Up-and-coming philosopher Philip Goff, a professor at Durham University in the UK, relatively recently opened his regular podcast, Mind Chat, with the proclamation, "I'm a philosopher who believes consciousness pervades the universe and is a fundamental feature of it." Joining him were regular adversary Keith Frankish, and special guest Noam Chomsky to discuss the merits of Goff's "new" take on consciousness. Oxford University Press has just released Why? The Purpose of the Universe, Goff's new work in which he champions the panpsychism that he opens his podcasts with.
Goff readily acknowledges that panpsychism is not new; its seed notions can be traced back to ancient thinkers, such as Thales and Plato. However, what makes Goff's arguments seem fresh are his claims that panpsychism has findings of science on its side; explanations from physics not just metaphysics, which makes his assertions seem more like Aristotle's daydreams. His new book Why? attempts to reanimate if not a dead God-in-the-world, then to execute a Voltairean need to reinvent a new god, and a new teleological marriage between science and metaphysics.
The modern notion of so-called emergent property dualism is derived from the cosmology of ancient thinkers -- most notably from the fragments of Thales of Miletus and the Phaedo of Plato. Aristotle also pitches in by providing authoritative thinking in support of some of Thales's cosmological explorations, especially his consideration of water as a primordial substance, for which there is some historical discussion. But it is the idea that "All things are full of gods" -- Thales allegedly said -- which if true and convincingly attributable to Thales would be more profound than his water cosmology, which has leaks, let's say. And in Plato's Phaedo, Socrates, on the day of his execution, discusses a variety of philosophical topics with his friends, including the immortality of the soul.
In one passage, Socrates discusses the idea that the soul is simple and indivisible. He argues that this makes it more likely that the soul is immortal, since something that is simple and indivisible cannot be easily destroyed. Socrates also argues that the soul is self-moving. He argues that this means that the soul is independent of the body and does not need the body to exist. This needs a closer examination.
"All things are full of Gods." - Thales
Early physics and metaphysics drifted apart and later ended up as the Mind-Body problem that still plagues thinkers today. While no attempt will be made to fully explore modern panpsychism or Goff's proclamation about a universe pervaded by consciousness, the connection to the past is vital, if for no other reason that it demonstrates the enduring qualitative inferences of the ancients in our modern think-frames. The reader is urged to check out Goff's podcast with Chomsky on the subject, which I've embedded below.
First, a short description of emergent property dualism is in order; it will help guide the cosmological vision as we go back to Thales and Plato. Emergent property dualism is a philosophical position that seeks to reconcile the mind-body problem by combining the ideas of emergent properties and property dualism. Property dualism is the view that mental properties are distinct from physical properties.
The property of consciousness is a mental property, for instance, but the property of mass is a physical property. Such mental properties are emergent properties of physical systems, such as the brain. In other words, mental properties arise from the interaction of physical parts, but they are not reducible to those parts. At the same time, such dualism can lead to a situation where mental properties can cause physical properties.
For example, the mental property of wanting to raise your arm can cause the physical property of your arm moving. This is because wanting to raise your arm is an emergent property of your brain, and it has a causal effect on the physical systems in your brain that control arm movement. This effect can be seen in action using a brain-computer interface (BCI), such as at BCI company Synchron, where a paraplegic hooked up to the BCI was able to operate a computer by merely thinking instructions to it (by way of a Bluetooth decoder). This new phenomenon of decoding brain activity by means of a device that "translates" instructions to a PC and then runs the thoughts of the person, resulting in Internet browsing, is part of a relatively new field called Information Philosophy. The site tells us, "Abstract information is neither matter nor energy, yet it needs matter for its concrete embodiment and energy for its communication. Information is immaterial. It is the modern spirit, the ghost in the machine." This has profound implications for understanding concepts going back to Plato's seed notion about the soul and immaterialism espoused in Phaedo. Indeed, we can see it, if we let ourselves do so, in Thales.
"Abstract information is neither matter nor energy, yet it needs matter for its concrete embodiment and energy for its communication. Information is immaterial. It is the modern spirit, the ghost in the machine."
Thales of Miletus, one of the most famous pre-Socratic philosophers, is often credited with being the first Western philosopher and scientist. He is also considered to be one of the earliest proponents of panpsychism. Thales is credited with having quipped that "All things are full of gods." He believed that the fundamental substance of the universe is water. He argued that water is the source of all life and that it has a soul. He also believed that the soul is present in all things, even inanimate objects. But his work comes down to us in fragments and by referenc e from other thinkers, most notably, Aristotle (Metaphysics and On the Soul) and Diogenes Laërtius; Thales wrote nothing down himself.
In evaluating the proposition "All things are full of gods," the modern reader meets up with some obstacles immediately. Gods. Any god, today, is problematic, in an age so markedly different from that of homo religiosus, during which gods were arguably in everything. Our knowledge of Thales's philosophy are "doxographical" references to fragments and flattering accounts by other philosophers, such as Diogenes Laertes, who was criticized for his lack of reliable sourcing. So, though his proposition is perhaps as tantalizing as, say, Heraclitus's oft-quoted fragment about flux, "Upon those who step into the same rivers, different and again different waters flow." It's a nice little nugget to ponder, not only as an abstract notion, but thinking also off Mark Twain's very real description of his river boat piloting years, as revealed in Life on the Mississippi, where the ever-changing river is almost hallucinatorily treacherous. If anyone knew about the One and Many, Mark Twain did. But, if Thales's little cosmological statement had been attributed to anyone else of his age, it might have gone missing.
Thales was one of the Seven Sages, mental legends of the ancient world, who is often credited with being the first Western philosopher and scientist. He has to be taken seriously, even if with a grain of NaCl. Aristotle seems to have at least seriously considered Thales's notable contribution to cosmology. As Thales saw it, the fundamental substance of the universe is water. He argued that water is the source of all life and that it has a soul. He also believed that the soul is present in all things, even inanimate objects.
What little information we have is largely due to Aristotle's respectful analysis of Thales's findings in Metaphysics and On the Soul. In Metaphysics we find:
Thales, the founder of this kind of philosophy, stated it to be water. (This is why he declared that the earth rests on water.) He may have got this idea from seeing that the nourishment of all things is moist, and that even the hot itself comes to be from this and lives on this (the principle of all things is that from which they come to be) -- getting this idea from this consideration and also because the seeds of all things have a moist nature; and water is the principle of the nature of moist things.
This principle is not alien to our way of thinking today at all. For when we bios probe the night skies in every direction we are searching for life out there, which is to say, we are searching for signs of planetary or other rocky outcrops that contain water, the one substance we know must be present for life to exist and evolve.
But this is another question from whether consciousness can emerge from inanimate objects or subjects not biological in nature, which is what some current theories that reach back to the ancients, including panpsychism, and perhaps Thales's alleged vision that "All things are full of gods." Aristotle, as noted above, lent credibility to the supposed utterances of the Sage Thales. Like Thales, Aristotle was especially remarkable for his pursuit of truth in the natural sciences. He was a keen observer of the natural world and conducted extensive empirical research, which he used to develop a broad and systematic understanding of natural phenomena. Aristotle's work is said to have laid the foundation for many branches of science, including biology, physics, astronomy, and meteorology. In Metaphysics, Aristotle writes,
Most of the first philosophers, then, thought that the only principles of all things were material. For, they say, there is some [subject] that all beings come from, the first thing they come to be from and the last thing they perish into, the substance remaining throughout but changing in respect of its attributes. This, they say, is the element and the principle of beings.
Thales would be such a first philosopher. But Aristotle cannot, through his own revered reputation, save the ideas of Thales. Nevertheless, today the conservation of matter tells us that it can neither be created nor destroyed, suggesting at least an affinity to the notions that the first philosophers proposed with the "principles of beings."
This is also a meet spot to transition into Plato's Phaedo, where the student has his teacher, Socrates, tell his fellow philosopher friends about the immortality of the soul as he prepares to shed his 'mortal coil'. He hopes to offer them consolation. "It really has been shown to us that, if we are ever to have pure knowledge, we must escape from the body and observe things in themselves with the soul by itself," he tells them. If the soul dies with the body, then whence the long journey toward truth. Socrates tells them the soul sheds the myriad hindrances and binds of the body that, while alive, have worked against the attainment of wisdom. But, he insists, that the soul goes on with its journey.
This is news to his buddies, as they have not heard him speak this way before and their wits need spruiking. Cebes doubts; he tells Socrates, "To believe this requires a good deal of faith and persuasive argument, to believe that the soul still exists after a man has died and that it still possesses some capability and intelligence." Plato's Socrates has his work cut out for him. Socrates will argue that "the one aim of those who practice philosophy in the proper manner is to practice for dying and death." (p. 269) Assuming materiality has been shed, as if a lifetime were a purgatorial experience, the soul will exit the body-form and commune again with the thing-in-itself Forms.
Socrates goes further with Cebes and indicates that all things that exist have souls and that the bodies the are encased in are mere forms, and life emerges out of death:
Do not, he said, confine yourself to humanity if you want to understand this more readily, but take all animals and all plants into account, and, in short, for [e] all things which come to be, let us see whether they come to be in this way, that is, from their opposites if they have such, as the beautiful is the opposite of the ugly and the just of the unjust, and a thousand other things of the kind.
Socrates' notion of opposites is then explained -- in my opinion, not effectively or convincingly for modern purposes. But it is telling that Plato (Socrates) sees soul in everything; it is his archai. Questions remain: Can such a soul be held responsible for consciousness? Can such consciousness be equated to what Socrates is referring to as intelligence? And he tells Simmias, now intrigued, "our souls also existed apart from the body before they took on human form, and they had intelligence."
So, for Plato-in-Socrates clothing soul is in everything, exists before a form is taken on in existence (not necessarily bio), and has what he calls "intelligence." Germaine to any future ideation of emergent human consciousness is how Plato closes out Phaedo with a discussion of his concept of Mind. For Plato it is seen as a consideration of a notion Anaxagoras has been playing with, which Socrates sums up: "it is Mind that directs and is the cause of everything. I was delighted with this cause, and it seemed to me good, in a way, that Mind should be the cause of all."
Socrates is a happy puppy until goes on reading Anaxagoras' work and finds that, according to the philosopher, "that the man made no use of Mind, nor {134} gave it any responsibility for the management of [c] things, but mentioned as causes air and ether and water and many other strange things." This struck me as sounding very much like contemporary dualistic theories that grudgingly accept the mind as an epiphenomenon while pushing for neurochemically based reality. Plato is not satisfied with Anaxagoras' duality:
That seemed to me much like saying that Socrates' actions are all due to his mind, and then in trying to tell the causes of everything I do, to say that the reason that I am sitting here is because my body consists of bones and sinews, because the bones are hard and are separated by joints, that the sinews are such as to contract and [d] relax, that they surround the bones along with flesh and skin which hold them together, then as the bones are hanging in their sockets, the relaxation and contraction of the sinews enable me to bend my limbs, and that is the cause of my sitting here with my limbs bent.
Panpsychists, like Philip Goff, are equally frustrated with such mind-body equations. In the introduction to the Miller and Reeve edition of Phaedo the editors caution the reader about Plato's intentions. We're told,
Plato seems to take particular pains to indicate that Phaedo does not give us Socrates' actual last conversation or even one that fits at all closely his actual views. He takes care to tell us that he was not present on the last day.
Plato uses Socrates as a kind of doll house character to act out some of his own queries about human affinities that the editors say of: "Phaedo's affinities in philosophical theory go not towards the Socratic dialogues, but to Symposium and Republic." This strikes this reader as jarring, as the play-acting Socrates and his didactics are at odds with the natural language of his dialogues, and this presentation reminds one that Socrates, as we get to know him through Plato, is a product of Plato's calculating imagination. On the other hand, such a staging does not really affect the thinking that goes into a consideration of Forms; it merely suggests that Plato seems to be investing authority into the considerations by placing them in the mouth (and mind) of Socrates.
It may not seem intuitively coherent at first, the ancients, such as Thales, Aristotle and Plato, do seem to be working on the same desire for cosmological convergence that we seek today in such pursuits as the Unified Theory of Everything. Brown University physics professor Stephon Alexander, a panpsychist who backs his theories with scientific evidence, sees an affinity with the ancient wisemen. In his latest book, Fear of a Black Universe (2021), he writes,
Schrödinger was especially influenced by the work of German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer and the Vedas, which posited the existence of a universal mind that contains all individual minds and the physical universe. Combining those with his own work, Schrödinger imagined the quantum wave function to be part of an undivided cosmic whole.
This is the meat and potatoes of a panpsychist entanglement. Alexander adds,
Did life emerge in the cosmos through a series of accidental historical events? Is there a deeper principle beyond natural selection at work that is encoded in the structure of physical law? And on top of that, the question that bothered Schrödinger and that got me into science in the first place: What is the relationship between consciousness and the fabric of the universe?
Great questions that point to the endless human quest for meaning and our place in the cosmos.
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References to the ancients above come Introductory Readings in Ancient Greek and Roman Philosophy, Second Edition, edited by CDC Reeve and Patrick Lee Miller, Indianpolis: Hackett Publishing (2015)
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