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Panexperientialism or objective time?

#1
Magical Realist Offline
What can it mean for events to happen to a chair or a rock or a tree? Well, science certainly conceives of a universe of purely physical things that events happen to. The chair falls over, the rock heats up, and the tree dies. There is even a long history of events that happened to these nonconscious things that exists somehow. But in what sense?

The phenomenal being of a purely objective being like a chair or a rock or a tree is utter blankness. There is no passivity there to react or respond to its environment in any way. Think about being a chair. All blankness inside, with no possibility of being the subject of some happening. But the events must therefore be objective in themselves, existing somehow in time without the need for passive experients. This is the concept of objective time.

So to save itself from panexperientialism, in which all things are subjects as well as objects, the events of time are conceived by science to occur and persist on their own as objective facts in themselves. The whole history of what has happened in the universe must somehow still exist, perhaps stored in the interstices of space itself. Not just a recording of the past even, but the past as it actually and eternally IS.

But I still have trouble imagining a past of events still existing FOR a chair or a rock or a tree. Do we not even refer to these things as subjects by calling them "it" or "they"? "The rocks fell in the avalanche and THEY piled up at the bottom of the hill." Yes, we assume subjectivity in even nonconscious things. This is how events can happen to them and remain attached to them as histories. There can be no pure object to which events happen and to which the past persists or even to which a future of possibilities can be said to exist. There MUST be some rudimentary subjectivity there by which that object can be said to have undergone some process or passage of time. A purely objective entity would be totally isolated from the universe, incapable of interacting with anything around it. To be is to be a subject, capable of having events happen to you in time and space.

Anthropologist Ernest Becker once wrote:

"We touched on the vital dualism of experience- the fact that all objects have both an inside and an outside- and we promised to talk about it at more length. It is one of the great mysteries of the universe, that has intrigued man since remotest times. It is the basis of the belief in souls and spirits. Man discovered it and elaborated it because of his own self-reflexivity, the real and apparent contradiction between the inside of his body - his thoughts and feelings, and the outside. But theoretically all objects in nature have some "interiority" even though we experience only their outside. Gustav Fechner, known as one of the fathers of psychophysics or experimental psychology, wrote a widely read book on this topic a century ago, a book that influenced a thinker of the stature of William James. Fechner, in his scientific work, wanted to prove there is an equal part of soul for every particle of matter - something today's laboratory psychologists conveniently forget about the great man. He said that all objects have interiority, even trees. Why not say that a tree leans on a fence because it feels weak, or soaks up water because it is thirsty; or that it grows crookedly because it is stretching toward the sun? If you take a slow motion film you can see this happening. We don't know what is going on inside it, but it must register some internal reaction to experience. At the bottom of the scale, the objects with least interiority would be rocks; probably they would have no more inner life than the idling of their atomic structures, but in these, as physicists have taught us, there is anything but repose.

These are hardly new or startling thoughts, but they help us to introduce the problem of man's distinctive interiority. When you get up the scale to man, the great dualism of nature, of creation as having both an inside and an outside, is carried to its furthest extreme. And it presents a poignant problem that dogs us all our life. We come into contact with people only with our exteriors- physically and externally; yet each of us walks about with a great wealth of interior life, a private secret self. We are in reality, somewhat split in two, the self and the body..."=="The Denial of Death" by Ernest Becker.
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#2
Yazata Offline
(Jan 4, 2015 08:34 PM)Magical Realist Wrote: Panexperientialism or objective time?

I think you know how I'd respond to that.

Quote:What can it mean for events to happen to a chair or a rock or a tree? Well, science certainly conceives of a universe of purely physical things that events happen to. The chair falls over, the rock heats up, and the tree dies.

I basically go with science on that one.

Quote:There is even a long history of events that happened to these nonconscious things that exists somehow. But in what sense?

I don't know quite what to make of the past. It's a fact today that I ate Italian food yesterday, but that Italian food (and yesterday's me) no longer exist today. So it might not be right to say that history exists. It certainly doesn't exist in the same way that things exist at the present moment.

Quote:The phenomenal being of a purely objective being like a chair or a rock or a tree is utter blankness. There is no passivity there to react or respond to its environment in any way. Think about being a chair. All blankness inside, with no possibility of being the subject of some happening.

I don't want to imagine a chair as having experiences with blank content. I'd rather say that it doesn't have any experiences at all. That suggests that it's impossible in principle to imagine what it's like to be a chair.

Quote:But the events must therefore be objective in themselves, existing somehow in time without the need for passive experients.

Yes, I'd say that.

Quote:This is the concept of objective time.

So to save itself from panexperientialism, in which all things are subjects as well as objects, the events of time are conceived by science to occur and persist on their own as objective facts in themselves. The whole history of what has happened in the universe must somehow still exist, perhaps stored in the interstices of space itself. Not just a recording of the past even, but the past as it actually and eternally IS.

There are certainly the 'block-universe' types who say that.

I'm less sure myself. There seems to be some kind of difference between how facts exist and physical beings exist. It might be a fact that a particular physical being exists right now. But it could also be a fact that that such a being used to exist but no longer does. We can even talk about possibilities being facts, saying that it's a fact that something could have occurred that didn't actually happen. There seem to be mathematical facts like 2 + 2 = 4.

Quote:But I still have trouble imagining a past of events still existing FOR a chair or a rock or a tree.

The block-universe types would likely define the chair as a four-dimensional object extended like a worm through the time dimension. What we call the chair is a three-dimensional slice of that four-dimensional object.

Quote:Do we not even refer to these things as subjects by calling them "it" or "they"? "The rocks fell in the avalanche and THEY piled up at the bottom of the hill." Yes, we assume subjectivity in even nonconscious things. This is how events can happen to them and remain attached to them as histories. There can be no pure object to which events happen and to which the past persists or even to which a future of possibilities can be said to exist. There MUST be some rudimentary subjectivity there by which that object can be said to have undergone some process or passage of time. A purely objective entity would be totally isolated from the universe, incapable of interacting with anything around it. To be is to be a subject, capable of having events happen to you in time and space.

You lose me at that point.
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#3
C C Offline
(Jan 4, 2015 08:34 PM)Magical Realist Wrote: [...] These are hardly new or startling thoughts, but they help us to introduce the problem of man's distinctive interiority. When you get up the scale to man, the great dualism of nature, of creation as having both an inside and an outside, is carried to its furthest extreme. And it presents a poignant problem that dogs us all our life. We come into contact with people only with our exteriors- physically and externally; yet each of us walks about with a great wealth of interior life, a private secret self. We are in reality, somewhat split in two, the self and the body..."=="The Denial of Death" by Ernest Becker.

Existence of nature [as pertaining to an anti-panpsychic conception of it] ironically lacks a fundamental manifestation and conceptual understanding of itself as such. Which is to say, empirical and reason-based evidence for the universe is dependent upon the rare emergent novelty of brains. Even an insect only apprehends a loose connection of phenomenal impressions that is distant from the vast / complex realm which humans interpret themselves as residents of (in the course of their perceptions, creative thoughts, and memories). Whereas the rock indeed wallows in changeless, pastless, unmitigated absence of everything (the overall sensori-noological slash epistemological state of the universe).

This invites the idea / possibility that the provenance of the world is no world at all prior to those phenomenal and intellectual representations (it might instead be an utterly bizarre circumstance merely gestured at by abstract description or mathematical symbolism).

It also opens the door to solipsism. Since the evidence that a cosmos exists is, again, dependent upon flimsy, happenstance instances of consciousness / reason developing over billions of years. Respect for a supersensible side to extrospective reality thus diminishes for some thinkers if it is so lame that it requires a mind to display its presence and generate other "proof" for it.

Wholesale panpsychism -- by making these "affairs of evidence" basic, native, and ubiquitous to nature -- could thus put a measurable dent in the possibility of either an aloof noumenal agency or a solipsistic, dreaming demiurge lurking behind its mortal avatar. However, conventional materialism is inimical to undiminished panpsychism. Given how its method must pre-conditionally exclude any transcendent origins overriding the apparent causes exhibited in appearances. By the very scheme of nature, both experience and intellect hopelessly require their genesis in biological / artificial workings that are extremely local rather than globally distributed (at least initially). There has been some slight headway in recent decades toward allowing panexperientialism (a lesser form of panpsychism), but even then it would only be in the manner of random qualitative events that go uncognized and lack any organization as both objects and cosmos. Still leaving the latter natively bereft of evidence for its own being. Relying upon later fluke addons.

Ergo, refutations of solipsism still remain disguised and rooted in social disdain for inflated egos (or circularly appealing to restrictive conditions as found in nature as being the only conditions possible). Adequate defense for everyday folk, but far short of the exalted demolitions of this or that irritating doctrine that traditional philosophical endeavors once sought.
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