CONSCIOUSNESS

1. Philosophy 43
and act. Consciousness as it actually exists in the intact individual can now be seen for what
it is and does. It enables us to generate a concrete version of an otherwise formless and intangible
reality and to develop an inner mental world that makes it possible for us to survive and
flourish in this actual world. P1
6 William James’s Veridical Revelation Jonathan Bricklin
(Eirini Press, Staten Island, NY)
“Is consciousness already there waiting to be uncovered and is it a veridical revelation
of reality?” William James asked in one of his last published essays, “A Suggestion About
Mysticism.” The answer, he said, would not be known “by this generation or the next.” A
century after his death, as if on schedule, physicists are now making the case, both experimentally
(Craig Hogan) and theoretically (Julian Barbour), that answers James’s question in
the affirmative. By separating what James passionately wanted to believe about will, self,
and time, from what his “dispassionate” insights and researches led him to believe, I show
how James himself laid the groundwork for adopting this eternalistic revelation as veridical.
“Consciousness waiting already there to be uncovered” – not “generated de novo in a vast
number of places,” but existing “behind the scenes, coeval with the world” – is consistent with
James’s “neutral” monism, and his belief that Newtonian, objective, even-flowing time does
not exist. Prime reality was not, for James, an object-world appearing to a subject-self, but a
“monism” of “pure experiences,” a stream of “sciousness” (consciousness without consciousness
of self), “thinking objects...some of which it makes what it calls a ‘Me,’ and only aware
of its ‘pure’ Self in an abstract, hypothetic or conceptual way.” These pure experiences “exist
and succeed one another,” entering into “infinitely varied relations,” “throw[ing] the question
of who the knower really is wide open.” James also emphasized that the only provable relationship
between brain states and consciousness is correlation not generation. That “thought
is a function of the brain” does not imply that the brain either stores or produces thought;
brain function may be merely transmissive, like a radio. While never fully abandoning commonsense
dualism himself, James believed that parapsychological and other transpersonal
phenomena had “broken down...the limits of the admitted order of things,” and that insofar as
science denies such exceptional occurrences, it lies “prostrate in the dust.” The “most urgent
intellectual need” he felt early in his career was that “science be built up again” in a form in
which transpersonal phenomena “have a positive place.” In centennial retrospect, his veridical
revelation, and his corroboration of it, helped create a positive place for the most radical
reconstruction of physics today. C16
7 Intrinsic Properties and Panpsychism Godehard Bruentrup
(Munich School of Philosophy, Munich, Germany)
There are two major arguments for panpsychism: the genetic argument, and the argument
from intrinsic natures. The genetic argument is built on the intuition that nothing can
give what it does not possess, and thus radical emergence is impossible. The argument from
intrinsic nature claims that the physical description provided by the sciences captures only
relational and dispositional properties. Thus, an intrinsic and categorical basis that carries
those functional structures must be assumed. I will briefly sketch how this line of reasoning
was already known in Early Modern Philosophy as a critique of the Cartesian notion of matter:
Some, not widely known, arguments by Leibniz, Locke, Hume and surprisingly Kant
provided some useful historical background information to set the stage for the contemporary
debate. In the recent debate I will focus on only one particular argument: Newman’s argument
against structural realism and relationalism. In ‘The Analysis of Matter’ Russell famously
claimed: “The only legitimate attitude about the physical world seems to be one of complete
agnosticism as regards all but its mathematical properties” (Russell 1927, 270-271). Newman’s
argument (1928) was directed against Russell’s skeptical view. Newman claimed that,
unless we take into account the intrinsic features of the relata, there will be too many relations.
The existence of a set of relations is trivially true of a set of objects unless the relata
have some qualitative intrinsic properties. Panpsychists have used Newman’s argument to
show that absolutely intrinisic properties are indispensable. Some recent authors have tried to