks and photons think or have conscious experiences, in the sense in which human animals have experiences. This is where pan-proto-psychism enters the picture as being a better theoretical option, where the mental aspects of fundamental particles, rocks, and trees are not experiential.

Many hard questions arise here. In this book, Benovsky focuses on the combinationproblem: in short, how do tiny mental aspects of fundamental particles combine to yield macro-phenomenal conscious experiences, such as your complex experience when you enjoy a great gastronomic meal? What makes the question even harder is that the combination problem is not just one problem, but rather a family of various combination issues and worries. Benovsky offers a general strategy to deal with these combination problems and focuses on one in particular – namely, the worry concerning the existence of subjects of experience. Indeed, if standard panpsychism were true, we would need an explanation of how tiny micro-subjects combine into a macro-subject like a human person. And if panprotopsychism is true, it has to explain how a subject of experience can arise from proto-micro-mental aspects of reality. Benovsky shows that understanding the nature of subjectivity in terms of the growingly familiar notion of mineness in combination with an eliminativist view of the self, allowsus to have a coherent picture, where this type of combination problem is avoided, without throwing the baby out with the bathwater. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Springer
• Release date: Dec 8, 2018
• ISBN: 9783030056339

Book preview

© The Author(s) 2018

Jiri BenovskyMind and MatterSpringerBriefs in Philosophyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05633-9_1

1. Dual-Aspect-Pan-Proto-Psychism

Jiri Benovsky¹, ²  

(1)

University of Fribourg, Fribourg, Switzerland

(2)

University of Neuchâtel, Neuchâtel, Switzerland

Jiri Benovsky

Email: [e-mail]

Abstract

Dual-aspect-pan-proto-psychism is a long and complicated name for a simple and elegant view. In this first chapter, I explain what this view is about and what it is for. I introduce the combination problem and the general direction to take in order to solve or avoid it.

§1.

The purpose of this first chapter is to state, as clearly and simply as I can manage, what the view I want to defend is. But in the course of explaining what dual-aspect-pan-proto-psychism is, I’ll already have to say something about what it is for—thus providing a general picture as well as at least a part of the motivation for it. Subsequent chapters will provide more theoretical background, more motivation, and argumentative support.

There was a time, not long ago, where I would have felt somewhat lonely in putting forward so blatantly such a view, and I would have had a very hard time to have it taken seriously (despite of a long tradition in many cultures, including Western philosophy and tracing back to Spinoza, James, Russell, and many others). But things have changed and various variants of panpsychism and/or Russellian monism are now on the market, and they seem to enjoy a growing popularity.¹ With growing popularity comes a better knowledge of the inner workings of the views at hand, and consequently more specific objections and challenges. These are now opportunities for us to improve this family of theories, and I wish to contribute to this collective effort in this book. I’ll defend a version according to which panprotopsychism is more adequate than panpsychism, and where dual-aspect monism (close to Russellian monism) is crucially important. In order to make this combination of views work—and in order to allow it to avoid/solve the hard combination problem—I’ll supplement it with a view of subjectivity based in the growingly familiar notion of mineness and in a variant of the no-self view.

§2.

Literally speaking, panpsychism is the view that everything has a mind. But the point is not to defend a kind of shamanic animist worldview, where one can talk to plants or mountains, when in a trance. If by having a mind we were to mean here that everything is conscious, perhaps even self-conscious, and that perhaps it has (or is²) a self, this would make for a quite unattractive view indeed, with many problems, which would be—as we shall see—entirely unnecessary. Panpsychism comes quite close to that, however. It is the view that fundamental physical entities have conscious experiences (Chalmers 2016, §1), see also Chalmers (2013, §1). Closely enough, Goff (2009, pp. 289–290) says that [p]anpsychism is the view that ultimate constituents of physical reality […] instantiate phenomenal properties. According to panpsychism there is something that it is like to be a physical ultimate. […] Panpsychism is the view that physical ultimates are conscious. One could then talk here about something like panexperientialism (see, inter alia, Strawson 2006)—a nice label to say that fundamental physical entities have qualitative conscious experiences. Pancognitivism is then not very far away—if something is able to have conscious qualitative experiences, it is not unnatural to think that it may be able to think, at least in some primitive way. Shamanic animism lurks in the neighbourhood.³

A less strong view is needed. As Goff (2017b, §2.1) puts it, one can state the core of the panpsychist view as the claim that mentality is fundamental and ubiquitous in the natural world. This can be simply taken to mean that fundamental entities have mentality and that they are parts of everything that exists—thus, mentality is present in all things in virtue of the fact that everything has a (fundamental) part that has mentality. One can then in principle avoid here the idea that mountains have conscious experiences, while accepting that the fundamental entities that compose them do. The idea could be that some macroscopic entities have conscious experiences (like human animals) and some do not (like mountains), while being both composed by fundamental entities which do have micro conscious experiences. Perhaps one can hold a view like that, but it’s quickly apparent that it gives rise to a messy business about composition/constitution—a strong and deadly version of the combination problem. The combination problem for the panpsychist is to explain the idea of ‘little’ conscious subjects of experience with their micro-experiences coming together to form a ‘big’ conscious subject with its own experiences (Goff 2017b, §4.2). There are several problems here:

(i)

If human animals have conscious experiences while mountains do not, why is it that sometimes this type of ‘mental composition’ occurs and sometimes it does not?

(ii)

How does ‘macro-mentality’ arise from ‘micro-mentality’? (Think of my experience of eating a gastronomic meal, and an experience that a fermion allegedly has.)

(iii)

How do ‘macro-subjects’ arise from ‘micro-subjects’?

These problems arise from the idea that fundamental entities have conscious experiences and that they are subjects which are the bearers of these experiences. It is this combination of panexperientialism and of the claim that any experience requires a subject to be its bearer that gives rise to this strong version of the combination problem (i.e. a conjunction of problems (i), (ii), and (iii).

§3.

But the combination problem, in one form or another, is a problem for everybody, not just the panpsychist. Consider the case of the material brain. On the one hand there are fundamental entities arranged brainwise, and on the other hand there is a brain (that is, if one is not an eliminativist about brains—for now, I’ll simply assume that brains exist). When it comes to composition, we have here all of the traditional problems concerning vagueness and arbitrariness⁴ (perhaps similar to the problem (i) above), but what I want to highlight here is that we don’t require that the macroscopic entity (the brain) must be of the same type as the micro fundamental entities (say, fermions). In short, we don’t expect, say, fermions to be ‘brainy stuff’. Fundamental entities that compose a tree are not ‘tree-like’ or ‘wood-like’ or ‘leaf-like’, and fundamental entities that compose a brain are not ‘brain-like’ or ‘neuron-like’. They are of a very different type indeed, if anything that quantum physics tells us is correct (just think of the wave-particle duality issue). When it comes to trees, mountains, tables, or brains we do not explain how they are composed by saying that they are made of tiny particles of tree-stuff, mountain-stuff, table-stuff, or brain-stuff. We explain how they are composed in virtue of an arrangement of fundamental micro-level entities that are of a very different nature. For instance, solidity seems to be a crucial notion when it comes to the nature of the macroscopic things, but it seems to have no relevance at all in the quantum micro realm of fundamental entities. Thus, macroscopic entities and the microscopic entities that compose them, while being both ‘material’, are of very different natures and have very different properties (say, solidity on the one hand, and wave-particle duality on the other), but this does not prevent us to say that brains are made of fundamental particles arranged in some relevant way.

Let us come back to panpsychism. The panpsychist wants to say that everything has some kind of mentality, even fundamental entities. As we have seen above, this gives immediately rise to hard questions about composition. But we should not mean these hard questions to be unfair: that is, we should not ask for something that we do not require of the neighbouring views. We should not produce an unreasonably