Panpsychism and the Native State

 

Colin McGinn writing on ‘The Body in the Mind’: (colinmcginn.net)

Panpsychism has seduced more adventurous souls. Desperate men have declared deep mystery—we just can’t know how the mind and the brain manage to join hands. 

Or else a form of panpsychism exercises its attractions: the only way that material properties can coexist with mental properties is that the former have traces of the mental already in them.

(in a footnote)panpsychism, for example, can be seen as a response to the body-mind problem. The idea that the physical world is really mental in nature suggests an answer to the problem, though one carrying heavy baggage. Idealism is the logical conclusion to this line of reasoning. I think myself that both mind and matter need to be reconceptualized in order to make progress with the problem, whether that be possible or not

That is a very difficult problem and re-conceptualizing is the key.  But where is the door?  There seems to be a slide towards begging the question when examination of the validity of panpsychism involves the use of the concepts mind and body which the probandum rejects.  Not of course that it can be proven.  Somehow a direct intuition must establish it.  It must be an immediate experience.  Could it be in some sense a primitive experience, the lack of distinction between the ‘me’ and the ‘not me’ of infancy which if kept up admittedly leads to idealism in the adult but is a manifestation of the plenum, the fullness of non-duality?

The concept, the mental construct and the ‘external’ reality are identical in a non-numerical way.  The ways of ‘appearing’ are part of the joint reality of subject and object.  This is a fluctuating reality which, pace Plato, is the only real we have.

Advaita re-conceptualizes it by proposing that mind-body dualism is not primal.  The object is placed in the mind; the analogy for this superimposition/adhyasa being the well known snake/rope confusion.  In this way mind/body comes to pass, as a sort of naive metaphysics that is utterly native.  What results is ‘my body’, ‘my mind’, my mental modifications.  We are locked from the beginning into that automatically constructed metaphysics.  This is what we share with the animal kingdom.

“Moreover there is no difference (of the learned) from the animals (in regard to empirical behaviour).  Just as animals and others turn away from sound etc. when these appear unfavourable after their ears etc. come in contact with them, and they move towards those when they are favourable, and just as by noticing a man approaching them with a raised stick, they begin to run away, thinking, “This one wants to hurt me” and they approach another carrying green grass in his hands, similarly even the wise are repelled by the presence of uproarious people with evil looks and raised swords, and are attracted by men of opposite nature.” (Brahma Sutra Bhasya - Preamble)