Philosophy Now Forum

I am vaguely familiar. Apart from Galen Strawson's excellent collection of articles in Consciousness in its place in nature I read David Skrbina's Panpsychism in the West which had a section on Whitehead and Russell. Someone else I was talking to outside this forum also asked me if I had looked at Whitehead in relation to this so my curiosity is now peaked sufficiently to take another look. Thanks for the prompt.

Do you think this has anything that is remotely associated with Panpsychism?
From what I have collected from Whitehead's, Russell's thinking as logicians, positivism etc - i find it puzzling to see them named in this context.

Whitehead had a fair old change of heart when their Logic project failed to ground Mathematics.

In the later part of his life Whitehead propounded a very comprehensive metaphysics that posited process, rather than substance, as the fundamental category. Rather than assuming substance as the basic metaphysical category, Whitehead introduced a new metaphysically primitive notion that he calls an "actual occasion." On Whitehead's view, an actual occasion is not an enduring substance, but a process of becoming.These actual occasions are a bit like subatomic particles, with some important differences:

• Each is momentary, coming into being, going through various phases and then passing away.
  
• The final phase of an actual occasion is not fully determined by the beginning. There is room for novelty, for the possibility of something new coming into being.
  
• Each actual occasion has awareness. In a primordial way it experiences its past and its present surroundings. Whitehead calls it an “occasion of experience.”
  
• What we think of as a particle is actually a series of these actual occasions. A single electron is a series of momentary electron-occasions that form an enduring object much like the momentary frames of a movie form a continuous picture.
  
• Nonliving things are composed of streams of actual occasions whose primordial experiences randomly cancel each other out.
  
• The primordial experiences of the actual occasions comprising living things, such as plants, animals and human beings, bind together and reinforce each other, giving birth to a higher-level experience. The richest and most intricate example we know of is our own conscious experience.

Wikipedia has a pretty good entry on Whithead, as does Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

I have not read enough of Russell to be able to comment on him.

That is interesting. Sounds like an objective version of existentialism, but I do not see any help for Panpsychism, eh?

According to Whitehead, each actual occasion (smallest unit of reality; sort of like a quantum event) has awareness. In a primordial way it experiences its past and its present surroundings. Whitehead calls it an “occasion of experience.” So experience, not just inert matter, goes all the way down, so to speak. Whitehead does not use the term "panpsychism," and others have called his theory "panexperientialism." But the idea that experience is as fundamental as matter is a form of panpsychism.

I think there is a lot of difference between a psyche or consciousness on the one hand and a rock 'experiencing' the ground at the termination of its fall from the cliff.
You seem to be clutching at straws.
You might well as look at Nietzsche's idea of 'becoming rather than being' as a way to look at the world.

From: http://www.iep.utm.edu/panpsych/

Bertrand Russell ultimately came to a neutral monist view in which events were the primary reality, and mind and matter were both constructed from them. After some early, suggestive comments, he became increasingly supportive of panpsychism in the late 1920′s. Russell’s book An Outline of Philosophy(1927) directly addressed this. He wrote: “My own feeling is that there is not a sharp line, but a difference of degree [between mind and matter]; an oyster is less mental than a man, but not wholly un-mental” (p. 209). Part of the reason why we cannot draw a line, he says, is that an essential aspect of mind is memory, and a memory of sorts is displayed even by inanimate objects: “we cannot, on this ground [of memory], erect an absolute barrier between mind and matter. … [I]nanimate matter, to some slight extent, shows analogous behavior” (p. 306). In the summary he adds,

The events that happen in our minds are part of the course of nature, and we do not know that the events which happen elsewhere are of a totally different kind. The physical world…is perhaps less rigidly determined by causal laws than it was thought to be; one might, more or less fancifully, attribute even to the atom a kind of limited free will (p. 311).

I think I am a metaphysician.

The rock doesn't experience anything. The subatomic "particles" (in quotes because the term is misleading) do, in a primordial way. This argument would make more sense if you read my paper on it: http://www.bmeacham.com/blog/?p=568.

But sub-atomic particles are a fiction devised to help explain physics.
As atoms are mostly nothing, and cannot be seen, how is it we see anything?
Such fictions are beyond experience.

Chaz: But sub-atomic particles are a fiction devised to help explain physics.

MGL: And physics helps explain our experience of reality. An instrumentalist interpretation of scientific theory cannot deny that there is some real phenomena that induces scientists to hypothesise about particles.

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Chaz: As atoms are mostly nothing, and cannot be seen, how is it we see anything?

MGL: You may have to expand your thought here. Individual atoms may be mostly nothing, but collectivley they make up everything we can see, including the organs we do the seeing with. Our eyes are quite literally photon detectors.

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Chaz: Such fictions are beyond experience.

MGL: Surely, if everying is reducable to "fictitious" particles of matter and energy, including the process of perception, then such fictions have to be part of experience.

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If this is about how to explain the emergence of complex phenomenal experiences in terms of materialism, then I'd agree that a ubiquitous, primitive precursor for such might seem necessary to avoid an almost magical-like arising of those features of consciousness in their correlation to whatever electrochemical activity in the head. But I also tend to view metaphysics from an "as if such and such were real or the case" standpoint. Materialism or physicalism is more of a game to be worked-out, like: "Taking into account what matter is supposed to be in this doctrine, then how would we go about resolving Chalmers' supposed hard-problem of consciousness, or whatever is submitted as a difficulty for materialism?"

In the course of the last decade, Gregg Rosenberg has also apparently presented a version of panexperientialism in A Place for Consciousness, where he argued anchoring those qualitative properties in causation: "Contemporary theories overlook that causation has both effective and receptive features....". One reviewer of the book commented: "Whilst reading this section I was sometimes left unconvinced by Rosenberg's arguments, not because of any fault with the arguments themselves or the way they were presented, but simply because the position he was adopting was contrary to some very deeply held beliefs." That may sum up the major obstacle; people are more concerned about how "pan-whatever" goes against their commonsense or traditional-held beliefs than these authors' reasons for advocating it and any of their approaches for how it might be implemented.

i think this could be called "data". As all things contain data and data are interpreted by all things as interpretation is just the process and result of "filtering" reality, whether or naught the reality is equal to its data or the data is just a representation of actual reality. Problem I think is that there are no reasons for why this data should be accessible to us "before" we have learned how to actually understand data, meaning to learn how to "filter" it in relation to us and therefore in relation to our world which consists of wildly other kinds of data than the data at small levels which may or may not be actual and therefore on a whole different level than our "representative" reality.

try to imagine the collision of atoms: how would your mind know how to "interpret" this? Of course it would interpret it, but it would make no sense to the mind because prior knowledge does not understand how it all relates.