ABSTRACT

In the following, I try to define the differences between the view presented by Jan Holmgren and my own. For this purpose I discuss some points raised by AN Whitehead, the question of solipsism, and a few further questions.


[1]
PROCESS AND REALITY

Jan Holmgren's commentary provides me with a welcome opportunity to discuss Alfred North Whitehead's 'Process and Reality'. As this is new territory for me, and also a somewhat difficult matter, and I was not able to read this whole book, I will follow primarily Dorothy Emmet's outline.

[2]
(Emmet, p.290:) Whitehead 'wanted to produce a comprehensive metaphysical system which would take account of scientific knowledge.'

[3]
(p.294:) 'The notion of objectification is one of the most difficult of all Whitehead's views, and it is doubtful whether any satisfactory elucidation of it has yet been made. He envisaged objectification as more than a response to a stimulus and more than a causal interaction; in some sense it is a genuine re-enactment of the feelings of one actual entity in another, and he maintained that we can experience this transition of feeling.'

[4]
(p.294:) 'The use of the term 'feeling' presents great difficulty. Whitehead used it as a technical term for 'the basic generic operation of passing from the objectivity of the data to the subjectivity of the actual entity in question' (PaR p.54). 'This is to maintain that every entity, however lowly, appropriates its responses to the rest of the world in some form of sentient experience, but this does not necessarily involve consciousness. Consciousness he saw as a rare kind of sentience arising within experience; experience does not, as idealists have held, arise within consciousness.'

[5]
'The difficulties in this theory stem partly from Whitehead's insistence that there should not be basically different kinds of entities in the world - organic and inorganic, for instance, or minds and bodies. All entities should display the same general character. He then took certain psychological notions and generalized them (by claiming that consciousness is incidental, not essential) to cover biological and even physical processes. ... As a description of the kind of concrescence of prehensions I find myself to be, this is persuasive. Extended downward to describe the inner life of molecules, it strains the imagination. ... '

[6]
Judging from Emmet's presentation, it seems that ANW's attempt to arrive at a static metaphysical system leads to impasses of thinking. This appears to always happen, whether the approach is primarily theistic, or Platonic, or based on phenomenology, or else primarily empiricist-naturalistic, like Whitehead's objectification. The probable reason is that the authors try to establish something impossible (by definition, actually) : knowledge of un-knowable mind-independent reality (MIR). In the case of the Whitehead-Russell 'Principia Mathematica' this impossibility was demonstrated by Goedel (who himself started from the empiricist MIR tradition). The most appropriate attitude would seem to be the one of Tertullian : 'credo quia absurdum' - but many others have unfortunately claimed direct and more or less unproblematic and doubt-free access to MIR. It is useful to compare these difficulties with Piaget's conceptually simpler construction of object and reality.

[7]
JH says <1> that he found Whitehead to express similar views to his own, 'which appear clearly as soon as he is read as a 'detectist''. My question is : does this procedure not amount to an affirmation of MIR rather than proof of its possibility ? ie, is it not begging the question ? This is my main problem with detectism. The quotation in <5> on Kant and Whitehead (PaR p.180) sounds as if the latter might take a similar path, 'proceeding from' (a pre-supposed) 'objectivity to subjectivity'. And this may indeed be so, judging from some others of Whitehead's statements, for instance (PaR p.23:) ''Actual entities' - also termed 'actual occasions' - are the final real things of which the world is made up. There is no going behind actual entities to find anything more real. They differ among themselves: God is an actual entity, and so is the most trivial puff of existence in far-off empty space.' (This sounds almost like the monads of Leibniz.) In my opinion, this statement is mistaken; and in addition it is not a proof but a posited assertion. While this is what we always do, it should be stated as such, rather than presented as a 'finding' or detection of something pre-assembled. We build the entities inside experience, and in that sense one can indeed go behind them.


[8]
SOLIPSISM

In <1> JH further quotes Whitehead as warning against 'solipsist subjectivism', and in <3> writes that my view is solipsist. This point needs some discussion. In a previous exchange (C3 to TA8) I commented that the term 'solipsism' is tricky, because it comes in two very different versions. According to Rollins, metaphysical solipsism (the notion that 'only I exist') has been discussed since the time of St. Augustine, and was usually rejected as absurd (all ontological claims are paradoxical, but this one is more so than most).

On the other hand, epistemological or methodological solipsism, which is similar or identical to phenomenology, 'has been espoused by almost every major philosopher since Descartes', for the reason that 'existential knowledge arises from immediate and thus unshared experience' (Rollins, p.490 - see also your <14>, and the reference to Chomsky and others).

[9]
But in the latter case, one must explain why the methodological solipsistic position is so quickly and completely forgotten and ignored as it seems to be, certainly in most of the present mind-brain discussions, but apparently also even by some philosophers of science. (Indeed, this appears to be a question of cardinal importance for the present-day conceptual conundrum.) The likely reason is the need for security of thinking which one hopes to be provided by assuming an ad-hoc external source (such as mind-independent reality, MIR). This is assumed to be more reliable than a self-starting bootstrap operation of one's own thinking plus feedback, with the built-in uncertainties as well as responsibilities of such a procedure.

[10]
Rollins' formulation that 'existential knowledge arises from unshared experience' is in itself paradoxical and may contain an unintended trap. The 'existential knowledge' part involves a leap of faith (not mentioned by Rollins), in case it implies the existence of mind-independent reality. In effect this amounts to the 'credo quia absurdum' of Tertullian mentioned above (though in a non-theological sense, and with neglect of the absurdity aspect). This means the basic ontological step from experience to MIR, which thereafter quickly comes to override and obliterate everything preceding, in order to maintain the certainty which MIR is assumed to offer. MIR, I want to suggest, functions somewhat like a computer program, as a conceptual unit (or a composite of many units), it may be reliable if you know its limitations. Still, someone had to construct it (from no program), it did not come pre-assembled out of the blue; to assume that it (or MIR) does so is a mistake and leads into a blind alley.

[11]
The difference between the two varieties of solipsism appears to stem from this intrinsic paradox (or absurdity, or weirdness) of traditional metaphysics (or ontology, or MIR), rather than from the concept of solipsism itself. 'Metaphysical solipsism' asserts a paradoxical (positive) existential state. But 'methodological solipsism' only means: to acknowledge that 'the mind' (or 'experience', 'awareness', or 'consciousness') is at the root of all mental activity, and in this case 'methodological solipsism' is simply another word for 'phenomenology'. To say that 'every major philosopher since Descartes started from phenomenology of experience' (though without use of the word 'solipsism'), is stating something quite obvious, and even trivial. What other possibilities did they have ? Therefore I would think that it is not only a 'research strategy' as Chomsky suggested <14>, but an aspect of everybody's daily thinking.

[12]
The difference between the two versions of 'solipsism' is therefore great. Thus it is probably better to avoid the word 'solipsism', because the difference between its metaphysical and epistemological versions is commonly not made (as for instance by JH). Unless it is accompanied by an explicit discussion of its meaning, it is liable to be misunderstood to signify an absurd ontological claim. A term like 'phenomenology', which indicates the origin of mental content from experience, is probably less vulnerable than 'solipsism'. And also, in my opinion, using Vaihinger's term 'as-if' as applied to MIR is more precise than some other terms with a similar meaning such as 'language game', or 'irony', or 'illusion'.

[13]
OTHER POINTS

On several occasions JH points to Darwinian and other developmental aspects of reality <17ff> and writes that it is 'missed' by as-if-MIR. Evolution is an objective science and is structured, like all knowledge, inside experience. There is thus no conflict, but reduction of experience to this or some other objective findings is not possible. To try this means jumping tracks from experience to objectivity.

[14]
Presentational immediacy is claimed <4> to be a way of talking about experience (the mind) in such objective terms. (The quotation refers to PaR p.143, where Whitehead seems to want to establish a link between causal reasoning and immediate gestalt perception.) But the presentational immediacy uses our previously constructed units to deal with ongoing experience, always subject to corrections as needed. Since we make immediate perceptual mistakes, immediacy is no guarantee of certainty (and clearly not of certainty about inaccessible mind-external entities, or fragments of it, including certainty concerning subjective experience). In the 0-D view the ongoing experience is not just 'highly mind-dependent' but the mind's center. This point I believe is the main difference between our views at present.

[15]
'Where are the long lasting structures stored if there is no real external world out side our momentary experiences ?' <9> This is an objective question, and the objective answer is: chiefly in the cerebral cortex, as mediated by the hippocampus. But if we go back from the outside to the inside track, we don't know about that to start with. Our ancestors 200 years ago did not know much about it at all, but have used them anyway, because the stored structures were available for use in and by experience. And that we now know about hippocampus and about evolution and about neural networks does not change the fact that we can only start from within experience. 'The external world' is a good way to talk about what we deal with, in as-if terms, but this does not imply it has to be a mind-independent world. In my opinion it is no less real because we provide the structures - why do you suggest that it would not be real ?

[16]
That we build reality does not mean that it is under our control <11>. For instance, biological receptor patterns and their results are products of long-term evolution, but this does change the fact that they are our patterns, and that without them there would be no structures. <13> The speed limit : this is not an 'artifact' (in the sense of 'mistake', as you presumably mean), but our structure, like other structures. Russell's statement <14> about mathematics fits well with Vico's opinion. <15> My definition of reality is not 'what can appear immediately in subjective experiences'. It is as follows: we build structures and invest them with reality-belief if they work, or if we want them to work; in either case they may be shown to be invalid.

[17]
If we are careful we qualify these reality structures as as-if realities (and as created ad-hoc from no structures inside given experience), though much of the time we get away without this precaution. If one feels that as-if is a vacuous starting point <18> which makes one feel uncomfortable, one can leave it out. People do that all the time, and 0-D is strictly speaking only needed for special purposes, as discussed elsewhere. The 0-D position implies accepting some responsibility even when structures are consequences of supra-individual developmental mechanisms (because the results are still our doing). This opinion may give rise to controversy, and I am interested in further discussion.

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REFERENCES

Emmet Dorothy M, Whitehead, Alfred North. In Edwards Paul, Ed., Encyclopedia of Philosophy, New York: MacMillan, 1967-72.

Rollins CD, Solipsism, in Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol.7, pp.487-491. New York: MacMillan (1976).

Whitehead Alfred North, Process and Reality, An essay in cosmology. New York: The Free Press, 1929 - 1969 (the page numbers refer to this New York edition; they differ from those of the Cambridge edition and of others) (PaR)

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Herbert FJ Muller
e-mail mdmu@musica.mcgill.ca