Action Theory and Philosophy of Mind || Mind--Dust or Magic? Panpsychism Versus Emergence

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Mind--Dust or Magic? Panpsychism Versus EmergenceAuthor(s): James Van CleveReviewed work(s):Source: Philosophical Perspectives, Vol. 4, Action Theory and Philosophy of Mind (1990), pp.215-226Published by: Ridgeview Publishing CompanyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2214193 .Accessed: 08/07/2012 01:22

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Philosophical Perspectives, 4 Action Theory and Philosophy of Mind, 1990

MIND-DUST OR MAGIC? PANPSYCHISM VERSUS EMERGENCE

James Van Cleve Brown University

If evolution is to work smoothly, consciousness in some shape must have been present at the very origin of things. Accordingly, we find that the more clear-sighted evolutionary philosophers are beginning to posit it there. Each atom of the nebula, they suppose, must have had an aboriginal atom of consciousness linked with it.

So wrote William James in the section of The Principles of Psychology entitled "Evolutionary Psychology Demands a Mind-Dust."' The mind-dust argument, or something like it, has recently been revived by Thomas Nagel.2 In Nagel's version, the argument runs as follows:

1. Human beings are complex systems composed entirely of matter. (Material Composition, or Anti-Dualism)3

2. Mental properties are not logically implied by any physical properties. (Anti-Reductivism)

3. Human beings do have mental properties. (Anti-Eliminativism)

4. There are no emergent properties. That is to say, all properties of a complex system that are not relations between it and something else derive from the properties of its constituents and their mode of combination. (Anti-Emergence)

Therefore,

216 / James Van Cleve

5. The basic physical constituents of the universe have mental properties. (Panpsychism)

This is an intriguing argument, and I wish in what follows to look at it closely. I am inclined to agree with Nagel on the anti-dualist, anti-reductivist, and anti-eliminativist premises, but in opposition to him, I shall contend that emergence is a more reasonable hypothesis than panpsychism.

I. Why Panpsychism?

Let us begin by seeing just what follows from Nagel's premises. From 3, 4, and the first five words of 1, it follows that human beings have mental properties that must derive logically from certain properties of (and/or relations among) their parts.4 According to 2, they could not so derive if all the properties of the parts were purely physical; therefore, at least some constituents of human beings must have nonphysical properties. Now premise 1 tells us that all the constituents of human beings are material constituents, so we may conclude further that some material constituents of human beings have nonphysical properties. And repeating this reasoning until we reach the basic constituents, we may conclude finally that some of the basic physical constituents of the universe have nonphysical properties.5 Note that the conclusion we reach is significantly weaker than

Nagel's: we prove that some of the basic physical constituents of the universe have nonphysical properties, not that all of them have mental properties. To arrive at panpsychism, we must therefore bridge two gaps: from 'some' to 'all' and from 'nonphysical' to 'mental'. How might this be done? In the course of elaborating his first premise, Nagel claims that any

matter could compose an organism:

Anything whatever, if broken down far enough and rearranged, could be incorporated into a living organism. No constituents besides matter are needed.

This, if true, would close the first gap. If some of the basic physical constituents of the universe lacked mental properties, an assemblage of them alone could not compose an organism, contrary to the assumption.

Mind-Dust or Magic? / 217

Is the additional assumption true? Conceivably not, for it is conceivable that there are two kinds of quarks in the universe, smart quarks and dumb quarks, and that you can't make an organism unless you have at least a few smart quarks. But the assumption is nonetheless highly plausible. Moreover, even if Nagel's argument could only show that mentality is present in some fundamental particles, that would still be an astonishing result.6 As for the second gap, I think Nagel closes it more or less by

stipulation. In response to the suggestion that mentality might derive from more fundamental properties that were neither mental nor physical, he simply says, "This could still be called panpsychism" (p. 185). No; it would be more accurately described as what C.D. Broad called neutralism. It would be preferable to close the second gap by arguing, as I think might plausibly be done, that mental properties are not logically implied by neutral properties, either.7

II. Why Not Emergence?

In support of the anti-emergence premise, Nagel says that the properties of a complex system must be causally explainable in terms of the properties of the parts. He goes on to say that this requires a connection between the two sets of properties that is in some sense necessary. Very well, but now we must ask: in what sense necessary? Is Nagel insisting on logical necessity, or would he settle for some kind of sui generis nomological necessity, intermediate in strength between logical necessity and Humean regularity? Nagel is not explicit on this point. It is clear, however, that if his argument is to get anywhere, he must mean logical necessity.8 Otherwise, premise 4 will not engage properly with premise 2 so as to yield a valid argument. It is logical derivability that is denied in premise 2, so it must be logical derivability that is affirmed in premise 4. If he means logical necessity, however, he is setting the standards

for explainability extremely high. If a property of a whole that follows only with nomological necessity from the properties of its parts is held on that score to be inexplicable, won't we have to say the same about any effect that does not follow with logical necessity from its cause? If so, the momentum of Nagel's argument will be such that it can't be stopped short of complete causal rationalism -Spinoza's view that causes and effects are related by logical necessity.9 This is a view that few philosophers nowadays would embrace.


In fairness, however, it must be pointed out that there is a way of defending the anti-emergence premise without going all the way over to causal rationalism.10 Let us distinguish between determinative relationships that hold at a time and those that hold over time. The argument against causal rationalism is at its strongest in the case of effects that succeed their causes in time; for how can what happens at one moment have any logically necessary connection with what happens at any other? In the case at hand, however, we are dealing with "cause" properties and "effect" properties that occur at the same time, viz., the properties of a whole and the simultaneously instantiated properties of its parts. Here it might be felt that the connection cannot merely be nomological, that it must be logical. For example, the shape of an object is a logical consequence of the nature and arrangement of its parts; must it not be likewise with any property of a whole? Well, I cannot see that there is any must about it. I do concede,

however, that one could be a "mereological rationalist" of this sort without being a thoroughgoing causal rationalist. I would only caution that if one is going to insist on a logical connection between properties of wholes and properties of parts, it should not be on Nagel's ground that otherwise the properties of the whole would be inexplicable.

I suspect that a good deal of opposition to emergent properties as inexplicable is simply the product of terminological confusion. People slide in their thinking from 'emergent' in the sense of 'not following logically from any properties of the parts' to 'emergent' in the sense of 'not following in any manner from properties of the parts', and that makes emergence seem like magic. But there is no reason why emergent properties can't follow with nomological necessity from properties of the parts, and in that case they would not be inexplicable for anyone but a causal rationalist. What may invite such terminological confusion is the fact that

'emergent' is often used as an antonym of 'reducible', which is itself ambiguous. In metaphysics, to say that one domain is reducible to another (e.g., numbers to classes, bodies to sense data) is generally to say that all truths in the first domain follow logically (or with the help only of principles that are themselves logically necessary truths) from truths in the second domain. In philosophy of science, on the other hand, the standards are generally looser; to say that one domain is reducible to another (e.g., chemistry to physics) is, for many writers, simply to say that all truths in the first domain follow from truths


in the second with the help of bridge principles whose necessity need only be nomological. That gives 'emergent' two meanings: a property of w is emergent in the first sense if it does not follow logically from properties of parts of w and emergent in the second sense if it does not follow nomologically from them. What is emergent in the first sense need not be emergent in the second, and therefore need not be inexplicable. As we have seen, it is emergence in the first sense that must be excluded in Nagel's argument for panpsychism. Of course, if the mental properties of a whole are emergent in the

first sense with respect to the physical properties of its constituents, mental properties will not be explainable or predictable by the laws of physics alone. One will need to appeal to special psychophysical laws of the sort that have been disparaged as "nomological danglers." But to be explicable only with the help of danglers is not to be inexplicable.11 Moreover, anyone who wants everything to be explainable by physics alone (without need of autonomous bridge principles) should be a reductivist or an eliminativist-not a panpsychist. 12 So far I have not advanced any objection to Nagel's main argument,

but only a warning about one of his subsidiary arguments: if one accepts the anti-emergence premise, it should not be on the ground that the only alternative is to believe in magic. I wish now to raise an objection to the main argument. Let us ask, with what sort of mentality does our panpsychist wish to endow the fundamental particles? Presumably not with intelligence and perception, probably not even with consciousness; Nagel speaks merely of "proto- mentality." Well, then, will intelligence in a complex system follow with logical necessity from the proto-mental properties of the constituents? I doubt it; the prospect of this seems no brighter than of the mental following from the purely physical. This means that we must admit a kind of emergence after all-of the higher mental functions from the lower mental functions. So why not simply admit the possibility of emergence to begin with? This objection is not new. It is implied in some remarks by

James,13 and it is clearly stated in the following passage from Arthur Lovejoy:

This, however, is to strain at an emergent gnat and swallow an emergent camel. The cognition of external objects and their relations, which is somehow achieved through the


brain, is not the sum of the atomic, non-cognitive sentiencies supposed to inhere in its component particles; and it is therefore no more "accounted for" by the assumed sentiency of those particles than it is by their motion.14

One could, of course, seek to diminish the force of this objection by pointing out that there may be logical connections between proto- mentality and full-blown mentality, even if we are at present incapable of discerning them. In general, one can always raise the possibility that an apparent case of emergence is merely apparent, owing to the existence of logical connections not yet fathomed by us. But this would be to raise at the same time the possibility of unfathomed logical connections between the physical and the mental, thus undermining the case for premise 2. Defending the argument in this way would only lay it open to attack somewhere else. The remaining expedient for the panpsychist would be to endow

the fundamental particles with full-blown mentality after all-thus making each of us a colony of homunculi. Besides finding this incredible, I doubt that it would even achieve the desired end. For how would one account for the unity of consciousness that somehow arises out of the colony? This question raises many issues that I cannot go into here.

III. Emergence and Supervenience

In this section I wish to clarify the notion of emergence further by relating it to the currently much-discussed concept of supervenience. Jaegwon Kim defines one important variety of supervenience this way:15

A-properties supervene on B-properties =Df. Necessarily, for any object x and A-property a, if x has a, then there is a B- property b such that (i) x has b, and (ii) necessarily, if anything has b, it also has a.

This is supervenience for a single domain of objects; the A-properties of an object supervene on the B-properties of that very object. One may also define a concept of supervenience for multiple domains, according to which the A-properties of an object supervene on the B-properties of some correlated object or objects.16


The modal operators in the definition just given can be taken as expressing either logical necessity or nomological necessity, depending on the particular supervenience thesis one has in mind. For example, in the thesis that normative properties supervene on natural properties, the necessity would generally be construed as logical; in the thesis that mental properties supervene on physical properties, it would more often be construed as nomological. Whichever way the modal operators are taken, the idea of

supervenience has two main components. The first component, corresponding to clause (i), is dependence on the B-properties: nothing can have A-properties unless it also has B-properties. The second component, corresponding to clause (ii), is determination by the B-properties: nothing can be just like a given thing as regards its B-properties without also being just like it as regards its A- properties.17 The two components can be neatly expressed in the pair of slogans "every A-property, some B-property" and "same B- properties, same A-properties."18 The latter formula is to be understood as applying across possible worlds and not just within them. That is: given any two individuals x and y from any worlds wl and w2, if x and y are alike in their B-properties, they are also alike in their A-properties.19 The worlds just spoken of will be either logically possible worlds or nomologically possible worlds, depending on the choice of modality. For more on emergence, let us now turn to one of the classic

sources-the chapter on "Mechanism and Its Alternatives" in Broad's The Mind and Its Place in Nature. Broad says that an emergent property of a whole is one that

could not, even in theory, be deduced from the most complete knowledge of the behavior of its components, taken separately or in other combinations, and of their proportions and arrangements in this whole.20

This is not all there is to Broad's definition, for it occurs as a differentia within a broader genus-behaviors of a thing that are in some way explainable in terms of its components and structure. It is clear, in fact, that Broad regards emergent behaviors or properties as both dependent on and determined by the components and structure of whatever object displays them. Dependency comes out in an initial division between theories according to which the behavior of a whole does, and those according to which it does not, depend on its


components and structure; Broad considers the doctrine of emergence under the former head.21 Determination comes out in a number of passages, including the following:

No doubt the properties of silver chloride are completely determined by those of silver and of chlorine; in the sense that whenever you have a whole composed of these two elements in certain proportions and relations you have something with the characteristic properties of silver chloride.22 The emergent theory asserts that there are certain wholes, composed (say) of constituents A, B, and C in a relation R to each other; that all wholes composed of constituents of the same kind as A, B, and C in relations of the same kind as R have [the same] properties...23

Similar arrangements of similar components thus give rise to similar behavior in the whole. I take it that this is meant to hold across worlds as well as within them, in which case this is determination in just the sense that figured above. We can now relate emergence as characterized by Broad to

supervenience as characterized by Kim. On the positive side, an emergent property of w is one that depends on and is determined by the properties of the parts of w. That makes emergence a species of supervenience. On the negative side, an emergent property is one that is not deducible from the properties of the parts of w. That means that the inner modal operator in the definition of the relevant kind of supervenience cannot be taken to express logical necessity. (It does not much matter which kind of necessity is expressed by the outer modal operator.) We can therefore define emergence as follows:

If P is a property of w, then P is emergent iff P supervenes with nomological necessity, but not with logical necessity, on the properties of the parts of w.

This is a variety of multiple-domain supervenience, in which the supervening properties are possessed by wholes and the subvening properties by their parts.

In cases in which it is possible to deduce properties of a whole from properties of the parts, Broad speaks of reducibility. Emergence thus contrasts with two alternatives, a looser alternative on the left and a tighter alternative on the right. On the left, we do not even have


dependence or determination; on the right, we have full reducibility. It is perhaps worth stressing that the only contrast here intended

between emergence/supervenience and reducibility lies in the nature of the necessity connecting the "upper" and "lower" sets of properties. Reducibility is sometimes contrasted with supervenience in a further respect: reducibility requires biconditional connecting principles, so that each A-property is coextensive with some B-property, whereas supervenience only requires one-way connecting principles, so that each A-property has a sufficient condition among the B-properties. This difference is not important for present purposes. For one thing, if we are willing to allow endless disjunctions of B-properties to count as B-properties themselves, then we will have biconditional correlations after all whenever we have supervenience.24 For another thing, Broad allows that the principles connecting emergent properties with properties of parts may be biconditionals, as in the remark "and nothing has these properties [viz., the characteristic properties of silver chloride] except a whole composed in this way."25 So Broad's intended contrast between emergence and reducibility is solely a contrast on this point: do the properties of the whole follow logically, or only nomologically, from the properties of the parts? There is one more point about Broad's account that needs to be

discussed. It could be objected to what has so far been said that there is simply no room for the concept of an emergent property, since for any property P of any whole w, there will always be properties of the parts from which P may be deduced. For example, is it not true of sodium that it combines with chlorine to form a whole having such-and-such properties, including its odor and anything else one might have claimed to be emergent? And from such properties of the parts, may not all properties of the whole be deduced?26 The answer, of course, is yes; but it is also clear that if properties of this sort are admitted in the "supervenience base," the doctrine of anti- emergence (or mereological reducibility, as it might be called) becomes completely trivial. (Compare: I could maintain that all properties of everything in the universe are deducible from the properties of James Van Cleve, provided you counted among my properties such items as "being such that the Eiffel Tower is 1,056 feet tall.") Clearly, some sort of anti-triviality stipulation is required. Perhaps the required work can be done by Broad's phrase "taken separately and in other combinations," for one could plausibly refuse


to regard the property "forming a whole with such-and-such features when combined with chlorine" as a property of sodium taken separately. There may be a problem with Broad's qualification, however.

Consider what Newtonian physics would say about a body A and two more massive bodies B and C. If A and B were the only bodies around, A would gravitate toward B; if A and C were the only bodies around, A would gravitate toward C; and if all three bodies were there, A would gravitate toward a point between B and C. This last fact, however, is not deducible from the laws governing the A-B and A-C systems in isolation. (The parallelogram law for the composition of forces is logically contingent.) It seems therefore to follow from Broad's definition that the behavior of the three-body system is emergent. Yet it also seems that this behavior follows logically, but not in an objectionably trivial way, from properties of the parts: B is here, C is there, and A is moving in a certain direction. Broad's account seems therefore to be too liberal in what it counts as emergent. Can it be made less liberal without making anti-emergence trivially true? There must be a way, but at the moment, I do not have a satisfactory proposal. In closing, I would like to set down a group of definitions I came

upon in the second edition of Webster's Unabridged, published in 1960:27

supervene 2. Philos. To occur otherwise than as an additive resultant; to occur in a manner not antecedently predictable; to accrue in the manner of what is evolutionally emergent.

("Not antecedently predictable:" I assume that this means not predictable except with the help of autonomous bridge principles, principles that come to be known only by instantial induction after the advent of the new quality.)

supervenient Coming or occurring as something additional, extraneous, or unexpected; also, emergent (sense 4). emergent 4. Philos. and Biol. Appearing as something novel in a process of evolution. Cf. emergent evolution. emergent evolution Philos. and Biol. Evolution conceived of as characterized by the appearance, at different levels, of new and antecedently unpredictable qualities of being or modes of relatedness, such as life and consciousness.


I was surprised to learn that as recently as three decades ago, 'supervenient' was used in some quarters as a synonym of 'emergent'. I can only suppose it a coincidence that today's technical sense of 'supervenience' permits a definition of emergence in terms of supervenience.28

Notes

1. William James, The Principles of Psychology (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1950; first published in 1890), pp. 146 ff.

2. Thomas Nagel, "Panpsychism," in Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 181-95. Jonathan Bennett has independently advocated a very similar argument inA Study of Spinoza's Ethics (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1984), pp. 135-39.

3. 1 have renamed some of Nagel's premises and reworded them slightly. The dualism eschewed by the first premise is substance dualism, not property dualism.

4. From now on I let 'properties of the parts' include relations among the parts as well.

5. In fact, nothing in Nagel's premises guarantees that there are basic constituents of matter; this must be assumed separately. Without this assumption, the most that would follow is that mentality is to be found "all the way down."

6. Could we avoid this result (fundamental particles endowed with mentality) by positing a special mentality-inducing mode of combination?

7. See C.D. Broad's discussion of neutralist theories in The Mind and Its Place in Nature (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1925), pp. 607ff.

8. That is, logical necessity in the broad sense that contrasts with nomological necessity. Some would prefer to call it metaphysical necessity.

9. The term is Bennett's; see pp. 29-30 of his book on Spinoza, cited in note 2.

10. I owe the following point to David Bennett. 11. Some of the proponents of emergence have themselves contributed to

the confusion on this point. Here is Samuel Alexander in Space, Time, and Deity (London: Macmillan and Company, 1920), p. 46: "The higher quality emerges from the lower level of existence and has its roots therein, but it emerges therefrom, and it does not belong to that lower level, but constitutes its possessor a new order of existent with its special laws of behavior. The existence of emergent qualities thus described is something to be noted, as some would say, under the compulsion of brute empirical fact, or, as I should say in less harsh terms, to be accepted with the "natural piety" of the investigator. It admits no explanation." (Emphasis mine.) Unless the final sentence is elliptical for "It admits no explanation by means of laws relating the lower-level variables only," it is not a true characterization of that which is emergent in the first sense.


12. From here on, I label as 'reductivist' only those views that seek to derive the truths in one domain from those in another logically, and I mean by 'emergence' only emergence in the first sense.

13. See, for example, the note on p. 162 of the Principles of Psychology, Vol. I.

14. Arthur Lovejoy, "The Meanings of 'Emergence' and Its Modes," Proceedings of the Sixth International Congress of Philosophy (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1927), pp. 20-33; reprinted in Readings in the Philosophy of Science, ed. by Philip Wiener (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1953), pp. 585-96.

15. Jaegwon Kim, "Concepts of Supervenience," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 45 (1984), 153-176, at p. 165. This is what Kim calls "strong supervenience."

16. See Kim, "Supervenience for Multiple Domains," unpublished. 17. In the literature on supervenience, 'dependence' and 'determination' are

often used as synonyms of each other and of 'supervenience' itself. I find it more natural to use them to mark the distinction between the two components of supervenience just noted.

18. I have modeled these slogans on the formulae Lewis White Beck uses to distinguish two doctrines about causation in Hume and Kant: "every event, some cause" and "same cause, same effect." See "A Prussian Hume and a Scottish Kant," in L.W. Beck, Essays on Kant and Hume (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), pp. 111-29.

19. If we require that wl and w2 be the same world, we get what Kim calls "weak supervenience;" this corresponds to dropping the second necessity operator in the definition of strong supervenience.

20. Broad, op. cit., p. 59. 21. Pp. 54-55. 22. P. 64. 23. See also pp. 61, 64, 67, and 92. 24. See Kim, "Concepts of Supervenience," for further details. 25. Broad, p. 64, emphasis mine. 26. Broad was aware of this point; see his remarks about "properties" (in

scare quotes) on pp. 65-66. 27. Webster's New International Dictionary of the English Language, Second

Edition, Unabridged (Springfield, Mass: G. & C. Merriam Company, 1960). 28. For their comments on earlier versions of this paper, I wish to thank

David Bennett, Jonathan Bennett, Jaegwon Kim, Philip Quinn, and Ernest Sosa.

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Action Theory and Philosophy of Mind || Mind--Dust or Magic? Panpsychism Versus Emergence