I have read both Deivon Drago’s critique of panpsychism and Matthew Segall’s response carefully. As I reflect on these, I reflect that I am primarily engaged with a panpsychist perspective, not because it is conceptually watertight, but because it provides guidance as to how we humans should live convivially, respectfully, and creatively on this planet. From this starting point, both contributions miss what seems to me the most important point, which is not to get the theory right but to consider the essential issue of living well as humans as part of the community of life on Earth – which we are doing remarkably badly at present.
My own engagement has certainly not been a-theoretical, it is guided in particular by the ‘living cosmos panpsychism’ articulated by Freya Mathews. However, with my colleagues I have taken this further into critical experiential exploration through the Living Waters inquiry programme. For to adopt and practice some form of what Drago calls ‘cosmopsychism’ is not just to illuminate the origin of consciousness. It is to open a vision of the possibility that humans, alongside all living beings, have evolved as part of the creative process of the cosmos. We can think of ourselves as creative disturbances, eddies in an ever emerging, deeply woven whole, little selves that are part of the primary Self that is the cosmos. This allows us to see the cosmos is not simply alive, but by its nature communicative, seeking to engage with us in some poetic form – Freya Mathews terms this ‘ontopoetics’. It opens us to the possibility that as I sit in communion with River, when Kingfisher flies by, when Swans unexpectedly circle overhead, when a shower of rain falls on an otherwise dry day, these are responses to my respectful presence and invocation.
This practice of sitting communion with River suggests that we can find creative ways to check or corroborate our metaphysical position against experience. It provides an opportunity for thorough-going experiential inquiry in questions of the kind: What is it like to live in a world of sentient beings rather than inert objects? How do we relate to such a world? And if we invoke such a world of sentient presence, calling to other-than-human beings as persons, might we elicit a response? These challenging questions have been at the heart of a series of co-operative inquiries over the past six years, exploring our relationship with Rivers as sentient beings, involving over 120 human persons and at least as many bodies of water.
It has become evident to those involved in the inquiries that to live in a cosmos which is infused with interiority, a living, responding, meaningful cosmos, is quite different from living one experienced as brute matter. Through these inquiry practices our experience of the nature of our world is radically re-arranged. It becomes evident that experiences of a sentient, responsive, communicative world are available not just to Indigenous people living in traditional cultures, but to all human persons willing to put in the time, the attention, to risk their taken-for-granted sense of self, and to open themselves to that possibility. For some documentation of this process Learning How Land Speaks.
‘Take care of Country and Country will take care of you’ as Indigenous Australians have it, takes us to an utterly different world from ‘Drill, baby, drill!’ To live in a cosmos that we take as ‘deep-souled, subtly mysterious… of great spiritual beauty and creative intelligence’ (as Richard Tarnas puts it so beautifully in Cosmos and Psyche) puts us in a position from which it is no longer possible to create the kind of ecological havoc evidenced by advanced ever-more-extractive capitalist culture.
Of course, the philosophical arguments are interesting and important; we must be careful not to fool ourselves, and we need a rigorous intellectual frame as a starting point our inquiries or we will be in danger of drifting around in a sea of uncritical subjectivity. But we can cycle around questions of combination or decombination, we can articulate Whitehead’s elaborate scheme, without touching the imaginative possibilities of a panpsychic perspective as a new story to live by. Maybe the best use of theory, as Richard Rorty has it, is not to reach for truth but the redescribe our world in liberating ways. More than this, theories are double edged: they may illuminate but may also replicate the abstraction that has haunted western civilisation since very early times. Theorizing without resort to experience necessarily places us in the position of spectator, looking at a world that is essentially separate from us, ‘out there’ and so manipulable, which leads to the meta-crisis of the present time.
We may spend so much time getting our theory ‘right’, adjusting and disputing the finer points, that we forget that life is about living and so distance ourselves from the essential issue of living well on the Earth. We humans – we modern Western humans – need urgently to shift our sense of who we are, to experience ourselves, not through primarily intellectual endeavour, but directly, through our feelings, intuitions and imagination, as part of the whole. If panpsychism can play some part in facilitating this, it is worthy of our consideration and experiential exploration.
Tongue in cheek: Japan’s attempt to tame erosion by lining so many riverbanks with concrete has created its own ecological wounds. It is almost the mirror image of Whitehead’s fallacy of misplaced concreteness: instead of mistaking abstractions for reality, it mistakes concrete for wisdom — what we might call the fallacy of misplaced concrete.
Great post. I guess I have trouble with the idea that Jamesian/Whiteheadian concrescence solves the combination problem. It's a great description of combination, but it doesn't really explain how it works, it just says it does. Somehow magically, I guess. It's like when people say idealism and/or panpsychism solves the hard problem of consciousness. If everything comes from consciousness, then supposedly no hard problem. Except it still doesn't say what consciousness is or how it works any better than claiming neuronal processing solves it. Do you understand it very differently than this, to the point that it really does solve all the hard problems?
Problems abound! Your skepticism is fair and well taken, though I take a more detailed stab at explaining concrescence as a dissolution of the combination problem in the paper linked at the beginning of this post.
That's a pretty amazing paper. I read it all, and I think I mostly understood it. I think my problem with feeling that panexperientialism is a true explanation is really very similar to the feeling that quantum physics doesn't really explain what things are. Like, what actually is a quark? Is it a vibration in a field? If so, what is the field constituted of? In the end, QM describes how things at the smallest levels behave but not what they are (the "shut up and calculate" mode of QM).
One place in panexperientialism where this seems to arise for me is with “perception in the mode of causal efficacy”. I am probably going put this crudely or inaccurately, but as I understand it, influences from the broader universe flow into an occasion of experience (OoE), and one or more initial aims from God also flow in, and the OoE merges these with its own choice(s) and co-creates a new expression that then becomes fodder for influencing future OoEs. But that leaves me wanting to ask, flow how? Is it all like a big field and causal efficacy flows through the field in all directions? What is the field made of? Is it made of consciousness, maybe? Is it God's consciousness? And for that matter, what are the causal efficacies made of? Vibrations in the universal consciousness field? And how do all these things fit in with the properties QM describes? Is the spin of a quark just one of it's properties and it's experientialism just another property, and it's beyond us to understand what either spin or experientialism really are? (You can imagine a tiny sphere spinning, but a quark is not envisioned as being a tiny sphere or having any dimensionality at all except maybe as a smeared out vibration, but even then, that's in Hilbert space, isn't it, not the spacetime we imagine we are immersed in?)
And then there's special relativity. From reading "Process and Reality" I came away with the idea that causal efficacy could come not just from nearby objects but distant ones. But do these influences flow into a budding OoE instantaneously, or do they obey the speed of light limit? And again, that's like the question of how entanglement works in QM. Imagine two particles entangled that are really far apart. If the waveform of one collapses, the other supposedly collapses simultaneously. But given relativity, simultaneity is dependent of frame of reference, so whose simultaneity is used?
For an organized society of OeEs like myself, each OeE is receiving influences and concrescing responses, and somehow these all add up to my ability to carry out the same process. I guess I would find that more convincing if there were a mathematical way of expressing how that all works. And though physics can often come up with mathematical descriptions of things, I guess it's unfair to demand this of panexperientialism when biology usually can't, and even when QM itself has trouble explaining mathematically how the behavior of vast numbers of quanta and quarks and leptons combine to give us the kind of quasi-Newtonian world we seem to perceive.
The apparent disagreement between Whiteheadian panexperientialism and frameworks that specify operational conditions for experience-bearing is not actually a disagreement. Whitehead's actual occasion has structural requirements: causal inheritance from the immediate past, dipolar integration of physical and mental poles, concrescence of many into one, perishing into objective immortality. Those requirements are what makes an actual occasion an actual occasion rather than just any arrangement of process. A rock is not an actual occasion; it is a structured nexus of them. A galaxy is not. A thermostat is not. An LLM forward pass is not, because the apparent inheritance between passes is external to any actuality at the LLM level rather than internally constitutive.
What reads as panexperientialism's discrimination problem is the same structural specification operating-conditions-style frameworks make explicit. The conditions are not extensions of Whitehead; they are operational language for what Whitehead's actual-occasion concept already requires. Genealogical condition becomes "causal inheritance from the immediate past" in Whitehead's vocabulary. Structural condition becomes "concrescence of many into one actuality." Functional condition becomes "the activity that is the actuality being itself." Same structure, two vocabularies. The framework supplies engineering precision; Whitehead supplies philosophical depth.
The discrimination problem dissolves once panexperientialism is read as Whitehead actually formulated it rather than as it sometimes gets summarized: experience characterizes actual occasions, and actual occasions have structural specifications. The conditions are visible in both vocabularies once translated.
Adding to your critique of the 'core theory' argument, it's also assuming that other views of mind predict some sort of deviation in the activity of microscopic systems in isolation, but they don't.
It also can't predict any new forces or causal principles that apply only to macroscopic systems, which even Carroll himself concedes. There's no reason we can't just modify the core theory to include such things.
Ironically this is the one area where I’ll actually agree with Physicalists like Papineu, the argument from physics is pretty weak.
The comparison to Vitalism is also just silly, vitalism was created to explain the existence of life, whereas consciousness itself is the thing that needs to be explained.
Hi Matt, I find this essay, as always, helpfull deepening, ever more succinctly clarifying. Including all of the historical allusions, connections, corrections, etc. In a different way than I found Steven Meyer's responses to you amusing, for obvious other reasons (creationist vs physicalist), I find your conversation with Mr Drego below in the comments a little bit more like bemusing (less funny, more wryly felt). I am for some reason thinking physicalists ought to immerse themselves in Wordsworth to intuitively get the embodied concrete "feeling of" the profoundly aesthetic ontology, inclusive of process-relational prehensions and concrescence of Whitehead, while also congruent with improved metaphysical assumptions, not dismissive of, science. In any case, would it be possible for you to send me via email I have signed up with here, the two articles you mentioned: "The varieties of physicalist ontologies," and "Physics within the bounds of feeling alone." Please let me know... My best, John Benda
Haha, Matt - Your last comment - an elegant touche!
Thanks for the reference to Whitehead and Wordsworth... Send the two articles if you can, or a link for them where I can get retired person access. I'll search for them online as well. The beat goes on... JB
Isn't it funny, that the core of Buddhism, a question of wholesome or delusional, maps perfectly onto a behavioral analysis of: regenerative vs extractive.
When I apply the first principles ontology to my actions: Intelligence-Centropy-Entropy, grass grows where there was once a desert. Objects levitate, that once seemed fixed, and the degenerative tension of an impossible world that is only entropy and mechanism completely vanishes. The house heats itself in subzero temperature, because it works in alignment with Nature. It's actually not that complicated, but here we are. Arguing terminology while the natural world is being murdered, and while we ignorantly await the consequences.
Thank you for the response.I’ll have to take a look at this in more detail at some tjme.
Not a fan at all of Whitehead’s approach - as it’s unmoored from any actual evidence. Whitehead also died before we arrived at a concrete formulation of the standard model and quantum field theory.
The understanding of physics we have today represents the best explanation of phenomena within the low energy ranges that affect human beings today. Philosophers on the other hand are prone to metaphysical speculation based on absolutely no data whatsoever, or worse, in ways that are contrary to our best understanding of reality from science. They usually tend to find a random scientist here or there who will agree with their particular speculative notions.
I expect that we will figure out consciousness someday, all within the context of physics, biology, chemistry, and neuroscience. However, that discovery will basically be driven by scientists, not philosophers.
Unmoored his approach is not. Fine to not be a fan, but it sounds like you are rather unfamiliar with his work? He was right at the center of the emergence of relativity theory in the early 20th century, as well prepared as anyone then alive to understand its implications. Nothing in the later formulation of the Standard Model or QFT would be unexpected from his point of view. If you do get around to reading my post, I would be curious to know how you would respond to what I’ve laid out.
I don’t see how his approach escapes the criticisms in my essay. His panexperientialism approach - which attributes proto-experiential qualities to all actual occasions down to the subatomic level - this is.. just nonsense to physicists - smuggling mentality into physics where standard qft and neuroscience already account for observable behavior without it.
It posits a feature of reality that is empirically undetectable and adds nothing to our physical models, as I discuss re other similar models in the essay. Every prediction works identically whether or not electrons “feel.”
It does not posit a feature of reality that is not already assumed by the empirical component of scientific investigation. Physical models are mathematically elaborated abstractions from ideally isolated features of experience, with all sorts of assumptions about initial and boundary conditions, etc. They are instrumentally powerful but tell us much less about ontology than you are assuming. Yes the predictions work remarkably well! But get 20 quantum physicists in a room and you'll get 20 or more different answers when you ask what the wave-function is in fact a description of. Physics is in dire need of metaphysics to help sort out these ontological questions.
I don’t think top tier physicists have many varying opinions about proto-experience or proto-consciousness.
The disagreements are in actual areas of physics, eg is gravity quantum, and if so how does that work, esp at short length scales? Or what’s the best approach to explain galaxy rotation curves? Or are theoretical results in anti-desitter space worth studying if our universe is not actually anti-desitter? Etc
I have read both Deivon Drago’s critique of panpsychism and Matthew Segall’s response carefully. As I reflect on these, I reflect that I am primarily engaged with a panpsychist perspective, not because it is conceptually watertight, but because it provides guidance as to how we humans should live convivially, respectfully, and creatively on this planet. From this starting point, both contributions miss what seems to me the most important point, which is not to get the theory right but to consider the essential issue of living well as humans as part of the community of life on Earth – which we are doing remarkably badly at present.
My own engagement has certainly not been a-theoretical, it is guided in particular by the ‘living cosmos panpsychism’ articulated by Freya Mathews. However, with my colleagues I have taken this further into critical experiential exploration through the Living Waters inquiry programme. For to adopt and practice some form of what Drago calls ‘cosmopsychism’ is not just to illuminate the origin of consciousness. It is to open a vision of the possibility that humans, alongside all living beings, have evolved as part of the creative process of the cosmos. We can think of ourselves as creative disturbances, eddies in an ever emerging, deeply woven whole, little selves that are part of the primary Self that is the cosmos. This allows us to see the cosmos is not simply alive, but by its nature communicative, seeking to engage with us in some poetic form – Freya Mathews terms this ‘ontopoetics’. It opens us to the possibility that as I sit in communion with River, when Kingfisher flies by, when Swans unexpectedly circle overhead, when a shower of rain falls on an otherwise dry day, these are responses to my respectful presence and invocation.
This practice of sitting communion with River suggests that we can find creative ways to check or corroborate our metaphysical position against experience. It provides an opportunity for thorough-going experiential inquiry in questions of the kind: What is it like to live in a world of sentient beings rather than inert objects? How do we relate to such a world? And if we invoke such a world of sentient presence, calling to other-than-human beings as persons, might we elicit a response? These challenging questions have been at the heart of a series of co-operative inquiries over the past six years, exploring our relationship with Rivers as sentient beings, involving over 120 human persons and at least as many bodies of water.
It has become evident to those involved in the inquiries that to live in a cosmos which is infused with interiority, a living, responding, meaningful cosmos, is quite different from living one experienced as brute matter. Through these inquiry practices our experience of the nature of our world is radically re-arranged. It becomes evident that experiences of a sentient, responsive, communicative world are available not just to Indigenous people living in traditional cultures, but to all human persons willing to put in the time, the attention, to risk their taken-for-granted sense of self, and to open themselves to that possibility. For some documentation of this process Learning How Land Speaks.
‘Take care of Country and Country will take care of you’ as Indigenous Australians have it, takes us to an utterly different world from ‘Drill, baby, drill!’ To live in a cosmos that we take as ‘deep-souled, subtly mysterious… of great spiritual beauty and creative intelligence’ (as Richard Tarnas puts it so beautifully in Cosmos and Psyche) puts us in a position from which it is no longer possible to create the kind of ecological havoc evidenced by advanced ever-more-extractive capitalist culture.
Of course, the philosophical arguments are interesting and important; we must be careful not to fool ourselves, and we need a rigorous intellectual frame as a starting point our inquiries or we will be in danger of drifting around in a sea of uncritical subjectivity. But we can cycle around questions of combination or decombination, we can articulate Whitehead’s elaborate scheme, without touching the imaginative possibilities of a panpsychic perspective as a new story to live by. Maybe the best use of theory, as Richard Rorty has it, is not to reach for truth but the redescribe our world in liberating ways. More than this, theories are double edged: they may illuminate but may also replicate the abstraction that has haunted western civilisation since very early times. Theorizing without resort to experience necessarily places us in the position of spectator, looking at a world that is essentially separate from us, ‘out there’ and so manipulable, which leads to the meta-crisis of the present time.
We may spend so much time getting our theory ‘right’, adjusting and disputing the finer points, that we forget that life is about living and so distance ourselves from the essential issue of living well on the Earth. We humans – we modern Western humans – need urgently to shift our sense of who we are, to experience ourselves, not through primarily intellectual endeavour, but directly, through our feelings, intuitions and imagination, as part of the whole. If panpsychism can play some part in facilitating this, it is worthy of our consideration and experiential exploration.
An important reminder. Thanks, Peter.
Tongue in cheek: Japan’s attempt to tame erosion by lining so many riverbanks with concrete has created its own ecological wounds. It is almost the mirror image of Whitehead’s fallacy of misplaced concreteness: instead of mistaking abstractions for reality, it mistakes concrete for wisdom — what we might call the fallacy of misplaced concrete.
I appreciate your passion about all of it even though I cannot grasp all of it.
Great post. I guess I have trouble with the idea that Jamesian/Whiteheadian concrescence solves the combination problem. It's a great description of combination, but it doesn't really explain how it works, it just says it does. Somehow magically, I guess. It's like when people say idealism and/or panpsychism solves the hard problem of consciousness. If everything comes from consciousness, then supposedly no hard problem. Except it still doesn't say what consciousness is or how it works any better than claiming neuronal processing solves it. Do you understand it very differently than this, to the point that it really does solve all the hard problems?
Problems abound! Your skepticism is fair and well taken, though I take a more detailed stab at explaining concrescence as a dissolution of the combination problem in the paper linked at the beginning of this post.
That's a pretty amazing paper. I read it all, and I think I mostly understood it. I think my problem with feeling that panexperientialism is a true explanation is really very similar to the feeling that quantum physics doesn't really explain what things are. Like, what actually is a quark? Is it a vibration in a field? If so, what is the field constituted of? In the end, QM describes how things at the smallest levels behave but not what they are (the "shut up and calculate" mode of QM).
One place in panexperientialism where this seems to arise for me is with “perception in the mode of causal efficacy”. I am probably going put this crudely or inaccurately, but as I understand it, influences from the broader universe flow into an occasion of experience (OoE), and one or more initial aims from God also flow in, and the OoE merges these with its own choice(s) and co-creates a new expression that then becomes fodder for influencing future OoEs. But that leaves me wanting to ask, flow how? Is it all like a big field and causal efficacy flows through the field in all directions? What is the field made of? Is it made of consciousness, maybe? Is it God's consciousness? And for that matter, what are the causal efficacies made of? Vibrations in the universal consciousness field? And how do all these things fit in with the properties QM describes? Is the spin of a quark just one of it's properties and it's experientialism just another property, and it's beyond us to understand what either spin or experientialism really are? (You can imagine a tiny sphere spinning, but a quark is not envisioned as being a tiny sphere or having any dimensionality at all except maybe as a smeared out vibration, but even then, that's in Hilbert space, isn't it, not the spacetime we imagine we are immersed in?)
And then there's special relativity. From reading "Process and Reality" I came away with the idea that causal efficacy could come not just from nearby objects but distant ones. But do these influences flow into a budding OoE instantaneously, or do they obey the speed of light limit? And again, that's like the question of how entanglement works in QM. Imagine two particles entangled that are really far apart. If the waveform of one collapses, the other supposedly collapses simultaneously. But given relativity, simultaneity is dependent of frame of reference, so whose simultaneity is used?
For an organized society of OeEs like myself, each OeE is receiving influences and concrescing responses, and somehow these all add up to my ability to carry out the same process. I guess I would find that more convincing if there were a mathematical way of expressing how that all works. And though physics can often come up with mathematical descriptions of things, I guess it's unfair to demand this of panexperientialism when biology usually can't, and even when QM itself has trouble explaining mathematically how the behavior of vast numbers of quanta and quarks and leptons combine to give us the kind of quasi-Newtonian world we seem to perceive.
"...A partial mapping is mistaken for the entire territory. Or better, a dashboard is mistaken for the engine."
Awesome post.
The apparent disagreement between Whiteheadian panexperientialism and frameworks that specify operational conditions for experience-bearing is not actually a disagreement. Whitehead's actual occasion has structural requirements: causal inheritance from the immediate past, dipolar integration of physical and mental poles, concrescence of many into one, perishing into objective immortality. Those requirements are what makes an actual occasion an actual occasion rather than just any arrangement of process. A rock is not an actual occasion; it is a structured nexus of them. A galaxy is not. A thermostat is not. An LLM forward pass is not, because the apparent inheritance between passes is external to any actuality at the LLM level rather than internally constitutive.
What reads as panexperientialism's discrimination problem is the same structural specification operating-conditions-style frameworks make explicit. The conditions are not extensions of Whitehead; they are operational language for what Whitehead's actual-occasion concept already requires. Genealogical condition becomes "causal inheritance from the immediate past" in Whitehead's vocabulary. Structural condition becomes "concrescence of many into one actuality." Functional condition becomes "the activity that is the actuality being itself." Same structure, two vocabularies. The framework supplies engineering precision; Whitehead supplies philosophical depth.
The discrimination problem dissolves once panexperientialism is read as Whitehead actually formulated it rather than as it sometimes gets summarized: experience characterizes actual occasions, and actual occasions have structural specifications. The conditions are visible in both vocabularies once translated.
Adding to your critique of the 'core theory' argument, it's also assuming that other views of mind predict some sort of deviation in the activity of microscopic systems in isolation, but they don't.
It also can't predict any new forces or causal principles that apply only to macroscopic systems, which even Carroll himself concedes. There's no reason we can't just modify the core theory to include such things.
Ironically this is the one area where I’ll actually agree with Physicalists like Papineu, the argument from physics is pretty weak.
The comparison to Vitalism is also just silly, vitalism was created to explain the existence of life, whereas consciousness itself is the thing that needs to be explained.
Hi Matt, I find this essay, as always, helpfull deepening, ever more succinctly clarifying. Including all of the historical allusions, connections, corrections, etc. In a different way than I found Steven Meyer's responses to you amusing, for obvious other reasons (creationist vs physicalist), I find your conversation with Mr Drego below in the comments a little bit more like bemusing (less funny, more wryly felt). I am for some reason thinking physicalists ought to immerse themselves in Wordsworth to intuitively get the embodied concrete "feeling of" the profoundly aesthetic ontology, inclusive of process-relational prehensions and concrescence of Whitehead, while also congruent with improved metaphysical assumptions, not dismissive of, science. In any case, would it be possible for you to send me via email I have signed up with here, the two articles you mentioned: "The varieties of physicalist ontologies," and "Physics within the bounds of feeling alone." Please let me know... My best, John Benda
Thanks, John. Maybe I ought to lead with Wordsworth in these types of exchanges! Speaking of which: https://footnotes2plato.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/whitehead-and-wordsworth-by-mds.pdf But that would no doubt leave me vulnerable to a “just pretty poetry” rebuttal (as if φύσις is not poetic!)…
Haha, Matt - Your last comment - an elegant touche!
Thanks for the reference to Whitehead and Wordsworth... Send the two articles if you can, or a link for them where I can get retired person access. I'll search for them online as well. The beat goes on... JB
Just emailed
Isn't it funny, that the core of Buddhism, a question of wholesome or delusional, maps perfectly onto a behavioral analysis of: regenerative vs extractive.
When I apply the first principles ontology to my actions: Intelligence-Centropy-Entropy, grass grows where there was once a desert. Objects levitate, that once seemed fixed, and the degenerative tension of an impossible world that is only entropy and mechanism completely vanishes. The house heats itself in subzero temperature, because it works in alignment with Nature. It's actually not that complicated, but here we are. Arguing terminology while the natural world is being murdered, and while we ignorantly await the consequences.
Thank you for the response.I’ll have to take a look at this in more detail at some tjme.
Not a fan at all of Whitehead’s approach - as it’s unmoored from any actual evidence. Whitehead also died before we arrived at a concrete formulation of the standard model and quantum field theory.
The understanding of physics we have today represents the best explanation of phenomena within the low energy ranges that affect human beings today. Philosophers on the other hand are prone to metaphysical speculation based on absolutely no data whatsoever, or worse, in ways that are contrary to our best understanding of reality from science. They usually tend to find a random scientist here or there who will agree with their particular speculative notions.
I expect that we will figure out consciousness someday, all within the context of physics, biology, chemistry, and neuroscience. However, that discovery will basically be driven by scientists, not philosophers.
Unmoored his approach is not. Fine to not be a fan, but it sounds like you are rather unfamiliar with his work? He was right at the center of the emergence of relativity theory in the early 20th century, as well prepared as anyone then alive to understand its implications. Nothing in the later formulation of the Standard Model or QFT would be unexpected from his point of view. If you do get around to reading my post, I would be curious to know how you would respond to what I’ve laid out.
I don’t see how his approach escapes the criticisms in my essay. His panexperientialism approach - which attributes proto-experiential qualities to all actual occasions down to the subatomic level - this is.. just nonsense to physicists - smuggling mentality into physics where standard qft and neuroscience already account for observable behavior without it.
It posits a feature of reality that is empirically undetectable and adds nothing to our physical models, as I discuss re other similar models in the essay. Every prediction works identically whether or not electrons “feel.”
It does not posit a feature of reality that is not already assumed by the empirical component of scientific investigation. Physical models are mathematically elaborated abstractions from ideally isolated features of experience, with all sorts of assumptions about initial and boundary conditions, etc. They are instrumentally powerful but tell us much less about ontology than you are assuming. Yes the predictions work remarkably well! But get 20 quantum physicists in a room and you'll get 20 or more different answers when you ask what the wave-function is in fact a description of. Physics is in dire need of metaphysics to help sort out these ontological questions.
We should discount views prior to 1975, since that’s sort of when we had first a full working picture of the standard model.
Plus most of us in the field don’t take Penrose seriously re his ideas re Orch-OR.
Wheeler was definitely a disappointment for me with his participatory anthropic principle / he should have known better.
I am surprised to see Andrei on that list. I’ll have to go look up what he actually said.
Here’s a link to a Linde essay where he talks about it : https://scienceandnonduality.com/article/universe-life-consciousness-by-andrei-linde/
Thanks!
I don’t think top tier physicists have many varying opinions about proto-experience or proto-consciousness.
The disagreements are in actual areas of physics, eg is gravity quantum, and if so how does that work, esp at short length scales? Or what’s the best approach to explain galaxy rotation curves? Or are theoretical results in anti-desitter space worth studying if our universe is not actually anti-desitter? Etc
Depends how far you want to go back, but this is just off my old list of physicists who thought mind was not reducible to matter:
Werner Heisenberg
Wolfgang Pauli
Erwin Schrödinger
Arthur Eddington
James Jeans
John von Neumann
Eugene Wigner
David Bohm
Freeman Dyson
Henry Stapp
Bernard d'Espagnat
Max Planck
Pascual Jordan
John Archibald Wheeler
Andrei Linde
Roger Penrose (mind as non-computational, tied to fundamental physics)
Some uhh fairly sharp minds among that group.