The river and the labyrinth – part II

According to Alfred North Whitehead’s so-called process metaphysics, the fabric of the world consists of processes, not static entities. As we have seen last time, this is a notion that – in one form or another – pops up in both western (Heraclitus of Ephesus) and eastern (Buddhism, Taoism) philosophies. While there is a very important kernel of truth in it, Whitehead went horribly wrong with his notion that metaphysics can, and indeed should, come before any epistemological account of how we can say anything about the nature of the world.

In this second part I wish to briefly examine in a bit more detail three fundamental ideas articulated by Whitehead and gesture toward why they go horribly wrong: panpsychism (and panexperientialism), eternal objects in the mind of God, and dipolar panentheism. After that, we’ll see what can be done about the important project of recovering the very notion of process metaphysics.

The three most objectionable moves

(i) Panpsychism & Panexperientialism

Panpsychism is the view that consciousness or mind-like properties are fundamental and ubiquitous in nature. According to this theory, mentality exists at some level in all things – from atoms to humans – not just in brains or living organisms. A distinct but related view is panexperientialism, which holds that all actual entities (in Whitehead’s sense of the term, see part I) have a form of experience or feeling, though this is somehow distinguished from full-fledged consciousness.

Let’s start with panexperientialism. Whitehead’s argument is that we can avoid the specter of metaphysical dualism by declaring that experience goes all the way down to electrons, which “solves” the mind-body problem by stipulation.

The fact is, though, that this isn’t an explanation but a simple relabeling. Saying that electrons “experience” their environment in some proto-conscious way explains absolutely nothing about how or why subjective experience arises from physical processes. It merely pushes the mystery down to the basement and declares victory by calling it a solution.

Panpsychism, on its part, notoriously faces the combination problem: even if electrons have micro-experience (whatever that means), how do billions of them combine to produce the unified, qualitative experience of a human being? Whitehead’s answer – through “societies” of occasions supervised by a dominant “regnant” occasion – simply restates the problem at a higher level, introducing vacuous terminology that doesn’t bear any contact with empirical reality.

If panpsychism can’t explain the transition from micro-experience to unified consciousness, it explains nothing we actually care about. The so-called “hard problem” isn’t dissolved, it’s duplicated: now you have to explain it at both levels.

By contrast, scientists studying consciousness (from its neural correlates to contemporary integrated information theory debates) work with empirically tractable, falsifiable proposals. Whitehead’s panexperientialism is neither, it is a philosophical preference masquerading as a solution.

Unfortunately, panpsychism has become fashionable again in certain philosophy-of-mind circles, thanks to authors like Philip Goff and Galen Strawson, but their versions remain equally scientifically ungrounded (and philosophically highly problematic).