Physicalism vs. Subjectivism - A Conflict of Accounts on the Flow of Substance

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Physicalism has it that causation works through the motion and interaction of material objects in space and time. MM-Theory puts a different twist on this: it has it that causation (if it can be called "causation") works through experiences flowing from one form to another; even this flow, however, works in a different direction from that assumed by the physicalist - we might call it "perpendicular"; the reader might recall from an analogy we drew in the Advanced Theory how fitting this term - "perpendicular" - is, for in the analogy of the auroras borealis, we saw how the apparent motion of lights across the sky was, in reality, motion of particles down from the sky - perpendicular to the apparent motion. Likewise, in MM-Theory, we say that the apparent motion of physical objects across space - that is, across our visual field - is only a consequence of the "real" motion of experiences streaming into our minds through our visual field - perpendicular to the apparent motion.

Though my aim in this post is not to question the logic that stands behind this line of reasoning, it is to question a deeper logic that underlies MM-Theory more at its core, one that the aforementioned line of reasoning would seem, if one were to delve into it carefully enough, to undermine. For if we grant, in spite of our disagreement with the physicalist, that his is nevertheless an adequate description of the typical manner by which we experience material reality, we in the same stroke renounce any right to invalidate his claims. Yet this is precisely what our analogy seems to attempt; it seems to purport that the physicalist, in his attempt to describe his experiences as such - a move our theory sanctions as justified on its own grounds (just as it does for any experience) - is "wrong" and that our account of motion and causation, which works "perpendicular" to that of the physicalist's, is "right".

Up to this point, one who is familiar with MM-Theory might find this point of contention relatively easy to resolve - that is, so long as we bring in a few inter-reality rules - namely, the rule of applying reality qualifiers. We could say, quite simply, that in the physicalist's reality objects move through space and cause other objects to move by interacting with them, whereas in the subjectivist's reality objects, or rather experiences, flow from one form to another in a "perpendicular" direction to that of physicalist's objects. This would be all well and good, and would settle the matter, if it weren't for the fact that in this particular case we are dealing not merely with "reality designs" (as defined in the paper Reality and Perception), but with a particular kind of experience. In this case, we are dealing with non-cognitive experiences - the visual beholding of objects moving through space and, in a temporal sequence, leading from one event to another (the latter we might interpret as "causation" but more on this in a bit). If this is truly the best description of our visual experiences, then we really have no right, given MM-Theory, to dismiss the reality of objects moving through space and events unfolding in time as merely the domain of the physicalist's design for reality. Such a dismissal can only rightfully be carried out if the design in question were purely cognitive - a theoretical doctrine through-and-through - and though there is certainly a theoretical component of the physicalist's doctrine, there is also clearly this empirical grounding which is not nearly as subject to interpretation and relative to one's belief. We all experience the physical world as constituted by objects in motion and events giving way one to another. Given that MM-Theory sanctions such an experience as valid - that is, as "real" - we really have no right to dismiss it as merely the "physicalist's reality" - it is our reality too.

How to reconcile this with our account of the "perpendicular" motion of experience is the aim of this post. To begin with, we should take stock of a few of the most basic tenets of MM-Theory - two in particular. First is that in order for a thing to be real, it must be experienced as such - that is, as the thing it is. This includes physical objects and their motion through space. It should require no reminder that our visual beholding of physical objects finds its roots in specific MODs in the brain, but it might require such a reminder for our experience of motion. Indeed, the latter can be linked to specific neurons geared to perform the very function of detecting motion. Therefore, we can assign the experience of motion - that is, the visual beholding of it - to these neurons, and thus cast it as its own unique experience. As such, it projects as its own unique "real thing" - namely, motion. The second tenet we want to bring in from MM-Theory is that of flow - or the law of entailment - which says that the manner by which experiences flow is by one entailing another. What we want to note from this for the present purpose is how this differs from the corresponding principle of physical motion. With respect to the latter, we generally think of motion as a mechanical matter, as pushes and pulls governed by laws of cause and effect, whereas with respect to the former, MM-Theory has it that experiences flow by the fact that the meaning in the antecedent one "entails" that of the ensuing one. I add the quotes to "entails" for emphasis - not merely because MM-Theory attributes a customized definition to the term (which should be clear at this point), but because of the importance of reminding the reader of the origins of that very customization - namely, that it draws on the analogy of logical entailment (for example, the rule underlying modus ponens) - for we rarely consider logical rules an example of mechanics - more an instance of semantics and what follows therefrom.

The first of these tenets would seem to bring the present problem to the surface, whereas the second is the key to resolving it. Part of this resolution, however, depends on being very clear about what the first tenet proposes, and therefore the mentioning of it is quite important. The importance of the latter can be stated as follows: it would be one thing to insist that the existence of physical objects depends on their being projected from experience - in this case, the visual beholding of them - and that thereafter their motion depends only on their existing in space and time and their being subject to the laws of mechanics - but it would be entirely another thing to insist that this motion too depends, not so much on the existence of physical objects in space and time and their being subject to mechanical laws, but on experience. In the former case, we might account for motion by appeal to what might be termed "meta-experiential principles" - that is, principles of motion that would fall outside the dominion of experience, and for all intents and purposes would be equivalent to the traditional laws of motion we find in classical mechanics - that is, as an objectivist would have it. The existence of physical objects would remain dependent on experience of course - namely, the visual beholding of them - but, as the argument would go, once extant, the laws of classical mechanics would "take over" as the means by which such objects would move through space and time. Consequently, such an argument would entail that there are other things besides experience - namely, laws of motion - and though the form they would take are obviously quite abstract and intangible, we could not defend the claim that all can be reduced to experience - there would be more to existence than that. It is important to appreciate, therefore, the strict conditions that MM-Theory places over the "realness" of any phenomenon - even when it comes to phenomena that are as abstract and intangible as motion itself - for that condition is that being real just means being rooted in an experience. Thus, motion must depend for its realness on one's experiencing it. What this means, then, is that to commit ourselves to MM-Theory is to commit ourselves to the "perpendicular" path of flow as the "true" direction by which those things that really exist unfold. We are then challenged to account for how motion can exist at all if we are to concede, as we should, that its direction of flow seems verily at odds with that of experiential flow.

As stated, the key to resolving this rests in the second tenet expounded above - namely, that "flow", as defined in MM-Theory, is not to be understood in terms of mechanical causation - or even remotely akin to it - but in terms rather akin to logical entailment. To put this in yet more refined terms, experiential flow should be understood in terms of reasons - that is, reasons for whatever phenomenon in question is projected, reasons that would account for, make possible, justify and necessitate the reality of that which is being experienced. To put the idea of mechanical causation in yet more refined terms, we might say that it is nothing more than the manner by which physical events are ordered in a temporal sequence, the arrangement of which is presumably necessary. From the subjectivist point of view that MM-Theory grants, the experiences preceding that of motion are the reasons for why motion exists in the first place; they do not cause motion (at least not in a mechanical sense), but justify motion and its existence. But even having said this much, the physicalist will still find fault with it, for not only does he maintain his disagreement with subjectivism on the whole (which is of no concern to us at present), but maintains that his account for the reasons or justifications underlying the motion of objects resides in the causal nexus that characterizes the interactions between those objects. In other words, it is not, the physicalist insists, something prior to, or "outside", our experience of physical reality that supplies such reasons and justifications, but something inside and between the objects therein - this he calls "causation". So indeed, he concludes, what accounts for the motion, or "flow", of the basic things of the universe (not experiences, as we would have it, but physical objects) works parallel, not perpendicular, to the motion of those objects - for this motion, along with all physical interactions, is none other than the manifestation of causation at work.

Our reply to this can be put as follows: indeed, we have granted that motion must exist for us (as subjectivists) just as much as it does for the physicalist, for it is directly grounded on an elementary experience of the human mind. But we need not grant the same for causation, for as David Hume made evidently clear, and with which the great majority of philosophers now-a-days agree, causation is not the sort of thing that can be classified into the same pigeonhole as other empirically verifiable phenomena. Physical objects are most definitely real, for we experience them quite acutely. Motion is likewise real, for we experience it with equal acuity. But causation? What Hume has shown is that when it comes to the question of causation, we are deep within the sphere of cognitive experience. It is true - we believe that one event following another, even with flawless consistency throughout our past experience, is an instance of a causal relation. We will often disagree on what causes what, or whether two terms are indeed causally connected or merely correlated – or even nothing but sheer coincidence. We do not see, Hume concludes, causation - we infer it.

Inference, it need not be stressed, is a cognitive act. Therefore, unlike in the case of motion, we do have the right to dismiss the case of causation linking physical events as holding merely within the physicalist's reality design, and to say of it that it is true relative to the physicalist's theoretical doctrine. The alternative doctrine offered by MM-Theory, featuring as it does an account of flow in terms of “entailment”, holds within the context of an utterly different reality design, and therefore, all such designs holding true relativisticly, need not concern itself, under the guidelines of inter-reality rules, with the physicalist’s doctrine.

Yet there is one last rebuke from the physicalist. So causation is not directly experienced, in most cases, through any mode other than cognition, but there is one case that can't be so easily formulated, and that is the case of motion itself, for motion is, in a sense, a form of causation, and if you are not prepared to dismiss motion as unreal, then neither ought you to dismiss causation in this form as unreal. What the physicalist means to convey by this argument is that one can justifiably trace the cause of a object's being in a particular spatial position to it's having been in another spatial position just a moment before and that, in that position, it was in a state of motion that brought it into the current position (and it need not have come to rest in the current position - objects in motion will continue in motion). If its motion is real, in other words, its being at any one position in the course of that motion must be accounted for by the fact that its being in motion brought it to that position.

In this particular case, we can grant the physicalist the truth of his claim, for if we insist that motion is necessarily real (being a projection of experience), then we must also grant that it functions as, or takes the form of, a particular variety of causation (namely as described just now) - that, after all, seems to be precisely what motion is, and therefore what the experience of it projects as. But this defense of causation, and physicalism in general, is not as detrimental to our form of subjectivism as it might at first seem. It is important to distinguish between our claim that the experiences preceding that of motion serve as the reasons or justifications for motion, and the claim - which we are not making - that those preceding experiences give reason for and justify the mere existence of objects at any particular point in the course of their motion. In other words, it is important to understand what is being justified by these preceding experiences; it is not the state of an object at a "snapshot" in time, but the entire lifespan of its motion insofar as that lifespan constitutes and exhausts the full experience of the object's motion.

Now this is an interest, and quite peculiar, point. It seems to imply that in order to have the experience of motion, such an experience must be had throughout an extended period of time - neither motion, nor the experience thereof, can exist in an instant of time. This is interesting, for it cannot be said of any experience (one can, for example, imagine the experience of seeing red in an instant of time), but in the same breath, it should not come as too much of a surprise. We have, after all, argued (in the Advanced Theory) that the experience of motion is one of the foundations for the more general experience of time (the other two founding experiences, the reader might recall, being memory and anticipation). Thus, in being temporally extended, the experience of motion creates time - or at least, one of the seeds from which a full temporal dimension can grow.

Understanding this certainly helps to come back to the physicalist's point and reply as follows: those experiences which precede that of motion can very well serve as the reasons and justifications of the latter while at the same time allowing that the mechanical cause of the moving object being at any one particular spatial point is that it had moved there from a different point. This is allowed precisely because what is being justified or given reason by the preceding experiences is the entire course of motion - the one comprising the object and its occupying all spatial positions in question. In other words, the mechanical cause that brought the object from one point to another just turns out to be an aspect or constituent of the experience of motion. What the preceding experiences are in fact justifying are the whole causal nexus insofar as it constitutes the motion being entailed.

Naturally, this needs to be understood against a caveat: such preceding experiences cannot extend their justificatory power beyond the scope of the present experience of motion. That is to say, we do need to distinguish between motion as it unfolds in the present moment (i.e. as it is presently experienced) and motion as it continues on into future moments or has continued from past moments. The latter intervals of time are, by definition, not experienced as occurring in the present. They can, however, be said to be experienced in other forms - namely, as memory and as anticipation (or as future predictions and reconstructions of the past) - but as the reader will surely concur, these experiences are highly cognitive in their characterizations, and therefore subject, with recourse to Hume once again, to the same treatment given to the physicalist's doctrine of causation generally. Thus, causation, the kind that parallel's the flow of physical objects through space, can only be granted the same reality as motion insofar as the motion in question, which such causation would after all be constituted by, is experienced in the present moment (however extended that moment so happens to be), and any other brand of causation - even that linking the motion of objects into future and past intervals of time (i.e. those that are beyond the scope of present experience save cognition) - stems purely out of cognitive inferences, and is therefore subject to the rules of relativism that our subjectivist stance allows for.

To conclude, then, there is no contradiction between the two world systems - that of physicalism and MM-Theory - at least in respect of the direction of flow, vis-à-vis the form of substance, that each one posits - not so long as they are well understood. In the first place, though the flow of substance in each case is rightfully described as "perpendicular" to each other, there is a world of difference between what is connoted by the term "flow". In the one case, physical motion is connoted; in the other, entailment. The meaning of these two versions of "flow" is such that they are not mutually exclusive in the least. The one (motion) constitutes something in existence, the other (entailment) that which justifies or gives reason to its existing. To put this another way, both are needed in order to have either, for in order that physical motion exist, some underlying reason must support that existence, and for that underlying reason to hold, it must necessarily give way to the existence of physical motion. The fact that physical motion requires an elongated interval of time in order to be complete is of no consequence to its coming from the preceding experiences that justify or give reason to its existence - for as we made clear in the Advanced Theory, any experience prior to those we call the human ones need not be bound to time themselves - they may very well hold sway throughout the whole lifespan of the experience of physical motion - from beginning to end - the former being grounded in a timeless state all the while. And in the second place, the entailment of experiences, being atemporal as it is (at least in some cases), can subsume temporally extended experiences (such as motion) into its network as mere nodes. That is to say, for example, that supposing we visualize the preceding experiences leading to the experience of motion as two nodes connected by an edge (that edge representing the entailment of the latter from the former), and the experience of motion leading to yet other human experiences (for example, a cognitive analysis of the motion under observation) as the latter node connected by an edge (again representing entailment) to a third node, we would have every right to allow that the middle node should represent the experience of motion however much it must take place throughout an extended period of time. We are allowed this precisely because of the atemporal character of the network so depicted (or at least its irrelevance to time), for in that case time itself, and therefore motion too, can be represented as a single node among all the others in that network. We come to a point, therefore, where we can conclude with this: that the flow of experience, best depicted as a timeless graph, should in no way conflict with the flow of physical objects through space (and time), for not only are they worlds apart in their basic character, and therefore perfectly compatible with each other in the ways we have expounded in all the preceding, but mutually imply, and in a sense depend on, each other.


Read my theory: http://www.mm-theory.com