This is the final post of a "philosophy week" and this is a blog with the phrase "Jamesian Philosophy" in its name. So we come around to James' philosophy today.
To his mind, I am sure, the relationship of mind and body was THE snaggiest and most consequential of philosophical issues.
In 1904, James wrote an introduction to an English translation to a work of Fechner, THE LITTLE BOOK OF LIFE AND DEATH, He (James) wrote in the introduction that energy fluctuations "can be superimposed and compounded, the smaller on the greater, as wavelets upon waves. This is as true in the mental as in the physical sphere. Speaking psychologically, we may say that a general wave of consciousness rises out of a subconscious background, and that certain portions of it catch the emphasis, as wavelets catch the light."
A lot is happening in this brief passage. One part of it is that James had a history of hostility to the idea of the compounding of consciousness. In his PRINCIPLES he called this the "mind dust theory". The idea to which he was expressing aversion was (and in some forms of panpsychism still is) the view that atoms as the building blocks of the world already possess some rudimentary sort of consciousness, and that this becomes greater as they unite and interact.
Our mental states are thus the complicated compounds of mental chemistry .
James disapproved of this theory in his 1890 textbook for several reasons, First, he was trying to build a scientific psychology, free of metaphysical baggage, which is what this sounded like. Second, in contributing to this natural science James developed the view that a mind state is a unitary thing, acting as a single agent. It is not a passive compound, it is that which does the compounding in the mental world. Third, it seemed to James that the "mind dust" scheme requires a subconscious, that proto-conscious stuff that yields consciousness when but only when the compounding passes a certain threshold. This subconscious, to James' eye, was merely a tumbling ground for whimsy.
Three good reasons not to be crazy about the supposed compounding of mind dust into actual minds.
At any rate, in the above passage, on Fechner, James in important respects abandons his earlier rejection of such notions. Fechner has converted him.
He would expand upon this in his 1908 Hibbert lectures on "a pluralistic universe". BOTH sides of this about-face, both James' initial rejection of compounding and his later acceptance of it, are important and both are to a great extent valid. Together they make the case not for panpsychism nor for human exceptionalism, but for a sort of Earth-Soul, of whose consciousness we are the elements, and for the emergence of that Earth-Soul within the history of the development of the ecosystem.
An Earth-Soul? What garbage! How can a pragmatist have such a fantasy? How does it "work"?
ReplyDeleteI think if James were among us today he might suggest that if belief in an earth-soul fosters a sense of awe, an aversion to slogans like "drill, baby drill!," and a sense of human responsibility for the next round of out-of-control wildfires then it will have done some work. But we have organs that do useful things for us, and the continued lives allowed us by these mechanisms allow for our thoughts, our loves, our valuing etc. The earth has the same organs, or at least gets performance of the same functions. "If you speak of circulation, [actual James quote here] what need has she of a heart when the sun keeps all the showers of rain that fall upon her and all the springs and brooks and rivers that irrigate her, going? What need has she of internal lungs, when her whole sensitive surface is in living commerce with the atmosphere that clings to it?" If you speak of the nervous system as the substratum of those thoughts and loves, well ... that brings us back to the compounding issue. Your consciousness may well compound with mine and that of a lot of other beings human and otherwise and know itself as a unitary consciousness of the planet. James' words again, "Must every higher means of unification between things be a literal brain-fibre, and go by that name? Cannot the earth-mind know otherwise the contents of our minds together?"
ReplyDeleteI can see how belief in an earth-soul might for some people do the work you say it does, just as I see how some people feel comforted by believing in a god. In "Pragmatism," James says that truth "is what works best in the way of leading us, what fits every part of life best and combines with the collectivity of experience's demands, nothing being omitted." The reference to "collectivity" suggests to me that, though an individual's belief in an earth-soul or a god may work for him or her, that would not be sufficient, for James, to make it true. If I'm right, then I am relieved that James did not fall off the deep end.
ReplyDeleteThe quotations you provide from "A Pluralistic Universe" are preceded by the statement, "Long ago the Earth was called an animal; but a planet is a higher class of being than either man or animal." As a higher class of being, it doesn't need a heart, lungs, or other internal organs, because it has "an altogether different plan of life." Fine, if you accept that the earth is a "being" in the sense that an animal is and that it has a "life." But I see no reason to accept that. The analogy between the earth and an animal may be poetic, but it has no philosophical value that I can see.
Consciousness is not so mysterious---it is hiding in plain sight. It IS compounded from many things, and exists in greater or lesser degrees, in all living things which have some sort of awareness. Example: the Mimosa plant. We should all sleep better, now.
ReplyDeleteWhat is mysterious is how the brain creates consciousness -- the mind-body problem. As Colin McGinn put it, "neither direct examination of consciousness nor of the brain can identify the properties that cause or provide the mechanism for consciousness, or how 'technicolour phenomenology [can] arise from soggy grey matter.'" I recommend McGinn's book, "The Mysterious Flame: Conscious Minds in a Material World."
DeleteSince we can't explain consciousness, we do not know that it is compounded from many things. "Consciousness" and "awareness" mean the same thing, so the statement that consciousness exists in all living things that have some sort of awareness is tautological.
The Wikipedia article on the Mimosa plant does not say anything about its being conscious. It states that it folds its leaves when touched or exposed to heat, and that "[s]ome mimosas raise their leaves in the day and lower them at night, and experiments done by Jean-Jacques d'Ortous de Mairan on mimosas in 1729 provided the first evidence of biological clocks." But none of those movements require consciousness.
"Consciousness" may have several meanings, and we are all in a terminological minefield here. Whitehead talks of something he calls "prehension," as a precursor out of which COMprehesion develops. Something is engaged in prehension whenever it grasps and moves about something else. A mimosa that raises its leaves because they have been touched is engaged in a prehensile relationship with that something else. Whether they comprehend one another is another matter. But a certain wealth of prehensile relationships is the substratum out of which comprehension presumably emerges. There is an interesting recent discussion: "Process Philosophy and the Emergent Theory of Mind: Whitehead, Lloyd Morgan and Schelling," readily available online.
DeleteArran Gare
Prehension as a precursor to consciousness seems plausible, but it seems a question for evolutionary scientists, not for philosophers.
DeleteAnd just so. I kept my comments brief, for anyone preferring brevity. I don't have background in analytical research, and, I'm pretty sure others don't either. Thanks for your learned input.
ReplyDelete