saturn return to sender

This is going to be scattered. Oh well.

I’ve been bouncing around in the excerpts from Wilber’s next Kosmos Trilogy volume. Reading a little when I have time and when the mood strikes me. I’m also carrying around his recent Integral Spirituality. The writing in the Kosmos Trilogy excerpts is occasionally spectacular. For some reason I’m less enamored with IS so far.

I’m still getting my head around the details, but lately his take on things is including the idea that perspective, in a particular sense of the word, is perhaps the “first principle,” one (or the?) irreducible aspect of existence. Everything is a perspective before it is anything else. One perspective is the personal experience of one’s own awareness, the 1st-person view, what the “inside” of existence is like. Another is the 3rd person view from the outside of another’s existence. These perspectives are a natural consequence of existing, to begin with, and the fact that existing seems to happen in more than one place at a time. Hence, you get 1st person, 2nd person, and 3rd person points of view. Each perspective is of necessity limited in its purview.

Everyday events begin with perspectives. We have our common, human-oriented notion of sentience and the regular meanings of 1st, 2nd, and 3rd person pronouns: I, you, we, it, him, her. But squirrels and insects also must be seen in light of perspectives, and so too must ecosystems, planets, and mountains, bacteria, atoms and quarks, and so on. A subatomic event involves perspectives before it involves processes, particles, waves, or anything else.

Perspective becomes the first consequence of existence, and perspective is concomitant with sentience, so if existence is made of perspectives, existence is made of sentience, all the way up, all the way down. Though Wilber seems uncommitted to panpsychism, some version of it is implied.

In contrast, the physicalist standpoint—that physical, measurable properties are all that can be said to exist—is the implicit Western, positivist view of the world. But it’s not hard to argue that our knowledge of anything beyond the experience of our own consciousness is completely contingent. Then awareness is of necessity prior to matter, prior to measurements.

Physicalism is, indeed, a 3rd-person account of the world, and it is perhaps no wonder that it gets into trouble when it attempts to reduce the 1st-person experience. It can’t; it’s outside its purview at a fundamental level. So it naturally must deny its existence or its validity. Similarly, idealism is a 1st-person account of the world, and taken to an extreme, it can claim that nothing but the self in the current moment can be said to exist. Neither view seems quite satisfactory, and as always, Wilber’s game is to say they’re both right, but partially, and then to paint a picture in which each contradictory view can exist comfortably. Good stuff.

But I have to say, panpsychism makes a lot of sense to me. If nothing else, it seems no less bizarre to reduce the universe to bits of awareness than to squeeze all awareness out of it and call it an epiphenomenon. If sentience—or Wilber’s perspective—is the building block of existence, the issue of how our apparently immaterial mental states animate our apparently material bodies seems less of an issue.

If nothing else, panpsychism is more elegant to me than claiming it’s all matter, and then somehow, somewhere along the way, mind happens to appear. When does mind arise? How? Do earthworms have mind? Protozoa? Any autopoietic system? Here’s a nice review of a book on consciousness by Galen Strawson (which I haven’t read), which talks about this stuff, too.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 21st, 2007 at 2:11 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.