Monist Alternatives to Physicalism

It is often thought that consciousness has a qualitative dimension that cannot be tracked by science. Recently, however, some philosophers have argued that this worry stems not from an elusive feature of the mind, but from the special nature of the concepts used to describe conscious states. Marc Champagne draws on the neglected branch of philosophy of signs or semiotics to develop a new take on this strategy. 

The term “semiotics” was introduced by John Locke in the modern period – its etymology is ancient Greek, and its theoretical underpinnings are medieval. Charles Sanders Peirce made major advances in semiotics, so he can act as a pipeline for these forgotten ideas. Most philosophers know Peirce as the founder of American pragmatism, but few know that he also coined the term “qualia,” which is meant to capture the intrinsic feel of an experience. Since pragmatic verification and qualia are now seen as conflicting commitments, Champagne endeavors to understand how Peirce could (or thought he could) have it both ways. The key, he suggests, is to understand how humans can insert distinctions between features that are always bound.

Recent attempts to take qualities seriously have resulted in versions of panpsychism, but Champagne outlines a more plausible way to achieve this. So, while semiotics has until now been the least known branch of philosophy ending in –ics, his book shows how a better understanding of that branch can move one of the liveliest debates in philosophy forward.

There have been many attempts to retire dualism from active philosophic life, replacing it with something less removed from science, but we are no closer to that goal now than fifty years ago.  I propose breaking the stalemate by considering marginal perspectives that may help identify unrecognized assumptions that limit the mainstream debate.  Comparison with Whitehead highlights ways that opponents of dualism continue to uphold the Cartesian “real distinction” between mind and body.  Whitehead, by contrast, insists on a conceptual distinction: there can no more be body without mind than mind without body (at least at the level of ultimate constituents).  Key to this integration is Whitehead’s understanding that mind, at its most rudimentary, is simply the intrinsic temporality of a physical event.  Thus, the resulting form of “panpsychism” is more naturalistic than commonly supposed, and it solves both the composition problem (traditionally fatal to panpsychism) and the “hard problem.”

Consciousness ties together knowledge and feeling, or sapience and sentience. The connection between these two constitutive aspects – the informational and the phenomenal – is deep, but how are we to make sense of it? One influential approach maintains that sentience ultimately reduces to sapience, namely, that phenomenal consciousness is a function of representational relations between mental states which, barring these relations, would not, and could not, be conscious. In this paper I take issue with this line of thought, arguing that neither of these salient aspects of consciousness reduces to the other. Instead, I offer an explanatory framework which takes both sentience and sapience as ontological fundamentals and explore how they co-evolve. In particular, I argue that while epistemic access cannot generate experience from scratch it does play a crucial role in constituting an important form of higher-order experience, namely, the capacity to experience a sense of ownership over one's experiential domain.