On the Horizon
An Essay on Holistic Panenexperientialism
The Magical Flower of Winter is an essay series exploring reality and our relationship to it. It deals with philosophy, science and our views of the world, working out a conception of reality self-grounded in experience. A natural entry point to this series is through this introduction that provides an overview of the project:
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Metaphysics has usually followed a very primitive kind of quest. You know how men have always hankered after unlawful magic, and you know what a great part in magic words have always played. If you have his name, or the formula of incantation that binds him, you can control the spirit, the genie, afrite, or whatever the power may be. Solomon knew the names of all the spirits, and having their names, he held them subject to his will. So the universe has always appeared to the natural mind as a kind of enigma, of which the key must be sought in the shape of some illuminating or power-bringing word or name. That word names the universe’s principle, and to possess it is after a fashion to possess the universe itself. ‘God,’ ‘Matter,’ ‘Reason,’ ‘the Absolute,’ and ‘Energy,’ are so many solving names. You can rest when you have them. You are at the end of your metaphysical quest.
But if you follow the pragmatic method, you cannot look on any such word as closing your quest. You must bring out of each word its practical cash-value, set it at work within the stream of your experience. It appears less as a solution, then, than as a program for more work, and more particularly as an indication of the ways in which existing realities may be changed.
William James - Pragmatism: A New Name For Some Old Ways Of Thinking
This essay will sketch an argument for the ontological, metaphysical and philosophical view of holistic panenexperientialism, acronymed HP. This is the view that all of reality is in or of experience (pan - all, en - in). In order to constitute a view of reality as a whole, panenexperientialism must be coupled with a variety of holism, a variety I have outlined in past essays1, whose relevant aspects will be reiterated. The neologism panenexperientialism, a phrase that unfortunately rolls of the tongue like heel-slipping down the last seven steps of a staircase, is modeled on existing “pan/cosmo-isms”, like panpsychism, that everything is conscious, cosmopsychism, that the cosmos as a whole is conscious, pantheism, that everything is God, and panentheism, that everything is in God. I will start out this essay by distancing HP from some of these other isms, in order to make clear what this view is not. Throughout I will be drawing on many aspects of the first phase of this project, introduced here. The view I outline is speculative in the strictest sense, and is a position that results from trying to avoid what I have termed the ontic projection fallacy - talk about the ontic, the that-ness of being and experience, beyond that it is. We are wont to project or infer experiential and theoretical aspects past the contexts they acquire their meaning in, a special, but prevalent case of which is the ascription of aspects onto the ontic. In attempting to avoid this fallacy throughout, this position can be considered one possibility for the radical conclusion to what the primacy of experience entails. In the extreme this could be considered philosophical fiction. Just as much as an investigation into what reality is, my project is an investigation of «I», this vessel that these words either stream through or arise from, and what this project has increasingly revealed to me is that these two investigations are one and the same. I hope this essay may at the least indicate how and why this is.
A comment on terminology: I have previously defended the choice of using experience, as opposed to Being, consciousness, mind, life and so on.2 Briefly, I much prefer experience, for then we do not add into our thought associations with these well-worn terms, to which we might as well add world, reality and existence. Experience seems the least abused of these philosophical terms that all overlap and attempt to aim at the same «thing» that lies at the heart of what it means to be. Similarly, I could say that by the ontic I mean pure consciousness, God or the Absolute, but as we have seen, by doing so we bring in preconceptions and expectations that we are once more speaking about something that may be reduced, that is epistemisable, convertible into «what»-ness, while the ontic, the that-ness of experience (Being, reality, world…) refuses these preconceptions at the outset. Though the epistemic shows forth its limits, these limits do not imply a beyond or an outside that are waiting to be epistemised where it not for our intellectual, empirical or technological limitations. What the limitations imply is that we are going up against the source, namely, the ontic.
The Landscape of Consciousness Ontology
The landscape of pan/cosmo-isms (anno 2020) is mapped out in Figure 1, reproduced from Wager (2020) with permission from the author. As is evident, the terrain is intricate, but I will in this section attempt to present an overview of the main landmarks and their differences and similarities to each other. I will close this section by offering a general critique that frames the relation of HP to these, though I will point out along the way what I believe to be some of the missteps taken by the various positions. The topmost two categories we will be concerned with defining are panpsychism and cosmopsychism. Panpsychism is the position that “all things have a mind or a mind-like quality.”3 Notice that the panpsychist position presupposes things, making it a material position, on the understanding that materialism is the position that matter, things or objects are primary. Cosmopsychism is on the other hand the position that the cosmos as a whole has a mind or a mind-like quality. This position acknowledges some priority to the whole, but as we shall see, it too plays into materialism generally conceived.
Within the panpsychist side of the landscape, the next two categories to be detailed are constitutive versus emergent. These can be read as reductionist versus emergent: constitutive isms hold that micro-properties are conscious, from which macro-consciousness, like our own, is constituted, while emergent isms are non-constitutive in holding that macro-consciousness emerges from conscious micro-properties (in other words, context or the whole plays in, see Science and Explanation). As such, constitutive panpsychism is for instance the position that both a straw of grass and electrons are conscious, and that our human consciousness is built up from the “smaller” consciousnesses of the constituents of our material bodies. The panpsychist sector falls under the general critique at the end of this section.
Within the cosmopsychist terrain, there is the threefold division into top-down/priority, bottom-up/emergent and single-level/existence. The first holds that “[s]ub-cosmic consciousness is derived from the fundamental cosmic consciousness”,4 the second that the cosmic consciousness emerges from sub-cosmic consciousness, and the third that there is only the cosmic consciousness. To start with the third, the example given in Wager (2020) for single-level/existence cosmopsychism is the panexperiential holism of Jaskolla and Buck: “The view that there is exactly one entity, the cosmos, and that entity is conscious.” This position faces issues with priority monism and the existence of sub-cosmic consciousness. Jaskolla and Buck (2012) state that “What we normally believe to be independent centres of conscious subjectivity are merely long-lived structural features of this big experience”, which is how they explain the non-entity-ness of sub-cosmic consciousness. Priority monism, that there is only one entity, is an issue both because we experience more entities than one, but is clearly also an ontic projection: “one”-ness and “entity”-ness are epistemic properties, and as such cannot be stated about the ontic. Regarding the second cosmopsychist division, emergent cosmopsychism faces the same identity crisis as do all “emergent” positions: emergence is the name the reductionist gives to those aspects that show forth dependence on context and/or the whole5.
The first cosmopsychist division is further divided into perennialism and Russellian cosmopsychisms. The perennialism of Albahari is “The view that the universe of multiplicity is grounded in a universal non-dual consciousness (non-dual in the sense of being beyond the subject-object distinction).”6 Albahari (2019) states: “The physical world and its subjects will be re-cast as a network of co-arising subjects, which turn out to be dispositional perspectives framed by configurations of cognitive and sensory imagery.” This network of co-arising subjects is grounded in aperspectival, unconditioned consciousness. This position as such also falls prey to the ontic projection fallacy: we cannot state of the ontic that it is “aperspectival”, “unconditioned” or “consciousness”, for these are epistemic properties or capacities. Russellian variants hold that the inscrutable micro-properties that ground the material cosmos are phenomenal, i.e. that the “ineffable” ground of the physical is phenomenal. Russellian cosmopsychism is the position that “The cosmos has a ‘revealed’ and a ‘concealed’ form. The revealed form is the world as revealed by physics while the concealed form is its consciousness. The cosmic consciousness is the fundamental form of consciousness from which all sub-cosmic consciousness are derived. The cosmos as a whole, in its revealed concrete form, is the fundamental concrete entity from which all derivative concrete entities derive.”7 This is the position in the landscape I believe gets closest to HP, though it is not without issues in ontic projection and prioritization.
I have glanced over much detail in the preceding, in particular how exactly the different positions stand in opposition in regards to how they deal with the common problems of the landscape, problems that relate to how “things” and/or subjects interdepend, and how they are composed or derivative of the micro or cosmic entities (the combination/de-combination and derivation problems). The reason I glance over most of these details is because what follows is independent of them. The interested reader can consult Wager (2020). I offer the following general critique of the pan/cosmo-ism landscape: though they profess a priority to consciousness, they nevertheless hold to a materialism, wherein the material, whether as microproperties or the cosmos, is presupposed, to which consciousness applies as a property or capacity. The presupposition of the entire landscape is that our consciousness and experience must be grounded in something else, whether micro or cosmic. Many of them further cling to reductionism, in particular the panpsychist and constitutive sector, in that macro-consciousness is constituted by micro-conscious or proto-conscious properties, a belief that can surely be attributed to modeling the philosophy of mind on the materialist-reductionist paradigm in science. The landscape accepts and builds on what I have argued to be an inverted relationship between the material and the experience it derives from. Furthermore, most fall to the ontic projection fallacy by applying the term conscious or subject (and similar terms) outside the contexts in which they gain their meaning. These critiques have been put forth in slightly more detail in World Views. I will hazard that much philosophy of mind, in particular within the foundations of consciousness, would look much different if only it was to a greater extent coupled to ontology, epistemology and phenomenology. The alternative I will offer is an alternative that does not hold to the priority of the material, and which does not fall prey to the ontic projection fallacy. Panenexperientialism, in positing reality as experiential, avoids the fallacy in self-grounding in the only given, the only “thing” we can speak to: experience itself. HP turns on its head the priority of the material vis-a-vis the experiential, and we will see that not only is reality in experience, but made of experience. This latter point bears due consideration, for it inverts the “passivity” that is afforded to us as experiencers inherent in most contemporary philosophy: by our intersubjective and co-creative experience reality is made. To state this in the terminology of Wager (2020): our experiences are the perspectives (neither micro nor macro) of which reality or the cosmos is fused, but reality is not a perspective, a subject or consciousness.
Aspects of Holism
Before proceeding to the argument for HP I will review some aspects of holism that will be made use of in the following. The most common characterization of holism as a view is that the whole is more than the sum of parts, the whole is prior (temporally or logically) to its parts, and that the parts cannot be isolated from the rest without loss. Thus, central to holism is interdependence. I have in earlier essays made statements to the effect that the whole is irreducible, that we cannot epistemically grasp reality as a whole in a reductionistic way. This relates to the perenniality that was discussed in Experience and Immersion and The Plurality of Experience: the whole that is reality is processual, a tapestry in the making, never finished.
The teleological or anti-reductionistic character of holism is the stance that we must give up our requirement of reductionistic-only explanation, as reality is a whole prior to any parts that may be abstracted thereof. When considering the parts and not the whole, the parts will fit together in ways that will seemingly require design. How can the stones in an arch have come about just so if they were not designed as an arch? But there is no agency at work in pulling reality along its script, only a whole that in its becoming and evolution shows forth creativity, a creativity whose orderliness comes about from epistemisation. Epistemisation is a breaking-apart of the whole, and is that process that is creative of memory, of representation, and of the past. It is only by comparison to the already-epistemised that the creative becoming of the present gains resemblance, and thus order. Thus we will find evidence of the wholeness of reality by parts that interlock in such a way that precludes a reductionistic-causal account, that in fact we call teleological, but without the finality of an end towards which it approaches, for there are no ends.
The image of stones in an arch further exemplifies the non-foundational aspect of holism. Holism is a self-grounding and autonomous stance, not grounded in anything other or absolute. This is the realization that for meaning to work, we do not require a solid ground to stand on, but a flexible whole to cohere in. In essence, we stand shakily, but necessarily so for there is no other way to stand. This flexibility that meaning coheres in can be illustrated by a web that not only stretches from one concept to another (definition by difference), but also from one usage to another in time (definition by deferral). This highlights the pragmatic and normative aspects of holism, revolving around meaning by use and the social evaluative standards that govern both meaning and usage. We will see these aspects exemplified in detail in the argument below.
Metaphysics and a theory of knowledge are co-dependent, just as ontology and epistemology is, and in treating these separately and independently we arrive at «hard problems». This we have seen to be a consequence of inversion, but furthermore it highlights the interdependence so central to holism. A full understanding of metaphysics, epistemology and so on that is harmonious with experience and each other cannot be recovered except by treating then as co-evolving normative enterprises. For a more thorough discussion of these aspects of holism, see in particular Language and Meaning, Wittgenstein and the Private Language Argument, Science and Explanation, World Views, Experience and Immersion and The Plurality of Experience.
Outline of an Argument for Panenexperiantialism
The truth is that an existence can be given only in an experience.
Henri Bergson - The Creative Mind
This section will present a “self-closing” argument for panenexperientialism, self-closing in the sense that the premises for the argument will in turn be (at least plausible) consequences of the argument itself. I will not profess that this argument at present is anything other than a sketch, but a sketch that illustrates the coherence of the position, and one that will see further iterations in the future.8 Coherence is the evaluative standard aimed for, because the idea that a position can be “proved” relies on an absolute (of certainty or truth), that no position can provide without regress. The evaluative standards of parsimony and adequacy could equally be argued. In the following I want us to take in the premises and the arguments, and forget about our preconceptions and theories about what the world is or isn’t for a while, these will re-enter the discourse when the time is right. The most central notion that has to be let go in this is that we are a product of the world, rather than us and the world co-arising as one whole. In relation to this I also want us to not read the sequence of arguments below as a necessarily logical or temporal sequence where each part follows from the preceding ones, and where each part is prior to the antecedent parts. This is one way in which holism enters: the parts are of one whole, and only due to abstraction and the character of language and the epistemic as sequential does any argument require a serial presentation. This might also contribute to a level of intricacy in the following.
First Premise: All is in experience
Experience, that there is experience, is the only assumption, the only given. This is as such our first premise, that all is in experience: from your first sense experience to your first memory, from the feeling of your body to the feeling of the sun heating your skin, from the visual impression of your own nose to the words you are now reading, from the feel of an object as separate from you to the idea that the world is outside you, all of this takes place experientially. Experience precedes the cogito (“I think”), as experience comes much before there is an “I” that finds itself thinking, much less doubting that it is thinking. Experience, “the stage”, precedes the what of the world, both subject/I/Self and objects/other/world. There is as such a that-ness, an experiential stage on which your world takes place.
Inseparable from experience is temporality: experience is irreducibly enduring. It has a thickness to it.9 In this experiential and temporal thickness we find “the other”, the object to our subject, the world to our self. In this way temporality or duration makes it so that experience can be novel, to be changing. What is changing? The answer to this is what we name reality, but seeing why and how this is will have to wait a little bit. We furthermore find that experience is to a large extent connected to a body that we find ourselves inhabiting, a body that translates between ourselves and the world.
Second Premise: There are multiple experiencers
In your experience you find that you are seemingly not the only experiencer: you find yourself among other individuals who (hopefully) take care of you, from which you learn, among which you find a world to which you contribute. You find that the actions of these other experiencers are not within your direct control as some parts of your own body are, and as such it benefits you to conceive of these as separate from you, yet having a similar experience. Importantly, we cannot state this with any “absolute” certainty, but it befits you to think of these others as their own centers of “self” or “mind”, just as you think of yourself that way. As such, as in any view, solipsism cannot be rejected with certainty, because “certainty”, as you might guess, is normative.
Discourse and the Epistemic
Given that experience cannot but present us with a thickness, a world, and that, by the second premise, there are other experiencers in this, we are not alone. We are experientially thrown into a world of ongoing discourse, from those we grow up among we inherit a world of language and culture. By increments we start to join this discourse, we imitate sounds and behaviors, we start to understand that the regularity and co-occurrence of certain actions mean something, and that this meaning can be utilized for our own ends, whatever their motivation. Central to this is memory and representation, that which allows us to differentiate the changes in experience. Again we may ask, changes of what? Memory and representation implies an original, and we must think now of the original experience, and not of original objects, which are derived from experience as useful abstractions. What the discourse amounts to is the epistemic. In our experience we encounter the epistemic through other experiencers in the first place, and subsequently also in artifacts: linguistic and symbolic representations. With our memory, we begin to identify certain patterns or clusters of co-occurring features of experience with objects, things that are useful to identify by a single concept or name, but that in our experience are subject to the never ceasing flow of change that characterizes everything in experience.
The “correct”-ness of our individual efforts at joining the discourse are normatively evaluated against the other experiencers and our common representations.10 This normativity implies holism, many aspects of which were outlined above. In this it is the discourse that institutes the epistemic, i.e. social practices give rise to language, reason, science and knowledge, all in a normative and holistic way. Epistemic means “of knowledge”, and central questions at the core of any theory of knowledge are: What is knowledge? How can we have knowledge? How can we be «certain» (or justified, or confident in the «truth») about our knowledge? Realizing the character of knowledge as experience-descriptive and the origin of knowledge as normative and holistic, we must also realize that «certainty», «justification» and «truth» are themselves normative-holistic concepts. One could now naively claim relativism and give up,11 but one would then have passed over the meaning of holism: There are no absolutes. Our «absolute convictions» come about from the transparency of the constitution of our knowledge - we model the world, but stop seeing the model as a model. Our model seems absolute, but the reality it maps is not. Our model of the world gains tremendously from incorporating the assumption that beings in my experience that appear like me, also are experiencing and are acting in a (shared but co-created) world like me. Solipsism is thus also avoided due to coherence: my explanation of the world gains and coheres more from not assuming solipsism. One could now argue that the rejection of solipsism is an ontic projection equal to so many I have argued are fallacious. In part this is why I put plurality as a premise, but I would also like us to reflect on the difference in infering that there is something beyond or behind other beings that behave and act in the world, and the material that doesn’t. Plurality is a projection of the experiential, and not to the ontic.
One inference and topic of discussion it would seem natural to bring up now is how discourse, language, the epistemic first arose. We could easily imagine some reason or cluster of reasons for how this emerged within a pre-conceptual or pre-linguistic tribe of humanoids, but we will not do so yet, the reason for which will become clear in due time. For now we are content with observing that we find ourselves thrown into an ongoing discourse and an epistemic web that seemingly precedes us, and which we in turn disseminate and shape.
Reality
We can now start to see the constructive power of our world views:12 In the preceding we have not presupposed a world prior to experience, all that we call world is found in experience. This is then the radical suggestion: Reality is the kaleidoscopic union of our experiences. We are each of us the beacon of a creative flame - our world view is not passive, but active - and experiencing is the process of shining this creative beam. Of course, we are immersed, so each of our experiences must cohere with each other, and since our world views carry with them the past in memory and representation, our experiences must cohere with the past as well. The intersection of a sufficiently large set of experiences is (normatively) called objective, though it does not exist outside the intersection, and no one has access to the intersection, only their individual facet of the prism. Immersion and plurality is key to understanding how this comes about: with care, avoiding a fully mechanical model, we may use the image of interlocking gears for each point of view, wherein each view is constrained by all the others. In this way reality is held up by each of us as a community. How can we know anything? It is all holistic and normative, grounded in praxis. We can forever approach the ontic, no knowledge is non-normative. We can speculate about and justify the inference that some prehistoric community uttered sounds, which after experiment gained repetition, structure and order (normatively), which evolved into the epistemic. But the epistemic is perpetually evolving, only ontic projection to the past makes it seem that we come closer to something (a false ideal). How can we explain seemingly objective and independent evolutions? As ontic creativity subject to coherence. Any “objective” or “independent” state of affairs will have to be brought about in experience in some way in order to gain status as anything other than theoretical. Our experiences cohere with each other, but are intrinsically creative. As such, indeterministic creative evolution is central to making sense of this view, and this creative evolution occurs in the union of experience, not independently of it. Much misunderstanding can be avoided by realizing the fundamentality of time as duration, and the impossibility of viewing anything «truly» outside its processual, always becoming, contextually dependent realization in experience.
The core of the holistic panenexperiantialist position is as such that the world, its things, its spatial relationships and so on "becomes" as it is experienced. Not only is all in experience, all is of experience. We are each immersed in a world of a multitude of experiencers, so it is easy to think that there is a world "preformed" out there as a consequence of the fusing of experience of experiencers past and present. But the thesis of panenexperiantialism is that this is an appearance. Reality is made up of our experience of it, and this creation is holistic in that our experiences are coherent with our past (as memory) and others experience (and their past). Reality as co-creative provides another reason for rejecting solipsism: if I was the only experiencer I should have the power to change reality by will, for it would only have to cohere with me, all that I have lived and experienced. We do not find this to be the case, a reason for which can be identified by the requirement of coherence with the experience and lives of other experiencers. Nevertheless, from the plurality of world views and significant differences we discover in other’s view of the world we do find our individual experience of reality to depend on our view of it, and we do find reality to be malleable as long as the changes instituted cohere with the whole.
The conception of reality as the union of our experiences is an idea that is hard to come to terms with. A significant reason why this is so hard to wrap one’s thought around is, I think, that we cannot visualize this geometrically in a «non-contradictory» way. To paraphrase Wittgenstein: «the eye cannot see itself in its field of sight.»13 Just like the eye is not visible to its own sight, the eye is still required for sight. In a similar way, our individual experiences are nowhere to be seen from a physical-theoretical point of view of only those things in our experience, but our individual experiences are still required for the physical-theoretical point of view to be possible in the first place. We are in difficulty when conceiving that reality should be somehow made up of our experience, because, on the analogy of eyesight, we inevitably ask, in what space does our view lie in? If there are multiple points of view, does not the existence of these presuppose a space that these all lie in? And this is the thing, there is no pre-existing space, the view and the space it is in comes about as one whole. Any drawing we may supply of this gives the impression that the eye or point of view is in some pre-existing space, but this merely showcases the limits of geometric representation. To appropriate a quote from Putnam: «…the mind and the world jointly make up the mind and the world.»14
Explanation and Theory
Let us briefly take stock. Experience and reality are inseparable, we are immersed in experience to the extent that our immersion is largely transparent to us. We find that we are not alone in reality, other experiencers co-create reality with us, and the reason reality is as we find it in our experience is as the coherent product of each of us. There is a principle of coherence at work that makes it so that our experience coheres with our memory and so that our experience coheres with that of others. This coherent product is a whole, not factorizable into the individual parts without loss. Yet we do try to provide a unifying account of this whole, not in terms of its experientially originary parts, but in terms of parts we have abstracted from experience through holistic and normative epistemisation: objects, things, fields, the material. As I put forth in Science and Explanation, a central part of experiencing is attempting to predict aspects of future experience so as to minimize surprise. The epistemic as a social-collaborative and communicative practice is the tool that serves this. Nevertheless, the whole is irreducible. Coherence does not imply complete reasonability. That reality should be fully intelligible, naturalizable, is an assumption the advances in science and philosophy of the last century should have convinced us to be erroneous. None of this is to say that material-reductionist explanatory efforts aren’t enormously useful and highly meaningful to us, but as always it is not a question of either/or, but what guides and is the master.
Can we find evidence for the holistic and normative aspects of reality in our scientific theories? The only place to look for physical evidence is in the seams, the joinery of physical reality: it is to physics we must turn. As we have seen, temporality is the primary dimension of experience: there can be no experience without duration. From the essential intentionality of experience we get space (I will not attempt to answer whether the dimensionality of 3 of space is contingent or necessary, we find both reductionistic and anthropic reasons for this being the case). Does holism and normativity translate into spatiotemporal terms? We should recognize these in the aspects of background independence and general covariance, as argued and discussed in more detail in The Theory of Relativity:
Background independence encapsulates an aspect of reality that any theory claiming to be fundamental must adhere to: the stuff out of which reality is made, whether substance, field or flow, cannot rely on anything other, some absolute background, on which it leans for its existence or its properties. Reality is self-sufficient, self-upholding, which our model of it must reflect if it aims to be “fundamental”...
General covariance expresses the contextual continuity of reality and how our spatiotemporal experience of reality is inseparable from the substance of our experience: there is no space without things to be extended in space, and there is no time separable from space or vice versa. Covariance further speaks to the immersive aspect of experience, how one’s experience is inextricably unique, yet fully coherent, cohesive and continuous…
Can we recover anything else from the holistic and normative view? Consider the following: Person 1 had an experience from which object A is abstracted, and similarly for person 2 and object B. By discourse, assuming a language, 1 and 2 equate A and B. Simultaneously, their memories of experiencing A and B are unique, so the equality of A and B is normative. 1 and 2 next experiences A’ and B’, respectively. Any equality or identification of A’ with A relies on memory: patterns of resemblance. The identification through comparison with memory makes it so that re-experiencing A’ as A and B’ as B is also normative, because there can be no objective-absolute standard against which they can be certain of A’ or B’ «really being the same» as A and B, because the re-experience is totally new given the duration since A and B, their only link found in resemblance in memory. The coherence between A’ and A stems from the criterion of coherence of experience. This, too, is a holistic criterion, and is «evolutionary». We can speculate that there can be experiences that do not follow this criterion, but then all order is out the window already, and such experiences would not be fit for propagation. This is the evolutionary aspect of HP. An at least plausible consequence of the criterion of coherence combined with holistic normativity is that the order of experience must be the same for all experiencers. Differing orders would cause inconsistencies and again not allow for a normative discourse that could keep evolving. Orderless experience would make it so that we were unable to compare memory with experience, and certainly no discourse could arise without points of resemblance. This translates to, in a sense, a generalized variety of the general principle of relativity that is experiential and not spatiotemporal: the epistemic order we find in our experience must be the same for all experiencers, and this is due to the criterion of coherence and holistic normativity. If the order, the laws of physics, were different for different experiencers, frames of reference, then the union of experience would not be coherent, and a holistic and normative discourse could not arise.
Another plausible consequence is epistemic openness: at the most detailed level of description, different experiencers will find that there can’t be a single «accurate» or «correct» description, but several compatible ones, so that the totality remains normative and free of inconsistencies. It could be argued that this translates to quantum uncertainty. This essential uncertainty combined with the principle of coherence and the immersiveness of experience leads us to non-separability: the pieces we abstract from our experience are not fundamental, the whole from which they are abstracted is. In this way we find that at the lowest level of description we are unable to account for the order of nature by treating it as separated parts, only as an inseparable whole can we account for the behavior of reality. Thus we can recover those aspects of the quantum theory and the theory of relativity that was claimed to show forth the wholeness of reality in Quantum Theory and The Theory of Relativity. We inevitably find coherent and powerful frameworks for our experience as a consequence of the holistic normativity of the epistemic, but we must be mindful that what defines “coherence” is itself normativity. As such the self-grounding aspect once more comes into play. We will find explanations and theories for all that we experience: cognitive theories to account for memory, perception, intelligence and so on. Physical theories for spacetime and the objects in it, and chemical and biological theories for substances and organisms. But no matter what material framework we pursue, we inevitably fail at the finish line - the originary experience we intended to describe with these frameworks has become a mystery, a hard problem, for it is conceived of as secondary to the models we have constructed. Time and again we return to confusing our model for reality, the map for the territory, and given the preceding account we may now hopefully see how we have been led on that path.
The explanations and the theoretical we have covered so far all aim at being reductionistic and causal: we take as fundamental and absolute things or objects, the material (fields are also material in this sense) that we abstract from our experience, and work towards reducing all the phenomena in our experience to the lawful interactions of the material. We are easily fooled into thinking that there is a progress in this material science towards an “objective” or “absolute” end state, but on the epistemic as holistic and normative we see that this is an illusion due to meaning variance.15 We think we have discovered the true depths of what e.g. an electron is, but in the absence of anything theory-independent and absolute that this concept corresponds to, what we have achieved in our scientific efforts is to vary the meaning of the concept of the electron in accordance with new empirical data and theory. This bottom-up approach is the movement from the parts in our experience and their theoretical extensions back to our experience. From the top-down or teleological end of things we obviously also have value-driven, ethical and aesthetic explanations and theories. These are equally, and perhaps more obviously, normative, but for the sake of brevity I will not discuss these in any more depth here.
A problem we may pose to this account is how we can conceive the spatiotemporally distant. How can reality as the union of our experiences account for objects and events far away in space and time? How do we conceive of a reality that in our materialist-reductionist theories precede ourselves and abiogenesis, the emergence of life?16 Such questions are materialistically valid, but are victims of the ontic projection fallacy. We want to say that surely the physical universe precedes us, and surely the objects and events millions and billions of lightyears distant from us are evidence of this. In a mode of physical explanation we can ask these questions, and do ask them, but upon realizing the limits of the epistemic we can’t answer them without making theoretical inferences beyond the experiential. Is the moon there when we are not looking? Does a falling tree make a sound when no one is there to hear? What is outside our experience belongs to the theoretical; we can project theory into potentiality. There are better and worse theories and explanations, but their adequacy and success is entirely normative too! We can certainly say that the moon is there when we are not looking, but this is a theoretical statement, an ontic projection. And we most likely will find that there is evidence for the moon having been there, because if we found evidence to the contrary our experience would be disorderly! And disorderly/discontinuous experience is weeded out by the principle of coherence. Logical constructions, theoretical and normative inferences and so on are all explanatory shorthand devices. These are crucial for us making sense of our experience, both as individuals and society. But when it comes down to ontological foundations they are the map, and not the territory. The map has been heavily embellished through our discursive and social practices, all of which is certainly "real" as being part of experience, but not ontologically fundamental.
On the account of experience as primary, objects and events distant in time and space are all theoretical inferences that are not experiential except as conjecture and experimental data. None of this is to say that these theoretical inferences are not good material-reductionist accounts, but it is important to realize their role and status as compared with the experience they are attempts at explaining. I may see a drop of water falling in front of my face, and without looking up I may theoretically infer that a rain cloud is above me. But I could also come up with any number of other inferences that would equally explain the drop of water. Only in relation to a standard can one inference and theory be judged relative to the others, a standard that itself is normative. Before bringing into experience the domain that will assist me further in ascertaining the cause of the drop of water, any and all inference I do can only be more or less “correct”, more or less “true”. I may now look up and see a rain cloud and accept my initial theoretical inference. Certainty rests in the experience only, and no manner of scientific method, reason, justification or logic will take away from the irreducible uncertainty inherent in the inferential as non-experiential. Obviously we accept the grand theories of modern science as “true” material accounts of reality, but the last century of philosophy of science has taught us about the paradigmatic provisionality of these, as well as their constructionist aspect and the perennial nature of their evolution. Their “truth” is just as normative as everything else epistemic, and that they are material accounts clearly establish their abstract and secondary role vis-a-vis experience. Just as we are immersed in experience so are we immersed in our explanatory frameworks, and this immersion is equally transparent to us.
…Return
As we have seen, we find explanations and theories for everything in our experience. But what about experience itself? And what about the plurality of experiencers? These were the two premises we started this argument from. We have seen throughout this project the issues we face in materialistically and reductionistically explaining why and how we have an experience, this is an inversion of the order of things. Nevertheless there are advanced and well-regarded frameworks in neuro- and cognitive science that outline the functional and instrumental role qualia may have for complex organisms and their cognition in heterogeneous environments, particularly in social groups. Going into detail in these will not be relevant for the argument, as the part that interests us is that we find a more or less good explanation for our being experiencing individuals. In World, Model and Mind we also saw how the theories at the forefront of cognitive research go so far as to assign what we experience to a generative capacity. What if these models just don’t go far enough in what exactly it is that is generated? Furthermore, we find a perfectly good explanation for the plurality of experiencers in the individuation of the evolution of species. To repeat, these are normatively good frameworks that bring us back to our premises, thus closing the circle on this whole argument, at least in a plausible and cogent way.
I have purposefully left out some typical theoretical inferences and topics of discussion, like the emergence of the epistemic among a pre-epistemic tribe of humanoids, the emergence of experiencers and/or life out of inanimate matter and the emergence of complexity out of the material. As is now hopefully clear, these inferences have been left out because they are causal explanations for the way we find ourselves experiencing what we experience, but are also theoretical events outside the domain of experience. As we normally think about them, they are inferences to the best explanation, but they all rely on a material-reductionistic account of experience. The reason these have not been engaged with in the preceding is because the holistic panenexperientialist account is, truistically, experiential and holistic, i.e. anti-material and anti-reductionistic when it comes to inferences about the foundations of reality. The material and reductionistic is perfectly appropriate and useful within their domain of validity and applicability, which is to say away from foundational issues centered on reality and the experience out of which it is made.
On this view, scientific “why”-questions receive experience-centric answers: we observe the state of things external to us to be this and that, for their being the case is explanatorily sufficient for our having the experience we have. Anthropic and anthropocentric reasoning and principles (that the state of things are this and that because if they were not we would not be here to question them) thus generalizes to experience-centrism. Why do we observe the biodiversity we do? Why do we observe the cosmological and astrological formations we do? Why do we observe the physical structure we do? Because collectively they provide a coherent account for the experience we are having. The principle of coherence speaks for contingency, not necessity, a thread to be followed in the upcoming essay on Meillassoux’s After Finitude. The only “why”-question this view does not answer is “why experience?”, i.e. why is there experience and not nothing? But here we can take a lesson once again from Bergson: existence, being or experience can have no real negation, as negation rests and depends on there being a pre-existing background in which the idea and its negation both exist. But existence itself cannot then be negated for there is no other space or background for the act of negation to bring us to. As such, there can be no real “nothing” as “nothing” is not what it is except against something to contrast, and this something at its foundational level is of course experience. “’Nothing’ designates the absence of what we are seeking…”17
What about the philosophical idea of the transcendent? I would like here to engage with the idea of the transcendent object as the infinite totality of its appearances, a conception I scratched the surface of in Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. Sartre states «A table is not in consciousness - not even in the capacity of a representation.», the reason for which, for Sartre, is that the table is the infinite totality of its appearances, which cannot be in experience. We may very well think or call the table, as the infinitude of its appearances, "transcendent" (I use boldface in the following to distinguish this transcendent conception of the table from the table as it is encountered in its manifestations). But this is itself a projection beyond experience, the table is never encountered by anyone, and what the table can refer to is its appearance(s) thus far, as the table. Given the normativity and provisionality of the epistemic, because the transcendent as the future-oriented infinitude of experience is never itself experienced, never completed, it is "just" a meaningless symbol, without a referent. This relates to the issue of infinity in the philosophy of mathematics, which was touched upon briefly in World, Model and Mind. Totalized infinities invite paradox, because they are simultaneously open and closed. The transcendent as "infinity" or the "continuum" is the limit we approach when attempting to represent the ontic (that-ness of experience, source of being, etc.) epistemically. The ontic is the source of all. But the ontic cannot be represented, we can say that it is, but anything further than that will be an ontic projection. Further statements are always-already epistemic, no longer applicable to the ontic.
Directionless Time
In this final section I would like to present a potential conception of time (experiential time, not spatialized physical time, see The Theory of Relativity for a discussion of the distinction) that follows from what has been put forth so far. This conception attempts to answer how we can understand time on the image of the ceaselessly unfolding flower, on the understanding of reality as always creatively becoming, and with the idea of a set and absolute past erroneous. Time goes only in one direction, or more precisely, time has no direction, for this is a spatial aspect, not a temporal one. What we think of as the past direction comes about just the same as the future: we co-creatively construct the past in the same «direction» as we move into the future. It is all one space. Temporal reality is like an asymmetric palindrome, but whose «sides» stretching out from the center both lie on top of each other. We each weave a past out of our experience, a past that is coherent for us, but that exists in no other medium than ourselves. This is the ever unfolding flower - it has no linear beginning, for a linear beginning presupposes the linear. Experience is what is, now, all else is a projection from experience - memory and representations, hopes and expectations. The only place we encounter the past is in our experience now of memory and representations, and the only place we encounter the future is in our experience now of our hopes and expectations. We are each the center out of which both our past and future springs, but not backwards and forwards, but both and all outwards. We easily envision now that the center is moving in some preexisting time, but this is why creative becoming is moving outwards, for the center itself is all there is to it, and it is not moving, but expanding. We must now take care to not assume that by using «expansion» that we mean growth. A self-sufficient becoming remains «the same size». Growth would erroneously lead us towards a preceding smaller reality and an antecedent bigger one, but these are spatial aspects as well.
As mentioned in the introduction, this entire essay might in the extreme seem a work of philosophical fiction when compared to the naturalistic accounts we are used to. I can perfectly well understand this judgment, but regardless I take this to be a coherent account, and at least one possibility for a holistic view in which we follow through to the very end what must be the case if experience is primary in the way described here. I concede that the argument might contain holes, or be making leaps or inferences I provide less of an account of, but I claim nothing more than that it is a sketch. I hope that this essay illustrates the way in which we are sculptors of reality, a phrase of Feyerabend I quoted in Science and Explanation. Commenting on this I said: “In a special sense, yes, but exactly in that sense that we should realize brings some participatory magic back to the cold and barren universe of the particularist.” The special sense I referred to has now been laid out: we co-create reality in a way coherent and continuous with each other's experience.
on the hill past our garden stands a tree
its fruit calls to me
its roots wants to bind me
yet were I to go to it
to eat of its fruit
to be bound to the ground
another tree would show itself
on the horizon
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References
Albahari, M. (2019). Perennial Idealism: A Mystical Solution to the Mind-Body Problem. Philosophers’ Imprint, 19(44)
Bergson, H. (2010). The Creative Mind. Dover Publications. [1934]
Jaskolla, L. and Buck, A. (2012). Does Panexperiential Holism Solve the Combination Problem?. Journal of Consciousness Studies 19 (9-10)
James, W. (1995). Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking. Dover Publications. [1907]
Putnam, H. (1981). Reason, Truth, and History. Cambridge University Press.
Wager, K. (2020). Panpsychism and Cosmopsychism (PhD Thesis). University of Birmingham. URL=https://philpapers.org/archive/WAGPAC.pdf
Wittgenstein, L. (2001). Tractatus Logico-philosophicus (D. F. Pears & B. McGuinness, Trans.). Routledge. [1921]
https://iep.utm.edu/panpsych/, emphasis added.
Wager (2020) p. 12.
Wager (2020) p. 17.
Wager (2020) p. 13.
I am obliged to Levi Frydowski for helpful discussions and input on many topics in this section.
See e.g. Experience and Immersion for more on this theme.
See Brandom’s work, e.g. Making It Explicit.
Counterarguments to relativism from the position of holism can be found at the end of Language and Meaning.
See World Views.
Wittgenstein (2001) section 5.6.
Putnam (1981).
See World Views.
Meillassoux calls this ancestrality in his After Finitude, an analysis of which will be covered in a forthcoming essay.
Bergson (2010).