Experience Is Not a Predicate

Replies to Some Critics

The Fall semester has just commenced, so the time dilation of summer has all but evaporated. In an effort at efficiency, what follows will be a two-part response to some critics. Both I’m happy to say are what I’d call constructive critics, though only one (Sweet Rationalism (Nathan)) has engaged directly with my work. The other, Jeffrey Williams (After the Collapse), has engaged more generally with positions that bear at least nominal similarity to my own (ie, panpsychism).

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I’ll begin with Williams, who I only just recently encountered when the Substack algorithm gods brought this article to my attention:

The Metaphysical Errors of Consciousness

There’s a ton I appreciate about the perspective he articulates. He argues that reductive materialism has entirely exhausted itself, but expresses resistance to what could be thought of as the opposite extreme seeking to install Consciousness in place of mechanism. Such a reversal would simply replace one inadequate foundation with another. I share his diagnosis of what David Chalmers famously frames as the “hard problem” of consciousness—that it presents not so much a solvable problem but a false dilemma generated by first reducing the living brain to an amalgam of mechanisms and then marveling about how conscious experience becomes impossible to recover from the reduction. This framing is a great example of what Whitehead called the fallacy of misplaced concreteness.

Where we seem to part ways concerns the methodology of speculative philosophy and how experience itself is understood. Williams writes:

I take the language of Grund and Ungrund from Heidegger, although I employ it here for my own purpose. Metaphysics seeks a Grund for articulated existence by stepping beyond articulation and then making positive assertions about what supposedly lies there. But once it has crossed that boundary, what grounds those assertions? Matter, universal consciousness, conscious agents, information, mathematical structure, the wavefunction, Being, God: the preferred noun changes, but the gesture remains the same. The purported Grund, having left behind the experience that could provide its warrant, reveals itself as Ungrund.

This does not mean that nothing can be grounded. Experience provides ground. What is encountered can be observed, measured, compared, questioned, tested, and encountered differently. The distinction I want to preserve is not between certainty and skepticism but between what experience gives us grounds to articulate and what metaphysical speculation projects beyond those grounds.

Ungrund (or Abgrund) is not originally Heidegger’s coinage, but stems from the 17th century Christian mystic Jakob Böhme, and entered philosophy through Schelling’s 1809 Freedom essay, a text Heidegger lectured on in the 1930s. I mention this genealogy only because Schelling’s development of the notion of groundlessness reveals how Williams’ important critique of metaphysical foundationalism first arose within the context of a speculative philosophy of nature, not against it. Schelling shows how the ground of experience is itself abyssal. There always remains an “indivisible remainder” that can never be resolved through rational articulation.

There seems to me to be a residual Kantianism underlying Williams’ position. Without wanting to sound reductive, he claims that consciousness is energy, and that energy is itself already a form of articulated experience. He continues:

A living organism is entirely energetic without thermodynamics providing an exhaustive articulation of its life. Likewise consciousness can be wholly energetic while remaining irreducible to any single description, mechanism, or explanatory system.

Energy itself, however, must not be converted into metaphysical ground. I do not claim that the prearticulate “is energy.” Energy is already articulation: our most primordial physical experience of what confronts us, appearing through the intuitions of space and time. To project energy beyond articulation and declare it the ultimate substance would merely replace consciousness metaphysics with an energetic metaphysics.

Experience is here policed at the boundary of articulation as something given only through our spatiotemporal intuitions. Thus we are called to testify within Kant’s courtroom, which restricts what can be experienced to the supposed laws of our type of understanding and form of intuition. Experience is thereby restricted to clear sensory observation, to what can be measured and tested by the usual empirical scientific methodology. My first major intervention here is to emphasize the way Whitehead’s more radical empiricism helps us widen this account. Beneath the clear and distinct surfaces immediately presented to the senses lies a vaguer, non-sensory form of perception he calls “causal efficacy,” which he describes in terms of the felt inheritance of the body, the “withness” of the eye in its seeing, the ear in its hearing, or the stomach during feelings of dread or anxiety. Williams assures us that no one has ever experienced what it is like to be an electron. But the sort of panexperientialism I defend rests on no such claim. What we do experience, directly and constantly, is the usually nonconscious feeling of our own organismic inheritance of the past. Our conscious attention arrives later, as does the clarity and distinctness of our conscious sense perception. Before sense perception there is bodily reception. Whitehead’s wager is that we might avoid the false dilemma of the hard problem by descriptively generalizing our own nonconscious bodily feelings so that they come to be understood as constitutive of causal connection throughout nature. This is what his more radical empiricism entails, rather than some kind of wild speculation beyond the boundaries of experience.

A few important clarifications are warranted at this point. Experience, on this view, is neither a substance (eg, the intrinsic nature of the structural relations studied by physics) nor a quality or predicate that is attached to substances. Nor, crucially, is it necessarily conscious. Consciousness, in Whitehead’s scheme, is a very high-grade form of subjective experience that, on this planet, is the achievement of animal nervous systems that have evolved for billions of years. Experience as such is coterminous with causal connection in nature, because experients—or “actual occasions” in Whitehead’s terms—are what the causal nexus concretely consists of. The well-known combination problem faced by constitutive panpsychism (or micropsychism) loses its bite once the typical substance-property ontology is replaced with a process-relational one: actual occasions are not little psychic bits that are supposed to aggregate into larger psyches. Rather, each actual occasion of experience is a novel act of unification that inherits its predecessors. All of this, while radically empirical in the sense articulated above, is also admittedly speculative. But none of us can even begin to describe experience without assuming some sort of metaphysical background in terms of which our propositions would make sense. Williams’ claim that nothing more primordial than energy is ever encountered is itself a metaphysical thesis. So the task before us, should we choose to accept it, is not whether to avoid metaphysics but how to engage in metaphysical speculation responsibly.

Williams agrees that energy is not best understood as an ultimate substance. On my process-relational reading, energy can be understood to function as a predicate, ie, as a quantitative measure of change, a determinable pattern whose determinate magnitudes are abstracted from concrete happenings. No predicate can be more concrete than the concrete occasions from which it was abstracted. Williams grants as much when he acknowledges that energy is already an articulation of experience rather than the pre-articulate itself. But I nonetheless worry that when Williams declares consciousness “wholly energetic,” he treats the abstraction as concrete and the concrete as off-limits. This would be another example of Whitehead’s fallacy of misplaced concreteness. This worry is somewhat abated by his insistence that no description of energy entirely accounts for consciousness in its own terms. But then the question becomes unavoidable even within his own terms: what are the concrete happenings of which energy, as a quantitative measure, is being predicated? Whitehead’s further wager, as expressed in Modes of Thought (1938), is that “the energetic activity considered in physics is the emotional intensity entertained in life”: occasions of experience are the concrete happenings, and energy is the abstract measure. This makes causality (a concept famously rendered opaque by Hume and removed from nature to be relocated into a transcendental conceptual space by Kant) intelligible from within, as the felt transmission of the past from occasion to occasion.

Here I should mention my collaborator Ruth Kastner’s (Getting Nonlocal) Transactional Interpretation of quantum mechanics, which gives contemporary physical traction to Whitehead’s process-relational metaphysics. Williams mentions several rival ontological interpretations of QM, arguing that the real lesson should be that no such metaphysical ground is available to us: QM “frees us from the metaphysics of classical understanding without providing another metaphysics to replace it.” On his foundationalist or substance-based definition of metaphysics, I don’t disagree. But substantialism is not the only metaphysical game in town. Kastner’s Transactional approach treats quantum states as “real potentiae,” a conception we work out in connection with Whitehead’s metaphysics in a recent paper with plasma physicist and philosopher Timothy Eastman here:

I anticipate that Williams may dismiss quantum potentiae as precisely the sort of unobserved ontological extravagances he wants to forbid. But on the panexperiential reading I am defending, real potentiality is not beyond experience but pervades it in the form of anticipation, decision, and the felt relevance of the not-yet.

Rather than dismiss Williams’ distinction between experience and understanding, I would seek to radicalize it. Experience never arises naked but always comes clothed in theory, shaped by inherited but malleable common sense assumptions. The task of speculative philosophy is not to vault beyond experience into a noumenal unknown to assert a dogmatic metaphysics but to help shift our commonsense understanding so as to metamorphose experience itself. The alternative to the foundationalist pyramid Williams rightly rejects need not be a reheated Kantian quietism. There is also a process-relational alternative that acknowledges the abyssal nature of experience as an open-ended creative advance—groundless not because articulation runs up against an artificial limit, but because reality is an adventure, a creality, rather than a finished substance.

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Next I’ll turn to Nathan, who I have been engaging with for several months. Here is his latest constructive reply to me:

I Wanted Erik Svensson’s Argument for Physicalism to Be Stronger. So I Tried to Build One Myself.

I am grateful to Nathan for going the extra mile to understand where I am coming from. For the most part, he faithfully portrays my panexperiential process-relational position by distinguishing it from more easily dismissed forms of substance-based panpsychism. What I take away from his critique¹ is the following challenge: if causal connection can survive the removal of concepts like “feeling/prehension” or “experience,” why should anyone favor my interpretation over an apparently lower commitment agnosticism that keeps relational becoming while bracketing what this framing construes as the experiential predicate?

(UPDATE: after this article was posted, Sweet Rationalism (Nathan) made clear he is not at all happy with my above construal of his challenge, which he insists collapses the conditional status of his framing. I nonetheless continue to construe it in the way I have above, for reasons explained below and in this note. He is, of course, free to continue to disagree with me.)

As I’ve already noted in my reply to Williams, I have to reject the grammar in which the question is posed. This is not an evasion but follows from one of Whitehead’s deepest metaphysical motivations: to avoid unconsciously projecting the subject-predicate structure of grammar onto our conception of ultimate reality. To reiterate, experience is neither a substance nor a quality inhering in a substance. For Whitehead, substance-quality metaphysics and the attendant bifurcation of nature follows straightforwardly from an unconscious use of the subject-predicate form of propositions. The point is not to perform some monstrous surgical procedure on our grammar, but bring more awareness to the way language shapes and can reshape experience. Whitehead’s account of experience is such that his actual occasions do not “have” experience as an attribute but are themselves experients or buds of experience, ie, subject-superjects whose being is their feeling.

Whitehead develops his own theory of propositions wherein the logical subjects of any proposition are actual occasions, and where the patterns predicated of them are complex “eternal objects” (or definite potentials that may or may not ingress into actuality). Experience itself is not an eternal object, not a quality that might or might not characterize an occasion of experience. Rather, experience names the process of concrete actualization as such. Within Whitehead’s scheme, “experiential” cannot be construed as a predicate. Here we might draw another connection to Kant, for whom existence is not a real predicate. Whitehead’s claim that experience is not a predicate is the panexperiential analogue. In his Philosophy of Organism, experience occupies the position existence does for Kant. To be actual is to feel and be felt.

It follows that experience is not a detachable property or substance separable from causal connection in nature, as if “causality” might remain anything like what our embodied minds imagine it to be if it were so severable. The only causality we know is the experiential sort. Subtracting experience does not leave the same entities minus an optional feature. It changes everything, perhaps more than we can know.

My question for Nathan is, what fills the blank left by bracketing experience? My answer is that actuality itself goes missing when you withhold experience. Causal transition in nature imagined as if experience were or could be absent is just an abstract description of the form of a process that is indifferent to what is doing the transitioning. Nature is not a bloodless dance of numbers. Real facts are happening. An agnostic stance doesn’t just avoid the question of what nature’s happenings concretely are. It leaves a blank. And in a culture like ours, formed by centuries of mechanistic common sense, blanks are silently filled in by the imagery of insensate stuff, Whitehead’s “vacuous actuality.” Causal influence itself also goes missing. Causal inheritance is not merely empty succession. Even the angnostic account cannot avoid the difficulty, since inheritance, uptake, response, etc., are all words for receptivity. Press a bit harder on the meaning of this receptivity and either these verbs are shown to reveal a minimal interiority, in which case my point is conceded, or they deflate into bare succession, in which case the very meaning not only of experience but of causation (as real influence and not just contingent conjunction) has been lost. Finally, valuation also goes missing, since occasions do not merely undergo transition but selectively integrate their inheritance relative to an aim, however trivial. Remove experience, receptivity, and aim, and novelty collapses into randomness constrained by law. Nature is imagined to be valueless until, belatedly, valuers miraculously arrive, as if the cosmos came bifurcated into two fundamentally distinct epochs of feelingless process followed inexplicably by feelers. The lower-commitment rival is epistemically cheaper only insofar as its agnosticism can indefinitely bracket the question. If it is ultimately resolved in favor of genuinely nonexperiential process, then inexplicable brute emergence appears to come for free.

If process-relational panexperientialism is on to something, then we should expect that, as the science of consciousness matures, its favored indicators of experience will continue to resist convergence on any non-arbitrary phylogenetic threshold where experience suddenly switches on. We should expect gradualist frameworks and theories of degrees will prove progressively more fruitful than bifurcated models. Nathan grants that speculative philosophy concerns constitutive truths rather than simply empirical truths. The former answer to criteria including coherence, adequacy, and applicability rather than to the magnitudes measured by instruments. My loss condition?: Show me what causality means without implicitly relying on experiential verbs and prehension loses its warrant.

The alternative to the bridge between our own concrete actual occasions of experience and the universalization of experience as coterminous with causal relations as such is an ontological chasm, ie, a cosmos of wholly feelingless process from which feeling is imagined to erupt unaccountably at some special date in evolutionary history. The difference panexperientialism makes is finally practical and perceptual: the radically empirical test. The ethical and ecological stakes of acknowledging nature is pervaded by experients, by valuers, are enormous. Nature ceases to be axiologically inert stuff awaiting human valuation. Relating to the nonhuman world, the wider cosmos beyond just complex animal life, as intrinsically ensouled in some minimal sense of the term transforms one’s experience. Such transformations are the whole point of speculative philosophy, which seeks not some finished truth out there waiting for our objective representation, but a truth in the making, a truth manifest only if and when we lovingly participate in its realization.

In Defense of Truth as Participation: A Process Philosophical Proposal

From Truth as Correct Representation to Truth as Co-Creative Participation

1. NOTE: Sweet Rationalism (Nathan) has since replied to this post to make some important corrections to how I portrayed his position. Here’s my erratum and restatement of what I take to be our disagreement:

Nathan later posted an additional response, to which I replied here: