The more we learn about fungi, the less makes sense without them.
They can change our minds, heal our bodies and even help us avoid environmental disaster; they are metabolic masters, earth-makers and key players in most of nature’s processes. In Entangled Life, Merlin Sheldrake takes us on a mind-altering journey into their spectacular world, and reveals how these extraordinary organisms transform our understanding of our planet and life itself.
If you like the show, consider supporting us on Patreon.
“In this episode we have the important job of finding out what Panpsychism is all about, and why the philosophical position is gaining more and more traction in philosophy, but even with physicists and other scientists. The idea that consciousness is the fundamental nature of the physical world is by no means a new one, and it does seem to resolve some of the problems of how consciously experiencing lifeforms could have evolved out of non-conscious non-living material. But most materialists balk at the idea and consider it absolutely bonkers, for reasons we’ll find out as we attempt to pay respect to the criticisms of the position too.”
I will restrain from commenting in depth – since I am neither a philosopher of mind nor able to summarize or disentangle all the various positions presented in this talk by Philip Goff.
So here are some small and very inconsequential personal observations about panpsychism. Talking about or even debating panpsychism was a no-no for a long time and scientific materialism (matter and material electromagnetic processes is all there is) is till the dominant view. Speculative philosophers lying outside the major traditions of philosophy (analytical and continental) such as Alfred North Whitehead and his “philosophy of the organism”- you might say occupy a lateral or transversal position in the history of philosophy since his process philosophy rhymes with a panpsychist or panexperientialist (everything has or is some form of experience) view of fundamental reality. It is also interesting that he did not espouse such a view early on, but gradually after his (and Bertrand Russell’s) groundbreaking work on Principia Mathematica lead him into trouble (Gödel’s incompleteness theorem), he gradually arrived at panpsychism as a way out of the bifurcation of nature that had split reality in separate realms, each endowmed with different degrees of reality. Isabelle Stengers in her opus – Thinking with WhiteheadA Free and Wild Creation of Concepts begs to differ – she’s more interested in how ANW dodges the psyche – and the de-psychologizing – noting that like William James je didn’t affirm that electrons “think like we do”, nor did attribute to the actual occasion a “psychology”, a “subjectivity” or “emotions”. Thus he avoids making human intelligence or psychic powers inevitable privileging human experience, something that happens in the case of a tract ny Russian cosmist Tsiolkovsky “Panpsychism, or Everything feels”.
Caught as we were between the dry certitudes of scientific materialism (matter is all there is) and dualism (separation of questions relating to mind from matter or mind stuff being different from mind/brain stuff), we never even got to entertain a third possibility that seemed too outlandish or too quixotic. This third possibility arose at a specific juncture – with William James being familiar with both new advances in physiology as well as the new (at the time) theory of natural selection and evolutionary descent with modification opened up new and extincting venues that reshaped philosophical questions. Closer to us science came to re-cognize (there is that word again) that there are other minds, and that a mind is not so exotic or such an unique appendage and a privilege. Minds arouse not out of non minds but gradual process. Rudimentary fuzzy, mind-like characteristics abound. This contrasted strongly with a view usually supported by X-Risk thinking circles, one betting on the rarity of human minds and consciousness. Reflexive thinking is according to such a view is an island in a desert of cosmic mindlessness. Panpsychism is a view of plenty – of minding and mindful abundance. This was the weakness of that line of argument.
Do not expect a light-bulb Aha! moment of conscious experience. A more gradualistic explanation derived from biology, especially natural history paleontology and ethology makes us see quorum sensing not very different from nervous cells communicating between themselves. So there’s Emergentist Panpsychism, but also Rusellian Monism (of which Goff might be a proponent if I got that right – not what matter does but what matter is) and panprotopsychist, or say Cosmopsychist or Micropsychist varieties. Let a hundred panpsychisms bloom!
Some sort of agency maybe subtends any form of sentience or responsiveness. In order for minds to be natural we have to adopt an evolutionary, gradual (without gaps or sudden jumps) appearance of consciousness. Clearly this chips at our privileged developed reflexive consciousness. It even leads to even a few apparent paradoxes, such as life as a phenomenon being not primary but ulterior. So mind first and life second. In this frame mind is being a question of degree not of kind! To make it clear, this is a bit more radical than just saying that plants or so-called lower organisms (such as crustaceans to bees) exhibit sentience, this is about even particles exhibiting some form of rudimentary experiential quantum. A lot of this feels a question of language, of finding the proper descriptive level of talking about quantitative (mass, speed, etc) and qualitative qualities (the notorious qualia).
I was always wondering how panpsychism stands in regard to historical materialism or Marxism, and if – General Intellect – can be made to fit with explanations of a more pervasive kind, that puts sapience in perspective and encourage us towards more-than-human intellectual adventures or even seeing our own social being as part of the world, not just an add-on. In fact in the former East Bloc context where scientific materialism was the rule, particularly in Socialist Romania in my own case, the ‘intelligence of matter’ briefly made headlines as psychologist and neurologistDumitru Constantin Dulcan published his book of essays Inteligenta Materiei (Intelligence of Matter, Editura Militara 1981). Even now it is really interesting to read the responses from various corners (including well-known mathematician Solomon Marcus). Still I wonder if there isn’t also a residue of mystical materialism a la Tsiolkovsky here.
Nuff said – panspychism (as Goff will prove!) has become again salonfähig as the Germans say it. You can talk about panpsychism not only athistory of consciousness humanities departments, but also at laboratories and in a scientific context and I swear nobody will call you a nutcase, plain gaga or a fringy lunatic slightly sickish new-age or animist type. That odor that Nagel was calling “the faintly sickening odor of something put together in the metaphysical laboratory”s is apparently gone. Perfect Proof to that is a considerable number of new videos, talks, debates, podcasts on YT and TW. What to choose? Well, I would go for the most passionate and ardent supporters – such as Philip Goff from the University of Durham. Important to add that there is also non-cognitivist position or rather a discognitivist position that try to decenter the brain or the central nervous system in order to get panpsyschism right and not try to priviledge (again) conscious experience or human cognition (for this check Steven Shaviro’s extraordinary book of essays). I think that such fine distinguishing lines (was what separates sentience from sapience? or what have substrate independence and simulation theory have to do with each other?). Another way to see this is by reading Science Fiction – and acknowledging that some of the most incredible ideas about sapient aliens and shipminds help us to think about consciousness too. The ‘Tentacle of Empathy’ seems to be everywhere these days. It also might be that ALL explanations of consciousness might sound crazy one way or another – this is the crazyist position of philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel.
Maybe this is the moment to observe that in the case of Tsiolkovsky, a ln avowed panpsychist akd pioneer of space travel. For me though, he’s basically a kind of militant ‘pansapientist’ monism – using a theory of the psyche (rational, intentional, reflexive, etc) that depreciates or dismisses other modes of thought as inferior. Recognizing that the world feels might not mean automatically that we’re more responsive or tuned to it. Stengers in her inspiring book Thinking with Whitehead from 2002 – in particular Entrée en Métaphysique Chapter explains why this is not the path taken by Whitehead (Tsiolkovsky is not mentioned but contrasting the two helps a lot). Tsiolkovsky recognizes that the universe is alive and feeling, but this not an opening for other ways of becoming or opening up the question to what os it like to he an atom, a body, a tissue etc. It leaves not much room for other modes of thought. We might call this a psychic or cognitive terraforming of the universe, something very close to the X Risk incentive to protect & spread human intelligence in the Cosmos and make sure it will use and unmake every other mind that doesn’t conform to the maximal potential for joyfulness. This gives rise to a sort of ultra-sapient chain of being with atomic adventures inside various organismic (a body, tissues, stones etc see below), and in each one (except if it inside the human) the full potential gets never achieved. Locked up in the unconsciousness and deep unthinking sleep of other lesser modes, they just await the consciousness light-bulb to raise them up to the level of human experience so that their limited notion of past and future can expand. This is what i understand from this fragment:
“In terms of mathematics, the entire universe is alive, but the power of its sensitivity is manifested in all its brilliance only among the higher animals. All atoms of matter feel in keeping with the environment. Finding itself in highly organized beings, atoms life their life and feel their pleasure and pain. If they find themselves in the inorganic world, they sleep, as it were, immersed in a deep state of unconsciousness, in nothingness.Even in a single animal, as they wander around its body, the atoms live the life now of the brain, now of the bones, hair, nails, epithelium, and so on. Meaning that atoms now think, now live like atoms imprisoned in stone, water, or air. Now they sleep, with no awareness of time; now they live for the moment, like the lower beings; now they are aware of the past and paint a picture of the future. The more organized the being, the farther this notion of future and past extends.”― Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, Panpsychism
Goes witouth saying that I am a fan of Jonas Ceika (you can check his YT channel as well as his book ABOUT HOW TO PHILOSOPHIZE WITH A HAMMER AND SICKLE). Support his Patreon and his channel – his in-depth dive into various philosophers as well as historical revolutionary movements is a thing to keep posted about.
Getting across pesky copyright bots on YT is a feat in itself – and Jonas has struggled to keep this educative video online. I really wish that it will not get flagged again and again since it is such an incredible and sharp take on Total Recall, done in a way that does honor to PKD vision. I am really happy to have included this video in our Timisoara Indecis art space show dedicated to the historical xenogenesis of the SF. It is both a way to revisit a classic of mutant struggle on Mars and a way to discover theoretical contributions (Alison Landsberg). Following Landsberg, Ceika brings to bear how such widespread popular mass media products become widely available and non-exclusive memories, with a political progressive potential that was unavailable to older more exclusive forms. He also picks up on role of such memory implants in the work of PKD and Verhoeven’s 1990 classic.
Prosthetic Memory is a critical look at this Verhoeven classic as well as a good introduction to the modern/post-modern divide, without the usual misunderstandings or hate associated online with the so-called strawmen of “cultural Marxism”.
spacetime coordinates: far future in the depths of the planet a new ecosystem has sprung up
Junk Head is a 2021 Japanese stop motionscience fiction animated film written and directed by Takehide Hori, based on his 2013 short film Junk Head 1.The film comprises some 140,000 stop-motion shots, and runs for 101 minutes. The story is set in a distant future world where humans have received longevity but lost their fertility, and are nearly extinct by population decline. (wiki)
Just wanted to post these (and I will come back to add some more juice). This is one of the most incredible animations (or SF materials in general) I have experienced recently (thx to Tomaso Mainardi for suggesting it!). The perfect embodiment of “キモカワ Kimo–Kawa” orGurokawa (グロカワ) uncomfortable cloying and creepy-cute aesthetics. It is also a good occasion to discuss its biological aspects, since it is a sort of biopunk stop motion animation. The ‘what if’ of Junk Head extrapolates from current demographic fears and panics about fertility and a decline in libido, especially prevalent in Japan with its low birth rate and 2006~ “grass-eating men” talk, actually a good development about men who shun sex, don’t spend money and have long walks. It is a pleasure to discuss some of the details and what an impact it left. For now just suck on these (even if they do not convey the sense of space and labyrinthine happenings):
Here’s an incredibly – well invaluable resource (for me as a non-professional interested in philosophy and its twists & turns) that I recently discovered. It is a collaboration of researchers from two institutions: King’s College London and Ludwig-Maximilian University in Munich.
I suggest starting with the episodes on the Indian influence on Islamic and European thought as an introduction to this entire section and I will detail below why I think one should start here at the end rather than at the beginning. Even if one does not have any interests in philosophy or any prior knowledge in the Western tradition of philosophical thought – from this eps one can at least gather how stunted this reception of Indian philosophy was (and partially still is) in the West.
For good or for worse (Theofil Simenschy, M Eliade) Romanian intelligentsia has shown along the years a certain appetite for Indian philosophy, so there is a lot of various translations – even pulp and trashy ones, adapted versions and pocket versions. All this is proof of a widespread interest in extra European philosophical traditions and a diversified pop cultural exchange btw India & Romania. At the same time one should not profess any innocence in regards to this Indophilia, and regard with a certain suspicion all claims about a Romanian-Indian continuum, especially in view of the usual right-wing nativist or aryanist tendencies. That said, before 1989 and after as well, so-called anti-sectarian perspectives where banishes, a position maintained by the majority Romanian orthodox church. This is a tendency to discredit evert hing associated with Indian practices or yogic knowledge. Gurus or anything close to New Age religions is regarded as potentially harmful or condemned as ‘perversions’. Not saying there are no exceptions to the rule, yet suffice to say, nodaways in Romania (as elsewhere) – there is a thoroughly hyper-commercialized mindfulness industry catering to the needsof those afflicted by generalized burnout under capitalism. I consider quite fruitful thw para-academic come & go tracing such pop cultural influences and there’s much interest in exploring weird deviations & non orthodox practices. My bes example is Bogdan Lyphkhanu – poet friend and also a consummate collector and investigator of such spiritual Romanian- Indian (and also Spiritualist, Taoist, Tantric, Occult, including unclassifiable etc) hybrids.
For various reasons, I abstain from discussing Islamicate – Indian philosophy relations. Many Islamic authors, since the very beginning, have drawn parallels btw Sufi Islamic mystical traditions and Indian philosophical schools. Importantly, many Western impressions on Indian philosophy are much indebted to previous Persian or Arab translations (listen to this podcast).
I am ignoring this at the moment to focus on the plethora of sometimes very specialized knowledge and updates commentaries on Indian (or specifically Buddhist/Jainist sources here), sources relevant to the current debates animating much of today’s mind philosophy (mind body dualism/hard problem of consciousness, panpsychism/pancosmism, eliminativism etc).
These podcasts are definite proof that we have moved away from the various misinterpretations. A that seem in retrospect quite rudimentary, completely biased and misinformed, never able to grasp the diversity of Indian philosophical schools or engage with the conclusions of their main representatives (their historical debates, the diversity of their examples, multiplicity of perspectives, a rich and evolving conceptual vocabulary and most of all their sheer diversity). The Western reception is biased from the beginning. No matter where it hails from, we get the sense we’re being served an impoverished and caricatural version of it. Beyond the mind philosophy relevance discussed above – there is also a new interest for the idealist resources of Indian philosophy as today’s idealist philosophy gathers pace or even with those attempts to seek out a bridge between the continental and the analytic Western philosophy. There are countless other aspects including those offering a new appreciation of Indian epistemology (in the Buddhist philosophy) and so on.
With the possible exception of Gottfried W. Leibniz, almost all mentioned in this podcast (Hume, Hegel, Schopenhauer, etc) show a combination of either uncritical admiration or outright disdain for Indian philosophy (particularly its cosmology or cosmogony as in the example with the elephant sitting on top of the turtle). If they were very attentive in their analysis of ultimate questions about experience, perception, truth and limits of knowledge, or avidly debating current scientific worldviews, western philosophers were less careful about other traditions, throwing around careless generalizations. Sadly they almos constantly ignore actually existing ‘Indian philosophy’, and make their statements based on hearsay or by taking Indian philosophy as a unified stock, a single corpus, a monolithic non differentiated block. One should first recognize if possible these initial widespread positions held by practitioners of Western philosophy, so that one can appreciate its further refinement or even complete revision of what we thought we knew about Indian philosophy.
That being said – this is just just an entry point, so pls consider listening the whole section from 43 Buddhist and Jains (or earlier) to 62 Kit Patrick. Each eps has short and up-to-date Bibliography on the subjects being discussed for those interested.
there is actually slime mold linking, growing and tracing the title of this book
I think Steven Shaviro should be something like one of the patron saints of timespacewarps and I will briefly state why here. Happy to be able to introduce him together with Darko Suvin over here.
I think, of all the various cultural theorists, whatever-hip-thinkers or walking talking encyclopedic humans out there – he is one of our most important purveyors relating to lived time, of how feeling relates to time, and is almost a creature (entity – to put in ANW terms) of time flow. He is a weird processualist, a tireless sci-fi enthusiast/reviewer and proponent of his own brand of speculative realism, a supporter of relational-panpsychist (or pan-experientalism), a critic and theoretician of music videos and post-cinematic affect and one of the most intellectually generous people I know of on the whole of Internet (most of his stuff is found for free online under digital form or on his blog). He interests go far afield, from the extremity of Maurice Blanchot, Kathy Acker, William Burroughs to third kind philosophical encounters btw Deleuze, Kant and Whitehead. He might be (in his own words) a “misanthrope”, “highly dissociative”, an unapologetic “kitsch Marxist”, living in ‘Motor City’ Detroit and teaching at Wayne State University, yet he is to be found on both E-flux discussing Accelerationist Aesthetics: Necessary Inefficiency in Times of Real Subsumption (2013) or Extrapolation, fabulation and speculation (as of October 2021) at Russian Moscow online courses. His numerous books have been instrumental imho in moving continental philosophy away from postmodernist/linguistic turn or deconstruction/ text-centered hermeneutic models towards the ontological or the very nature of reality, thus allowing for a widening reception of the so-called ‘speculative turn’. His huge and always nourishing reading list is open for everyone.
Hard to write a review on this one – because it is such a favorite. While I have just started reading his new 2021 Extreme Fabulations: Science Fictions of Life I realised I had to pay my due to this one. Here are a number of things that might make Discognition unavoidable reading for our times. Of course, you could just read Steven Shaviro’s short dense book as a direct shortcut to key ‘thought experiments’ in mind philosophy (hard problem of consciousness, Mary’s room or the knowledge argument, cognitive eliminativism etc) and the various philosophical responses to them (Churchland, Nagel, Churchland, Dennett, Brandom, Brembs, etc.) as well as Shaviro’s own. If you are interested in the original volume with a lot of the original essays that he uses as source materials feel free to check There’s Something about Mary: Essays on Phenomenal Consciousness and Frank Jackson’s Knowledge Argument. What makes Discognition completely different from most cognitive science & countless mind philosophy books is that he will make us enjoy mind philosophy as an exercise in science fiction (or paraliterature as Samuel “Chip” Delany calls it). And if we manage that, we will rather sooner (than later) realize that mind philosophers can hardly keep up with speculative fiction’s proclivity and SF’s daring adventures in matters of cognition, consciousness, affect, physicalism, subjectivity, reason, responsiveness, sentience etc. in imaginatively devising thought experiments that would be practically impossible as a program for cognitive sciences or within the preserve of cognitivist paradigm. Steven Shaviro makes no secret about his own pan-psychist leanings, or rather his pan-experientialism orientation (in line with both William James pragmatism or what Alfred North Whitehead metaphysics tried to probe), yet this position comes forth after giving due attention to many other perspectives or philosophical currents. Speculative realism and object-oriented ontology, as in his previous books The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism, remains a point of reference. The title “DISCOGNITION” is a great way by Steven Shaviro to try bend our cerebrated (yet dualist and disembodied) and vaunted capacities further and further, to be able to try and circumvent the heavy toll of constraining cognition as well as to switch tables on our faltering human exceptionalism. Cognitivism has been listing a growing list of human biases and fallacies, confirmed by research – all largely expanding on critical philosophy’s founding gestures: Kant’s categories and forms of thought. Yet the fundamental tenants of cognitivism (u could also call them metaphysical presuppositions) get more entrenched than ever. As ‘neurobullocks‘ has been infusing much of neuro pop from TV series to criminal psychology – or be it advertising and neuro -marketing, nowadays only neurodivergence manages to question the neuropolitical underpinnings of neuronormativity.
In the end, we have nothing to lose (he seems to tell us with every chapter) – but our embittered speciesism, a narrowing cognitivism-only path that allows only brains, higher functions of the human mind or consciousness to act like proper scientific models, exquisite literary presences or proper philosophic objects – at the dispense of everything else, with the risk of ignoring various instantiations of “what would be thinking like”: a machine, an artificial intelligence, a computer, a murderer, a slime mold, an alien etc. (a list that could be potentially endless). We are bound to central nervous systems, and yes, sapience is a wonderfully rare thing, yet this comes at a heavy price of ignoring the largest majority of our experience as well as other (for us largely speculative) modes of thought. Recent SF, carefully chosen examples by S. Shaviro – put consciousness in proportion and show how human thinking processes might be themselves just a narrow sliver – a wonderful but limited and limiting way to even define experience as such. He brings all these examples to roost and many others – including Ted Chiang’s The Lifecycle of Software Objects or Peter Watts Blindsight or R Scott Bakker’s Neuropath. To his merit, Shaviro always emphasizes that he is neither a philosopher nor a science fiction writer – though to my knowledge, he is uniquely poised to enjoy doing what he does and never make the authors and thinkers he reads cry (as Deleuze said). He is one of those very rare raconteurs that never disparages his material, offering an attentive mind and affective stance that takes science fiction and philosophical speculative bets very seriously, pushing them to their ultimate ends. He is never tone-deaf, never forcing himself on the medium but letting it speak loudly and clearly. His close-reading discipline works almost as a direct how-to example in helping delineate difficult questions posed by the authors themselves. He redefines and refines complex relations and attempts making difficult distinctions by contrasting philosophy with science fiction or with science proper. There are always differences as well as deep resonances here, and there is always the potentiality of mutual learning from each other:
Fictions and fabulations are often contrasted, or opposed, to scientific methods of understanding the world. But in fact, there are powerful resonances between them; they are both processes of speculative extrapolation. In other words, constructing and testing scientific hypotheses is not entirely different from constructing fictions and fabulations, and then testing to see whether they work or not, and what consequences follow from them. For science is far more than just a passive process of discovery, or a compiling of facts that are simply “out there.” Rather, science must actively approach things and processes in the world. This is the reason for making hypotheses. Science needs to solicit and elicit phenomena that would not disclose themselves to us otherwise. It must somehow compel these phenomena to respond to our questions, by giving us full and consistent answers. All this is necessary, precisely because things in the world are not cut to our measure. They have no reason to conform to our presuppositions, or to fit into any categories that we seek to impose.
TimeSpace Warps 