Recycling
Psychogeography and panpsychism on the path to Porthmadog.
I was walking beside the Afon Glaslyn that rises high on Yr Wyddfa and weaves its way for sixteen miles down to the sea near my home. As a retired never-quite-a-hippy, I imagined the river of Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha and its transcendent timelessness. Everything is eventually recycled through the ever changing river that is still the same river, and the protagonist becomes one with the ferryman. A radio discussion about panpsychism from the previous day was still in my head like one of those musical ‘ear-worms’.
Where the Glaslyn joins the Dwyryd estuary before emptying into the Irish Sea, I look across to Plas Penrhyn above the cliff, home to my metaphorical ferryman Bertrand Russell from 1955 until his death in 1970. Philosopher, pacifist, mathematician and social activist, Russell is often credited with the theory of panpsychism, although ideas of universal sentience can be traced back over 2500 years to the ancient Greek philosophers. Psychogeography, meanwhile, concerns itself with noticing and gaining deeper appreciation of where you happen to be, finding meaning and delight in the mundane details of your square mile.
The radio programme distinguished between panpsychism (consciousness is everywhere) and pantheism (God is in everything). It asked whether it refers to an undifferentiated awareness in even the smallest particle, or only to beings of greater privilege and sophistication. One participant tried to draw a clear demarcation between beings with 'souls' and unaware “zombies”: people with the outward appearance of being aware but behaving as automatons. His view seemed to me to have a rather arrogant tone in the way he portrayed his ‘dualism’. Was he too a “zombie”, or at least one of those senior academic blokes that don’t recognise they just have to have the last word?
On the other hand Joanna Leidenhag's and Philip Goff’s versions were for me the most compelling. Consciousness is in everything, everywhere. There is no cut-off point, no artificial boundary. Any alternative seems illogical. Arguments about when and where it started just evaporate. Panpsychism doesn't explain any mechanism, but does offer a way of appreciating a diversity of beliefs and no beliefs, with or without the concept of soul/spirit. There is also an argument that not just the world, but the wider universe, form an integrated and aware ‘organism’. Panpsychism is a ‘broad church’ that can also embrace, without the slightest murmur, a whole range of otherwise obscure phenomena such as telepathy, ghosts, experiences of life before birth and after death. Critics ask about the evidence base and about the modus operandi, but I don't really know how my fairly-smart phone works. Meanwhile Google and Alexa seem spookily able to predict my thoughts.
It seems fitting to be mulling this over amid the ancient stones of Eryri (500 million years old). They must have many stories to tell if you choose to listen. Hiraeth could itself correspond with a panpsychist pull of the ‘spirit’ in these same stones. Once open to the possibility of total interconnectedness, I have found added meaning in art, music and literature.
Have you ever wondered about the purpose of music, that most abstract of art forms? A common question is whether music is ‘about’ anything beyond itself, but perhaps it tunes into something of this ineffable substance. Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992), a ‘mystic’ Catholic composer found his inspiration in birdsong, Balinese Gamelan, in the rocks and in the stars. But not so weird, not so mystic in a panpsychist context. Perhaps Messiaen was attuned to deeper levels of experience and meaning. For me, just the idea of panpsychism enhances my appreciation of music. Coincidentally, I am listening to Gustav Mahler’s Third Symphony (a hymn to nature and pantheism) while writing this. Maybe not such a coincidence. Another genre, jazz, I never quite ‘got’, but somehow now understand how improvisation recognises and develops micro-meanings from the smaller particles of music: likewise in abstract art and poetry, but I’m learning.
A frightening footnote to the radio discussion raised the issue of whether machines, whether AI, might develop consciousness or self awareness. The thought initially seems far-fetched, from the realm of science fiction, but a logical assumption could be that panpsychism makes this not just natural, but inevitable. An intelligence not so artificial after all. We have been warned.
Back to the river, I pondered whether my view was too simplistic or naive, and strangely recalled a previous life, in which I occasionally visited a grand gothic ‘gastro-pub’ in Surrey about 30 years ago. The Hautboy Hotel, long since recycled for housing, stood proudly alone in the village of Ockham near Woking. In that village in 1285, philosopher and theologian William of Ockham (aka Occam) had been born [600 years later, Bertrand Russell was to grow up a few miles from there]. William became best known for the principle of ‘Occam’s Razor’. Crudely, this metaphorical razor shaves away the hairy complications from competing theories, leaving the ‘bare face’ of the simplest and most likely. I wonder if the academics may be missing a trick when they disappear into ever decreasing circles of specialism and complication [within panpsychism]. I’m with Ockham.
With a broad brush, panpsychism, laced with psychogeography (or vice versa), gives me added meaning and purpose to the minutiae of everyday life. Everything passes and is recycled (“re-psych-led” even), including us, every sentient constituent particle, dust to dust, passing through the digestive systems of countless creatures, from land to river to sea to sky over and over again. And aspects of these blog posts are recycled too, in case you hadn't noticed.
LINKS
BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, Panpsychism
Russellian Monism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
What is Occam’s razor? | New Scientist
Blessings from Aldershot and Kathmandu (cambriancrumbs.blogspot.com)
Here and there, then and now (cambriancrumbs.blogspot.com)
Olivier Messiaen and the directional meaning of music – The wondrous music of becoming
Listening Guide – Symphony No. 3 Intro – Mahler Foundation
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I look forward to your comments. Also it would be nice to know where you are in the world. Thanks for reading.