Fechner’s ‘Day View’

November 8th, 2007 Fred McVittie

Gustav Fechner, the 19th century philosopher and pioneer psychologist, is most known for developing the science of psychophysics, the investigation of the relationships between physical events and stimuli and the appearance of these stimuli in consciousness. In addition to this work, (which he apparently regarded as something of a diversion to his major interests), Fechner is primarily associated with a metaphysics which attempts to unite concepts of body and mind. Echoing some of the monist ideas of Spinoza, and latterly Muller and others, Fechner regarded all phenomona as having both a physical and a psychological dimension. In the language of his day Fechner referred to this psychic dimension as ’soul’, although there is no absolute necessity to embrace the full theological implications of this terms to appreciate the distinction he is making. In looking out into the world, Fechner would claim, our experience is not only of the material substances that make up that world but also a kind of ‘liveness’ which animates that experience. This does not apply only to those aspects of experience which we usually associate with liveness, plants and animals predominantly, but that this liveness is a component of being itself. Fechner goes on to critique what he saw as an overly materialistic and empiricist way of looking at the world which he felt denied this liveness, and referred to this way of looking as the ‘night view’, a sterile and ultimately bleak way of looking which evacuated the world of meaningfulness, in contrast to what he called the ‘day view’ in which the world is witnessed in its full liveness. It is important to note that this quasi-panpsychist viewpoint that Fechner argued for does not attribute the world, or the materials of the world, with specific agency; he is not arguing for a crudely animist way of looking in which spirits haunt every rock and tree, but of a more abstract and distributed notion of what we would now refer to as consciousness. This has some resonance with the work of David Chalmers, for example, in contemporary consciousness studies, who similarly argues against theories of consciousness as an emergent phenomena and in favour of a conception of it as a omnipresent aspect of being.

Posted in Chalmers, David, Enlightenment, Fechner, Gustav, Liveness, Panpsychism | No Comments »

The Brain as a Consciousness Collector

November 24th, 2007 Fred McVittie

One understanding of the panpsychist viewpoint is that all phenomena of the world incorporate the property of consciousness, in the same way that they incorporate space and time. So, for example, a rock, in addition to having its incontrovertible extension into the three dimensions of space: height, width, and breadth, and in addition to its irrefutable persistence over time, also has a quality of consciousness as an aspect of its being. In fact, without this consciousness it could not be said to be engaged in the act of being at all. Alternatively, one might say that the dimensions of space and time, (which may not correspond with human understandings of three-dimensional spacetime,) are also dimensions of consciousness.

A possible product of this way of regarding the world is a redefinition of the brain not as the seat of consciousness as it is currently described, but rather as a kind of ‘collector’ of consciousness. Instead of mind emerging from the behaviour of neuronal networks as an entirely unique phenomenon, disconnected from the contents of that consciousness, as the emergentist viewpoint inevitably indicates, the brain concentrates and organises the consciousness of the universe like a vortex in water.

Posted in Brain, Consciousness, Mind, Monism, Panpsychism | No Comments »

Religion as Folk Cosmology

November 27th, 2007 Fred McVittie

Cosmology is the study of the Universe and the place of humanity within it, although ’study’ is perhaps too objective a word for it. It seems to be a universal human tendency to derive, construct, or imagine a structure for the Universe, a ‘big picture’ if you will, in which the human being is somehow represented, but the means of arriving at this big picture are not necessarily coterminous with what we tend to think of as ’study’. Study implies a dispassionate, rational, distanced investigation of the matter under scrutiny, whereas the majority of cosmologies in which the human is present as anything other than pond-life could scarcely be regarded as distanced. Typically such cosmologies place the human firmly at the centre of the universe, a universe populated by spirits, gods, ethers, panpsychic forces and otherworldly energies that would not stand up to the most rudimentary rational assault.

The beliefs inherent in most religious practices, represented in their commonality in the form of the Perennial Philosophy, can be regarded as a form of institutionalised Folk Physics, or more specifically, a Folk Cosmology.

Posted in Centre, Cosmology, Panpsychism, Perennialism, Religion, Universe | No Comments »