TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. The Essential Embodiment Theory Briefly and Compactly Re-Presented and Re-Motivated
2. Three Later Significant Elaborations and Extensions of The Essential Embodiment Theory: Natural Libertarianism, The Neo-Organicist Worldview, and The Metaphysics of Liberal Naturalism
3. One Cheer, But Only One, For Analytic Panpsychism
00. Concluding Semi-Autobiographical Quasi-Whiteheadian Postscript
This essay will be published in five installments; this third installment contains section 2.
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2. Three Later Significant Elaborations and Extensions of The Essential Embodiment Theory: Natural Libertarianism, The Neo-Organicist Worldview, and The Metaphysics of Liberal Naturalism
But the story continues. As Maiese and I were writing the final three chapters of Embodied Minds in Action, I gradually or suddenly realized that our complete rejection of Cartesian fundamentalism also entailed our completely re-thinking the conception of nature and the natural sciences that’s presupposed by classical Cartesian interactionist substance dualism, 20th and 21st century property dualism, reductive materialism or physicalism, and non-reductive materialism or physicalism, alike. Or in other words, in order to solve the mind-body problem and the problem of mental causation, instead of trying to fit minds like ours into the mechanistic and materialist or physicalist picture of nature and the natural sciences, like trying to jam a round peg into a square hole, we have to revolutionize our picture of nature and the natural sciences. In Embodied Minds in Action, Maiese and I called this revolutionary idea The Dynamic World Picture (Hanna and Maiese, 2009: section 7.3). After that, in 2012, amazingly enough, the mainstream Analytic philosophers Thomas Nagel and Helen Steward also wrote some very similar things:
[R]ational intelligibility is at the root of the natural order. (Nagel, 2012: p. 17)
On a teleological account, the existence of value is not an accident, because that is part of the explanation of why there is such a thing as life, with all its possibilities oif development and variation. In brief, value is not just an accidental side effect of life; rather, there is life because life is a necessary condition of value.
Even though natural selection partially determines the details of the forms of life and consciousness that exist, and the relations among them, the existence of the genetic material and the possible forms it makes available for selection have to be explained in some other way. The teleological hypothesis is that these things [are] determined not merely by value-free chemistry and physics but also by something else, namely a cosmic predisposition to the formation of life, consciousness, and the value that is inseparable from them. (Nagel, 2012: p. 123)
The task [of understanding free agency] requires some reflection on the organizational principles of living creatures, for it is only through such reflection … that we can start to understand where the difference really lies between, on the one hand those things that are true agents, and, on the other, mere machines, entities that nothing will ever be up to, however impressive they may be…. I am exceedingly hopeful that the next few years will see the beginnings of a revolution in our conception of the human person, as philosophical and everyday conceptions of the scientific picture of the world are freed from outdated Newtonian ideas and begin to take more note, both of the complexities of science as it really is and of the undeniable fact of our animal nature. (Steward, 2012: pp. 198-199)
For the record, I’m absolutely certain that neither Nagel nor Steward has ever read a single word of Embodied Minds in Action. So it must have been the Zeitgeist. But in any case, my realization around 2009 about the profound need for a revolutionary turn to The Dynamic World Picture has led me to work out three significant elaborations and extensions of the essential embodiment theory since then: first, in a book called Deep Freedom and Real Persons, I presented and defended a radically original and paradigm-shifting theory of free agency called natural libertarianism (Hanna, 2018), and second and third, in several essays and an as-yet unpublished but universally freely shared online book manuscript called The Philosophy of The Future, I’ve presented and defended a radically original and paradigm-shifting new conception of nature and the formal and natural sciences, called the neo-organicist worldview, which in turn directly entails the metaphysical doctrine of liberal naturalism (Hanna and Maiese, 2009: pp. 312-313; Hanna and Paans, 2020; Torday, Miller Jr, and Hanna, 2020; Hanna, 2021b; Hanna, 2022a). In this section, I’ll briefly and compactly present and motivate all three of these.
By deep free agency for rational human animals, I mean the conjunction of real free will and real practical agency in rational human animals, which in turn means (i) that you really can choose and do what you want to, or refrain from so choosing or doing, without being in any way compelled or prevented by irresistible inner or outer forces (i.e., free will), and (ii) that you really can self-consciously choose and do what you want to, for reasons, and with deep moral or non-moral responsibility (i.e., practical agency). And by deep moral or non-moral responsibility for X, I mean (i) that X is something you chose or did yourself, whose objective moral value flows from and directly attaches to your freely willed choice or action, and (ii) that deep moral responsibility requires free will—if you were not able to choose or do X, without being in any way compelled or prevented by irresistible inner or outer forces, then you could not be deeply morally or non-morally responsible for X. An example of choice and action with deep moral responsibility would be your deciding, right now, either to join, or to quit, The Democratic Socialists of America. And an example of choice and action with deep non-moral responsibility would be creating a work of art.
Now, the thesis of natural determinism says that everything that happens now and in the future is strictly fixed by the laws of nature together with all the actual facts about the past. And the thesis of natural indeterminism says that at least some things and perhaps all things that happen are not strictly fixed by the laws of nature together with all the actual facts about the past, but also happen more or less randomly, according to mathematical laws of probability. Most contemporary philosophers and scientists, and many non-philosophers too, hold that you are not really free, because they also believe that the truth of contemporary formal science and natural science entails universal natural mechanism. Universal natural mechanism says (i) that everything in the cosmos either just is or is a sub-part of natural or physical processes that are either deterministic, indeterministic, or some mixture of both (say, macroscopically deterministic but microscopically indeterministic at the quantum level), and (ii) that all the causal and quantitative characteristics of those happenings are not only (ii.a) strictly fixed by the general causal laws of nature and/or the mathematical laws of probability, especially those laws governing the conservation of quantities of matter or energy, together with all the settled facts about the past, especially including The Big Bang Singularity, but also (ii.b) calculable from those laws and facts on a real-world Turing machine, i.e. a digital computer. If universal natural mechanism is true, then you’re not really free, because, instead, no matter what you may believe about your own freedom, you’re really only a deterministic or indeterministic natural automaton/natural machine, ultimately caused by The Big Bang Singularity.
I’ll now briefly and compactly present and motivate a theory of deep free agency in rational human animals that, as I’ve mentioned already, I call natural libertarianism (Hanna, 2018),[i] that’s neither contrary to contemporary natural science nor committed to universal natural mechanism—indeed, it completely rejects universal natural mechanism—and, correspondingly, I’ll also briefly and compactly present a new proof for the real possibility of deep free agency in rational human animals, by explaining and proving its actual existence.
Natural libertarianism flows from two simple but earth-shattering ideas proposed by Kant in the 18th century, and also from one slightly less simple but still earth-shattering idea proposed in the 20th century by Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine and his co-researchers (Nicolis and Prigogine, 1977; Prigogine and Stengers, 1984; Prigogine, 1997), that’s fully in theoretical conformity and harmony with the essential embodiment theory. First, action that is perfectly in conformity with a law, is not necessarily entailed or otherwise necessitated by that law (Kant’s earth-shattering idea #1). Second, real freedom presupposes, in rational human animals, the natural processes specifically characteristic of living organisms; but living organisms are not natural automata, whether deterministic or indeterministic, because they are self-organizing and purposive; hence real freedom is grounded in biological anti-mechanism (Kant’s earth-shattering idea #2). And third, the correct physics is a non-deterministic (and also non-indeterministic, but for simplicity’s sake in this section I’ll highlight the non-determinism) interpretation of non-equilibrium thermodynamics (Prigogine’s earth-shattering idea).
For simplicity’s sake, I’ll refer to Prigogine’s earth-shattering idea by using the acronym “NDI-NET.” And let us suppose, for the purposes of argument, that NDI-NET, as worked out, for example, by Prigogine in The End of Certainty, is true, and that all the general causal laws of nature and/or mathematical laws of probability, as formulated by modern science—with the exception of The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, requiring that in the spontaneous evolution of a physical system, entropy never decreases (hence requiring that entropy is always either increasing, or else constant in an equilibrium, time-reversible state, in every physical system), which isn’t universally true if non-equilibrium thermodynamics is universally true—are also true, under the NDI-NET interpretation. From these suppositions, taken together with Kant’s two ideas, not only does it not follow that universal natural mechanism is true and that we are really natural automata, it also follows that universal natural mechanism isn’t true—i.e., it’s false—and that we all really aren’t natural automata/natural machines.
To see this, suppose that everything we choose and do is at least consistent with those general causal natural laws and/or mathematical laws of probability (with the exception of The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, which of course isn’t universally true if NDI-NET is universally true), and that therefore we never violate any of them. And in particular, suppose that we never bring any new matter or energy into the natural world, hence we never violate any of the general causal natural laws and/or mathematical laws of probability governing the conservation of quantities of matter or energy. Nevertheless, it does not follow that whatever we choose and do is entailed or otherwise necessitated by those laws. This is because, as Kant pointed out, mere conformity of action with laws is not the same as entailment or necessitation by laws.
Indeed, for any general causal law of nature and/or mathematical law of probability whatsoever, no matter how specific it is, together with all the settled natural facts about the past, nevertheless, there is always some physical open texture that is not entailed or necessitated by that law, although it remains perfectly in conformity with the laws. More precisely, in the wake of The Big Bang Singularity, there is always and everywhere some physical open texture that, at various stages of far-from-equilibrium, temporally-unidirectional, complex, negentropic, self-organizing thermodynamic activity, as studied in NDI-NET, creates targets for ultra-specific, context-sensitive natural activity, for example: (i) the roiling surface-structures of boiling water, (ii) the Belousov-Zhabotinsky chemical reaction, plus light excitation (Prigogine, 1997: pp. 66-67; Wikipedia, 2022b[ii]), (iii) the unfolding of weather systems, (iv) the development of viruses, (v) organismic activity including the purposive lives of simple organisms, plants, and animals, (vi) the desires, feelings, passions, perceptions, and thoughts of conscious animals, and above all, (vii) really free choice and action by conscious animals, including rational human animals. I’ll call these thermodynamic targets live options, and this physical open texture natural open space. Given some live options in natural open space, then, even though you never violate any general causal laws of nature and/or mathematical laws of probability and never bring any new matter or energy into the natural world, it remains really possible for you, in context, to choose and do some things you want to, in purposive, creative, and morally-empowered ways, by spontaneously locally re-organizing and re-structuring the total quantity of matter or energy that’s always already available then and there. For example, imagine Nietzsche writing The Birth of Tragedy Out of The Spirit of Music. Needless to say, that amazing book had never been produced before in the actual history of the cosmos. Correspondingly, I’ll call this sort of activity, natural creativity.
Now, inspired by Nietzsche’s example, I am now going to do a little spontaneous Dionysian dance by flapping my arms and legs, bobbing my head, and hopping up and down a bit, like this –> [RH does the dance]: I call this The Freedom Dance. The Freedom Dance, as an act of natural creativity, is just like an artistic genius who creates an original work of art by spontaneously locally re-organizing and re-structuring whatever already-existing materials are given to them: in that sense, it’s just like Nietzsche creating The Birth of Tragedy. As naturally creative animals, we’re all small-scale natural artistic geniuses, little singularities and little bangs, who purposively bring new energy-structures into the world, and thereby actualize potential energy. As we’ve seen, The Big Bang Singularity has done many things. But it did not, on its own, write The Birth of Tragedy, nor did it do The Freedom Dance. On the contrary, Nietzsche wrote The Birth of Tragedy, and I did The Freedom Dance, with actual free agency in both cases. Therefore, neither Nietzsche, I, nor anyone else, is a natural automaton or natural machine; instead we are all naturally creative animals fully capable of free agency.
Notice that I’m not saying that it’s impossible to design and build a natural automaton/natural machine that, when it’s turned on, makes various motions that might effectively fool someone, or even many people, into believing that it was I or you doing The Freedom Dance. On the contrary, it’s logically, really, naturally, and perhaps even technologically possible that there is such a machine. What I’m saying is that, synthetic a priori necessarily, the deceptive naturally mechanical motions of such a natural mechanism could not be The Freedom Dance, since that and only that was actually freely performed by me, or for that matter by you, and not by any natural automaton/natural machine designed and built to resemble us in various ways.
So, self-evidently, natural libertarianism is true, given my original assumptions.
Now, if the essential embodiment theory and natural libertarianism are both true, then the thesis of universal natural mechanism is false. In turn, the false thesis of universal natural mechanism properly belongs to even larger yet equally false conception I call the mechanistic worldview, centered on the root metaphor of the machine (for example, in the 17th and 18th centuries, a clock, in the 19th century, a steam engine, and paradigmatically since the full emergence in the 1920s and 30s of what James C. Scott very aptly calls “high modernism,”[iii] a Turing machine, i.e., a digital computer), which says that
everything in the world is fundamentally either a formal automaton or a natural automaton, operating strictly according to Turing-computable algorithms and/or time-reversible or time-symmetric deterministic or indeterministic laws of nature, especially the Conservation Laws (including the 1st Law of Thermodynamics) and the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, which also imposes always-increasing entropy—i.e., the always-increasing unavailability of any system’s thermal energy for conversion into causal action or work—on all natural mechanisms, until a total equilibrium state of the natural universe is finally reached (see Hanna and Paans, 2020; Hanna, 2022a: esp. chs. 1-2 and 4).
Furthermore, if the essential embodiment theory and natural liberartarianism are both true, and if the thesis of universal natural mechanisn and the mechanistic worldview are both false, then what conception of nature and the natural sciences must correspond to these facts? My answer is—the neo-organicist worldview, centered on the root metaphor of the living organism (for example, a plant, an animal, and above all, rational, self-conscious minded animals like us), which says: (i) that everything in the world is essentially or fundamentally uncomputable, negentropic, processual, purposive, self-organizing, time-irreversible or time–asymmetric, and non-equilibrium thermodynamic, (ii) that there is a basic metaphysical and ontological continuity, running from the Big Bang singularity to uncomputable, negentropic, time-asymmetric, non-equilibrium thermodynamic energy flows, to living organisms, to conscious minded animals, to rational, self-conscious minded animals with free will and practical agency, and finally to social institutions of all kinds (Torday, Miller Jr, and Hanna, 2020; Hanna, 2022a), and (iii) that all mechanical systems whatsoever, whether formal or natural, are nothing but systematic abstractions from—that is, degenerate cases of, fragments of, or limiting cases of—fundamentally organic systems, and therefore all mechanical systems whatsoever are logically or nomologically strongly supervenient on organic systems (Hanna, 2022a: esp. ch. 4 and Appendices 1-4). In turn, the neo-organicist worldview directly entails the metaphysical doctrine of liberal naturalism (Hanna and Maiese, 2009; Nagel, 2012; Hanna, 2018). Liberal naturalism says that the physically irreducible but also non-dualistic mental properties of rational human minded animals are at least as basic in nature as biological properties and any other physical properties, and metaphysically continuous with them. More precisely, according to liberal naturalism, rational human free agency is an immanent structure of essentially embodied conscious, intentional, caring human animal mind; essentially embodied conscious, intentional, caring human animal mind is an immanent structure of organismic life; and organismic life is an immanent structure of spatiotemporally asymmetric, uncomputable, negentropic, non-equilibrium thermodynamic matter/energy flows. Each more complex structure is metaphysically continuous with, and embeds, all of the less complex structures. Again, and now put in terms of dynamic emergence, according to neo-organicism and its liberal naturalism, human freedom is dynamically inherent in and dynamically emerges from essentially embodied conscious, intentional, caring human animal mind. And essentially embodied conscious, intentional, caring human animal mind is dynamically inherent in and dynamically emerges from life. Therefore, human freedom is dynamically inherent in and dynamically emerges from life. Moreover, life is dynamically inherent in and dynamically emerges from spatiotemporally asymmetric, uncomputable, negentropic, non-equilibrium thermodynamic matter/energy flows. Therefore, human freedom, human mind, and life are all dynamically inherent in and dynamically emerge from spatiotemporally asymmetric, uncomputable, negentropic, non-equilibrium thermodynamic matter/energy flows. By way of a quick summary, here’s a diagram of the basic metaphysical continuities and structural embeddings according to the neo-organicist, liberal naturalist conception:
NOTES
[i] It should be especially noted that natural libertarianism doesn’t have anything to do with political libertarianism, which is a combination of psychological egoism, ethical or moral egoism, neoliberalism, and the self-serving self-delusion that it’s a form of political anarchism.
[ii] The Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction can be excited into self-organizing activity by means of the influence of light, using tris(bipyridine)ruthenium(II) chloride as a catalyst. But even this still falls short of organismic life.
[iii] See (Scott, 1998: p. 4):
[High modernism] is best conceived as a strong, one might even say muscle-bound, version of the self-confidence about scientific and technical progress, the expansion of production, the growing satisfaction of human needs, the mastery of nature (including human nature), and, above all, the rational design of social order commensurate with the scientific understanding of natural laws.
And now, a century later, high modernism has hit a brick wall. Indeed, it’s not implausible to see the 2020s as the mega-crisis of high modernism, the formal and natural sciences and Analytic philosophy, and the mechanistic worldview, alike. See (Hanna and Paans, 2020; Hanna, 2022a, 2022b).
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