Segall (excerpt)

 

Introduction: The Physics of Consciousness

“Humans are blobs of organized mud.” So begins physicist Sean Carroll’s popular book The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning and the Universe Itself (2016). His book aims to show how atoms in motion according to the laws of physics could give rise to the full array of human values and meaning, including all our thinking, feeling, and willing. Process philosophers generally eschew such “brilliant feats of explaining away,”[5] instead viewing these hardcore commonsense[6] capacities not only as essential ingredients making possible the civilized phases of human society (including the scientific enterprise itself), but also as high-grade exemplifications of powers latent throughout the physical universe. Such powers—which we have direct practical experience of in our own consciousness—count as evidence that any comprehensive cosmology needs to account for. Carroll leans on his scientific credentials to assure us that even our most prized “inner experiences” can only really be “a way of talking about what is happening in the brain.”[7] While he does want to find some way of poetically resurrecting a self-made meaning worth living for, Carroll remains a hard-nosed physicalist generally adhering to the dictum that “facts don’t care about your feelings.” But what if our feelings are among the facts? What if, indeed, feeling is the only medium through which facts might come to matter?

This paper aims to bring natural science to its senses. Physicists like Carroll may call themselves physicalists, but I hope to show that the project of “explaining away” that he is engaged in, while brilliant in its clever use of abstractions, is really a confused form of model-centric idealism. Contemporary physical cosmology is suffering from a bad case of misplaced concreteness due to the lingering residue of unresolved Kantianism. As an aid to my aim, this paper continues prior efforts to read Whitehead’s philosophy of organism as a descendent of Schelling’s Naturphilosophie, and, to state the same in reverse, to interpret Schelling’s Naturphilosophie as a precursor of process philosophy.[8] Situating Whitehead’s cosmological scheme in lineage with Schelling’s philosophy of nature invites a dialogue with Kant, both in his pre-critical cosmological phase and in his later turn to transcendental idealism. Like Whitehead, Schelling philosophically generalized the findings of the new paradigm sciences of his day to articulate a vision of cosmogenesis as a panpsychic process of dynamic evolution. Also like Whitehead, his core premise was that Kant’s critical appraisal of sense perception unduly severed the conscious mind from its roots in a living ground: “Idealism is the soul of philosophy; realism is the body; only both together can constitute a living whole.” Living nature, Schelling continued, is the medium within which mind becomes real by taking on flesh and blood.[9] Whitehead similarly complained that Kant’s distorted treatment of perception as a merely subjective process uprooted from anything real left natural philosophy floating in the thin air of abstract modes of thought grasping for artificial sources of experiential togetherness, as if the mere appearance of an objective world might satisfy our thirst for knowledge.[10]

Though often characterized as an absolute idealist, Schelling can and has been read as a radical empiricist.[11] Through his influence on scientific giants like Alexander von Humboldt, he made important contributions to the development of what we nowadays refer to as an ecological worldview.[12] Despite his rejection of the mechanistic materialism guiding most modern scientific inquiry, historians of science have argued that the omission of Schelling’s Naturphilosophie from the historiography of nineteenth-century physics “impoverishes our understanding of it.”[13] In his final public lectures in Berlin in 1842, Schelling called German philosophers to take up a deeper empiricism no longer artificially limited to the “mere sensation” of the outward facing senses but inclusive of the “inner sense of the emotions” or feelings, which he adds “is a sense that still very much needs a critique.”[14] In his Gifford lectures delivered in Edinburgh in 1927 and later published as Process and Reality (1929), Whitehead “[aspired] to construct a critique of pure feeling, in the philosophical position in which Kant put his Critique of Pure Reason.”[15] He was not conscious of having answered Schelling’s call, but I hope to show that answer it he did. His aspiration was to invert Kantian transcendentalism so as to reconnect the human mind and its scientific knowledge with the physical world it desires to know (an inversion I have elsewhere characterized as “descendental philosophy”[16]): “For Kant, the world emerges from the subject; for the philosophy of organism, the subject emerges from the world—a ‘superject’ rather than a ‘subject.’”[17] Reimagining physics within the bounds of feeling alone entails overcoming the bifurcation of nature so as to understand how it “is that the energetic activity considered in physics is the emotional intensity entertained in life.”

Mathew Segall