Should a Russellian be a Panpsychist?

Emmett Holman has an interesting article in the latest Journal of Consciousness Studies that’s also very timely in light of the discussion in the prior post. Surveying several approaches to a Russellian theory of mind (RTM, to use his abbreviation), Holman observes that most have been panpsychist, but at least one is presented as a version of physicalism, and some are neutral monist interpretations. Holman takes a look at the landscape to see what the advantages of competing approaches might be. He doesn’t come to a strong conclusion, but thinks that it’s not clear that a panpsychist approach should be preferred.

Setting the stage, Holman outlines the basis for interest in RTM: “The advertising for RTM is that it constitutes just the insight needed to break (what many see as) the current impasse on the mind-body problem.” He explains in particular that RTM is a response to dissatisfaction with “mainstream” physicalism, defined as the stance that “the mental supervenes on the physical as the physical is characterized by physical theory” (emphasis original).

According to RTM, the problem is that physical theory characterizes the entities in its domain strictly extrinsically, in terms of causal, functional and other relations in which they stand to each other and to our experience. Nowhere does physical theory inform us as to the intrinsic nature of the entities; and it can only be in virtue of this intrinsic nature that the entities have the causal powers or dispositional properties they exhibit. The question arises: can we know what this intrinsic nature is?

Well, the Russellian notes that conscious experience acquaints us with intrinsic phenomenal properties. In taking this point further, there are several possible views to take of the intrinsic nature of basic entities.

1. First, a monistic panpsychism posits that this intrinsic nature is essentially mental or phenomenal, and thus the mental dimension of human experience derives from the inherent mental quality of all nature.

2. A Russellian version of physicalism might say that the mental emerges or otherwise is a consequence of a configuration of physical (defined here minimally as non-mental) intrinsic properties.

3. Finally, a neutral monist would say the mental derives from basic intrinsic properties that themselves are neither mental nor physical.

Looking critically initially at the second (physicalist) option, Holman notes the objection that it might be seen to offer an epistemic gap just as large as conventional mental/physical gap. Well, perhaps not, since a combination of non-mental intrinsic properties giving rise to mental intrinsic properties may be seen as superior to trying to get mental intrinsic properties from non-mental extrinsic ones.

Still, isn’t the panpsychist option superior? Here, however, Holman looks critically upon another “gap” faced by this option. Since the idea of an elementary particle having mental states like we have seems ridiculous, advocates of panpsychist theories typically speak of the basic intrinsic properties as “proto-phenomenal” or “proto-experiential” etc. Elementary entities are sometimes said to have a “low-level” version of experience or mentality, or have properties that are in some way just analogous to human mentality. As long as we lack an account of how the simpler properties give rise to the more robust ones, a troubling gap persists here.

How about a neutral monism? Holman sketches his own version of how a neutral monist approach to the nature of these intrinsic properties might go. “The relevant fundamental intrinsic property [would be] a determinable property which is itself neither experiential nor non-experiential”(emphasis original). Its determinates can manifest degrees of experientiality along a zero to one scale.

Before pursuing this line of thought further, Holman circles back to see if any panpsychist accounts introduced concepts more amenable to coming in degrees than simply the concepts of the phenomenal, the experiential, or the like. One concept he sees which may have promise is the notion of “subjective unity”, which he finds, among other places, in Gregg Rosenberg’s work. Conscious states differ from the rest of nature in that they have (quoting Rosenberg) a “complex but not composite” character. Conscious states can be very rich and diverse (including various sensory modalities) yet they have a special kind of unity which binds them together. They can’t be simply decomposed into parts the way physical systems can be. The components can only exist as part of the unified state.

If this idea has merit, then maybe subjective unity can be “scaled down” gradually or in degrees in way that appears more intelligible than was the case for the notions of mentality or experience as such. In fact this could perhaps support a neutral monism in the following sense: the most basic entity considered alone has no experiential value. But once multiple entities are considered, they can be participants in a subjective unity with an attendant degree of experientiality.

Holman doesn’t take this past a sketch, and he also considers some other variations very briefly. He concludes that more work needs to be done on Russellian theories and it is not clear to him which avenue is superior. But he maintains that it is not clear to him from his survey that panpsychist versions are inherently to be preferred. At the same time, he doesn’t’ think much of the “physicalist” option either. Holman’s sympathies appear to lie with neutral monism, but he awaits a more full-fledged theory to consider here.

Postscript 1: Like many others who have written about this subject, Holman’s main references to Russell himself are to 1927’s Analysis of Matter. I note that Carey Carlson’s book relies much more on 1948’s Human Knowledge, which I have not read. I wonder if Carlson’s much greater emphasis on the importance of viewing RTM though the lens of an event ontology vs. an object ontology can be linked at least in part to this fact. I’ll have to get the book.
{UPDATE 14 June 2008: Having read both books -- the event ontology is firmly in place in both. The basic framework did not change from 1927 to 1948. To pick up the neutral monism from Russell without picking up the event ontology on which it rests is simply to miss too much of the point.]

Postscript 2: Note that Holman’s lone example of the “physicalist” version of RTM is from an older paper from Daniel Stoljar. Stoljar’s position in his more recent book (Ignorance and Imagination) has evolved and he doesn’t specifically champion this version of RTM. His endorsement of physicalism in the book relies on the epistemic argument that we just don’t know enough to say that the non-mental couldn’t be the supervenience base for the mental. The unknown “experience-relevant non-experiential facts” could be intrinsic, extrinsic or both. I have a series of posts on this book under the label Stoljar.