Part 1: Solipsism
One must know that one is not in order to be able to understand that we are. - Ask the Awakened by Wei Wu Wei...
Sometimes we learn, not by taking in new facts, but by unlearning old habits. Our views of the world which we inhabit are built on a dense background of assumptions rarely questioned. It is not because we are shy, or reluctant to pose difficult problems, that we fail to question our assumptions. We are most assuredly not wallflowers in matters of debate and reasoning. Rather, it is largely because this fabric of assumptions is not seen. It structures what we think we know, yet we fail to see it.
What this manuscript is about, is an attempt to point to something of importance which is directly at hand, which is knowable, is readily available, and yet is commonly ignored. Put plainly, it is about the singular and collective sides to our nature. But that is not very helpful. In order for those words to work properly, the notion of 'us' needs to be dragged out of town, beaten up, torn apart, buried for six months, dug up again and then shot. And that is just for starters. I will use words like 'I', 'we', and 'us' incessantly in what follows. I don't know how to talk about our selves without using such words. But let it be understood that the thing to which these words refer is the very subject of the discourse here. It is not a given. It is not something we (who? what?) can assume.
At the heart of the current exercise is the attempt to find the right way to treat of subjective experience within a theory of our constitution as human individuals. Many previous attempts to do this have either failed outright, or have failed to speak to more than a very restricted community of like-minded individuals. In recognition of this, the strategy taken here will be one of extreme epistemic caution. Extreme caution seems warranted when discussing subjective experience, as pretty much any and every claim I may care to make about my subjective experience may be flatly refuted by the claims of another individual.
How can we adopt a suitable degree of epistemic caution then, if we want to discuss subjective experience, and yet generalize, as far as possible, to the whole human species (and perhaps beyond)? In essence, the stance adopted above towards personal pronouns will apply, ceteris paribus, to all mental language. Thus, I will try to avoid any reference to Mind, Consciousness, Thought, and pretty much all the presumed elements of higher cognition, such as memory, emotion, intention, belief, and so on. Where I am forced to use these words, they are to be regarded as suspect and subject to re-evaluation. Two basic concepts from psychology will be embraced, however. These are the siamese twins of perception and action. Without assuming too much about the form of perception, the feel of perception, or the emotional valence of any perceptual experience, we need a way to talk about what goes on in nervous systems, and about behavior. For both of these topics, the notions of perception and action are essential and indivisible alike. Hopefully, the way in which we talk about perception and action herein will apply equally to the perception/action systems of bats and of humans alike. If that is plausible, then we may claim to be exercising epistemic caution.
In considering how we might interpret the peculiar case of subjective experience, it is worth bearing in mind that there is nothing, absolutely nothing, in all of our established hard science (physics, chemistry, biology), that either predicts the existence of subjective experience, or that can provide us with an idea of how subjective experience relates to anything else we know. This is our starting point. We can already see that any account of subjective experience that goes beyond the trivial will present challenges to our established science. I do not believe these challenges will be catastrophically upsetting. Rather, it seems, science may get a deal bigger if it can accommodate the reality of subjective experience within its fold. To get there, we first need to take stock of what we know about experience in the first person.
There are several learned communities that treat of subjective experience, and they are not very good at talking to one another. Each of them will contribute something to the developing discussion here, but we must necessarily be selective. We will be seeking to develop a coherent story that makes sense to a broad range of clever people from very disparate backgrounds. Firstly, of course, there is the academic discipline of Psychology. Psychology has repeatedly tried to account for both behavior and 'mental life' using a shifting set of concepts, tools and analogies. Many insights from social psychology and from the lesser travelled by-waters of ecological psychology will arise herein, but mainstream cognitive psychology, with its view of 'mind' as a thing with an architecture, will be of less help to us. Neuroscience studies brains, and there is a default assumption underlying much of neuroscience that to do so is to study the basis for subjective experience. But while brains and nerve cells may be studied using the methods and skills of conventional science, interpreting the result in terms of experience and the human condition is an altogether more difficult matter. The story to be told here will suggest some new directions that practitioners of neuroscience might pursue; more importantly, however, it will suggest that some things we have sought inside people's heads may not be found there at all.
If anyone were naive or cocky enough to believe that these two disciplines were in charge of understanding subjective experience, a survey of the theoretical basis of Psychiatry might provide a sobering experience. Ideally, psychiatry would exist because of the need to deal with the experience of suffering. In reality, its activities are confounded with the needs of society to deal with behavior that is aberrant and intolerable to some. Its dominant metaphor used to be possession, which was replaced with the metaphor of somatic illness, a change we can all applaud. But the somatic illness metaphor is not sufficient in dealing with psychosis and neurosis. Something else is afoot here, and neither psychology nor neuroscience has been much help. In this work, I will suggest a way of interpreting nervous system activity and its relation to subjective experience that suggests new ways of coming at some aspects of mental illness.
One might think that these three disparate disciplines, all concerned in one manner or another, with subjective experience, might exhaust the field. But there are others. The muddied waters of Psychoanalysis represent a heartfelt and somewhat desperate attempt to arrive at a theory of personal meaning -- of meaning as it relates to the experience of a subject. Although never fully integrated into a scientific stream, psychoanalysis has nonetheless been enormously influential and stubbornly refuses to go away, not least because we need a theory of personal meaning, no matter how odd it may be. In the U.S.A., analysis and psychiatry co-exist in close proximity to one another. In Europe, there is more distance. But there is a failure by all concerned to develop a common vocabulary, enabling meaningful conversation between any of these disciplines.
And still that is not all. Within Western Philosophy, there is a focus, usually referred to as Phenomenology, which deals specifically with the character of subjective experience. The names Husserl, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty are the principal ones. And within several Eastern contemplative philosophical and religious traditions, there is a long and venerable history of the critical study of subjective experience.
Six traditions, each attempting to say something coherent about subjective experience. Six different traditions, six cultures, and surprisingly little overlap between the six. Who can speak for all six? There is also a bastard non- discipline, Cognitive Science, which, if its self-descriptions in its professional organizations and journals are to be believed, aspires to inter-disciplinarity in the attempt to study 'cognition', whatever that is. Unfortunately, the disciplines it usually draws upon do not range as widely as the above. Computer Science is included, for example, and linguistics. Anthropology is grudgingly admitted. Western philosophy (though rarely the phenomenologists), and orthodox psychology of course are in. But if Cognitive Science were to live up to its stated goals, it would reach out to encourage psychologists to talk to psychiatrists, contemplatives to talk to analysts, and so on and so forth. In that spirit, perhaps, this work might be a contribution to cognitive science, though that seems almost inflammatory, as much of what I have to say will consciously go beyond established science, and I am not sure what the word cognition means any more. I think it better to say what I have to say, and be done with it, without claiming allegiance to any church.
There is a timeliness to this debate. Humans are becoming aware of other humans in a manner unheard of throughout our million-odd year old history. Less than four years before I wrote this, on December 26th, 2004, an earthquake struck off the north-western end of Indonesia, near the province of Aceh. The resulting tsunami was a disaster of biblical proportions. Within a very few hours, a series of unstoppable waves had killed over 200,000 people and displaced over one and a half million more. But calling this event 'biblical' serves to emphasize that this kind of monumental event had happened before. What was really unique about the great Boxing Day Tsunami was that the whole world watched. All along the coastlines that were so badly affected, there were thousands of little digital cameras, many of them built into mobile phones. This was 2004, so many of those phones belonged to European, Australian and American tourists holidaying in beach resorts in Thailand. (There are fewer pictures from Myanmar, which remained invisible in a form of state-imposed opaqueness.) Suddenly, the images were everywhere. The whole world learned what had happened to real people. For many of us, this was a geography lesson with a vengeance. The Andaman Islands, with their aboriginal inhabitants; the province of Aceh, with its ongoing insurgency that somehow failed to make the news most days; This was not just a lesson in geography. It was a lesson in humanity.
Only a few years before, a catastrophe of even greater proportion, this time of entirely human origin, had visited the countries of Rwanda, Burundi and Zaire (or Democratic Republic of Congo, as it is since known). News about the ongoing genocide leaked out slowly, and generated a great deal of uncomfortableness in distant populations. But the world missed a trick here, and no meaningful intervention followed. By the time most of us realized that the events that had transpired were of an order of magnitude which guarantees an unenviable place in the history books, along with the Killing Fields of Cambodia, the Ethnic Cleansing of Stalin, the Holocaust, it was already history. It was not immanent, and it did not generate the same kind of immediate recognition in people that other people, real people, were in real and present peril. The mobile phones were not in place. The world had no eyes (footnote: Camera phones alone are unlikely to change much, of course. The ongoing problems in the DRC, many of them legacies of the Rwandan genocide, are testament enough to that.). The technology of most importance here was radio, which was employed in whipping up murderous rage. The radio broadcasts were sufficiently widespread to coordinate the slaughter of a million or so people, but they were local enough (and of course linguistically encoded) such that most of us missed them. Technology's role here is morally neutral. It can bring us together, or it can help to wipe us out.
These two incidents illustrate crudely the distinction between an inclusive 'we' and an exclusive 'they'. In the former case, there is the communal perception of an event, mediated by vision and sound, and there was a collective response. In the latter, there was a divide drawn, not out of ignorance, but out of a lack of identification with the events that were unfolding. This work will examine the difference between 'we' and 'they', and will suggest that this is, to some extent, an empirical agenda, and not merely an exercise in well-meaning empathetic humanism.
Humanity needs to understand humanity. And we have the tools and abilities to do so, in ways that were hitherto not possible. There has been a wealth of work in many disciplines, which when put together, has the potential to deliver a coherent larger picture of who we individuals are, and how we are embedded within a social reality that is different from any single one of us, but that is us at the same time. The progress I am aware of is spread over such areas as neuroscience, psychology, philosophy, cultural studies, information technology, and beyond. I am privy to only some of this, and I will set out things as they appear from where I am standing, without any claim of privilege.
Many of these considerations are also as old as the hills, and the time appears ripe for a rich engagement between intellectual traditions that have progressed largely independently. In particular, the Eastern contemplative traditions have studied the rather odd character of individual experience, and asked probing questions about the relation between individual experience and objective, or larger, reality. There are substantial areas of overlap between 'Western' scientific approaches to understanding minds and brains, and 'Eastern' approaches to relating subjective experience to observer-independent reality. Much of the Eastern tradition has been laid out in scholarly works that are deeply embedded within specific religious traditions, the trappings of which are of no interest here. But the intellectual meat most certainly is. My expertise here is virtually nil, as I grew up as an Irish kid in the 1970's, and my exposure to Eastern philosophy did not extend much further than Bruce Lee films. However, I will here make use of another Irish writer whose expertise in such matters is much greater, Wei Wu Wei. In common with many writers in the same vein, he tends towards the cryptic and the aphoristic. I will attempt, where possible, to tease out the notions that lie hidden in such aphorisms. There may be virtue in paradox and a purpose in the cryptic nature of Zen aphorisms, but this present work you are reading is an attempt to help refine our collective language for discussing the matter of individuals and collectives. It does not seek to goad the reader into behaving one way or another. It does not seek to act as a signpost on some path to enlightenment. No, it is firmly within the more occidental tradition of analysis and exegesis.
There is a lot of reason to want to make progress here. If the present work is to contribute, it is important that it not get bogged down in overly narrow debates. This will be an ever present danger in presenting an argument that spans so many disciplines. We shall proceed at some pace, therefore. In a first chapter, I will consider individual experience, or the first-person point of view. The second chapter will consider the other side of the coin, the collective world. The remainder of the book will attend to the consequences of adopting a particular stance with respect to the subjective world of experience which is tied to an individual.
In some sense, this manuscript is being written because there is some new knowledge in the air. We have found out some stuff that is important, and it manifestly affects our understanding of ourselves and our position in the world. Some of this new knowledge comes from big shiny machines that scan brains, producing pristine pictures of nervous systems in action. These are technological marvels, and as I write, our ability to peer into working brains improves continuously. Some new knowledge comes from the assiduous efforts of mathematicians, laboring over arcane symbols, or, more realistically these days, poring over computers, watching as iridescent lines trace out strange and sometimes beautiful paths in new territories only now being uncovered. For mathematics is now as much an empirical science as neuroscience or astronomy. Middle class American linguists endure the assault of bugs and other jungle challenges in order to observe language and culture unlike anything they grew up with, and thereby broaden our conception of how we are, and how varied the human condition may be. Philosophers in shabby dress (a constant over the ages) converge to attempt to integrate these multiple sources of insight, and create a coherent whole. They seek an account of who we are, where we belong, and what we might expect from ourselves. In that respect, we are all philosophers.
It is equally true, however, to point out that the themes discussed here are old themes that mankind has grappled with for several thousand years. It is humbling to realize that Aristotle and Plato recognized key issues we grapple with still. We will meet a few of their ideas herein. We will also brush against Eastern contemplatives, who have a centuries-old tradition of keen critical analysis where we are only beginning to ask questions. But you don't have to be a philosopher, a scientist, a boddhisatva, or a mathematician to appreciate this new found picture of what it is to be human. It speaks to all of us. Because this is a story about all of us, who we are, where we are, and what we can know.
Introducing the P-world
The first order of business is in many respects the hardest. I need to point out something that may be entirely obvious to you, or it may be quite opaque. Look around you, as far as you can see to the right, left, up, down. Now listen, attending to the sounds both near and far. Notice the feel of whatever you are sitting on, and whatever you are holding in your hands. All this goes some way to delimit the subjective world of phenomenal experience. Phenomena are things that are experienced by a subject. That's you for now. Without a subject, there are no phenomena. In a lifeless world, say on the far side of Pluto, there are no phenomena, as nothing is being experienced.
But there is undoubtedly more in your subjective world of phenomenal experience than the sensations associated with your immediate physical surroundings. Is there perhaps a melody running through your head? Can you cast your mind back to breakfast? Your recall of breakfast is, for that short while, part of your experienced world. As your attention wanders, so the content of experience changes. A piano player launches intently into a piece of music, and while the music plays, the pianist's subjective world of phenomenal experience becomes inseparable from the performance of the piece of music, until the last cadence, when the final note fades, and she slowly becomes aware of the physical surroundings, the listeners, and perhaps the dull ache of a chilblain, which had happily faded from experience during the music.
It is the very existence of the subjective world of phenomenal experience that I wish to point to. But the label is already becoming tiresome, so I will hereafter use the simpler term 'P-world' instead. You have a P-world, and I have one. the 'P' stands for phenomenal, but it might also remind us that P-worlds are personal: they stand in a one to one relationship with people. There is one P-world for each person. At this point we must be careful! The potential for confusion arises, as P-worlds are not the same thing as people. Each person has one (and only one) P-world. P-worlds are also private in a very important sense, and their private nature has led to much misunderstanding over the ages. The term P-world (or the subjective world of phenomenological experience) hopefully actually refers to something well- defined, bounded, and very real. But it does not refer to the totality of a person. Happily, we have some precedent here to help us. Most of us would be comfortable with the claim that bodies are in a one-to-one relation to human persons, but that 'body' and 'person' nonetheless are quite different things, and we can meaningfully inquire about the relation between a body and a person. In fact, as we will see, this quite familiar question is intimately related to the similar question of the nature of the relation between a P-world and a person.
It is an odd fact that some people 'get' this notion of the P-world immediately, while to others it seems like a difficult concept. A P-world is the totality of direct experience, and so it is not a concept, or an idea. If it were, we could share it, for ideas are eminently share-able, and concepts can be passed back and forth for refinement and evaluation. Immediate experience is not like that. It is directly at hand. Philosophers sometimes call this 'given-ness', but I will try to avoid technical terms where possible.
Pointing to the P-world is to treat it as if it were a thing. And that is my plan, but this is not straightforward. Under normal circumstances, 'things' are seen; 'things' are experienced; We distinguish between ourselves, and things. In experience, however, the thing perceived and the perceiver are united. When we describe people having experiences, we say things like 'John saw a chair'. But the experience, which is, at that moment, constitutive of John's P-world, is neither subject nor object. It incorporates both, if you will, but there is only one thing 'happening', and this is hidden in the essentially dualistic statement which separates John and a chair.
At this stage you might bristle somewhat and complain that I have introduced a technical term, the P-world, where we already have perfectly good words. We have 'mind', 'attention' and 'consciousness' for starters. Why not use one or other of them and be done with it? The reason I choose not to use these words is that they have all been around the block too often, and have acquired all kinds of associations and meanings which are not required here. If I talk of 'consciousness', for example, this will immediately suggest the notion of the unconscious. But there is no un-P-world (thank heavens), and the association is unwanted. Similar problems are attached to 'mind' (I do not want to suggest that it is possible to be 'out of your P-world' after a few drinks), and 'attention' (you can not meter out the P-world, or fail to have a P-world). The long and troubled history of these words makes them difficult to use coherently. They seem to mean different things to nearly everyone who employs them. They also stink of bitter, narrow, academic battles between philosophers, and I have no intention of inflicting that upon you.
So I will insist upon the utility of the term 'P-world', which is still relatively unpolluted with unwanted associations and elaborations. It is the subjective world of phenomenal experience, nothing more and nothing less. I have one, you have one, Genghis Khan had one, and he does not have one any more.
Now, having worked a little to get here, you may think we have stated nothing but the obvious. It is my intention to disabuse you of this quaint notion. I know nothing of your P-world, of course, but to you it is very familiar. But is it really? In the next section I will offer some slightly whimsical ways of thinking about your P-world. First though, let us ask about 'size', or, more accurately, boundedness. Experience of course does not have a size, but it is not infinite in extent either.
Your P-world has a certain spatial extent. You do not experience things that are very distant, for the simple and obvious reason that they are incapable of inflicting their presence upon you through your senses. If that is trivially obvious, perhaps the next question is less so. What is the temporal extent of your P-world? As a whole, it stretches from womb to grave, but what about now? Does it have temporal extent? This turns out to be a rather tricky question. We speak of 'now' as if it were an infinitesimal of no duration, an infinitely thin crack at which the future plunges into the past. But lift your eyes to a clock and watch the hands go around. You can see the second hand progress around the clock face. You see this directly. You experience it in a way that you can not experience the motion of the hour hand. You can figure out that the hour hand has moved, but you can experience the movement of the second hand. The P- world thus has some kind of temporal depth. Psychologists call this the 'psychological present', and it has long been employed as a somewhat fuzzy manner of talking about the fact that experiences have something akin to 'depth'. We may return to this issue later, but for now let us just note that when thinking about P-worlds, the banal and the very peculiar may lie side by side.
We have told ourselves so many stories over the years about who we are, and what our minds are, and how they work, that it is probably a good idea to do a few loosening up exercises at this point. These should help to remind you of the well-formedness of the P-world, and serve to distinguish it from several of the other associations that come with talk of minds and consciousness. The P-world is not the same thing as either mind or consciousness, because we mean multiple things by those words, but the P-world term should, if I succeed, only refer to one particular 'thing'.
Considering a P-world from the outside, is tantamount to looking at the experience of another person. Of course we can not do that satisfactorily. Faced with a friend about to enact a regrettable folly, we often say things such as 'if I were you, I wouldn't do that', knowing full well that if identities were exchanged, you necessarily would. And so we must needs objectify that which is not an object. But we can get some distance like this. For example, here is Genghis Khan's P-world:
I have somewhat fancifully drawn it thinner towards the start of life, and I think it is natural to assume that the Great Khan's experiential life was indeed fuller as he got older, but we need not take this too literally.
Genghis Khan's P-world and my own do not overlap. I was born in 1962. But there are about 6 billion other P-worlds that do overlap with mine (I am not addressing the question of non-human experience yet). Here is a little bit of my P-world.
It gets 'thicker' and 'thinner' as I am waking and sleeping. We ignore sleep a lot, mainly because we don't have too much to say about it. There are sleep scientists, of course, and they have plenty to say, but given that about one quarter of our lives is spent in this state, we talk about it very little, and we have very little idea how it fits into the grander scheme of things. (The word 'conscious' has taken a battering in this context, but we will not use that word here.) I feel happy in claiming that my experiential world changes during sleep, but I insist that it is not non-existent. I don't form memories during sleep, so I typically don't know, if I am asked, what it is like to be asleep, but it is familiar enough that I do not feel either curious or edgy when falling asleep.
The thickness and thinness shown in the above illustration are cartoon-ish depictions, but they may strike a chord. They are an attempt to show, from the outside, what is essentially unshow-able. To eff the ineffable, if you will. Everything I know tells me that there is a continuity to my experience, and that is the P-world, but I cannot pull it into experience. To do so, would be to look at it, and thus separate a subject from an object. In the experience, subject and object form a whole. I am fancifully reminded of a group of TV sets, who have a common discourse in the matter of their own nature. Unfortunately, each can only express what is currently playing. The first TV is convinced it is a racing event. A second knows only the desert and cowboys. They cannot separate the narrative from that which gives rise to the narrative. So too, our accounts of ourselves are necessarily couched in terms of phenomenal quantities, while experience is not like that. Things are the programmes on TV, experience is the TV. It's a weak analogy, but it may help.
At this point, I would like to introduce a friend, Wei Wu Wei. Despite the Chinese sounding name, he was, as I am, of Irish extraction. Unlike me, he was an aristocrat, who spent some time in the world of theatre and dance; he later ran family vineyards in the South of France, and even owned a race horse that won the 1957 Ascot Gold Cup. Terence Gray, as he was more usually known, became something of a mystic in later life, and studied scholarly works within several streams of Eastern contemplative philosophy, especially those of Zen Buddhism and Daoism. He left eight short books, densely packed with aphorisms and notes ranging from technical metaphysics to outright whimsy.
It has come of something of a surprise to me to see that many of the thoughts and tentative insights I am at pains to work through in this small book appear to be deeply compatible with issues as understood in these traditions. But I am not a scholar thereof. Therefore, I will occasionally bring Wei Wu Wei into the discussion as he comments on things. It has been my experience that many of the cryptic aphorisms of Zen Buddhism actually bear unpacking and discussing, however much that flies in the face of the spirit of the aphorism. In short, it often seems to me that Wei Wu Wei and I are frequently talking about the same thing, despite the enormous difference in our respective starting points. I will not attempt any kind of a reconciliation of Eastern and Western knowledge here. Instead, I think it will simply be fun to see that we have much in common, and it is possible to eff the ineffable from within more than one tradition.
I am trying to point out the existence of the P-world, or the subjective world of phenomenal experience. In order to point to it, I need to distance myself from my own experienced present and to suggest that you can distance yourself from your one too, simply by looking at it 'from the outside'. P-worlds are a bit like bodies in that there is one per person, but they are not wholly constitutive of personhood. Here is Wei Wu Wei on the subject:
Why Are We Unaware of Awareness?
The answer is that split-mind, cognising by means of a subject cognising objects, cannot cognise its own 'wholeness' as its object. There is no need to cognise our 'wholeness', and it is forever impossible to do so, for there is no 'thing' here to cognise and no 'thing' there to be cognised. (Posthumous Pieces, 34)
...or, as I was saying, making a 'thing' of the P-world is a mighty odd undertaking. I am rather more optimistic then Wei Wu Wei here, though, and I hope that as long as we do not confuse the experience being had with our selves (or the 'program' with the 'television'), we might have some fun in the attempt.
All we have done so far is to point to something that is so obvious, we can't even point to it. And it has landed us in some hot water right away. If the phrase 'The Subjective World of Phenomenal Experience' actually manages to refer to something well-defined, then there are interesting things to ask of it: what is the relation between a person and a P-world? (Again, I insist they are not the same thing, and it will be essential to maintain this distinction.) What kind of natural objects are P-worlds? How do P-worlds interact? How much can we find out about them?
As pressing as these questions are, we must first ask the blunt question of the origin of the P-world. Where in heck do these worlds of subjective experience come from? They are certainly not predicted by any theory of the natural world that we have developed. Or are they? There seems to be great disagreement here. Subjective experience must, it seems, be a natural phenomenon. What else could it be? In my simplistic book, to be is to be a natural something. So as we objectify the subjective world, and look at it anew, we should bear in mind that it is something that arose (grew?) in a natural world. Once we stop identifying with the P-world, we can study it as a natural phenomenon. We just have to park the pesky question of our own identity first.
Science is of surprisingly little help here. And that very fact is somewhat disturbing, as we have come to believe in science as the ultimate arbiter of dispute. If a sensible answer is to be had, science, many believe, is the oracle that will dispense it. And many likewise believe that if science, as currently construed, cannot provide any answer, then the question is somehow not well formed. This is, of course, poppycock, as I think most of us know, though we may not shout it from the barricades. In fact, we can already see why science is of little help here. Science has its origins in the attempt to account for the world as encountered. The earliest ambitions of scientists related to things they were familiar with, but wanted to understand: the motion of stars and planets seen in the sky, the properties of metals found in the earth, and so on. Science built its reputation on a framework of empirical inquiry, and a methodology that worked to dispel argument. Thus it strove to be objective. But the objects of its inquiry were, initially, phenomenal. They were things encountered in experience. Paradoxically, the focus on the need to reach agreement demanded excising the experience itself from the question being asked. As Alexander Koyré put it:
[Modern science] broke down the barriers that separated the heavens and the earth... . [But] it did this by substituting for our world of quality and sense perception, the world in which we live, and love, and die, another world - the world of quantity, of reified geometry, a world in which, though there is a place for everything, there is no place for man (Koyré, 1965, p. 24)
The successes of science are undeniable, and nowhere so self-confident and robust as in physics, which underscores so much of our modern technology, and whose poster child is the ability to extend our artifacts, and perhaps selves, beyond the very planet we inhabit. Physics is the measure of science, and psychologists glumly taunt each other with accusation of 'physics-envy' in their desire to achieve equally solid footing. But physics got where it did, by starting with the phenomenal and then looking beyond that. Its observations grew and shrank in space and time. The most relevant observations underpinning modern physics are from the impossibly small and the unimaginably big, from the nearly instantaneous and the imponderably enduring. They are, in other words, as far as possible from the familiar spatial and time scales of our phenomenal experience of the world. And the sting in the tail is that this refined science is forced to concede that in order to make sense of any observations whatsoever, the observer does not play an incidental role. The noumenal universe revealed by modern physics is totally removed from everyday experience, and any attempt to interpret it in terms of familiar experience, where things make sense, are finite, and are either one thing or another, any such attempt is forced to acknowledge the central role of the observer in the very constitution of any statement of fact.
In order for science to properly treat of subjective experience, then, it seems that it must grow a little. Nothing said herein ought to be flatly at odds with the current state of play in science (though positions may be taken on one side or another of currently contentious debates). However, our starting point here is the reality of the P-world, the reality of experience in the first person.
So let us set some of these questions temporarily aside, and return to an imaginative exercise. P-worlds are distinct. Each has a different first person point of view. But P-worlds are much more distinct than differing camera views of one objective scene. Each is a whole, distinct phenomenal world. The phenomenal table, the table you encounter, is generated within your P-world. My phenomenal table is generated in mine. We are already in a position to ask one of the biggest questions in metaphysics! How can we act as though we inhabit a shared world?
As big and important as this question is, it is not actually too difficult to sketch the shape of a satisfactory answer, but there are a few steps along the way. The start of the answer is this:
Nervous systems, embedded in physical bodies, immersed in information rich environments, bring forth phenomenal worlds.
This is dense and somewhat cryptic. Rather than attempting vainly to explain it all in one go, we will unpack many aspects of it as we go along. The statement is deeply indebted to the language developed by Umberto Maturana and, especially, Francesco Varela, two scientists who combined their hard-nosed science with deep philosophical considerations. But there is also somewhat more to the answer, at least where humans are concerned.
If we were to mistake persons for P-worlds, we would be condemning ourselves to a solipsistic interpretation. For P-worlds have the property of closure. They are not infinite in extent, however you measure extent. They are finite. And each one is generated by an individual body, with a nervous system, in a complex environment. Let us look at this apparent solipsism. Do not be alarmed. Although P-worlds have this solipsistic character, we will reclaim our shared common-sense reality in a little while. First, however.....
...feel the solipsism of the P-world.
We, each of us, own a bubble of experience, a phenomenal world. They are quite distinct. This means they don't overlap. Remember, only that part of experience that is private and first-person belongs here. Yet we appear to inhabit a shared world. A first step is to try to become aware of the bubble of immediate experience, centered at the perceiving subject.
Imagine if you will two identical cabins, one belonging to Nora, one to Jim. The cabins are identically kitted out, with the same picture on one wall, a dresser, a table, with a teapot and some cups, and two stools. In Nora's cabin, Nora sits on one stool, and she sees a hologram of Jim on the other. The source of the hologram, Jim, is in his identical cabin, and he sees a hologram of Nora on the other stool in his room.
Now Jim and Nora can converse. They can point to a shared world, and need not be aware that they are in different cabins, even if they know this to be the case. They can point to things, comment on the picture and the cobwebs. With a little technical license, we can allow Holo-Jim to pour Real-Nora a nice cup of tea. In this way we can begin to appreciate the separateness of phenomenal worlds, and yet believe that meaningful transactions among individuals is possible.
Two questions immediately arise with a vengeance. What generates the 'holograms', or bubbles of phenomenal experience? And how is it that they exhibit such a remarkable degree of correspondence?
The answer to the first is as above: nervous systems, embedded within physical bodies, immersed in information rich environments, generate P-worlds. There is no separability among these several parts. Nervous systems do not have meaningful existences independently of bodies, nor are bodies independent of their supporting environments. These are lessons that have emerged from a century of studying perception and action. The hologram metaphor does not go nearly far enough, because it suggests that Nora is distinct from her cabin. But within a P-world, each of us sees our own body as distinct from the environment around it, while the P-world encompasses both Bodies appear as things, just like tables and teapots. Such is our perspective.
What then of the second question? How is it that your P-world and mine appear to correspond so well that we can converse and interact as if we inhabited the same shared world? To this, I will venture, there are two independent and complementary answers. The first answer is that reality is lawful. The natural world is impressively lawful. If we have learned anything at all from several centuries of science, it is that nature is wonderfully, reliably, lawful. Central to the generation of the P-world, as we will see, lies the lawful relation between perception and action. If you move your head one way, the resulting change in optical stimulation on your retina is not capricious or arbitrary, but arises from the lawful behaviour of the play of light on the surfaces in your immediate surroundings. This lawfulness is present for humans, bats and jellyfish alike, though with our rather different constitutions and sensory capacities, the lawfulness evident to a bat is undoubtedly quite different and uninterpretable from a human point of view. But you and I are human, and we engage with the same underlying reality through bodies of roughly comparable constitution and with similar properties. Thus we have no difficulty in agreeing that rocks are hard, the sky is up, the sun hot and the water thirst-quenching.
The second answer to the manifest correspondence between our worlds is unique to humans. We have arrived at a point where we have a great deal of collective agreement about the nature of the world we inhabit. This agreement is expressed in our shared understanding of things which have no basis in mere physical reality. We believe in universities, personal property, sin and gods. We wear pants. The collectively constructed social world we inhabit arises from our interaction, and we will look in some detail at this process in the next section.
Thus, although holograms have many properties of illusions, there is no claim here that we live in a state of perpetual deception, much as the idealist Bishop Berkeley may (or, better, may not) have suggested. On the contrary! The lawfulness of the material world we encounter, on the one hand, and the collective agreement on non-physical aspects to our shared world, together conspire to reassure us that we inhabit the same world (in some sense of the word). We do each have a unique phenomenal world, yet the lawfulness of the underlying fabric ensures that similar relations obtain between perception and action, and thus we too can point out 'shared' pictures and teapots, and our social constitution as humans ensures that we can recognize the full cultural significance of both pictures and teapots.
If we mis-identify the P-world with our selves, we are, indeed, condemned to a less than glorious solipsism. But if we acknowledge the essentially private nature of the perception-action relation, and notice, too, how much of our meaningful experience of the world is not of this nature, we emerge again from isolation. Universities, taboos, all beliefs, the whole socially constructed reality of it, from property to piracy, we realize that we are these too. This is the essence of what it is to see the P-world.
There may be more than one way to slice a pie. Or cake. But having adopted one approach to slicing, it is well- nigh impossible to revert to the other. Likewise, in trying to understand the vastly multi-faceted world we experience, there may be alternative, mutually incompatible ways of dividing the world up, each of which is capable of revealing different aspects of the world to us.
A simple illustration might help. Consider the task of making general statements about a population consisting of men, women, boys and girls. We could begin by sorting the population out on lines of age, separating the adults from the children. There may be many reasons to do so, and clearly there are important characteristics of the population that will become evident if we do. But in doing so, we forego an alternative slicing of the pie. Because we have first applied a scalpel along the age line, we can no longer group the people primarily based on sex. Identifying males and females is now only possible within each age group separately. This means that many other important characteristics of the population may now be harder to see, or may be lost to us entirely.
A less obvious example of this was provided by Richard Dawkins in 'The Selfish Gene'. The approach taken by Dawkins here has been frequently misunderstood. In a considered argument, Dawkins adopts the gene's point of view and demonstrates convincingly that there are many aspects to the process of evolution that are more usefully described from this point of view than from the alternative point of view of the complex organism or the species. Many of these may be otherwise invisible. This is not to claim that one point of view (gene-centric, organism-centric) is 'correct' in any sense, but rather that our understanding of the process of evolution can be greatly enriched if we start from a different point. (Dawkins inadvertently did it again when he introduced the notion of the meme, and we will return to that point later).
In the P-world story being sketched here, we are attempting another repositioning of the point of view from which our story is being told. Like the gene's-eye view, this one may seem initially to do an injustice to our received self image as autonomous, willful beings. In the story unfolding here, we forego some comfortable and fundamental distinctions. We do not assume that we know what kind of thing 'we' are. Importantly, we do not make the simplistic assumption that the notion of self or identity is co-extensive with the P-world. In this context, it would be wise too to avoid the mentalistic ontology of psychology as far as possible. Within the view being sketched here, many familiar notions, including at least the notions of belief, memory and volition, will appear differently, or not at all. This is not the same thing as claiming that the point of view adopted here trumps more conventional ones. It is instead the idea that if we recognize the P-world as a well-formed entity in its own right, we obtain some novel insights into our singular and collective selves. Not every story we might want to tell about ourselves can be told from this angle. But there may be important stories that can only be told so. What is more, it is my contention that the main obstacle to establishing common ground among the various disciplines of 'mind' (psychology, psychiatry, neuroscience, contemplative traditions, psychoanalysis, phenomenology) is that we have not yet developed a vocabulary that accords subjective experience its due.
This talk of 'selves' and 'identity' may appear loose and imprecise. What exactly is it that I am suggesting we give up? I think the answer to this lies in the notion of autonomy. When we distance ourselves from the P-world, we see each as subject to a multitude of influences; some of these are of internal origin and may be considered to be essentially biological. Some arise from couplings and interactions among P-worlds, and hence are social in character. There will be a great deal more to discuss here in the next chapter. We are used to conceiving of ourselves as willful, autonomous individuals. If we interpret our experiential lives as I am suggesting here, this view is threatened. But there are many reasons for thinking that this stance may be appropriate, accurate, and, above all, useful. No one could credibly argue against the weak thesis that there are aspects of our being that can only be seen when we acknowledge the internal and external influences on our lives. Here we go further, and suggest that our very constitution, what we are, is both personal and collective, and must be seen as such to understand how we are, why we are, and how we might aspire to being. The second half of this small book will be particularly concerned with exploiting the novel perspective adopted herein.