Real naturalism

‘Real naturalism’ London Review of Books 26 September 2013 Galen Strawson ——————————————————————————————————— This is a slightly expanded (and easier to read) version of the article published in the London Review of Books vol 35 no 18 (26 September 2013) http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n18/galen-strawson/realnaturalism The original full-length version of this article was the Romanell Lecture delivered to the meeting of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association in Washington in 2011 and published in the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Association 86/2 pp 125–154

——————————————————————————————————— I’m a naturalist, an out-and-out naturalist, a philosophical or metaphysical naturalist, a naturalist about concrete reality. I don't think anything supernatural or otherwise non-natural exists. One can’t classify anything as supernatural or non-natural until one has a substantive conception of the natural relative to which something can be classified as non-natural. I do have one. I take it that reality—by which I mean concrete reality, anything that exists in spacetime—is entirely physical. I’m a physicalist naturalist. I don’t believe there’s any nonphysical concrete reality. I think metaphysical naturalism is the same thing as physicalism as just defined: the view that concrete reality is entirely physical (I’m putting ethics aside). There are, however, important questions to be raised about what this amounts to. They’re old questions, in fact, but they haven’t received enough attention recently. One result of this is that many—probably most—philosophers who call themselves naturalists are in fact extreme anti-naturalists. They're false naturalists—noturalists. Certainly something very strange has happened to the use of the word ‘naturalism’ in the last fifty years or so, when it comes to the question of conscious experience—‘experience’ for short. The philosopher W. V. Quine, who in his reductive passion and ontological austerity was seen as a standard bearer for naturalism in philosophy, never for a moment doubted or denied the existence of experience, as some of the false naturalists appear to do (even as they deny that they do). Quine never denied the existence of what he called the ‘heady luxuriance of experience … experience in all its richness’. Nor is this surprising: Quine never subscribed to the most foolish view ever adopted in the whole history of philosophy (the whole history of human thought). He never denied a certainly known natural fact: the fact of the existence of experience. No serious naturalist can do this. Nevertheless,

beginning in the twentieth century, self-styled naturalists have seemed to think that questioning or doubting or denying the existence of experience is part of a thoroughgoing naturalism. How did this happen? It began with the transmogrification of behaviourism in the early twentieth century. Behaviourism started out in a highly fruitful way, as a moderate methodological thesis in psychology (roughly: it’s not worth studying the phenomena of experience, although they obviously exist, because they’re not susceptible of scientifically rigorous quantitative treatment). It turned into a mad metaphysical thesis in philosophy, according to which there is nothing more to experience than behaviour and dispositions to behaviour; i.e., bluntly put, experience doesn’t really exist. Things got worse (the process accelerated after the publication of J. J. C. Smart’s famous paper ‘Sensations and brain processes’ in 1959). The denial of the existence of experience came to be thought of as naturalistic independently of any behaviourist (or ‘functionalist’) assumptions—in spite of the fact that the existence of experience is a certainly known natural fact. The dubious existence or non-existence of experience was thought to follow simply from the fact—the view—that everything is wholly physical. Here there is a wonderful irony, for the false naturalists—even as they deny the existence of a certainly known natural fact, the fact of experience, and revile Descartes, their favourite target, for being an outright realist about experience—are themselves in the grip of a fundamentally Cartesian conviction: the conviction that experience can’t possibly be physical—that matter can’t possibly be conscious. The irony is fierce because Descartes was at bottom aware that one can’t rule out the possibility that matter may be conscious. Many of the false naturalists, by contrast, have had no such doubts. Some of them will deny this. They will insist that they do admit the existence of consciousness or experience, and do allow that it can be physical. But they do this by changing the meaning of the word ‘conscious’ to mean something that involves no consciousness. They looking-glass the term ‘conscious’, where to looking-glass a term is to use it in such a way that whatever one means by it, it excludes what the term actually means. If physicalism is true, experience (consciousness) is wholly physical. For experience certainly exists, and everything is wholly physical if physicalism is true. It follows that there are things about the nature of the physical that physics doesn’t characterize, because it doesn’t characterize the nature of experience. Some say that the word ‘physical’ is to be defined by reference to physics, so that if physics doesn’t characterize the nature of  

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something, then it isn’t physical. But this is wrong. The word ‘physical’ is what is known as a ‘natural-kind’ term (like ‘iron’, or ‘water’), albeit of a highly general sort, and it’s generally allowed we can be very wrong about the nature of anything denoted by a naturalkind term. So we may be very wrong about the physical. We can’t be sure we know the nature and limits of the physical. So we can’t be sure we know the nature and limits of the natural: we can’t be sure we know the nature and limits of the natural even if we’re right (I’m assuming we are) that the natural is the physical. This is putting it mildly, because physics and cosmology are in turmoil. It’s not just that we don't definitely know the nature and limits of the physical. We definitely don't know the nature or limits of the physical. It doesn’t help much to say that we have a clear fix on the physical inasmuch as we know that the physical is the spatiotemporal, because we’re very far from clear about the nature of spacetime. We may be very wrong about it, even postEinstein. A considerable number of leading physicists and cosmologists think that the description of reality as spatiotemporal is superficial. It’s sometimes said that, for all our uncertainty, we have a pretty good fix on the basic nature of the physical. David Lewis once claimed ‘that the physical nature of ordinary matter under mild conditions is very well understood’ (1994: 412). But this isn’t true. It’s not true even when we put aside the point that the known phenomena of experience are wholly a matter of the physical nature of ordinary matter under mild conditions (the mild if special conditions that obtain in the brain), according to physicalist naturalists, along with the point that the physics and neurophysiology of the brain don’t enable us to understand how this is so. We’re left with profound theoretical uncertainty even after we’ve put aside these points, uncertainty about the nature of the so-called ‘fundamental particles’, for example; and this uncertainty obviously extends to all conditions in which the fundamental particles are found, including all mild conditions. The same goes for gravity, ‘dark energy’, ‘dark matter’. A physicalist conception of the natural has, nevertheless, a great deal of substance. I take it that vast numbers of the claims of current physics are either straightforwardly true or very good approximations to truth. The periodic table is on to something fundamental about the ultimate nature of concrete reality. So are formulae like f = ma, e = mc2, the inverse square law of gravitational attraction, the Bell Inequality, and so on. Note, though, that all these truths about the physical, outright or approximate, are expressed by statements of number or equations: mathematical equations featuring various constants in addition to various numbers and mathematical functions. They’re truths about  

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quantities and relational structures instantiated in concrete reality, a point well made by Eddington and then Russell: this is the fundamental form of our theoretical knowledge of the physical in physics. And this point about the form of our knowledge of the physical is at the same time a point about our ignorance of the physical. Physics may tell us a great deal about the structure of physical reality, but it seems that it can’t tell us anything about the intrinsic nature of reality in so far as its intrinsic nature is more than its structure. I’m trying to approach a defensible version of physicalist naturalism about the mind by stressing a point that has never entirely disappeared ever since it was made so forcefully by Locke. The point is: our ignorance. It can be expressed by saying that ‘physical’ is a naturalkind term, or by stressing the Eddington-Russell point about the numerical-structural nature of descriptions in physics. Neither of these ways of putting the point is necessary, however. One can sufficiently characterize our ignorance by starting out from the Locke-Hume (and doubtless older) point about the sense in which we can only ever observe regularity when we observe causation, not causal power as such. One can plausibly generalize this into the broadly speaking Kantian (and again also older) view that when we make epistemic contact with any concrete reality x other than our own current experience, we can only ever have access to an appearance of x, an appearance that is necessarily a function not only of how x is, in itself, but also of how x affects us given how we are in ourselves, given, in particular, our sensory-intellectual constitution. (Kant doesn’t even exempt our access to our own current experience from this limitation.) Plainly the more ignorance we record, the less substantive our conception of the physical. But our conception of the physical is still hugely substantive. I take it that many of the claims of physics are simply true, as already remarked, and I endorse all those that are, and all the property attributions that they make. At the same time I never forget the respect in which ‘physical’ is a natural-kind term, and ‘spatiotemporal’ another, or the point that there may be—certainly is—much that we don’t know about the physical. So I’m a naturalist and a physicalist; a naturalist physicalist. I think concrete reality is wholly physical. But I don't for a moment think that physics, the human science of physics, can fully characterize the nature of concrete reality, even in principle. One might call those who believe that physics can in principle fully describe or characterize the physical

 

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‘physicSalists’. They’re not realistic or serious physicalists. Serious physicalists certainly hold that nothing non-physical exists—that nothing exists other than the entity physics talks about (the physical universe, physics’s whole subject matter). But they’re clear on the point that physics can’t convey the nature of everything that exists—even though everything is wholly physical. This isn’t New Age anti-scientism, it’s Hard Nose physicalism. This is what real, realistic physicalism actually looks like—as Eddington, Russell, and many others know. On many matters, physics is completely silent. If you’re not completely clear on this point, you really have no idea what physics is. So, again, the natural is the concrete real. It’s the concrete real whatever it is, whatever its nature. The question is then ‘What do we know about concrete reality?’ As physicalist naturalists we answer ‘concrete reality is wholly physical in nature’. Our question is then ‘What do we know about the physical?’ We’re aware that the less we can claim to know about the nature of concrete reality, the less we can exclude as definitely non-natural or supernatural or illusory. So, again, what do we know? When we ask this question we get, first, an old answer. We know, each of us individually, that we exist, as Descartes pointed out. But we also encounter another more general and more interesting certainty, as Descartes also pointed out: the fact of consciousness, the fact of the subjective qualitative character or ‘phenomenological’ character of experiences, which I’m calling ‘experience’, or ‘the experiential’, or ‘experientiality’. The existence of experience is a certainly known general fact about concrete reality. It is therefore, for anyone who takes the concrete real to be entirely natural, a certainly known natural fact. It is therefore, for any realistic physicalist naturalist, a certainly known physical fact. The point that the existence of experience is the most certainly known general natural fact (I’m not now concerned with radical scepticism) is acknowledged by almost all philosophers; only a tiny group of philosophers has ever denied it, beginning in the twentieth century. So now we have our starting point. The necessary, inevitable starting point of of genuine, realistic physicalist naturalism, real naturalism, as I call it, is outright realism about experience, conscious experience. What do I mean by ‘realism about experience’? I’m going to try to define the term ‘experience’ in such a way that I can’t be misunderstood. There’s so much terminological wreckage in the philosophy of mind that it’s close to collapse as a shared enterprise. This is why I’m inclined to answer the question what I mean by ‘experience’ by saying that I mean real experience, and that by ‘realism about experience’ I mean real realism about  

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experience. This is not facetious. The trouble is that some who claim to be realists about experience are really no such thing (they have looking-glassed the term). What is real realism about experience? Take some stock examples: feeling pain, having colour-experience, tasting milk. One way to convey what it is to be a real realist about experience is to say that it’s to continue to take colour experience or taste experience or pain experience to be exactly what one took it to be, quite unreflectively, simply in having it, before one did any philosophy: when one was six, for example, and was given food whose taste one didn't like; or asked a friend what something tasted like, or whether they liked the taste; or turned in the direction of a bright light with closed eyelids and experienced reddishorange, and then covered one’s eyes with one’s hands and watched the reddish-orange fade to black; or wondered, as children often do around that age, whether one’s brother or sister or friend saw colours exactly as one did oneself. Children of this age experiment constantly with experience. They squeeze their eyeballs to see double, rub their closed eyes to ‘see stars’, block and unblock their ears, spin round until they’re dizzy and then stop and watch the world swirling, fully aware that it’s their experience, not the world, that is swirling. They’re well aware that objects that they know to have a constant colour appear to be different colours in different lights, that their faces and the faces of their friends look a different colour under a neon light in a bathroom mirror, and so on. Children’s realism about experience (all non-philosophers’ realism about experience) is real realism about experience. However many new and astonishing facts real realists about experience learn from scientists—facts about the neurophysiology of experience, say, or about the ‘filling-in’ that characterizes visual experience, or ‘change blindness’, or ‘inattentional blindness’—their basic general understanding of what colour experience or pain experience is remains exactly the same as it was before they did any philosophy. It remains, in other words, entirely correct, grounded in the fact that to have experience is already to know what it is, however little one reflects about it. There’s a fundamental sense in which the having is the knowing. It’s knowledge ‘by acquaintance’. In the case of any particular experience, one is acquainted with the essential nature of the experience, in certain respects, at least, just in having it. To taste pineapple, in Locke’s old example, is sufficient, as well as necessary, for knowing what it’s like to taste pineapple. More strictly, it’s to know the nature of the taste experience one then has: the having is the knowing. But infallibility about particular experiences isn’t essential to the present point. It wouldn’t matter if it could be

 

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shown that one could somehow be wrong about the experiential qualitative character of one’s current experience just in the having of it (i.e. not in any judgement one makes about it). For one would still have an entirely correct general understanding of what experience is, of exactly the sort that a six year old has, and certain knowledge that there is such a thing as experience.

I think this way of defining ‘experience’ is helpful because it guarantees that anyone who claims not to know what is in question is being disingenuous. It’s simple stuff, but it needs to be said in the current philosophical climate. I’m talking about the lived qualitative character of experience, generally considered, exactly as it is ordinarily conceived of, exactly as it is figured in the ordinary everyday basic understanding of it. I take it that this understanding is an entirely correct understanding of a fundamental feature of reality—of reality as it is in itself, if you like. If someone says they’re still not sure what I mean, I reply that all they have to do is to think back to their pre-philosophical past.

With this in place, one can say the following. If as a physicalist naturalist, one thinks that naturalism or physicalism gives one any good reason to question the ordinary, basic prephilosophical understanding of the experiential—to attempt any sort of elimination of the experiential, any sort of reduction of it to the non-experiential, any sort of account of experience that is in any way deflationary relative to the ordinary understanding of experience—then one has gone wrong. One isn’t a real realist about experience. It follows that one isn’t a real naturalist, where to be a real naturalist one must be a realistic naturalist. One is a false naturalist—indeed an anti-naturalist. One is an anti-naturalist because one doubts or denies a known natural fact—the most certainly known general natural fact. So too, one isn’t a real physicalist, where to be a real physicalist one must be a realistic physicalist. One isn’t a real physicalist because one doubts or denies a certainly known physical fact, the fact of conscious experience; for one must as a physicalist naturalist take this known natural fact to be a physical fact. This is the central test. It’s completely independent of any points about ignorance—the Eddington-Russell point or any other. It’s a point about knowledge, not ignorance. We can certainly try to question real realism about experience.We can try the hypothesis that experience is in fact illusory or unreal. In this case we admit, as everyone agrees we must, that it seems that there is experience, while claiming that there isn’t really any. That, however, leaves the supposed illusion, the seeming, in place as a natural fact—hence a

 

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wholly physical fact. And now a familiar and irresistible argument refutes the hypothesis. The problem is that the illusion already possesses, by hypothesis, the very properties whose illusoriness is being hypothesized. The phenomenon of there seeming to be experience—the phenomenon we’re supposing to be an illusion—can’t exist unless there really is experience. Dennett tries this move. He proposes that ‘there is no such thing [as] phenomenology. . . . There seems to be phenomenology . . . but it does not follow from this undeniable, universally attested fact that there really is phenomenology’ (1991: 365–6). But in fact it does follow, for the reason just given: for there to seem to be phenomenology just is for there to be phenomenology. When it comes to experience, you can’t open up the is/seems gap. Descartes makes the point. To suggest, as Dennett seems to, that the apparently sensory aspects of phenomenology (say) are in some sense illusory because they aren’t the product of sensory mechanisms in the way we suppose, but are somehow generated by processes of judgment or belief, is just to put forward a surprising hypothesis about part of the mechanism of this rich seeming. It is in no way to put in question its existence or reality. Whatever the process by which the seeming arises, the end result of the process is, as Dennett agrees, at least this: that it seems as if one is having a phenomenally rich experience of (in his example) green-golden sunlight, Vivaldi violins, and so on. And if there is this seeming, then, once again, there just is phenomenology. Consider the case of pain. Why should anyone ever have wanted to question the existence of experience in this way? Do naturalists or physicalists have some good reason to try this which other people don't? Some of them think they do, but they’re wrong. We know experience exists, and none of us, physicalists or not, have any good reason to think we know anything about the physical that gives us any reason to find any problem in the idea that experiential phenomena are wholly physical phenomena. It’s not as if the conservation principles of physics provide reason to think this, or the thesis of the causal closure of the physical. Real naturalist physicalists, realistic naturalist physicalists, know this. They know enough about the nature of our ignorance of the physical to know that there are no good grounds for thinking that anyone could ever discover anything about the physical that could provide good grounds for questioning real realism about experience—no reason for favouring any sort of elimination or reduction or deflation. It’s true, of course, that the experiential seems utterly and bewilderingly different from the physical as ordinarily conceived of. But this doesn’t give us any reason at all to think that the experiential isn’t wholly physical, considered specifically as experiential. Nor does physics  

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give us any sort of reason to question the existence of experience, or its entirely physical nature. For all its seemingly bewildering difference from the physical as ordinarily conceived of, and also from the physical as conceived of by physics (the second difference is arguably less clear), the experiential is none the less wholly physical, according to all real physicalists, all realistic physicalists, because it certainly exists and is certainly real and concrete, and everything real and concrete is physical, according to physicalists. It’s worth noting that all materialists until the twentieth century were real materialists, where this means, crucially, that they were real realists about experience, and took experience so conceived to be wholly physical. Joseph Priestley, a strict materialist, holds in the 1770s that ‘the faculty of thinking is the result of a certain arrangement of the parts of matter’; that ‘sensation and thought do necessarily result from the organization of the brain’; that ‘mind…is not a substance distinct from the body, but the result of corporeal organization’. This is also Hobbes’s view in 1641. It’s Regius’s view in 1647, Locke’s suspicion in 1689, Toland’s view in 1704, Collins’s view in 1707–8. It’s extremely widespread in eighteenthcentury France, it’s old news in the powerful nineteenth-century movement in Germany that followed German idealism and was known as German materialism. There’s no reason to doubt that Democritus and other ancient materialists and atomists held essentially the same view As remarked, the point about ignorance doesn’t need to be expressed in the EddingtonRussell way. Suppose someone rejects Eddington-Russell, and claims that physics does give us some knowledge of the intrinsic nature of the physical that is not merely numericalstructural knowledge (they may claim that physics gives some positively descriptive, nonnumerical-structural knowledge of the nature of properties like spin and charge, or indeed motion). We can grant the claim, for then a further point comes to the fore: we have no good reason to think that our knowledge of the nature of these more than merely numericalstructural properties gives us reason to think that the physical can’t be experiential. Locke saw this, and Priestley, again, was very clear: ‘I define … matter … to be a substance possessed of the property of extension, and of powers of attraction and repulsion. And since it has never yet been asserted that the powers of sensation and thought are incompatible with these … I therefore maintain, that we have no reason to suppose that there are in man two substances so distinct from each other, as have been represented.

 

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So we know the experiential exists. Good. Do we know that the non-experiential exists? No. As a physicalist naturalist, I take it that experiences are spatiotemporally located events, neural electrochemical goings-on, and I’m also going to assume for the moment that experiences have, as such—in having mass, charge, shape, size, and so on—certain irreducibly non-experiential concrete properties. It is, however, important to stress that this is an assumption. It’s a highly substantive and unverifiable assumption. One has to grant that it’s an assumption as soon as one accepts some version of Eddington-Russell: (1) there is a fundamental sense in which physics offers only abstract structural descriptions, (2) there must be something more to concrete reality than just abstract structure, something concrete that has or exemplifies the structure. As soon as one accepts (1) and (2), one must grant (3) nothing in physics requires or entails that the structure-transcendent nature of concrete reality is or must be fundamentally or irreducibly non-experiential in character. And one mustn’t think that anything in one’s everyday conception of the physical can count against (3). That would be like thinking that our everyday experience of solidity in sitting on chairs, walking on the ground, bumping into doors, and so on, can give us insight into the actual physical nature of solidity, i.e. electric charge. It can’t. ‘But it’s part of the very meaning of the term ‘physical’—it’s analytic, if you will—that ‘x is physical’ entails ‘x has some non-experiential property.’ No. There’s nothing in physics to warrant this claim about meaning. ‘Physical’, once again, is a natural-kind term. It’s a natural-kind term of extreme generality, which we apply to something whose nature we know ourselves to be profoundly ignorant of in fundamental respects. To claim to know with certainty that spatiotemporal extension entails non-experientiality is to claim to know more about spacetime than is warranted by anything in science. One can re-express the point by saying that physicalism is compatible with panpsychism. This makes it vivid, because many think it obvious that physicalism isn’t compatible with panpsychism. They think physicalism is not only incompatible with pure panpsychism (according to which all concrete phenomena have only experiential properties), but also with the more moderate version of panpsychism (according to which all concrete phenomena have experiential properties as well as nonexperiential properties). They’re wrong. Serious discussion of the so-called ‘mind-body problem’ begins only on the far side of this mistake. Getting the point about our ignorance of the physical is a revolutionary experience in a standard Western philosophical career. It involves an massive  

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intellectual jolt. (It spaced me out for about two weeks, back in the 1990s.) I suspect that many philosophers will never get it. I’ve argued that a physicalist naturalist can’t rule out the idea that the physical is wholly mental or indeed wholly experiential. The point needs to be made. I have nevertheless, and for the moment, assumed that physical reality does have non-experiential concrete properties or being. One doesn’t also have to assume that it has experiential character, for this, as remarked, is a certainly known fact about concrete reality, which we’ve already assumed to be wholly physical. Given that concrete reality is physical, we know that physical reality has experiential character. It may be that all physical reality has some experiential character, as already remarked. But we needn’t now rule out the possibility that panpsychism is false in all versions, and that physical reality has experiential character only when organized in certain specific ways—e.g. in the way in which it is organized in brains. Either way, all realistic, serious /genuinely hard-nosed/ physicalist naturalists are outright realists about experience, simply because its existence is, once again, the most certainly known general natural fact about concrete reality, i.e. (according to all physicalists) physical reality. All realistic naturalists—all real naturalists—respect the basic data of experience: most notably, experience itself. Real naturalism is accordingly in direct conflict with the wildly antinaturalist doctrine now commonly known as ‘naturalism’, which has for the last fifty years or so treated its first and fundamental datum—experience—as if it were its greatest problem, and has tried to deal with it by questioning its existence, more or less covertly, or at least questioning its claim to be, in a fundamental respect, exactly as it seems, and indeed is. We have two main points, the point about ignorance, and the point about knowledge, the point that the existence of the experiential as ordinarily conceived of is a certainly known natural fact, the most certainly known natural fact. The first two times I made these points in public, I was told, with some heat, that nobody now disagrees, and that I was attacking a straw man. If this is true, I’m delighted, because I’ve been trying to make the point for twenty years, years, and this means things have changed. But I’m not actually sure that everyone does now agree. Here’s a test. Everyone who does agree must be fully open to panpsychism. And this doesn’t yet seem to be so. Let me summarize the three principal charges against false naturalism and add a fourth (the charges are connected but distinct). First, once again, false naturalism denies, or at least sees reason to question in some way, a certainly known natural fact: the existence of experience,  

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by which I mean real experience, conscious experience, experience as characterized by real realism about experience, i.e. the experiential qualitative character of experience as ordinarily and correctly understood. The second charge is a topping on the first. False naturalism’s denial or questioning of the existence of experience is provably mistaken, independently of the fact that simple reflection on one’s epistemological position already shows the existence of experience to be a certainly known natural fact. It’s provably mistaken because we can’t open up the is/seems gap between appearance and reality. For in this case the appearance in question is the reality in question. Third, false naturalism involves a very large mistake about physics. This point is independent of the fact that false naturalism’s doubting of experience is provably mistaken, and can be summarized by saying simply that nothing in physics, or indeed science generally, or in our ordinary experience of the physical world, supports the denial or questioning of the existence of experience in any way at all. It’s true, as true as ever, that we don't see how the claims of physics fit with the facts of experience as (correctly) represented by real realism about experience. But there is, crucially, no active clash between the claims of physics and the facts of experience. There’s all the difference in the world between an inability to integrate two descriptive schemes, an inability to fit them together, which is something merely negative, and an active, positive clash between the schemes, in which a claim made in one scheme is incompatible with a claim made in the other scheme. Only an active clash with the claims of physics could give us any prima facie reason to doubt real realism about experience. But there is no active clash. And, actually, even an active clash couldn’t give us a reason to doubt real realism about experience. It could only give us reason to doubt the claims of physics. One can re-express this last point by saying that when self-styled naturalists argue from physicalism or naturalism to the non-existence of experience, or the questionability of the existence of experience, the argument isn’t just wrong, it’s perfectly wrong. This is the fourth charge. The argument gets things exactly the wrong way round. If we call experience ‘E’, and call anything non-experiential ‘non-E’, then the correct argument is as follows. [1] If concrete reality contains something other than E that we as naturalists take to be a natural phenomenon, e.g. physical stuff conceived as something that is in its intrinsic nature non-E and that is (for this reason) such that we find it hard to understand how E exists as it  

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does if non-E exists, given the highly intimate relation we suppose to exist between E and non-E, then non-E must be a problem for naturalism; but not E. We are in this case in no position to say, as naturalists, that [2] non-E certainly exists, as a matter of natural fact, and it’s most unclear, given non-E and the relation we suppose to exist between non-E and E, how E is possible (and perhaps E is not possible). We may be in a position to say that [3] If non-E exists, as a matter of natural fact, then, given the relation we suppose to exist between non-E and E, it is most unclear how E is possible. But the next step must then be this: [4] Well, E certainly exists, as a matter of certain natural fact; so if it is most unclear how E is possible, given the relation we suppose to exist between non-E and E, then it is presumably most unclear how non-E is possible, given that we know that E exists; and we have in fact no good reason to believe non-E is actual. We have in other words no reason to think that [5] physical stuff is wholly non-experiential in its fundamental nature. In fact we have no reason not to think that [6] physical stuff is wholly experiential in its fundamental nature. [6] may seem very strange, but reasons of theoretical economy, parsimony, simplicity, elegance tell in its favour. This is because, having committed ourselves to physicalism, we know that

 

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[7] some physical stuff is experiential in nature, whatever is the case with respect to its fundamental nature (we know that common or garden physical stuff is experiential in nature under the mild if extraordinarily intricate conditions found in the brain). And given that some physical stuff is certainly experiential in nature, [6] is the simplest hypothesis: all physical stuff is in its fundamental nature wholly experiential in all conditions and in all respects and all the way down. [6] is pure panpsychism. It makes a claim to be the most plausible version of hard-nosed physicalist naturalism. I call it ‘pure’ because it goes beyond the version of panpsychism according to which all physical stuff has experiential being in addition to non-experiential being. It’s important to see that it is wholly compatible with physics. It leaves everything true in physics untouched. (Certainly, and again, it doesn’t encounter any conflict with the principle of the causal closure of the physical or the conservation principles.) I’m not particularly disposed to argue for panpsychism here. I’ve simply argued that there’s no reason to favour the view that the energy patterns of which physics gives structural descriptions are fundamentally non-experiential over the view that they’re fundamentally experiential, especially given that we know that some of them are experiential in nature. Nor does the situation change if we allow that physics gives us more than purely structural information in furnishing us with concepts of spin, charge, motion, and so on. Some may still think that we have positive reason not to think that physical stuff is fundamentally experiential in nature, because we have no positive evidence for its experientiality, except in the case of our own brains. But this is no positive reason to think that physical stuff other than the physical stuff that constitutes our brains is not fundamentally experiential in nature, for we have no evidence for its non-experientiality either. If we ask what evidence there is for the existence of non-experiential concrete reality as opposed to experiential reality, the answer is easy and mathematically precise. There is zero evidence. There is zero observational evidence for the existence of non-experiential concrete reality. Nor will there ever be any. All there is is one great big, wholly ungrounded, wholly question-begging theoretical intuition or conviction. 4

For an elaboration of the intuition that this is a g on a theory, see Strawson 2006. For a (correct) reply according to which it can never be proved to be intolerable, see Stoljar 2006b.

 

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In effect it comes to this: We don't see most of the matter around us doing things that we think of as showing signs of experience or experientiality. So we conclude that we know that it’s not experiential, and that it’s ridiculous to think otherwise. This seems like arguing from [P → Q] to [not-P → not-Q]. This argument appears to be the great foundation of the wildly anti-naturalistic naturalism de nos jours. So much for any naturalism that involves a commitment to the existence of non-experiential concrete reality. I’m not arguing that there’s a sense in which our knowledge can’t go beyond of the experiential because experience is all we know for certain to exist. Our certainty that there is experiential reality,

and

our relative uncertainty that there is anything else, doesn’t in itself provide any grounds at all for an argument that there’s nothing but experiential reality. Nor does the fact that experientiality is the only concrete thing whose nature we have some direct acquaintance with provide any grounds for the view that everything concrete is experiential. Nor am I arguing that we have reason to suppose that the nature of concrete reality is wholly experiential via the claim that there’s a fundamental sense in which we have no positively descriptively contentful conception of non-experiential concrete reality, and so can’t even genuinely formulate the hypothesis that there is any non-experiential concrete reality. Many will still think that it's somehow essentially ontologically or theoretically cheaper to postulate non-experiential stuff rather than experiential stuff as the basic stuff of reality. This is a mistake. It’s not cheaper. It's either more expensive, because we know there is experiential reality and don't know there is any non-experiential reality, and we now have to posit radical emergence as a way of getting experiential reality out of non-experiential reality; or the cost is at best equal. I end with a prediction and a challenge. The prediction is that no philosopher who disagrees will take any notice of this argument. I’m sorrowfully confident about this for a reason Hobbes gave in 1645, which has a vast amount of empirical support: ‘arguments seldom work on men of wit and learning when they have once engaged themselves in a contrary opinion’. The challenge is this. If you think anything I’ve said is anti-naturalist in any way at all, then I think you’re not a naturalist. You’re not a serious, realistic naturalist. You haven’t got to first base.

 

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