immanence

(Warning: This post goes into ontological questions of interest only to philosophers.🙂 I leave aside their potential ecological implications for another time. But see Arne Vetlesen’s Cosmologies of the Anthropocene: Panpsychism, Animism, and the Limits of Posthumanism for one take on those. I hope to discuss that book in a future post.)

One of the most rigorous philosophical proponents of panpsychism, or panexperientialism — the idea that everything that exists experiences, or that all that is is best thought of as a form of experience — is philosopher Galen Strawson. In publications like this one (from which all quotes I cite below are taken), Strawson makes the case that experience is the one thing we can be sure of, precisely because we experience.

He calls himself “a naturalist materialist monist […] who knows that the only general thing he knows for certain about concrete reality is that experience exists.” “Any real naturalist,” Strawson writes, “must be a realist about experience, because experience is the most certainly known concretely existing general natural phenomenon, and is indeed the first thing any scientist encounters when they try to do science.” (Or the first thing anyone encounters when they try to do anything, even if they ignore that first thing and move on to the next — the desire to eat, say, or to plan for tomorrow, or to speak to one’s friends or familiars, to rest, or whatever else. Any of it presupposes experience, by definition.)

This is a little like Descartes’s famous proclamation “I think, therefore I am,” except that it refers not just to thinking (a particular kind of experience), but to all forms of experience; and it eliminates the “I.” (Strawson’s writing does end up making the case for something like an “I,” or an awareness, but it’s not necessary to what I’m discussing here.)

What Strawson isn’t sure of is whether there’s any case at all to be made for anything non-experiential. There might be, he says, but we have no evidence for it. If we know experience is real because we have it, he writes, “The view that there is any non-experiential concrete reality is, by contrast, wholly ungrounded. It’s a radically and irredeemably verification-transcendent belief.” (I love that term “verification-transcendent.”)

I want to make the case that we do have evidence for it.

Strawson (like me) is a process-relationalist. (“Being is process. Being is doing, activity. A through-and-through processual view of reality is mandatory. All concrete being is essentially time-being — whatever exactly time is.”) He understands that anything that is real is real in the sense that it exists, durationally, and that it either persists or changes. But there are discontinuities in its persistence that I think point to non-experience.

We don’t need to posit non-experience in other things — in, say, rocks or dark matter or whatever else. We simply don’t know what being a rock feels like, if it feels like anything, since it’s outside of our experience. We only know that we experience the “rockness” of a rock by touching and feeling it. We’re external to the rock, or to anything that might constitute its experience of itself, at whatever ontological level (holist, molecular, atomic, subatomic, et al.). What it, or its constituent parts, may experience is beyond us.

For evidence of non-experience, we can simply point to our own experience of ourselves. When I am awakened from a deep sleep by a sudden disturbance, I experience a “coming to experience” from something else that feels like non-experience. This is only a feeling, of course — we cannot know for certain that we were non-experiencing — but there is plenty of evidence to corroborate the claim that it exists: several hours have passed, others who were awake know that time has passed for them and that I was clearly there amidst them, just sleeping, and so on. Whatever else I was doing for that duration of time — and as a process-relationalist I know quite well that my body was doing many things: its organs, cells, neural networks, and probably most other parts, were continuing to exist, and quite possibly to experience — the “I” that I take to be so central to my own experience was not experiencing. There was no sense of “I” during that time.

This means one of three things.

First, it could mean that I was experiencing, but that the order, form, or memory of that experience did not continue through the threshold that took me from a sleeping to a waking state, or that it changed so much that I simply no longer remember that experience. Experience always involves some measure of memory, but that memory is selective, and in the case of waking from dreamless sleep, it rarely if ever remembers anything at all, though memory from previous waking states is plentiful. That’s just a feature of this particular type of “state transition.”

Second, it could mean that “I” am actually not as real as “I” think “I” am. Rather, the sense of “I-ness” is a construct or “fiction” constituted through certain kinds of experiencing entities, that was not being constituted by them for the time that I was dreamlessly asleep. In other words, the “I” that I sometimes experience myself being is not a real or primary-order experience, not the true and abiding “me,” but is more an object of experience, a second-order experience — something being experienced that makes me feel that “I-ness.” When I am asleep and not dreaming, that “I” does not exist. But experience still does; it just happens to be floating free of the narratively constituted “I” that sometimes claims it. I am not necessarily “I.”

Or, thirdly, it could mean that I was actually non-experiencing. The “I” that I am was existing (as it must have been) without being the bearer of experience. I was a non-experiencing, existent entity.

In the past, I’ve favored the second explanation. This comes closest to a Buddhist perspective, and is consonant with certain prominent views in the neurosciences. But there’s a strong case to be made for the third view. Just because I was not experiencing, this doesn’t mean that “I” am not I.

This third view is arguably the “common-sense view,” and is also a view that’s been articulated in recent years by object-oriented ontologists like Graham Harman. But it is also amenable to a process-relational account, insofar as the sense of “I”-ness can be considered to go through processes of wakefulness (or experience), dreamless sleep (or non-experience), and dreaming sleep (a different and somewhat hybrid form of experience), and that in some of these “I-ness” disappears. It is not that it is a fiction. It’s not identical to the experiencing me, but the latter is one of the modes of the former. Experience and non-experience are modes (and likely not the only two modes) of a reality that is more than simple experience.

If the third of these is true, then “panexperientialism” is a restrictive view on reality, a reality that includes more than just experience.

In a sense, both of these views — the panexperientialist (numbers one and two above), which sees dreamless sleep either as a loss of memory or as a loss of a certain quality or constitution of experience (loss of the narratively constituted “I”), and the more-than-experientialist (number three), which sees it as a mode of being alongside the experiential — are flipsides of each other. It all depends on whether we define the experience of “I-ness” as a fictional or second-order phenomenon (as Buddhists and some others do), one that comes and goes while experience itself persists, or if we define experience as one of several modes of being, with being, not experience, being universal. We can call the latter a “pan-being,” or “panontic,” account. (Which, in many ways, squares the difference between panpsychism and the more commonly held view that some things experience and others do not.)

What’s gained and lost in the latter, when compared to panexperientialism? Panexperientialism claims that everything that is experiences; everything has a certain feeling of itself within its world. The alternative is that some things do not, or that some things do not always do that — that it is possible to be a non-experiencing being.

For a panexperientialist, I may be asleep, but I am still experiencing (many things). Or, experience is still continuing, but “I” am not because I’m not real to start with except as an experience. For a pan-being-ist (panontist), on the other hand, when I am asleep, I still exist but I am turned off to experience. Others adjacent or even constituent of me (such as my body, my brain, et al.) continue to experience, but I do not. Being “experiencing” and being “non-experiencing” are different modes of being, useful for different situations, and some of us (“beings”) have had to develop the capacity for certain kinds of complex experience, while others have not. All of us are beings, even if the list of beings is both endless and indeterminable. The relationship between beings and Being (pace Heidegger) is, in any case, a separate question.

Which is the more parsimonious and convincing account of these? I’m not sure. (And, fortunately, it’s far from my full-time job to figure it out. I welcome any thoughts on it.)