Human Consciousness and Effective Theory

A Case Study in Ontogenetic Diplomacy

“Most people would be easier to persuade that they are a piece of lava on the moon than to take themselves to be an ‘I’ (a self).” -Fichte

Though I often find it to be an important first step beyond scientific materialism, I am not myself entirely convinced of the transcendental idealist position. I don’t quote Fichte because I am keen to follow him into the absolutization of a cosmic Ego. The experience of getting tackled in rugby (as Whitehead exclaimed to Hocking during a seminar at Harvard) should already be enough to absolve me of such absolutism. But then again, already I must admit that these first four sentences of my post make precisely the sort of self-reflexive references to consciousness that threaten to prove Fichte’s point. “I” names the speaking subject in the nominative—captain Ego at the helm—while “me” shifts that same first person into the objective case, turning the self into something solid enough to grasp, or tackle. While it is true that someone else can tackle me, no one else can be me. There is no such thing as “the pain,” only my pain or your pain. Like you, I am the subject for whom all other experienced characteristics of the world (whether logical, physical, or psychical) are the predicates.

Of course, in-between the first- and third-person points of view there is the second-person. Reducing you to a predicate of my own self-activity would be a moral travesty. Thus a subject cannot be understood to be a substance, if by substance is meant something requiring nothing but itself in order to exist. Subjects are relational processes. This is as true for you and me—mere earthlings—as it is for any cosmic Self. Selves may succeed in realizing a kind of unified uniqueness, but only for a time. Our unity to the extent we can achieve it is only ever a composite unity: selves are made of cells. Thus, we need a “cell-theory of actuality” (Whitehead).

This is another way of getting at the transcendental panexperientialist orientation I was trying to articulate in this post:

I use the term “transcendental” in that post, which may suggest I am some kind of idealist. Elsewhere I refer to my approach as “descendental” to signal that it differs from and in fact functions as a realist inversion of transcendental idealism). There’s good reason that the panpsychist and idealist positions often sound a lot like one another. This confusion is magnified by the ways our contemporary intellectual climate, though showing signs of shifting winds, remains thoroughly materialist. Anything that challenges this physicalist common sense presents like nonsense, and who has time to struggle through technical disagreements between various purveyors of nonsense?

Even popular idealist and panpsychist positions nowadays tend to casually objectify consciousness, as though it were just another property out there in the world like mass or spin, or some kind of conceptually tractable Universal Mind (David Bentley Hart is quite lucid on this in his recent chat with Alex O'Connor). Lost in either picture is our own personal stake in life, our own experiential point of view that cannot be reduced to any third-person object or set of objects, our own sense of participating in the metamorphosis of the world-process moment by moment. Conscious human beings are not just another external fact to be accounted for, not just another piece of lava on the moon. We are actors with a real role to play in the creation of reality. In this sense, I read Fichte’s transcendental idealism not as a destination but as an invitation to articulate a novel form of constructive organic realism that would keep us as knowers involved in the world we are aiming to know. Timothy Jackson’s renders this approach in terms of “ontogenesis”:

---

All of this is context for a comment exchange I’ve had with Mark Slight, an incisive Dennettian functionalist who has been patient enough to engage with me in a comment thread.

I found my comment exchange with Mark slightly frustrating but very familiar. Talking across metaphysical divides is difficult, delicate work. Likely because non-physicalism is assumed in advance to be non-sensical, he didn’t get around to actually reading the post before replying. We’re all busy, I get it. He challenges what he takes to be my position based on an admittedly click-bait title. He does so from within a picture of reality that my argument in that post is trying to unsettle. As I reply to clarify my frame, he keeps taking my claims as if they were intended to function inside his preferred metaphysical picture. I thought it might be helpful to respond at length with this post, treating our exchange as a case study in ontogenetic diplomacy. Ontogenesis implies ontological pluralism. Thus one of the consequences of adopting such a stance is that philosophy becomes in large part a diplomatic method for coordinating the creative contrasts among various ontologies. The point is not to synthesize them into some absolute system, but to find ways of keeping the dialectic that deepens our knowledge turning. That is what I have tried to do with Fichte’s idealist position, and it is what I will next try to do with Mark’s physicalist position.

I read Mark as asserting the very sort of effective-theory ontology that Tim Jackson has been criticizing. In my “Philosophies of Ontogenesis” essay (linked above), I endorse Tim’s warning that we must move carefully between at least three registers: the prosaic (everyday life), the inquired (hypothetico-empirical science), and the speculative (imaginative generalization or speculative metaphysics). The pathologies of contemporary debate arise when one register tyrannizes the others: when speculation floats free of inquiry, or when inquiry pretends it has no metaphysical presuppositions, or when the prosaic gets dismissed as “merely subjective” or “just an opinion.”

It seems to me that Mark wants to keep everything in the inquired register, all the while smuggling in speculative commitments without admitting it. In my post on consciousness (linked above), I try to take scientific inquiry as seriously as I take the commonsense presuppositions of everyday life. But I’m also asking explicitly philosophical questions about the conditions under which anything can count as evidence or fact in the first place, and about the metaphysical consequences of granting full reality to experiential living processes rather than treating them as epiphenomenal complications layered atop a completed physics. This is why we pass each other like ships orbiting the dark side of the moon. We’re not disagreeing about which propositions are true so much as we are assuming different accounts of what a proposition is (see my article “Physics Within the Bounds of Feeling Alone”¹ for more on the role of “propositional feelings” in scientific modeling).

In our comment exchange, Mark tries to corner me with a common functionalist trilemma. He asks me to assume, at least for the time it takes me to consider his thought experiment, that the laws of physics are a fixed, mathematizable rule-set defined over a prestated space of possible states, and that what is most real is whatever can, in principle, be captured by such a formalism. This is exactly what Tim critiques as effective theorization turned into ontology: a pre-defined phase/state space smuggles necessity and closure into models that were never meant to be metaphysical ultimates. Mark’s functionalist simulation scenario is a metaphysical posit disguised as a scientific finding.

Physicalism’s characteristic mistake is to treat the laws of physics as decontextualized, ahistorical ultimates. This is why Mark’s premise—“either the matter in you obeys math or else something extra is going on”—misses what I’m doing. I’m not denying regularities. I’m denying that the deepest regularities are best conceived as a prestated formal space through which human beings and the rest of nature move like trains on a track.

From the process-relational/panexperiential perspective, “function” is not something that floats free of feeling. Even at the most primitive level, for anything to actually occur, it must register and respond, prehend, inherit a past and aim at a future. If you remove the experiential togetherness required for an actual occurrence, you may describe a more or less useful map of what has happened. But this is an abstract diagram, a conceptual skeleton, not an alternate possible world. Actuality is not reducible to a computer simulation for the same reason the creative advance of nature is not reducible to a closed system of formal laws.

My language about conscious experience being the condition for scientific evidence of anything else irritates a certain temperament. Mark wants evidence to be objective and person-independent, with subjective experience appended as an additional data-stream that might be integrated into a completed physical worldview. I am arguing that this order is backwards. Evidence is always evidence for someone. Objectivity is not the absence of subjective perspective but the coordination of perspectives through shared method of abstraction. You don’t first have a world of facts and then add experience to the metaphysical mix. There is experience, and within it we carve out facts by refining our practices of attention and observation.

My exchange with Mark is a microcosm of why physicalists and non-physicalists so often talk past one another. There are no “facts” without relevance; no relevance without a perspective; no object without a subject; no law without abstraction from a field of experience. The “hard problem” isn’t a glitch in neuroscience, or just a philosophical reductio of materialism. It’s the symptom of an amnesiac cosmology that inherits early modern mechanical philosophy’s idea of dead, external matter, and then wonders how life and mind could be anything but an anomalous afterthought.

Metaphysics is not in the business of producing rival empirical hypotheses. It is an attempt to interpret the evidence we already have in a way that is coherent with its own conditions of possibility and adequate to lived experience. Different metaphysical systems can often accommodate the same experimental results while telling very different stories about what those results mean.

Mark attempted to settle our debate with a simulation thought experiment. But this would require me to first accept that reality is, in principle, exhaustively capturable by an effective theory over a prestated phase space. That is exactly what the ontogenetic critique challenges. Not because it is anti-scientific, but because it is trying to become more self-critical about the power and the limits of scientific abstraction in an evolving universe.

The divide is not between “science” and “pseudo-science” (contra Walter Veit). It is between divergent onto-epistemic temperaments: one that measures the success of scientific knowledge in terms of the predictive control afforded by its models, and tends to ontologize those models because of that success; and another that respects the power of the hypothetico-deductive method of science while also never losing touch with everything that exceeds it and that it presupposes.

1. https://doi.org/10.1080/02604027.2024.2406182