Life demands reconsidering physicalism as dogma

By Louis Berger

What is Life? Here is the answer given by Wikipedia, The internet’s free encyclopedia:

Life is a condition that distinguishes organisms from non-living objects, such as non-life, and dead organisms, being manifested by growth through metabolism and reproduction. Some living things can communicate and many can adapt to their environment through changes originating internally.

(This entry, under “Life,” goes on to specify some technical aspects—about entropy, open systems, exchanges of free and degraded energy—which we may safely ignore here.)

I want to begin by calling attention to the framework implicit in this answer. The encyclopedia might have chosen to describe what life is from any one of a great number of different disciplines and perspectives—say, from the standpoint of the novelist, painter, poet, politician, lawyer, economist, philosopher, psychologist, physician, semiotician, philologist, theologian, or mystic. Instead, it chose the framework of natural science, without preliminary discussion. These days, that seems natural, a matter of course. The answer is couched in terms of physics and biology, employing as a key concept sciences’ polarized dichotomy dead/alive, inert/active-growing-adapting-reproducing. In what follows, I want to explore what it means to place the question into this polarizing context, and to point to an alternative frame.

The living/dead polarity has long been important in human thought, but with the rise of age of Western science it has assumed a particular form. At the beginning of that age, René Descartes famously postulated the disjunctive polarity of extended matter, res extensa, and “thinking thing,” mind, res cogitans. That fundamental distinction reappeared, and continues to reappear, in numerous guises, notably in the distinction between primary qualities such as shape, extension, number, solidity, volume: quantifiable, measurable, “objectively” observable and measurable properties that objects in the external world have independently of any observer, and secondary qualities such as color, taste, smell, and sound: “subjective” properties that manifest as sensations “inside” observers and thus resist objective treatment. This distinction has evolved to strongly imply that only the former qualities are “really real” (as some have ironically characterized them) while the latter are basically much like illusions, dreams, imaginations, phantasms, and so not real—for science, not worth taking seriously. That is, secondary qualities are not only scientifically intractable (because they pose basic problems of “objective” observation, measurement, and quantification) but have come to be widely treated as irrelevant for the natural sciences. These deal with the putatively inert constituents of the world, and have removed, ejected, and excluded secondary qualities from their domain of inquiry.


Dangerous Dichotomies

This bifurcation into two domains has generated major theoretical, conceptual, practical and continuing difficulties in a wide range of disciplines, especially for philosophy and psychology. It leads to the constellation of paradoxes and apparently unresolvable conundrums (e.g., how can matter, the body, affect mind? How can we have reliable knowledge of the “outside” world?) usually subsumed under the rubric “the mind-body problem.” Attempted resolutions continually revisit a small number of basic alternatives (e.g., all is matter; all is mind; matter and mind are just different ways of looking at the same thing; the mind-body problem is spurious, generated by careless language, and should just be dismissed); none has been able to resolve the problems raised by the extended matter/”mental thing” dualism; each proposal leads to further conundrums. From these unsatisfactory options, then, natural science has selected the first; at least in practice if not in theory, it dogmatically and militantly adopts materialism or physicalism—roughly, the premise that everything in the world is physical, that there is nothing above and beyond the physical, that the physical facts in a certain sense exhaust all the facts about the world. In other words, ultimately the explanations of all phenomena, including life, will be given in terms of underlying inert matter and its features. (Some see this as science’s defensive reaction to the previous ages’ dominance by religious dogma, mystery, magic thinking, and authority.) It is not exactly a new position—it echoes the pre-Socratic philosopher Democritus’ claim of more than 2,000 years ago that “by convention there are sweet and bitter, hot and cold, by convention there is color; but in truth there are atoms and the void”—but it certainly has achieved the status of received truth.

So far, I have recounted that natural science deals essentially with primary qualities, those exhibited by the inert world, and excludes secondary qualities, those pertaining to liveness, sensation/perception, cognation. How, then, can natural science hope to explain the nature of life in terms pertaining to dead matter? How can any project undertaken within “normal science” (Thomas Kuhn’s famous term) re-inject living phenomena into the discipline? How can any explanation couched in terms belonging to the inert realm explain life? (One answer is that such an explanation simply falls outside the domain of the field; explaining life is not the business of physics or the physical sciences. The physical sciences certainly can choose to take this position.)

One attempt at a physicalist explanation, but in my view a rather banal one, is via correlations: when this happens, that also happens; when matter does this, life does that. This, for example, is the route hotly pursued within contemporary psychiatry; brain events observed via scans, or neurochemical studies, are correlated with psychological ones—“depression,” “bipolar disorder,” etc. (which seems to easily slide into identification, the claim that mind is brain). That does not seem like much of an explanation to me, although whether this mechanistic approach has been or will be clinically/therapeutically productive is another and very large question indeed. (I have addressed it in a number of books, journal articles, and conference papers starting in the 1970s.)


The Folly of Emergence

A more theory-oriented, more conceptual, and also a widely and mostly uncritically accepted “explanation” is emergence, the premise that as the Nobel Laureate Max Delbrück put it, “at some time in the past, life did indeed emerge spontaneously from inanimate matter” (Mind from Matter? 1986). This is the position held by nearly all present-day philosophers of mind, and, I believe, by nearly all scientists. Never mind that we do not now know the exact details; mechanistic neuroscience will sooner or later (and probably sooner than later, it often is said) fill in the missing theoretical gaps. If one is a dedicated materialist or physicalist, there does not seem to be a viable alternative, of course, other than perhaps assigning the question to the domain of religion. The received view is that we have an apparently reliable promissory note—even though no one has the faintest idea of how such a qualitatively drastic transition can be conceptualized.

Nevertheless, in spite of the consensus that eventually emergence will—must—“explain” what life is, emergentism has been carefully and compellingly criticized by the relatively few scholars who do not fall in line with that received view. One of these is the philosopher David Ray Griffin. A core criticism concerns the kinds of examples typically cited to support emergence of life from inert matter. In his book Unsnarling the World Knot (1998) which I highly recommend (along with David Skrbina’s Panpsychism in the West, 2005—see also my lengthy review ), Griffin says:

The alleged emergence of subjectivity out of pure objectivity has been said to be analogous to examples of emergence that are different in kind [and thus irrelevant to the argument]. All of the unproblematic forms of emergence refer to... features of things as perceived from without.... But the alleged emergence of [living] experience is not simply one more example of such emergence. It involves instead the alleged emergence of an “inside” of things that have only outsides. It does not involve the emergence of one more objective property for subjectivity to view, but the alleged emergence of subjectivity itself.

He presents extended discussions of this point.

The prominent philosopher Thomas Nagel echoes Griffin’s conclusion: “there are no truly emergent properties of complex systems” (Mortal Questions, 1979); so does the philosopher Mark A. Bedau: “although...emergence is logically possible, it is uncomfortably like magic... [there is] the traditional worry that emergence entails illegitimately getting something from nothing" (cited in Wikipedia, “Emergence”). Incidentally, “supervenience,” the currently fashionable and widely touted successor to the hypothesis of emergentism, fares no better under critical examination; see Griffin.

The alternative perspective Griffin offers is panpsychism, the position that all things have mind or a mind-like quality, that mind exists, in some form and some sense, in all things. The panpsychist asks us to see the “mentality” of other objects not in terms of human consciousness but as a subject of a certain universal quality of physical things, in which both inanimate mentality and human consciousness are taken as particular manifestations. In one or another form, this hypothesis has been advocated since ancient times by a succession of important thinkers, and as both Skrbina and Griffin show, it has numerous advantages over both materialism and mind-body dualism. Especially, first, it removes the inexplicable qualitative change implicit in emergentism, and second, it leads to a whole set of new and potentially productive questions and novel issues.


Panpsychism & Life

Now, it is easy to caricature and ridicule this hypothesis (which has led some advocates to suggest using the less provocative, more neutral term “panexperientialism”). For example, on the rare occasions when philosophers and scientists even mention it, they are likely to immediately ask rhetorically, condescendingly, and contemptuously things like, “You mean to say you really believe that rocks are conscious?” Panexperientialism certainly is a body of thought deeply incompatible with our Western physicalist worldview and one vulnerable to such superficial disparagement, but that does not justify giving it short shrift. Anyway, I will not attempt here to explain panpsychism further, or to give supporting arguments on its behalf. In that regard, interested readers will find much that is relevant and, I think, compelling and interesting in the two books I mentioned. I will, however, offer a few concluding comments concerning the implications a panexperientialism perspective holds for the core question this essay addresses, “What is Life?”

First, a negative implication: Panpsychism counters materialistic views that ultimately see everything and anything as complex entities built out of physics’ inanimate fundamental building blocks (e.g., currently, “strings”), views that trivialize, marginalize, indeed remove life. In my own profession, a case in point is the materialism that is almost universally and unquestioningly assumed, and highly valued, in the mental health fields (in spite of their giving lip service to the social and psychological dimensions). I have been writing for decades about what I see to be the malignant consequences for clinical work employing this framework (see, for example, Substance Abuse as Symptom, 1991, or Psychotherapy as Praxis: Abandoning Misapplied Science, 2002). One negative implication of panexperientialism, then, is that in order to have a better chance to understand what life “is” (and also in order to work more productively, deeply, and responsibly in fields such as psychiatry), one not only needs to critically reexamine materialism/physicalism and its implicit mind/body, primary qualities/secondary qualities bifurcations, but also to take seriously the drastic panexperientialist alternative.

Second, an implication for the natural sciences. To me, panpsychism clearly invites a natural science that would include much more than formalization, mathematization, quantification, measurement, “objectivity,” and the like. Although it might not be obvious, such formalistic methods, approaches, and criteria are the means whereby a discipline necessarily and unwaveringly becomes locked in on the domain of primary qualities; formalizations are the means whereby life is kept out of the domain of the sciences. (I began making this point early on in the journal article “Innate constraints of formal theories,” 1978.) I suggest that if we are going to look to physics to illuminate the nature of life, the field will have to reconsider its physicalist dogma. This may be a timely suggestion; after all is said and done, we really do not even understand much about so-called inert matter. The world of contemporary physics is incredibly complex, strange, and mind-boggling, full of incomprehensible paradoxes, mutually incompatible frameworks, unimaginable concepts, apparently magical phenomena—see, for example, Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe (1999) or his The Fabric of the Cosmos (2004).

There are indications that its practitioners are beginning to consider the possibility that physics is reaching some kind of conceptual endpoint, that something radically different conceptually ought to be explored to move the discipline further (the work of the physicist David Bohm is one prominent attempt). If formalization excludes life, then perhaps physics should consider incorporating non-mathematized, non-mathematizing theories, concepts, and methods—unorthodox ingredients that would allow re-admitting “secondary qualities” into its domain of study (but I certainly do not know how that might be done).

One obvious thorny, problematic issue in physics that might profit from such an alternative approach is observation. "Observation" plays an important conceptual role in physics, especially in quantum theory, but because of the limitations necessarily imposed by its primary-qualities-based frameworks, physics has so far been able to deal with it only simplistically, superficially, and unsatisfactorily (see Raymond Tallis’ The Explicit Animal, 1999, chapter 3, for a comprehensive discussion).


Why Do We Want to Know?

The third is a pragmatic point: One ought to consider why the question “What is Life?” is being asked—for what purpose, in what context? For some purposes and in some contexts, mechanistic answers such as Wikipedia’s will do nicely, but in other situations it might be necessary to bring panpsychism into the picture.

Finally, I suggest that the best general answer to the posed question is: At bottom, we don’t know much about what life is. (Let us admit that often when one says “I don’t know much about it,” it really means “I don’t know anything about it at all.”) Some have gone even further and argued that we can never know, because as a species we lack the neurobiological capacity to really understand living, conscious being (whatever that might mean). The important philosopher Colin McGinn has argued for this option in numerous publications. His version of this profoundly skeptical position is that we simply lack a “mental [brain?] module,” in much the same way that house pets lack “modules” that would enable them to do calculus or differential equations. On that view, we can never understand what consciousness, or life, or inner experience, etc. “is.” In any case, whether McGinn’s premise will ultimately turn out to be correct, at this stage we need to avoid hubris and freely admit our vast ignorance about life. We need to avoid facile explanations; we need to look beyond the available set of standard explanatory schemes. I have sought to make the case that panpsychism offers such a look.

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Dr. Berger is a clinical psychologist with an atypically broad and unusual professional and academic background. In addition to decades of work as a practitioner, teacher, consultant, and writer of publications pertaining to psychodynamics and the philosophy of mind, he has academic credentials and considerable professional experience in engineering, applied physics, and music; the last includes 10 years as a member of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. His publications are The Unboundaried Self (Trafford, 2005), Psychotherapy as Praxis (Trafford, 2002), Substance Abuse as Symptom (The Analytic Press, 1995), Psychoanalytic Theory and Clinical Relevance (The Analytic Press, 1985), Introductory Statistics for the Behavioral Sciences (International Universities Press, 1981), and over 50 papers and book reviews, most of which are reprinted in his sixth book, Issues in Psychoanalysis and Psychology: Annotated Collected Papers (Trafford, 2002). In 2008, he published a 9,200-word paper on societal psychopathology, “Must we destroy life on earth? Psychopathological society as unwilling ‘patient,’” available at Amazon.com as an electronic Kindle document.