Session three dives into the subject of panpsychism, starting with a quote from Heraclitus on the subject; which is that all things glow and have an ever living fire that animates them from the inside out. A claim that the world is ensouled, making panpsychism a sort of philosophical animism.

Numerous authors throughout history have taken this view in various forms of course, the most famous being Jung. David Chalmers is another who brings this into the realm of Consciousness and stating that understanding everything from a functional point of view still begs the question; why is there experience?

More recently there is Michael Levin, who Matt explains has been driven to adopt panpsychism to explain the collective intelligence of cells which he refers to as goals in morphospace. No one cell can understand or perceive the whole, yet there is collective intelligence that shapes the behaviour of particular units. In other words a tail cell doesn’t know its a to become such but it’s morphology is none the less shaped by its community (or perhaps society in Whiteheadean terms).

If you’re interested in Levins work, he recently shared a new video called “Against Mind-Blindness: recognizing and communicating with unconventional beings”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9qb3bKREI4

This video actually does a pretty good job of illustrating the definition of panpsychism which in the context of the lecture is “The view that all things, in all their aspects consist exclusively of ‘souls’, that is, of various kinds of subjects or units experiencing with their qualifications, relations and groupings or communities.” -Charles Hartshorne

This is perhaps the more puritanical view of panpsychism, which I think is perhaps over optimised along a singular dimension and so perhaps becomes a bit theological in that ‘we are all gods children, even the rocks and your toaster’. In other words viewed through the metaphysics of someone like Bennett, we can say this view is emphasising the “Being” aspect of experience, while ignoring the experential aspects of “function” and “will”.

I may of course have gotten this wrong, because the next section of the recording suggests that panpsychists - in contrast to idealism - generally resist the monistic tendency to reduce finite individuals to an absolute spirit or megamind… What cannot be interperted as a single sentient subject may be dealt with as a group or crowd of subjects (Leibnizian principal) or as an element in a more comprehensive single subject (Fechnerian principal). So while Hartshorne appears to suggest a reduction of this sort, I may be taking his words out of context.

So between Hartshornes words suggesting that ‘all is soul’ and the Leibnizian and Fechnerian principals, we get into a bit of a mess - and thats without speaking to Whiteheads god and process theology (mentioned in the next lecture) to the mix. This is perhaps dependent on vantage point, where a whole to one set of perceptions may be a part to another set of perceptions. Holons again, though it’s one thing to know this intellectually and another to experience it - which is perhaps Hartshornes point, and certainly seems to have been Gurdjieffs when he emphasized ‘being’. In other words - similar to the Hartshorne - I can say that ‘all is one’ yet without concrete experience I cannot resolve such a statement as I have many possible intellectual references (all is mind, all is heart, all is soul, all is XYZ).

As the lecture goes on to say this is the combination problem; can minds be made of minds, higher minds made of lower minds etc. and like my platitudes above William James apparently suggests that we let go of the logical and simply accept that this is how things do actually organise. This reconciliation between experiential continuity and intellectual discontinuity, Whitehead apparently calls ‘Concresence’.

Concresence as it is called, is explained along the lines of experiential units having both positive and negative poles. The negative pole gathers perished objects of the past which grow together into a new unit of experience or superject; which is a new subjective experience. This rhizomatic entanglement then perishes and launches itself into the future to be inhereted as an object in the next subjective occurance.

In terms of Bennett’s work this is what would be called Coalescence, which occupies point six of the Enneagram symbol - sometimes taught as the moment where ‘community enters’ which seems fitting with Whiteheads language and terminology, which explains this coming together as prehension, a sort of anticipatory mechanism (or organism) that lures these perished occasions forward into the future.

This nomenclature of “Prehension” can probably be translated into ‘pilot waves’ in Bohms world and hidden variables in the world of Active Inference, indeed you could also say the ‘grand play’ of lila or get spiritual mystic at this point depending on audience. In other words representation is a socio political issue that has a knock on effect with regard to the potential realised…

At this point in the lecture, the video ends and discussion moves into discussion with Alex Gomez Marin on matters of precognition. Apparently Whitehead sees the world and life as rhythms, yet he and Griffin(?) are worried that allowing for retrocausility means the future is not open. To bypass this concern Marin suggests that perhaps its probabilistic, which seems fair, as the concern - if you ask me - seems to be falling into the reductionist trap of cartesian dualities, in this case the binary notion of ‘open/closed’. In other words the future may be more or less closed at certain times and more or less open at others, such as the Yugas in Vedic cosmology.

Marin then goes on to frame prehension in terms of an ingression from eternity to actualisation, which in Bennetts language would be the Hyparchic domain which lies between eternity and chronos. Marin seems to be on this point because he suggests the key to prehension is beyond the duality of unrealised / realised, and should be thought about in terms of polarities rather than dualities.

Alex and Matt go on to talk about materialism and the mechanical view as ‘parasites of the mind’ because the notion that everything has to happen through physical touch rules out ideas like prehension (or hyparxis). In other words, they rule out non-local realism, and deny forms of knowledge beyond what Bennett would call polar or discriminative knowledge and the ordering of function to adapt means to ends.

Marin suggests we must become artists, get high or read a lot of philosophy to bootstrap out of ignorance. However such statements still seem to be about knowledge, which as the subjective aspect of function is therefore unwittingly still caught in the paradigm that he opposes. In other words, much like this written recollection, the menu is not the meal - this is not the experience itself. We could actually get Whiteheadean here and say that this subjective review is the perished remains of a subjective experience (watching the course), objective data, that is now being lured towards and unknown future… Bohm would approve of such enfolding for sure!

Finally the hosts discuss Galileo and Locke making the mistake of trying to separate the primary from secondary characteristics; objective quantity from subjective quality. This is a fallacy that Whitehead demonstrates by saying that even quantitative measures like force are tied to and even derived from our subjective experience. Here its suggested that prehension (or Bennetts hyparxis if you prefer) is a metaphysical invention that lets us understand physical causation, affects, feelings, emotions, memory and perception as the same concept. That ‘feelings of the future’ are propositionsal feelings, conceptual and physical prehensions. In other words, that prehension unites the physical and mental.

While this doesn’t seem wrong to me, it does seem a little loose and perhaps a little confusing without a proper grasp of the concept. Using Bennetts terminology for a moment, eternity (the realm of all possibility) is realised through hyparxis (or Whiteheads prehension) into chronos (temporal actualisation). So yes, all possible thoughts, feelings, memories etc. are moved into existence through this metaphysical invention. With that said, I feel that while Bennett and Whitehead were accurate and precise with their terminology, Gurdjieffs cosmic ‘reconciler’ is perhaps the most common sense and accessible nomenclature. Simple semantics but not so well defined… With that said if materialism is a naive teenager that got hold of the car keys, maybe this is the kind of simplicity thats needed?