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CHAPTER 1

Preamble to Part I

A natural and perhaps even necessary first step in a book that aims to offer an alternative account of reality is to highlight what is wrong with the current approaches. After all, why bother with alternatives if the status quo is fine? As such, my intent in the next two chapters is not to gratuitously attack my peers in science and philosophy, but to highlight the need and secure the intellectual space for what is later argued in Part II.

The fact is that the mainstream physicalist ontology fails rather spectacularly to account for the most present and sole undeniable aspect of reality: the qualities of experience (see the "hard problem of consciousness" in Chalmers 2003). Physicalism is also arguably irreconcilable with results now emerging from physics laboratories around the world (e.g. Kim et al. 2000, Gröblacher et al. 2007, Romero et al. 2010, Lapkiewicz et al. 2011, Ma et al. 2013, Manning et al. 2015, Hensen et al. 2015, etc.), unless one takes so many liberties with the meaning of the word 'physicalism' that its spirit is outright contradicted. So both in terms of its explanatory power and its consistency with empirical observations, our mainstream view of the nature of reality is found wanting. Academically popular alternatives, such as bottom-up panpsychism, face many of the same empirical challenges, as well as analogous limitations in terms of explanatory power (see, for instance, the "subject combination problem" in Chalmers 2016).

Yet, my purpose with the next two chapters is not to compile a long and tedious list of the empirical and philosophical challenges faced by current ontologies. These challenges are well known and recognized in scientific and philosophical circles, there being no need to further stress them. What I want to attempt here is something more ambitious and — hopefully — ultimately more constructive: to point out the failures and internal contradictions of the very thought processes that led to these flawed ontologies in the first place. Only by understanding these failures and contradictions, as underlying causes of our present philosophical dilemmas, can we hope to reform our thinking and eventually solve the dilemmas.

In this context, Chapter 2 discusses what is perhaps the root of our contemporary philosophical ailment: the tendency to attempt to explain things by replacing concrete reality with abstractions. Such attempts consist by and large of mere word games, played in thought with a rich phantasmagoria of concepts, and represent perhaps the single greatest threat to our ability to remain grounded in reality in the 21st century. In a cultural environment that, because of the gap left open by the loss of religious myths, tacitly expects the latest scientific and philosophical theories to dazzle and boggle the mind (see Kastrup 2016a), scientists and philosophers alike seem ever more willing to lose themselves in a forest of abstractions highly prone to category mistakes.

This cultural legitimization of explanation by ungrounded abstraction is a hydra with many heads. Chapter 3 represents my attempt to identify these heads and diagnose the specific intellectual afflictions behind quandaries such as the "hard problem of consciousness" and the "subject combination problem." I hope to show that these quandaries are merely artifacts of unanchored thought, with no grounding in non-conceptual reality.

Later in the book, in Parts II to IV, I attempt to back up the legitimacy of the criticisms laid out in this Part I by offering an alternative way of thinking, as well as corresponding ontology, which overcome the intellectual afflictions alluded to above. As such, I hope to not only talk the talk, but also walk the walk. Insofar as I succeed in fixing the errors they point to, the criticisms in the next two chapters are given validation. May these criticisms thus be judged not by their incisiveness, but by my ability to demonstrate that a philosophical approach exists that does not fall prey to them.

Conflating abstraction with empirical observation: The false mind-matter dichotomy

At the time of this writing, this article was scheduled to appear in Constructivist Foundations, ISSN 1782-348X, Vol. 13, No. 3, in July 2018. Constructivist Foundations is an interdisciplinary journal published by Alexander Riegler (Free University of Brussels) and thirty board members. It is indexed in Thomson Reuters's Arts & Humanities Citation Index (AHCI) and, in 2016, held the second highest ranking (Q2) in the Scimago Journal Rankings, a well-recognized measure of an academic journal's prestige.

2.1 Abstract

The alleged dichotomy between mind and matter is pervasive. Therefore, the attempt to explain matter in terms of mind (idealism) is often considered a mirror image of that of explaining mind in terms of matter (mainstream physicalism), in the sense of being structurally equivalent despite being reversely arranged. I argue that this is an error arising from language artifacts, for dichotomies must reside in the same level of abstraction. Because matter outside mind is not an empirical fact, but an explanatory model instead, the epistemic symmetry between the two is broken. Consequently, matter and mind cannot reside in the same level of abstraction. It becomes then clear that attempting to explain mind in terms of matter is epistemically more costly than attempting to explain matter in terms of mind. The qualities of experience are suggested to be not only epistemically, but also ontologically primary. The paper highlights the primacy of perceptual constructs over explanatory abstraction on both epistemic and ontic levels.

2.2 Introduction

The (unexamined) assumption that mind and matter are jointly exhaustive and mutually exclusive concepts is pervasive today. In other words, many people implicitly take every aspect of reality to be either mental (e.g. thoughts, emotions, hallucinations) or physical (e.g. tables and chairs), mentality and physicality being polar opposites in some sense. Originating with Descartes and Kant (Walls 2003: 130), this dichotomy has been firmly entrenched in Western thought since at least the early nineteenth century. Eminent scholarly publications of the time, such as The British Cyclopædia of Natural History, lay it out unambiguously: "as mind is the opposite of matter in definition, the perfection of its exercise must be the opposite of that of the exercise of matter" (Partington 1837: 161). From the early twentieth century onwards, more nuanced formulations of the dichotomy were proposed. Alfred North Whitehead (1947), for instance, considered mind and matter co-dependent opposites. Even Henri Bergson, whose conception of an élan vital was meant to dilute the Cartesian split, was careful not to completely eradicate the dichotomy (Catani 2013: 94).

Indeed, this trend towards more nuanced formulations endures to this day. Philosopher David Chalmers, for instance, wrote that the "failure of materialism leads to a kind of dualism: there are both physical and nonphysical [i.e. mental] features of the world" (1996: 124). He speaks of property dualism (Ibid.: 125) to distinguish it from the discredited substance dualism of Descartes. Nonetheless, the essence of the dichotomy persists intact. Public endorsements of property dualism by influential science spokespeople, such as neuroscientists Christof Koch (2012a: 152) and Sam Harris (2016), lend academic legitimacy to it. Harris, for instance, claims that mind and matter each represent "half of reality" (Ibid.), making the implicit assumption that they have comparable epistemic status (that is, that matter is as confidently knowable as mind). So pervasive is this assumption that it has become integral to our shared cultural intuitions.

Whilst a fundamental dichotomy between mind and matter is readily accepted by large segments of the population — perhaps for psychological reasons (Heflick et al. 2015) — in philosophical circles the corresponding dualism is properly regarded as unparsimonious. For this reason, philosophy has historically attempted to explain one member of the alleged dichotomy in terms of the other. The ontology of idealism, for instance, attempts to reduce "all sense data to mental contents" (Tarnas 2010: 335), whereas mainstream physicalism — perhaps better labeled as 'materialism,' but which I shall continue to refer to as 'mainstream physicalism' for the sake of consistency with some of the relevant literature — attempts to reduce all mental contents to material arrangements (Stoljar 2016). To be more specific, idealism entails that mind is nature's fundamental ontological ground, everything else being reducible to, or grounded in, mind, whereas mainstream physicalism posits that nature's fundamental ontological ground is matter outside and independent of mind, everything else being reducible to, or grounded in, matter.

The problem is that the ingrained cultural intuition that mind and matter have comparable epistemic status tends to creep — unexamined — even into philosophical thought, leading to the tacit conclusion that idealism and mainstream physicalism are mirror images of each other, in the sense of being structurally equivalent despite being reversely arranged. In the present essay, I contend that this tacit conclusion is false because it overlooks important epistemic considerations: we do not — and fundamentally cannot — know matter as confidently as we know mind. By incorrectly positing that idealism incurs epistemic cost comparable to that of mainstream physicalism in at least some important sense, the tacit conclusion undervalues idealism and overvalues physicalism. This confusion may be a key enabler of physicalism's success in underpinning our present-day mainstream worldview. Once the tacit conclusion is properly examined and rectified, as attempted in this essay, idealism may emerge as a more plausible ontology than mainstream physicalism at least in terms of its epistemic cost.

Like Gilbert Ryle (2009), I argue that mind and matter do not form a dichotomy. My argument, however, does not depend — as Ryle's controversially does (Webster 1995: 483) — on equating mind with behaviors. Indeed, Ryle attempts to refute the alleged dichotomy by effectively relegating mind to the status of mere illusion (Ibid.: 461). My argument, instead, rests on the notion that mind and matter are not epistemically symmetric — a concept I shall formally define in Section 2.5 — as members of a dichotomy must be. I do not deny mind, because it is epistemically primary: all knowledge presupposes mind.

That the notion of physically objective matter — that is, matter outside and independent of mind — is now largely taken for granted suggests cultural acclimatization to what is in fact a mere hypothesis. After all, physically objective matter is not an observable fact, but a conceptual explanatory device abstracted from the patterns and regularities of observable facts — that is, an explanatory abstraction (Glasersfeld 1987; more on this in Section 2.4). Indeed, there seems to be a growing tendency in science today to mistake explanatory abstraction for what is available to us empirically. This has been extensively documented before, but mostly in regard to clearly speculative ideas such as superstring theory and multiverse cosmologies (Smolin 2007). When it comes to the everyday notion of physically objective matter, however, many fail to see the same conflation at work.

To illustrate and highlight the conflation with an admittedly extreme example, Section 2.3 briefly reviews the ontology of pancomputationalism, which posits ungrounded computation as the primary element of reality (Piccinini 2015). Indeed, the idea of replacing physicalism with ontic pancomputationalism should provide a visceral demonstration of the epistemic cost of substituting explanatory abstraction for observable facts. In this context, my suggestion is that an analogous epistemic disparity exists between idealism and mainstream physicalism. In other words, if one is convinced that ontic pancomputationalism is absurd in comparison to physicalism, then — and on the same basis — one has reason to question the plausibility of mainstream physicalism in comparison to idealism.

Section 2.4 then elaborates more systematically on the different planes of abstract explanation used in science and philosophy. It provides the basis for the refutation of the alleged dichotomy between mind and matter later carried out in Section 2.5, which forms the core of this essay. Finally, Section 2.6 sums it all up.

Before we start, however, some terminology clarifications are needed. Throughout this essay, I use the word 'mind' in the sense of phenomenal consciousness. Following Nagel's original definition of the latter (1974) — which has since been further popularized by Chalmers (1996, 2003) — I stipulate that, if there is anything it is like to be a certain entity, then the entity is minded. As such, mind — as the word is used here — is epistemically primary, an assertion further substantiated in Section 2.4. In this sense, mind does not necessarily entail higher-level functions such as metacognition — that is, the knowledge of one's knowledge (Schooler 2002: 340) — or even a conscious sense of self as distinct from the world. It necessarily entails only the presence of phenomenal properties, in that it is defined as the substrate or ground of experience. Moreover, insofar as what we call 'concreteness' is itself a phenomenal property associated with the degree of clarity or vividness of experience, mind is the sole ground of concreteness. Anything allegedly non-mental cannot, by definition, be concrete, but is abstract instead, in the sense of lacking phenomenal properties.

I am well aware that the word 'mind' is used in entirely different ways — often decoupled from experience — in other contexts, such as e.g. philosophy of biology (Godfrey-Smith 2014) and artificial intelligence (Franklin 1997). Yet, I believe the usage I am defining here is adequate for the context of the present paper. And given this usage, experience can be coherently regarded as an excitation of mind, whereas mind can be coherently regarded as the substrate or ground of experience.

2.3 The epistemic cost of explanation by abstraction

By postulating a material world outside mind and obeying laws of physics, physicalism can accommodate the patterns and regularities of perceptual experience. But it fails to accommodate experience itself. This is called the 'hard problem of consciousness' and there is now vast literature on it (e.g. Levine 1983, Rosenberg 2004: 13-30, Strawson et al. 2006: 2-30). In a nutshell, the qualities of experience are irreducible to the parameters of material arrangements — whatever the arrangement is — in the sense that it is impossible even in principle to deduce those qualities from these parameters (Chalmers 2003).

As I elaborate upon in Section 2.5, the 'hard problem' is not merely hard, but fundamentally insoluble, arising as it does from the very failure to distinguish explanatory abstraction from observable fact discussed in this paper. As such, it implies that we cannot, even in principle, explain mind in terms of matter. But because the contemporary cultural ethos entails the notion that mind and matter constitute a dichotomy, one may feel tempted to conclude that there should also be a symmetric 'hard problem of matter' — that is, that we should not, even in principle, be able to explain matter in terms of mind. The natural next step in this flawed line of reasoning is to look for more fundamental ontological ground preceding both mind and matter; a third substrate to which matter and mind could both be reduced.

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Excerpted from "The Idea of the World"
by .
Copyright © 2013 Bernardo Kastrup.
Excerpted by permission of John Hunt Publishing Ltd..
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