Unsnarling the world...not

"Unsnarling the world-knot" is a book by David Ray Griffin, the leading process theologian. Process theology is a very liberal form of Christian theology, inspired by the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne. Interestingly, neither Whitehead nor Hartshorne were Christians, but their process philosophy did include a personal god.

In this particular book, Griffin makes a bold attempt to actually solve the mind-body problem. Indeed, he believes that he *has* solved it. Griffin's alternative to both materialism and dualism is a form of panpsychism which he dubs panexperientialism. The book is a prolonged argument in favour of this position, with each chapter becoming progressively longer and more difficult. However, the book shouldn't be insurmountable to people seriously interested in the mind-body problem. A working knowledge of Dennett, Searle and McGinn does help. It also helps to have read other books by Griffin himself, to put his panexperientialism in context. A good place to start might be "Whitehead's radically different postmodern philosophy", reviewed by me elsewhere.

Griffin believes that neither dualism nor materialism really solves the mind-body problem. Dualism, while admitting that the mind and the brain are numerically different, cannot explain how they can interact with each other. Materialism cannot explain how mind can emerge from matter, or how it can be identical with it. To Griffin, materialism and dualism are really part of the same problem, since both of them consider matter to be naturally inert and dead (or "vacuous" to use Whitehead's term). In the dualist scenario, God forces matter to organize according to "natural" laws imposed from without. He also creates immortal souls different in quality from matter. To Griffin, this worldview is connected to our alienation from and domination of nature. Materialists simply go one step further, and do away with God entirely, leaving only dead matter. They are then caught in a bind, attempting to derive mind, morality and aesthetics from a dead universe.

Griffin's solution is to embrace the idea that everything that exists has at least a rudimentary form of consciousness. Not just every living organism, but even atoms and molecules have "experience" - hence panexperientialism. What we call "consciousness" is really the last and most complex phase of "experience". Indeed, the most basic metaphysical entities are "occasions of experience", sometimes called "creative occasions". These entities or monads "prehend" each other in a never-ending process. In a sense, matter doesn't *have* experience, matter *is* experience. Each occasion of experience is both subject (when it "prehends" another occasion of experience) and object (when it's "prehended" by others). In this manner, the mind-body problem can be solved, since each monad is both "mind" and "matter", subject and object.

Griffin is clever enough to admit that some things, such as stones, really are dead and inert. A stone doesn't have experience in any meaningful sense of the term. However, even stones are made up of occasions of experience. These are organized in a manner which cannot generate higher-order forms of experience, let alone consciousness. This makes the stone a dead, inert heap. However, if one monad becomes dominant and manages to organize the other creative occasions in a more complex fashion, a "personally ordered society" emerges. This compound individual will have more advanced experience, and eventually something we would recognize as real consciousness emerges.

I admit that Griffin's theory (which is a combination of Whitehead's and Hartshorne's respective ideas) is quite clever. But does it really solve the mind-body problem?

At one point, Griffin distinguishes "the perceptual mode of causal efficacy" with "the perceptual mode of presentational immediacy". The former seems to be a kind of gut feeling through which we become aware of causality, space, time and the existence of an outside world in general. Griffin believes that this gut feeling can exist in a very primitive form, and hence be assigned even to atoms and molecules (or at least to micro-organisms). Presentational immediacy is our unmediated empirical ability to observe such things as the colour red. Presentational immediacy is derived from causal efficacy. At some point during evolution, living organisms translated the gut feeling of red (causal efficacy) into real seeing of red (presentational immediacy). Consciousness of the kind we can observe in humans is a combination of causal efficacy and presentational immediacy: we see "red" in the context of causality, space and time. Thus, we can see red objects, how they change through time, etc. I'm not entirely sure whether this part of Griffin's reasoning makes sense: can our complex minds really be taken apart in this manner? In what meaningful sense can awareness of causality, space and time really exist in a primitive form?

Griffin points out that most of our minds aren't "conscious", but nevertheless has experience. To use everyday language, most of our minds are subconscious. This seems to be one of Griffin's main arguments for the idea that consciousness can evolve from primitive experience. However, the subconscious phenomena mentioned by Griffin strike me as very advanced: the ability to prehend objective moral principles in the mind of God is a good example. Another is paranormal powers such as telepathy and PK. This surely presupposes that the mind is *already* advanced, and cannot therefore be used as an argument that it's derived from primitive ancestral forms.

There is another and perhaps more serious problem with process theology: panexperientialism seems to be redundant, since the system also includes God. Indeed, Griffin cannot derive objective morality from the "occasions of experience", which are wholly amoral. This is solved by appealing to God, whose mind includes moral principles as a kind of quasi-Platonic forms. Sufficiently advanced occasions of experience can then prehend these Platonic forms, but this sounds like a throwback to the dualism the theory was supposed to overcome. The moral principles aren't a part of the panexperientialist process, but are infused from the outside. Objective aesthetics are derived in the same way. Griffin also believes that each occasion of experience gets an initial push in the right direction by God, suggesting that the process isn't entirely self-sustaining. Another contradiction concerns God himself, who according to Griffin is a compound individual consisting of all creative occasions in the entire universe. But where does God come from? Has God evolved from a primitive form of experience? Clearly not, since these need God to give them initial pushes. Therefore, God has always existed - but if so, consciousness does *not* evolve from primitive experience. Rather, we are dealing with an involution-evolution schema, similar to that of Theosophy. Why not simply adopt this scenario, and combine it with a personal God, as in the system of Aurobindo, or a quasi-personal God as in Ken Wilber's Integral Theory? (Incidentally, Theosophists also believe in a kind of spiritual monads, emerging from the Brahman.)

I think the reason for Griffin's reluctance to embrace something like Theosophy is that process theologians want to be seen as scientific and modern, something they wouldn't be able to do if they had adopted a more explicitly Theosophical orientation. (Ironically, Griffin was some kind of Theosophist in his youth before turning to Whitehead and Hartshorne.) Instead, process theology has opted for a panpsychist version of materialist evolution, in which experience (rather than matter) goes from less complex to more complex. Griffin even prides himself on his position being "naturalist" or "physicalist". The limited success of process theology outside Claremont shows that the strategy isn't working: to materialist scientists, Whitehead and Hartshorne were still too religious, due to their belief in a personal God which doesn't seem to be evolving (at least not entirely - strictly speaking, Process God is dipolar). Griffin is less scientific than many other process thinkers due to his support for parapsychology, personal immortality and reincarnation, making his particular version of this theology even harder to swallow for naturalists sensu stricto. Imagine what the New Atheists or CSICOP might do with Griffin's writings, if they ever become interested in process thought!

"Unsnarling the world-knot" isn't a bad book by any means. If you are a dyed-in-the-wool materialist, this book might help you unsnarl a few of your knots. Had I read it a few years ago, this might very well have been the book that swayed me away from materialism (ironically, I read Colin McGinn's "The Mysterious Flame" instead - McGinn is one of Griffin's primary targets). I suppose you could argue that Griffin succeeds in replacing evolutionary materialism with evolutionary panpsychism, "as far as it goes". But how far *does* it go? The fact that Griffin is forced to introduce a personal god into his philosophy, in order to salvage objective morality and aesthetics (in effect, objective meaning without which the Process would be just as nihilistic as in a materialist universe) shows that we have to probe deeper than Whitehead's and Hartshorne's process philosophy.

Or, to use the author's simile, unsnarl a few additional knots...