My 29 May 2020 letter to Prof. William Seager, a philosopher of mind at the University of Toronto and co-author of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Panpsychism.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/panpsychism/Dear Prof. Seager,
I hope this email finds you well in these strange, uncertain, even liminal times.
I'm writing to express my delight at discovering you and your work, and to thank you for it. You, sir, are "one-stop shopping" for all things panpsychical, someone and something I didn't even know I'd been looking for until I found you and it. I stumbled across your work by googling both Chomsky and Whitehead. To my knowledge, Chomsky has never mentioned Whitehead, which seems a bit strange, but his oeuvre is immense and I wanted to take a look. I landed on your paper "Whitehead and the Revival (?) of Panpsychism", which was illuminating. I moved from there to your SEP entry on panpsychism, which is even more revealing. The reading of both was fascinating. The mental effort going into this work is impressive. It's lineage is even more so. But goggling over these brainstorms isn't the only reason I'm writing you. If you'll indulge me, I'll try to be as brief as I can, which is difficult but manageable.
I've been thinking, working, and writing somewhat in parallel with the panpsychism movement for some time now. I've largely been following Chomsky's lead as it's made the most sense to me, up to and including the biolinguistic Minimalist Program. Over the past five years, and since the beginning of this year in particular, some ideas have seemingly come to a sort of phronetic fruition, especially around the idea of memory. To my astonishment, the word “memory” doesn't appear even once in the SEP entry, which is especially surprising since information is widely accepted as a physical phenomenon, and computers, as analogies and models for consciousness as well as useful machines, are mostly memory storage and memory processing. The concept of memory offers an approach to the mind-body problem, namely the formulation “mind ∩ body = memory”, or memory is the intersection of mind and body, which reaches from the genetic memory of cells, through to the somatic memory of autonomic processes and reflexes, and beyond to the cognito-affective memory we’re familiar with. The struggle over emergence also suggests a simpler alternative idea, sensory amplification, which along with accumulation (already a characteristic of memory) describes both mental growth and development. Thus consciousness may be considered as temporally ordered and spatially organized memory: amplifying the phenomenological inputs from the senses, both from outside (the familiar five) and inside (e.g. hunger, fatigue, proprioception, sexual drives, etc.), accumulating said inputs in memory and as memories, which can then be processed, thought about and reflected upon, creating new memories. After all, you can’t and won’t think about what you can’t or don’t remember. Without memory, these sensory inputs are merely noisy signals without form or meaning, which is basically the situation and predicament of an infant or someone stricken with Alzheimer’s syndrome. Fortunately, natural evolution has equipped us with an innate memory structure for handling these signals and using them to acquire forms and meanings via somatic substances and sensory qualities, what Chomsky calls Universal Grammar, but whose range and domain extend far beyond the faculty of language (a latecomer in our evolutionary development) to order and organize experience into our useful and actionable interior model of the world, others, and self. In addition, human beings are able to read from and write to memory, an aspect of our memory which appears to establish the faculty of language, while being enhanced by language. It is also our fundamental phylogenetic and ontogenetic difference from animals (along with language), who experience an eternal present fine-tuned by memory and who adaptively react to it, and which explains how humanity fell out of nature into history, with our senses and tenses of the past, present, and future, which animals appear to lack.
This is the basic idea, but these concepts go neither far enough nor deep enough by themselves, i.e. they appear descriptively consistent and coherent but aren’t really applicably and adequately explanatory. To extend the reach and scope of these ideas requires seeing panpsychism as a substitute idea, a placeholder. This is where an appeal is made to Whitehead's organismic process philosophy, in particular his notion of the mental and physical as "poles" of an actual occasion, or organism, but connected together rather than separate, rather like a bar magnet, and then extended beyond the mental and physical to axiological Value and ontological Being respectively. (I’m indebted to the late University of Georgia philosopher Frederick Ferré for his book "Being and Value”, the first in his trilogy on constructive postmodernism, from a series edited by David Ray Griffin, for clarifying these ideas. Ferré was a Whiteheadian whose father was a grad student of Whitehead’s.) Axiological Value is what panpsychism is standing in for, while the material properties and processes of substances, aka physics and chemistry, are what represent ontological Being.
A simple analogy, or model in this instance, is suggested, using 0 and 1 as the characteristic numbers for Value and Being, and connecting them, just as in a unit line segment, which Cantor demonstrated to be as transfinite as an infinite line. The suggestion of 0 as characteristic of Value is justified by the central place and essential role it plays in mathematics and logic (my degree is in mathematics from UT Austin) and without which what we know as modern mathematics and logic is impossible. Somewhat poetically, 0 may thus be considered the essential “king” of numbers, with 1 the existential “queen”, the latter justified by the fact it can reproduce the rest of the numbers by recursion. This provides a minimally structured, yet rich, polarity to replace Cartesian duality while retaining its utility as a concept, now stripped of its unnecessary metaphysical baggage. In this sense, Value and Being represent both the transnatural metaphysical limits and unboundedness of reality and the knowledge to be found therein. Quoting from a letter to Chomsky (edited):
Being and Value are metaphysical categories necessary for analysis and synthesis. Together they constitute Integrity and establish Integrity's existential limits and essential unboundedness, with Being providing the finite means which Value makes infinite use of. This resolves Cartesian dualism into a polarity united by Integrity, an idea suggested by Alfred North Whitehead's organismic process philosophy of the mental and physical ‘poles’ of an actual occasion, or organism. The characteristic number of Being is 1 and the characteristic number of Value is 0, which are convenient for prelinguistic heuristic processing and natural human language construction and interpretation. Being is conserved (can neither be created nor destroyed, only transformed), is the origin of quanta, is the basis of the existential, and is described by the discrete. Meanwhile Value is nonconserved (can be created or destroyed as well as changed), creates qualia, is the basis for the essential, and is described by the continuous.
Value is considered to be a natural ordering and organizing principle or process which, again, to paraphrase Wilhelm von Humboldt on language, makes infinite use of the finite means of Being, including non-mechanistically generating the variety of qualia we know and experience, addressing the palette problem. This is a conception of the cause of natural life and consequently its evolution. Finally, between Value and Being, as mentioned, is their boundary and product, which is called Integrity, which stands for the individual, and demarcates and mediates the internal/interior/intrinsic/essential range and domain of Value from and between the external/exterior/extrinsic/existential range and domain of Being, while consisting of and participating in both. In a rather large nutshell, these are the ideas I’ve been working on.
If you’re curious, you can find two papers plus an in-depth email to Chomsky and Robert Berwick explicating and exploring these concepts, the last two written since the beginning of this year, at poemworld.blogspot.com. (Berwick is Chomsky’s co-author on a simply smashing book about biolinguistics titled “Why Only Us” (2016), which I personally count as on a par with “Origin of Species”, and was pivotal in the development of these ideas.) The most pertinent paper is titled “Peirce, Whitehead, Chomsky: Memory, the Mind-Body Problem, and Language”, which proceeds from the first principles and processes described above.
It links up ontology and axiology with thermodynamics via:
1. “Schreinemakers’ Analysis”, a geometric method for constructing topologically correct phase diagrams of matter and its reactions, here extended to include memory
2. the “Morey-Schreinemakers Coincidence Theorem”, which states that for every univariant line of a phase diagram passing throught the invariant point, one side is stable and the other side is metastable, with the invariant point as the boundary;
3. Gibbs’ Phase Rule, which is F = C - P + 2, i.e. the number of independent intensive variables, or degrees of freedom, F, is equal to the number of system components, C, minus the number of phases, P, plus 2. Memory is the single component of the system, so C=1, with World, Others, and Self as the three necessary phases of memory, plus an initial “no phase” condition, thus P=0, 1, 2, 3 (hypothesized as the order that a human infant develops them but also ontologically comprehensive and complete), which finally yields Value, Being, and Integrity as the three corresponding necessary independent intensive variables, or degrees of freedom, culminating in the invariant point of Integrity with no degrees of freedom; and
4. Le Châtelier’s principle, which may be stated as “whenever a system in equilibrium is disturbed the system will adjust itself in such a way that the effect of the change will be nullified.”
The relationship between thermodynamics and memory is extensive in the STEM literature, e.g. information theory, Maxwell’s demon, Landauer’s law, etc. The idea of phases of memory seems fairly original, in the sense of material phases like solid, liquid, and gas, rather than phases of a process. The idea was appropriated because it works, that is, is yields useful insights, similar to some ideas in classical physics, such as angular momentum, being useful in quantum mechanics, such as spin. They're analogies if not analogous. There are open questions of whether the idea of “intrinsic variable” is applicable to Being, Value, and Integrity. The distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic variables, though useful, especially in thermodynamics, has been shown to breakdown elsewhere. The interpretation is preserved for the time being because of its utility, but it is certainly open to question and inspection.
A phenomenological cycle/circuit is also proposed that has some interesting properties. Starting with a simple directed graph connecting Integrity to Signs/Symbols, or semiotics, via two separate paths (Being to Substances to Forms to Signs/Symbols, which is the external path; and Value to Qualities to Meanings to Signs/Symbols, which is the internal path), upon being geometrically transformed, it reveals two dual recursive paths (one for internal memory and one for external memory), supported by four iterations (two internal and two external, but also two autonomic and two autonomous), and a "switch", permitting the alternation between interiority and exteriority, and which includes something looking very much like Chomsky’s Merge operations at the switching points, all of which are explored in more depth in the letter to Chomsky and Berwick. In its totality it’s reminiscent of a “flip-flop”, or bistable multivibrator, an electronic circuit with two stable states that can store information and is the basic storage element in sequential logic. In addition, and quite intriguingly, it appears that removing a single piece from this picture reduces the human memory structure to a general animal memory structure, losing both recursive paths, two of the four iterations, and the switch, which is advantageous for the saltatory evolutionary picture as proposed by Chomsky and Berwick in “Why Only Us”. There is much more as well.
As an aside, the fusionism proposed by Mørch and yourself can be said to be descripitively suggestive in both your own “big simple” characterization, which captures the centrality of Integrity as a thermodynamic “invariant point”, almost as a Leibnizian monad, while her parts-and-whole approach embodies the developing nervous system’s dependency upon the unfolding genetic plan for Universal Grammar, which once established depends upon the brain and its correlates for its functioning. They both also suggest the non-mechanistic "Gestalt" of qualia. But this is only a guess based upon a cursory synopsis of your ideas. Speaking of which, I’m not suggesting that these ideas are necessarily correct. This hypothesis is tentatively held and offered, as suggested by the previous comments regarding the status of thermodynamic phases of memory. They could, of course, be wrong, and probably are in some, if not many or all, respects, which is what makes them reasonable. I am inviting skepticism and criticism, which are tokens of curiosity and interest, based upon my qualified confidence in the framework of ideas presented.
I don’t wish to belabor the issues any further than I already have here. Hopefully I’ve whet your appetite to explore further. Regardless, you have my gratitude for providing a sumptuous feast of food for thought.
Best wishes,
Bruce Banner
Fort Worth, Texas
