But I’m no great fan of consciousness…photosynthesis is much more interesting to me.
“I worry a bit about the glorification of consciousness as the pinnacle of all Creation…there is…a seductive, but deceptive, seeming move away from anthropocentrism in the ascription of consciousness to all things, but what this really does, I think, is to say “oh right, all things are like us, or all things have this awesome thing [i.e. consciousness].” But I’m no great fan of consciousness…photosynthesis is much more interesting to me.”
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“It seems to me that most conversations concerning emergence theory, that either resolve themselves in a paradigm of reductionism or a strong emergence or weak emergence or a strong panpsychism or a weak panpsychism, still operate with this utterly unquestioned assumption that the most complex creatures on the planet are humans and that mind is the pinnacle of Creation and that human mind is the phenomenon toward which universal history has been tending.”
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“And I’d love to be able to ask if there’s a different way to account for the emergence of, not just complexity, but difference…and so rather than taking our own mental cognitive processes and projecting them back upon bacterial flagella, quarks and protons and neutrons, to ask instead…how it is that what we think of as mind is the process of bacterial processes; which isn’t to say that they’re a random concourse of inanimate things…we might just say agency is something other than what we thought it was…and there has to be lots of different ways to dislodge human consciousness as the pinnacle of Creation and of the locus of all agency that matters. And I think that a bi-product of thinking that way is, again, this disembodied God in the sky who is just masculine consciousness.”
The above transcribed quotes come from Professor Mary-Jane Rebenstein’s recent interview on The Catacombic Machine. It is a great interview!
In the interview, Professor Rubenstein talks about her new pantheism book and, at the end of the interview (around the 1:08:53 mark), she talks a bit about the animism of Bruno and Spinoza, and expresses some of her concerns regarding panpsychism and the glorification of human consciousness, which I thought was really great. I’ve had very similar thoughts, and this is why I like Griffin’s term panexperientialism better because it does a decent job getting at the unique Whiteheadian idea that not just humans but cells, molecules, atoms and even subatomic particles incorporate a capacity for feeling; unlike other various forms of panpsychism, W’s final real things are actual occasions of experience, not bits of consciousness or proto-consciousness…
That said, however, I do think Whitehead still does sort of fall into that hierarchical, anthropocentric nonsense that Rubenstein was talking about with regard to consciousness; it may not necessarily be consciousness per se that makes humans so special in Whitehead’s scheme (because, again, for Whitehead, consciousness is merely a highly developed form of experience), but intense, complex and novel experiences. This still does seem to assume that humans are at the peak of things because of their ability to enjoy/suffer intense and novel experiences… But along these lines, then, I also liked that Rubenstein talked about trees during her interview because it brought to mind something I recently read by contemporary Whiteheadian scholar and process philosopher, Brian Henning:
“If we are to honestly meet our obligation of education, we must be willing to admit that some plants may be sufficiently complex to support a form of personal society that provides some degree of central coordination. If this is true, the difference between plants and animals may not be quite as neat as the distinction between “democratic” and “monarchic” societies implies. Thus I agree with Ferre, who writes, ‘From a metaphysical point of view, the distinction between them [plants and animals] is far less interesting than the great similarities that unite them as innovative, responsive, creative systems.’ If plants are indeed more complex than previously recognized, then the intensity of experience open to them is greater than previously realized and we must modify our behavior toward them accordingly.”
Yeah, I think we humans need to get over ourselves and our oh so special consciousness!
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