Charles Hartshorne
Hans Jonas is a very interesting — I am tempted to say fascinating — as well as learned philosopher. He has written perceptively about biological problems and also about the type of philosophy in which I have most confidence. I have decided, however, not to comment in much detail upon his views. This is partly because I am not sure that he is at his best in evaluating process philosophy or in analyzing “the phenomenon of life.” I like him best either as an historian of ideas or as a moralist and philosopher of religion. He seems to me to stand for much that is most valuable in our spiritual heritage and also for much that is soundest in the “modern temper.” In both respects I think he is closer than he fully realizes to process philosophy.
I. Sense Data as Physiological
I begin with some epistemological points. Each of us who tries to understand organisms is, or has, an organism, a human body. This body is that part of the material world that each of us knows in the most intimate way in which such a part can be known. One can see, hear, and touch one’s body, as one can other bodies; but in addition one can feel, enjoy, suffer it by physical pleasures, pains, kinaesthetic, and other bodily sensations in a manner not open to us with the rest of the material world. More than that, since the most immediate material conditions of all our sensations are inner bodily processes, one can argue that these processes are the most direct data, the most sheerly given realities, in all our sensory awareness. This thesis is misunderstood if taken to mean that what we initially know in sensory experiences are inner bodily events, from which knowledge we then infer or surmise possible truths about the environment. Experiencing, sensing, is one thing, knowing (if the word is given a pregnant meaning) is another. Infants do the first. How much can they be said to do of the second? Nor is the point that we can set up infallible “protocol sentences,” from which to infer statements about the rest of nature. The having of data in the sense I intend is something that occurs in animals lacking the human capacity to make statements. This capacity is no absolute power with unlimited access to data. What we can in detail tell ourselves or others that we experience is not identical with what we do experience. The power consciously to analyze experience and “put it into words” is one that infants and subhuman animals lack and none of us possesses in ideally perfect form. But all of us, and all the higher animals at least, do have experiences, and these have data, in the senses I am trying to give these words. Now I submit that A. N. Whitehead is right in holding that there is no reasonable way to distinguish between what is sheerly given in sense experiences (as such only more or less accessible to definite conscious detection and description) and the physiological conditions of these experiences. I shall set out some reasons for this identification.
(1) It seems clear that the idea of a “given” is vacuous unless it means something that must be or must occur if the experience is to be or occur. But this requirement is met by the physiological conditions. Even the sensory content of dreams must have such conditions. We dream of being cold when we are cold, of hearing a sound when there is such a sound. But in other cases, artificial or internal stimulation of nerves can produce sensations without the normal external correlates. The neural correlates are the absolute requirements for sensation, not environmental conditions. If it should be objected that the idea of a given implies not only that the thing given must be there if the experience occurs, but that it must be there for the experience in the sense of being consciously detectable in or by it, then I repeat what was said in the previous paragraph: The power to know what we experience is no absolute power. Like Leibniz, Freud, Peirce, Bergson, Whitehead, and many others, I think that we often flatter ourselves in this respect. Infants cannot say what they experience; we are better off than infants in this respect. But how much better off? If introspection were the absolute power that many philosophers, usually without quite saying so, take it to be, there would be less controversy about the use of introspection in psychology. It is indeed an implication of “the given” that adult human beings have some capacity to detect it in their experience. Data must be more or less accessible to such detection. The position I am defending holds that while inability to detect an item is not, in general, proof that it is not given, the bare possibility that the experience might occur and the thing said to be given not occur is proof that it is not a datum. How detectable items are depends on their prominence, the degree of analytic power of the subject, direction of interest and attention, and the like. But by definition they must be necessary for the experience. This can be shown only for inner bodily processes.
(2) In some types of case we are indeed well aware that the data of sensory experiences are physiological, as when we tell a doctor how and where it hurts. The doctor is interested in knowing this because it is evidence about our physical condition. (Referred pains are not counter-instances, for the “where” is initially in a single sensory field and location in public, intersensory space is a learned and fallible procedure.) To deny that pain is a potentially cognitive function seems remarkably arbitrary. Physical pleasure is equally cognitive. In principle there is no demonstrable difference between any sensation and any other so far as its immediate evidence is concerned. Always this evidence is of something happening inside the body. Absolute immediacy for the distance receptors as such cannot be shown. Nor need it be assumed to explain our knowledge. Given natural selection and evolutionary adaptation in a universe with a considerable degree of causal order, it is no mystery that normal animals do a fairly good job of judging correctly about (responding correctly to) their environments, using the not quite direct evidence, the sensory content, available to them. Of course they do this.
(3) There is a third requirement if something is to be accepted as datum of experience: The thing must be independent, for its existence or occurrence, from the experience. Without this assumption the escape from solipsism can only be a tour de force. It is a dismal way to begin an epistemological inquiry to allow even a logical possibility of an experience which is aware only of itself or its own creations. I agree with Thomas Reid, as against Hume (and Russell), that an experience whose data are merely its own ideas or impressions is nonsensical. Not even dreams are correctly so described. There is a creative aspect of experiencing, but what is thus produced is precisely not the data but the awareness of the data. Granted X, there may then be produced the awareness of X, and this will be something additional, a new reality of which X has become a constituent. With Whitehead, I interpret this as an argument, not the only one, for the view that the experience-experienced relation is one of temporal succession: first the reality to be sensed or intuited, then the intuiting of it. No proven fact contradicts this.
(4) Here we break, and to our advantage, with all traditional two-aspect theories of mind and body, according to which the two aspects occur simultaneously. Rather, we take the subject-object relation to be one of later-earlier. What is sensed or felt is what has just happened in the body, not what is happening precisely now. Thus the bodily condition is cause in the normal temporal sense. And so we escape from the supposed need to assume an absolutely peculiar form of relatedness in the mind-body case.
Note, however: If the given is to be antecedent cause and yet independent of its effect (the human experience), then strict determinism must not apply. The necessary condition must not be in the strict sense “sufficient.” For “necessary and sufficient” is the same as sufficient and necessary, and thus it implies complete symmetry of dependence between cause and effect. The phrase, therefore, contradicts our natural intuition of one-way dependence of effects on causes, as well as our intuition that experiences depend on things experienced, not conversely. In process philosophy strict determinism is rejected for all cases.
II. Data as Past When Given
If the reader is shocked by the idea that sense awareness gives us the past rather than the exact present, I ask him to consider not only the fact that events outside the body are demonstrably prior to our perceptions of them, but also the basic fact of experience that in memory we seem to have intuitive awareness of what has already happened, especially of what has just happened. (The notorious “mistakes of memory” go back far enough in time to be explicable by functions other than memory pure and simple.) The argument that the past “no longer exists” and so cannot be intuited proves either nothing or too much. For if the past is non-existent, then there are no causes of present happenings. If the past exists sufficiently to have effects now, it exists sufficiently to form data of present experiences. If experience-of-X includes X, so does effect-of-X include X. The denial of reality to past events is ill-considered. Bergson was one of the first to do justice to this point. But Peirce too was aware of it.
III. From Physiological Data to Environmental Knowledge
The view of experience we have reached is as follows: Every experience has its data, and these are the same as its independently real, temporally prior and necessary, but not strictly sufficient conditions. (They suffice for its possibility, not for its actuality. Even given the conditions, its occurrence, precisely as it is, was contingent and might not have been.) Apart from memory, the data are inner-bodily, presumably largely neural. From sensing, feeling, or intuiting just occurrent neural processes, we judge, believe, surmise (in good part correctly, having learned to do so in infancy and childhood with bodily equipment evolved so as to make this normally probable) that certain processes are going on around us in the world. It is by a special sophisticated form of this procedure that we learn about neural processes as what we are sensing. In all this a reasonable but not an absolute degree of causal order is assumed. The status of this assumption I shall not inquire into in this essay. I have dealt with it elsewhere [3].
Since all knowledge of the extra-bodily world is indirect, it follows that our ideas about other animals (also about plants and minerals) must be derived by analogy from direct awareness – not, as subjective idealists argue, from awareness of that very awareness or of mere ideas, but from awareness of certain physical processes inside our skins as directly sensed or felt. This might seem to mean that our knowledge of “other mind” is in no case direct. However, this does not quite follow, as we shall see.
The world as given in sense awareness is through and through a matter of what are termed “secondary qualities” – red, sweet, shrill, painful, ticklish, etc. Every one of these qualities is set aside in the account of the world given in textbooks of physics and chemistry, save so far as the qualities are employed as signs, in principle more or less dispensable, of temporo-spatial structures which alone are recognized by science as making up the world apart from our kind of animal. As actually given, the structures in question are merely outlines (or relations) of secondary (or tertiary) qualities. Thus the highly abstract, colorless, tasteless, value-free world of science is conceived by a radically truncated, though in some ways much extended, analogy with the world as given.
I do not mean that science has no good reason for its abstractive procedure. The procedure becomes arbitrary only if it is accompanied by the assertion that in truth nature, apart from animals, simply is such an abstract affair, with temporo-spatial structures and their causal inter-relations, but devoid of qualities in the sense in which secondary qualities are such. On this matter Russell agrees with process philosophers; he admits that nature cannot be as abstract as science depicts it as being. Structures cannot exist without qualities ([4], pp. 168, 246 ff.). But he holds that we are incurably ignorant concerning the qualities belonging to natural kinds apart from our kind of animals. I do not see that we must admit quite so absolute an incapacity to know, at least in principle, what is to be meant by quality, apart from the mere relationships, mathematically expressible, given by the equations of science, and apart from the sensed qualities in our experiences. I think we can know in principle that the two questions, “How does it feel to be X?” (or “What experiences does X have?”) and “What qualities does X have?” are one and the same question, save that the first formulation is the more illuminating. These are not two mysteries but only one. Here as so often Peirce and Whitehead agree. I shall sketch the reasoning.
IV. The Pervasiveness Of The Psychical
That some parts of nature involve no form of experience or feeling, however primitive or other than the human form, is an absolute negation which no possible observation could ever support. Those who think otherwise are invited to tell us their criteria for the total absence somewhere of anything like experiencing or feeling. For the absence of elephants there are criteria or for the absence of protein molecules (very high temperature, for one); but for the total absence of anything psychical such as memory or enjoyment there are no criteria that do not merely beg the question. I have been saying this for years and have yet to receive a clear answer. The notion of mere matter is vacuous, representing no possible knowledge. We do not know that it would be like for there to be such a thing.
Please note: “Mere matter” is not equivalent to “insentient things,” things that do not sense or experience. Of course, there are such things, e.g., tables and chairs. What philosopher has ever held that these entities experience or feel? But the total absence of sentience in tables would mean not only that they do not sense or feel, but that their invisibly small constituents, if they have them, do not. On what ground would the latter statement be made? Tables are too inert and too lacking in dynamic unity to be regarded as sentient. But molecules are not inert or lacking in dynamic unity. Leibniz was so much clearer about these questions than some philosophers today! The author of the article “Panpsychism” in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy pays no attention to the distinction just made [l]. He also pays no serious attention to the most important recent representatives of the psychicalist doctrine, particularly Peirce, Bergson. and Whitehead.
The argument can summed up also as follows. The less directly given must be explained by principles illustrated in or somehow derived from the more directly given; nothing like mere matter, devoid of qualities of feeling, is directly given. The body is the most directly given material thing, and, as given, it is composed not of mere matter but of psychical life: pulses of feeling, pains, pleasures; feelings of sweet, sour, tickle; and the like. I wrote a book on this subject over forty years ago which is still in print [2]. Nor, I think, has its main thesis been refuted. Broadly similar views about the given may be found in Croce, Berkeley, Bradley, Bosanquet, Whitehead — writers sufficiently different from one another — and in some psychologists, e.g., Spearman.
Our contention is not that only the body is directly given. One’s own past experiences, at least those immediately previous to the present experience, are so. We call this experience of past personal experience ‘memory.’ Perception could be termed ‘impersonal memory’ since, while it also gives the past, it gives other portions of the past than one’s own previous experiences.
Memory in this generalized sense, common to personal and impersonal memory, is the whole of our direct acquaintance with reality. ‘Introspection,’ as both Ryle and Whitehead (agreeing for once) maintain, is not an additional avenue to reality but is rather one way of utilizing personal memory, especially in very short run or most immediate cases.1
All the forms of direct experience have in common that their data are past and are irreducible to mere matter. As given, they have psychic life in the general form for which the handiest label is feeling, as including sensing, emotion, desire, some form of valuing. This is a phenomenological assertion in support of which many authors (including Peirce and Bergson, though not, alas, Husserl) could be cited. I came to it before my study of the history of philosophy and when I was not thinking of any philosopher who asserted it. Simply experience seemed to me like that. It still does.
The data of memory are previous personal experiences. The data of perception are also previous experiences, but not personal ones. Consider a physical pain or pleasure. It is a datum of one’s awareness. Set aside the notion of mental pains or pleasures; for example, a woman weary of carrying a child might feel relief at the onset of labor pains. Such mental satisfactions or dissatisfactions are not what I intend by physical pleasures or pains. Sexual pleasure may be of both kinds. Some thinkers seem curiously unable to distinguish between physical feelings and the mental ones that may, in special cases (some of them more or less abnormal, as in masochism), accompany them. So, once more consider a physical pain or pleasure. It is a datum of awareness if there are any such. It may be sharply localized in phenomenal space. It is, in Whitehead’s phrase, an objective feeling form, not a subjective one. True, it is a feeling that the human subject has come to feel, but so that, in Whitehead’s admirable language, the entire experience is one of feeling of feeling. There is a duality and, according to the hypothesis that I adopt from Whitehead, the doubleness is quite real and definite since one feeling follows the other in time. The human feeling is subsequent; the subhuman feeling that it feels is antecedent. We suffer because that sort of feeling, on a more primitive level, has already been felt. not by us but by the microconstituents of our nervous system.
Of course, it is not by direct intuition that we know the meaning of “microconstituents of our nervous systems.” Intuitively we have only the duality of subjective and objective feeling, quality of our awareness, and quality of what we are aware of. Our bodily constituents, the details of which we know only through science, are given in emotional terms and no others, direct intuition being too indistinct to disclose them.
V. Experience as Immediate Sympathy
In other language, what we have been saying is that the subject-to-immediate object-relation is one of sympathy in a very literal sense, participation by one subject in the feelings of other, and temporally prior, subjects. Whitehead’s “physical prehensions” are his technical label for what in ordinary language are acts of immediate sympathy. I deeply believe that there is no other key whatsoever to the ultimate relation of mind to its objects or to its body. When Wordsworth spoke of “seeing into the life of things” he knew only vaguely what he was talking about, but he was vaguely right and faithful to experience in so speaking. To be alive is, in principle, to share in life not simply one’s own. The cell theory might have taught us this long ago. But philosophers often pride themselves on not learning, even by way of suggestion, from science. Wittgenstein is one source of this lamentable way of thinking. The theory that life is essentially participatory is as old as Buddhism, but it is made easier to conceptualize by modem science, which has disclosed the elements of illusion in the idea of mere bits of stuff hurtling about in space, each being what it is simply in itself, with no necessary reference to anything else. This old atomistic myth has lingered on in the “logical atomism” of Hume and Russell.
The formula, then, for an animal mind is that of life participating in the life of at least some of the bodily parts. Allowing for difficult borderline cases, this formula can be taken to cover macroscopic or multicellular animals in general. There are enormous differences in complexity. Our human “symbolic power,” centered in language in the human sense, is so unique in degree that it matters little whether or not we call it a difference of kind. Thus a bird can learn a short human melody but nothing like a symphony. And even the impressive work with chimpanzees learning a sign language will probably put them in the class of fairly young children, not of human adults. The other rivals of humanity, the whales and porpoises, may be similar but are more difficult to study.
Macroscopic plants present a basically different problem, and one that has been misconceived by most philosophers. Aristotle stumbled close to the truth when he said, “A tree is like a sleeping man who never wakes up.” And indeed an animal in (dreamless) sleep is an almost vegetable creature, exchanging materials (air) with the environment, circulating fluids, and growing or repairing parts, but as a whole only potentially an experiencing subject. We now know that the basis of the animal’s possibility for waking experience, the central nervous system, is a subsystem of cells able so to coordinate its parts that they present a suitable array of lesser lives for the participation of the whole-life. In dreamless sleep the nervous system does not quite achieve this coordination, though it makes some contributions to the vegetative functions. The logical conclusion is neither the Aristotelian one that there is a special non-experiencing “vegetative soul” (what could that be?) nor the dualistic or materialistic one that there is in plants no psychical life at all, but rather that the subjectivity which is the active agency in this case is not only on a lower level than with macroanimals but that it is wholly restricted to the microconstituents, presumably the single cells. In growth it is not the tree that does things; simply the cells produce additional cells or repair or enrich their own parts. To talk of the tree doing things is shorthand. As Whitehead picturesquely puts it, a tree is a democracy, a pure democracy without even a temporary ruler or representative. Leibniz, with creditable hesitation, supposed the contrary, that a plant has a “dominant monad,” but a botanist of his time (or was it in Fechner’s time?) made the right criticism that a plant has less unity than this implies. Fechner, without hesitation, and I think less creditably, assumed that all the experience in the tree belongs to the tree as a single subject.
Some would argue that since our experiences depend upon the nervous system, the logical conclusion is that without such a system there is no experiencing, whether in the whole or in the parts. If this reasoning is sound, why not the following? Since in animals digestion is achieved by subsystems of cells called stomach and intestines, therefore there can be nothing analogous to digestion in single-celled animals. The same is the case with the possession or lack of possession of lungs and the utilization of oxygen. Rather, the proper conclusion is only that what many-celled animals achieve by subsystems of cells, single cells may achieve in a more primitive way by arrangements of subcellular parts. The test of subjectivity is dynamic unity, and this seems as clear in cells or protozoa as in a person but by no means as clear in a tree as in either a cell or a person.
Coming at last to “inanimate” nature and following the same general pattern of thinking, we see that if there is in a tree no whole-life capable of sympathetic participation with life, meaning here experiencing, in the parts, there is a fortiori no such whole-life in a rock, a house, or, probably, a star or planet (in spite of Fechner’s eloquent attempt to persuade us of the contrary). The doings of such things seem mere statistical outlines of the doings of their constituents. As J. Clerk Maxwell said with regard to a gas, it is as with a swarm of bees: at a distance it may appear to be a single thing that scarcely moves, but seen close to each bee proves to be highly active and to move in an individual way. Thus the apparent inertness and lack of organized unity of animate things that suggest their lack of psychic life is compatible with their consisting of active, organized, unitary, and sentient parts that are unseen. Accordingly, traditional dualisms and materialisms are groundless. They commit a mixture of the fallacy of division and the fallacy of confusing “we fail to observe the presence of such and such” with “we observe the absence of such and such.” Let it be ever remembered that Leibniz was the man who first avoided both of these fallacies. Alas, he fell into others.
There is a final problem. If there are least parts with no subparts, then these partless units cannot be organisms in quite the same sense as ordinary units, those with parts, may be. If such a partless unit is a subject, it must, it seems, be an “unembodied one ,” the real instantiation at last of this old idea. Not quite, however. A body is the set of those other subjects which a given subject most intimately experiences. Electrons may experience neighboring protons or neutrons, say. In other words, here the role of body is taken over by neighbors. Thus conceptual continuity is preserved even in this extreme case. In a general way I am here agreeing with thoughts of Peirce, Bergson, and Whitehead. Believe it or not, there does exist a new type of metaphysics, perhaps as truly unique to the twentieth or late nineteenth century as relativity or quantum physics. That our culture has not been made aware of this is a signal example of the difficulty of the philosophical task.
VI. Mere Matter: A Category Mistake
A basic conviction common to process philosophers and all who, like Leibniz, hold that the true pluralism is of subjects, not mere objects, is the contention that when we compare an animal, a plant, and a rock as each a single thing, differing however radically in quality, we are making a “category mistake,” a mistake as to logical types. An animal is a single agent in a sense in which a plant, a rock, or a gas is not. There are qualitative differences here also, but they cannot be clearly understood until the category difference is taken into account. To keep within one logical type one must compare an animal with a cell of a tree, not with a tree, and with molecules or atoms, not with rocks or gases. Also, when it comes to particles, there is an additional type difference in that the self-identity of individuals through change is questionable on their level. There are particulate events rather than particulate things; however, in process philosophy there is no absolute requirement that all events must form careers of identifiable individuals. Here the break with Leibniz is sharp, but the Buddhists took a similar path long ago without help from quantum physics. And they were psychicalists too in a vague sense and process philosophers of sorts. Thus the new philosophy is in some respects very old.
Jonas is inclined to think that process philosophy underestimates the difference between even the lowest biological organisms and the constituents of inanimate nature. I suggest that he underestimates the resources of this philosophy for conceiving almost infinite, in a sense truly infinite, differences in spite of the “monistic” ontology. What Whitehead calls “societies,” corresponding to the individuals or things of common sense, can vary more widely than our imaginations can readily follow, both in degree and kind of “social order,” that is, their degree and kind of identity through change as well as in the levels of feeling or experiencing of their momentary members or “actual entities.”
Granting, for the sake of argument, that, as Leibniz held, we can understand singular realities only to the extent that we can see their analogy to ourselves as singulars, it is to be expected that such understanding will be most difficult to achieve as we consider cases most unlike ourselves. With other persons we know roughly what they are, for they are roughly what we are; with nonhuman animals we must make more allowance for differences from ourselves; with single cells still more, with molecules much more still; with particles not only extreme qualitative differences but, as noted above, probably a logical-type difference as well in the partial absence of identifiable socially ordered sequences, that is, individuals enduring through change. At the opposite extreme, in the attempt to understand deity, we have again the difficulty of combining analogy with utmost difference. The radically superhuman and the extremely subhuman are not likely to be the easiest topics for human thought.
The difficulty of interpreting the inanimate is not mitigated by a materialistic or dualistic language. If the stuff of nature at large is not any form of experiencing, this can only mean that, whether we call it “matter,” “energy ,” or (as Democritus did) bits of “being” in the void of “nonbeing,” we know of it only that it is something or other with the abstract relational patterns that physics defines through its formulae. In the only directly given instances of being we have access to, the relational patterns are filled in by the stuff of feeling and the like. If we discard this in our view of nature at large, there is nothing to put in its place.
It is not only Whitehead who attributes some minimum of “historicity ,” in Jonas’ word, to inanimate nature. Bergson also argues that without something like memory (or, I add, perception as impersonal memory) there is no way to relate the moments of time to preceding or succeeding moments. But both writers have a vivid conception of the vast differences in the kinds and degrees of identity through change which this involves.
VIl. Quanta of Becoming and Theory of Relations
Professor Jonas is troubled by Whitehead’s epochal theory of becoming. The reason for this theory is a version of the old Zeno argument against change assumed to be continuous. Henrik von Wright has, apparently independently, argued for a similar view as the only way to avoid contradiction in describing becoming, the only way to have definite terms with definite natures for relations of succession. Otherwise, in any time, however short, a process will be both p and not p, and nothing will conform to the idea of entities with definite and consistent properties. Whitehead’s argument was that (assuming continuity) before a process taking up a second can occur, a process must occur taking up half a second, and before that one taking up a smaller amount of time, and so on, implying a nonfinte series which, though beginningless, must have been run through before anything identifiable can happen. The difficulty is not to get to the end of the series but to get into it. With the admission of momentary actualities, which become rather than change and which correspond to successive finite segments of physical time, the specified difficulties vanish.
There is here a difference between Bergson and Whitehead. For the latter it is (in spite of some careless Whiteheadian sentences) simply false to say that successive moments of process “interpenetrate.” And Bergson’s own view of open future and closed past, or of present memory as embracing the past but not vice versa, his theory of becoming as cumulative creation, is contradicted by the use of symmetrical expressions such as interpenetrate. The earlier penetrates the later but surely not the later the earlier. Over and over Bergson rightly rejected the doctrine of mutually external moments of process and treated the contrary extreme of mutually internal moments as thereby justified, as though mutual internality were the only escape from mutual externality! This is no more logical than it would be to hold that, since a formal logic of propositions, all of which are mutually independent of one another, would be absurd, we must adopt one of propositions all mutually implicative or equivalent. Instead, logicians operate with the assumption that some pairs of propositions are mutually independent, some mutually implicative, and some such that, while p entails, depends upon, the truth of q, the converse dependence does not obtain.
Alas, most controversies about internal and external relations have fallen into this amazing fallacy of treating contrary symmetrical extremes as exhausting the possibilities. On the externalist side we have Occam, Hume, and Russell; on the internalist, Spinoza, Bradley, Royce, Blanshard, and in Ancient China the Buddhist Fa Tsang. I see no logical justification for the neglect, common to both parties, of the asymmetrical case. In the last hundred years only Peirce and Whitehead are even relatively clear on this point, and even they are sometimes forgetful or confused about it.
VIII. A Cautious Interactionism
Among the advantages of the new metaphysics is the way it enables us to escape the harshness or crudity of the old issues between epiphenomenalism, two-aspect views, interactionism, and materialistic identity. In these controversies several values are at stake. There is the value of keeping open the path of scientific inquiry. This value is threatened by crude declarations that causal explanations are incompatible with teleological ones, or that a caused action is not really an action but merely a happening. In process philosophy there is no absolute dichotomy between happenings and actions. All happenings are also actions, so far as the singular dynamic agents are concerned, though in most happenings nothing remotely approaching the human level of conscious purpose is involved. Also causes of happenings or of actions are simply necessary preconditions that are only approximately or probabilistically “sufficient” to determine the outcome. There is no absolute contrast between “mechanical” and nonmechanical, for nothing is, in the sharp sense, merely mechanical. Always there is in present happening an element, however slight, of here and now determination not fully and uniquely implied by the preceding situation and causal laws. Always, however, the conditions do make a difference, whether or not they tie down results to precisely what happens, and it is worth knowing what the conditions are and what difference they make. Hence, science has plenty to do searching out necessary and probabilistically sufficient conditions without worrying about the idol of absolute determinism.
As for interactionism, the scientific import of this is easily exaggerated. Our theory of participation makes it clear that neural processes powerfully influence experiences, for they furnish their direct data (except so far as these are our own remembered past experiences, and they exercise selective agency over which memories assume prominence in consciousness). Thus the processes are conditions of the experiences. Is there a reverse influence? Process philosophers affirm that there is; but how strong is this influence? If participation is the way the world hangs together, then the only possibility of explaining an influence of human experiences upon cellular processes is in the supposition that cellular processes are themselves experiences participating in our (antecedent) experiences. However, there seems reason to consider this reverse participation or influence as incomparably weaker, in one sense, than the other. Taking anyone cell, an experience of ours has far greater influence on it than it has on our experience, and the experience influences a multitude of cells directly, while each cell influences directly only a few neighbors. But taking the nervous system and the body as a whole, the comparison is very different. It is the higher forms of life that can adequately participate in the lower forms, not vice versa. (Were it otherwise it would be the lower forms that had science, not we at the pinnacle of terrestrial life.) From this it seems to follow, so far as r can make out, that “epiphenomenalism,” while not strictly true (how many propositions are that?), is less false than some critics of it suppose. Our cells can do a lot without us, as one can see from the fact of dreamless sleep when our experiences are in abeyance, but we can do nothing without them. We must participate in their feelings, they can dispense rather largely with ours. There is, therefore, a stronger case for our bodies influencing our minds than for our minds influencing our bodies. Combining this consideration with the vast and, for our intelligence, virtually infinite complexity of the nervous system, it seems to follow that too much is made of the need to assert the absolute independence of neuromuscular processes from influence by our experiencing in order to safeguard or promote scientific investigation.
As the well-known geneticist Sewall Wright pointed out to me long ago, an influence of mind on body need not, to be Significant, involve more than extremely small energy differences. It is like pushing a tiny button, or not pushing it, to launch. or withhold, a mighty missile. Still earlier Maxwell hinted at a similar idea. As Jonas also has pointed out, an almost infinitesimal change in angle can produce as great a change as you please in outcome.
IX. Robots And The Problem Of Quality
Another issue that takes on a different character when viewed in process terms is that of thinking machines and man-like robots. The issue is not whether we are mere machines, for there are no mere machines. At least on the microlevel there is always a lowly form of life or mind, i.e., of self-activity, which Plato and Aristotle identified with mind or soul, but which they did not realize is pervasive in nature. The issue is only whether in robots there is any whole-life, or whether instead the life in them is solely in the imperceptibly small parts. On the participatory theory there can be such whole-life only if life in the parts is sufficiently coordinated. Moreover, in animals the coordination is on a supramolecular level, a harmony of cellular activity. In robots there is nothing like this. (Or, if there should be, we can consider crossing that bridge when it seems a probability for the reasonably near future.) There is a kind of coordination, but it is not such as to make possible a simulation of life, experience as at least emotional and sensory; rather, the aim is at simulating intelligence as derivation of conclusions from premises or at simulating the functions of the brain as feedback mechanism to guide bodily movements. But experience is no mere device for getting conclusions from premises or for controlling movements; it is something in itself, indeed it is the principle of reality. And it is feeling, enjoyment, basically, with intelligence a complication and contingent development. Experience is the end of ends.
We are told that if a robot acted in all ways like a human being, we should have to accept it as equivalent in awareness. Since I take it as an a priori truth that absolute duplication of human behavior by a machine radically different in internal structure is a contradiction in terms (every difference makes a difference), I wonder how I am to react to this proposal. And I think that the evidence of a robot’s experiences, or lack of them, must include the facts of its internal construction. Behavior is not the end to which the nervous system is mere means; behavior is, in part, a means to preserving and stimulating the nervous system and its accompanying experiences and, in part, a means to preserving and stimulating the nervous systems and experiences of other animals. If the cellular structure of animals is the thing that makes their whole-experience possible, as I believe it is, then I want the robot to show analogies to that structure if it is to pass as a fellow conscious being.
The value of structure is found, not in structure alone, but in quality of experience. In most of the talk about thinking machines nothing but structures are mentioned. But on that level of abstractness not even the ideas of causality, time, or space are intelligible. This is the real message of Hume’s analysis of causality. What has present happening to do with past or future happening? In experience it is memory, perception, and goal seeking that tie events together; in materialism we have merely the assertion that something or other does this.
The neglect of secondary or tertiary qualities by science leads some to suppose that these qualities characterize only the subjective experiences, or these and the bodies, of animals. The specific qualities yes, since we can have no direct evidence that they qualify things outside our bodies. However, we do (as I have argued above) have direct evidence that they qualify bodily constituents. Moreover, the fact that science builds its world picture out of mere temporo-spatial-causal relations shows only that our human power to deal with qualities is more limited than our power to deal with quantities and geometrico-causal relations. And for a good reason! The so-called primary qualities are more abstract, and it is the concrete that is difficult to handle conceptually, not the abstract. (For this reason mathematicians mature early.) We can conceptually run through possible geometries, possible relational patterns, and there is no clear limit to our power to explore possibilities of this kind. But what can we do to explore possible qualities? A man born blind can do rather little to imagine color experiences though, as Helen Keller guessed, he can do more than some suppose. But to conceive mathematically definitely a certain type of geometrical pattern, we need only sufficient logical power. And we have learned that the geometrical structures of the world hang together in certain lawful ways that can be more or less sharply defined. How do the qualities of feeling in the world, outside our type of organism, hang together? That is a mystery by far less accessible to intellectual plus observational inquiry. If we knew that we should indeed know everything. For quality includes relational pattern, as every artist knows. Quality could not be other than more or less mysterious. It is not we who could know how all things feel. We are not God “to whom all hearts are open.” We might, however. know that all things — except loosely organized composites — do feel.
X. Death, Objective Immortality, and God
Professor Jonas suggests that Whitehead, by his “immortality of the past” doctrine, has too easily done away with the tragedy of death. But here he is hardly making vivid to himself what for Whitehead is the real situation. Apart from God, the immortality of the past is cold comfort indeed, being but a generalization of the standard notion of “social immortality” which any philosopher can preach if he wants to. Granted, the human species is itself not known to be immortal, and indeed it clearly could come to an end, whereas for Whitehead the creative process as such could not do so, and therefore in a generalized sense all actuality is for him strictly everlasting. However, with the generalization goes a diluting. My vivid experiences are palely, inadequately. and more and more palely and inadequately as time goes on, prehended by later experiences, some (until I die) belonging to my personally ordered society, the rest not. More and more the prehensions are “negative,” relegating aspects to the irrelevant background of experience. Only God has adequate prehensions of the past, only his prehensions are entirely positive. Thus, unless one can accept not only Whitehead’s categories but also his idea of deity, the tragedy of death remains nearly as it is in other philosophies that reject personal immortality in the usual sense.
Even with God, there remain deeply tragic aspects. “Always there is the dream of youth and the harvest of tragedy.” That we are mortal is something with which I for one have no emotional quarrel; but that the time and manner of our dying is subject to chance intersections of creative actions that no one, not even God, can know or determine in advance, is harder to face with equanimity. Premature death, ugly ways of dying, or lingering half alive, these are evils, even though mortality as such is not. Lovers all face the question: Which of us dies first? If it is A, B suffers bereavement, and A perhaps fails to carry out some of his or her major plans in life. For both selfish and unselfish reasons one wants and does not want to survive the other. In any case it takes a high level of self-transcendence to find sufficient the preservation of one’s experiences, not ultimately in one’s own experiences, or even in those of other human persons, but in those of deity. True, this self-transcendence is no more than should all along have been read into the imperative, love God with all your being. Nevertheless, some insist that only if one can count on endless additions to one’s own experiencing, or endless further experiences of one’s friends, has death lost its sting. So I cannot feel that this philosophy trivializes the meaning of mortality.
The faith of Jonas that we can contribute to the divine life, and in that way achieve permanent significance, seems formally close to Whitehead’s, apart from being more vaguely and tentatively expressed. At least the two ways of thinking seem to be within talking distance of one another, which is more than one can say of some philosophical confrontations.
Notes
1. For Ryle’s view on introspection as retrospection, see his The Concept of Mind, 1949, Barnes and Noble, p. 166.
Bibliography
1. Edwards, P. (ed.): 1967, ‘Panpsychism’, The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, CollierMacmillan.
2. Hartshorne, C.: 1934, The Philosophy and Psychology of Sensation, The University of Chicago; reprinted in 1968, Kennikat, Port Washington, N.Y.
3. Hartshorne, C.: 1973, ‘Creativity and the Deductive Logic of Causality’, Review of Metaphysics 27, 62-74.
4. Russell, B.: 1948, Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits, George Allen and Unwin, London.
Source:
Charles Hartshorne, “The Organism According to Process Philosophy,” Philosophy and Medicine, Volume 7, Organism, Medicine, and Metaphysics: Essays in Honor of Hans Jonas on his 75th Birthday, Edited by Stuart F. Spicker, pp, 137-154.