Marxism is Real Naturalism: Galen Strawson and Panpsychism

Sartre once remarked that the attempt to construct a philosophy that goes beyond Marxism simply recreates a pre-Marxist view that is no longer relevant to current understanding. In a recent issue of the London Review of Books (9-26-2013) I believe the philosopher Galen Strawson guilty of just such an attempt in his article “Real Naturalism.”

Engels long ago pointed out that there are basically two trends in modern philosophy– one which leads to idealism and myth making, and one which leads to materialism and the correct scientific approach to understanding the nature of reality. I hope to show in this article that Strawson (hereafter “GS”) has taken the idealistic path.

GS states unequivocally the following: “I’m a naturalist, an out-and-out naturalist, a philosophical or metaphysical naturalist about concrete reality. I don’t think anything supernatural or otherwise non-natural exists.” We shall see. Reality has already been qualified by the adjective “concrete” which leaves open the possibility of some sort of “non-concrete” reality to play the role usually reserved for “spirit” or “mind” in idealistic philosophies. I want to be able to replace the term “naturalism” with the term “materialism” (which I defend) so I am a “materialist about reality” period.

We need to be clear about terms. I think naturalism is the same as materialism but some naturalists disagree. Some think that there are emergent qualities in the material world that lead to the transcendence of mere nature. I think they are mistaken and are dualists or idealists as regards reality and are naturalists in name only. All such emergent qualities are ultimately to be explained by basic constituents of a material nature.

Physicalism is also another name for materialism. This outlook originated with the Logical Positivists with respect to their materialist philosophy of mind. For the sake of clarity I will use the term “materialism” instead of either “naturalism” or “physicalism” (or sometimes “n-materialism” and “p-materialism” to be really clear) in order to avoid the obfuscation introduced into philosophy by the multiplication of useless terms. I hope I have not obfuscated here.

Now GS says that the non-natural can only be known in relation to the natural and everything natural is “anything that exists in space- time.” Well, materialism also holds to this view and, since everything that exists does so in space-time, GS should simply say he is a materialist, adopt Marxism-Leninism as the most consistent materialism, and that would be that. Except that he thinks many people who call themselves n-materialists are not– they are really false n-materialists, they are “noturalists.” Which is just what I think GS himself is.

What upsets GS is his view that in the last fifty years or so so-called n-materialists have questioned the existence of conscious experience and nothing could be more self evident than that we have experiences. GS blames this lamentable state of affairs on the influence of Behaviorism which led most n-materialists to think that, since Behaviorism explained all human activity without recourse to concepts of consciousness and experience, it was unscientific to use such concepts. Even when they broke with Behaviorism as such they still denied the existence of “experience” because they did not think the concept compatible with the n-materialist view that everything was “physical.”

These “false” n-materialists, in the view of GS, simply deny that matter can be conscious and since they don’t believe anything else basically exists except matter it follows that there is no such thing as experience. Now GS admits that many of them deny that they don’t believe that matter can be conscious and so experience can be “physical,” but he says they only make these claims by changing the meaning of “consciousness” so that “whatever they mean by it, it excludes what the term actually means.”

GS now switches from speaking about n-materialism to p-materialism. There is no problem here because they are the same thing. We cannot reduce everything we hold to be explainable in terms of p-materialism to terms of physics. Physics right now is in flux and no one can state that they know exactly what the ultimate theory of reality will be, or if there will even ever be such a theory. According to GS, outside of certain quantitative structures revealed by mathematics and experimentally tested physics appears unable to “tell us anything about the intrinsic nature of reality.”

GS wants us to doubt physics because he wants to create a p-n-materialist theory of the mind which will not be reducible to statements of physics. He exhorts us to think in terms of the views of Locke, Hume and Kant, as well as Eddington and Bertrand Russell to accept the “point that physics can’t convey the nature of everything that exists– even though everything is wholly physical.” This appeal to the great thinkers of the past is unnecessary.

I can’t think of any materialist, unless he or she has completely lost his or her way, who would deny that the nature of certain things that exist– appreciation of a work of art by a person for example– is to be explained by physics even though the art work, the person’s brain and the neural activity within it are wholly physical. It is enough for materialism to point out that the nature of the appreciation which exists within the person would not exist without the physical (materialistic) prerequisites of the brain.

So I don’t see a problem with the existence of “experiences” which GS wants to call his “starting point: outright realism about experience, conscious experience.” A new term has now been introduced: “realism.” This too is, I think, just another term for “materialism”– “r-materialism.” I don’t want to belabor the point, but while Marxists are content to use just one term, “materialism” tout court, our non-Marxist philosophical colleagues insist on using three different terms and usually eschew using such a crude old fashioned and discredited term as “materialism”– not all of them but enough so that I need to use these distinctions I have made for purposes of clarification.

I agree with GS about the “terminological wreckage” that one finds in the philosophy of mind and so sympathize with him in wanting to get a clear understanding of what “experience” means. It is just the pre-philosophical notion that every one has, from childhood up, when they feel, hear, taste or see something that they are aware of. He takes the example of the taste of pineapple from Locke– to taste pineapple is all you have to do to know what tasting a pineapple is like. That is a real experience, the experience of the taste of pineapple. Materialists would be wrong to think “they have any good reason to give an account of experience that is in any way deflationary or reductionist relative to the ordinary pre-philosophical understanding of experience.”

GS is surely right for any ordinary everyday conversations about experience, but a materialist, talking to another philosopher, would not be remiss in pointing out that the taste of a pineapple is a function of some type of brain activity without which there would be no experience of said taste. I think it rather obvious that “physical reality has experiential character only when organised in certain specific ways– e.g., in the way in which it is organised in brains” [or proto-brains or some functionally equivalent organ or structure.] At this point in his essay this materialist position presented by GS need not, he tells us, be ruled out. But he is going to try to and rule it out later because he wants to defend the possibility of panpsychism! Let us see if he succeeds.

Now I agree with GS that experience really exists the way he says it does– I have a real experience of the taste of pineapple and I do not question the existence of this conscious experience. But GS says that if that is the case then I must be “fully open to panpsychism.” This is the view, according to the Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, “that the physical world is pervasively psychical, sentient or conscious (understood as equivalent).” Well, I am fully open to his argument (if he has one) but I don’t think his argument will prove his case.

He begins to make his case by arguing that materialists who argue for the non-existence of experience are wrong, and since we all are aware of experience we have better reason to doubt the existence of non-experiential reality than of experiential reality. He says we know “some physical stuff” is experiential because of brain states and concludes that we have no reason not to conclude that “all physical stuff is in its fundamental nature wholly experiential in all conditions and in all respects all the way down.” But not all materialists argue that experience doesn’t exist. The fact that we experience external reality does not necessitate the fundamental nature of external reality is “experiential” in the same sense that we experience it and call our awareness “experiential.” This is the fallacy of equivocation.

GS, however, concludes that he has shown that panpsychism is the logical result of p-n-materialism. He calls it “pure” panpsychism ” since “it goes beyond the version of panpsychism according to which all physical stuff has experiential being in addition to non-experiential being.” He also claims that this version of panpsychism “leaves everything that is true in physics untouched.” Quite a claim since we don’t know if everything that we think is true in physics is true.

GS admits he has not really made the case in his article for panpsychism. What he thinks he has done is to show that “there’s no reason” to think that the world given to us by physics is fundamentally non-experiential rather than experiential. Since the world as we know it is our experience of it. “There is,” he says, “zero observational evidence of any non-experiential concrete reality.”

What does this mean? Because all our knowledge of the world is our awareness and experience of it therefore there is no evidence that it has an existence independent of experience. GS denies that this is what his position amounts to. But that is exactly what his position amounts to. He simply enunciates his position and says anyone who doesn’t except his view is “not a real naturalist.”

You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to see the problem with panpsychism. Physics is not the only science we have to deal with– there is biology, geology, and paleontology just to name a few others. Science has pretty much shown that our cognitive abilities including consciousness and awareness and the abilities to experience the world we live in are functions of our nervous system and the evolution of our brains. A rock is not going to be “aware” of anything. There was a time when there was no life on earth and no experiences either. Everyone knows this story. Our observational understanding of the history of the universe makes the materialist (non-panpsychic) view the most compelling logical explanation of all the concrete facts we presently have at our disposal.

I think GS knows his position in both counter-intuitive and unscientific because he ends his essay by saying that he predicts “that no philosopher who disagrees will take any notice” of his “argument.” But a bunch of assertions is not an argument and he has already said that he was “not particularly disposed to make the case for panpsychism” in this article.

He quotes Hobbes to back up his prediction: “Arguments do seldom work on men of wit and learning, when they have once engaged themselves in a contrary opinion.” If you don’t accept GS’s position, well then, “You’re not a serious, realistic naturalist.” Perhaps GS should rather be thinking about Horace’s observation “mutato nomine de te fabula narratur.“