Illusionism Meets Panpsychism: Dialogue with Keith Frankish

I greatly enjoyed my dialogue with Keith Frankish this morning. Thanks is due to Justin for getting us together. I’d say we had a fascinating conversation exploring process-relational metaphysics and my Whiteheadian form of panpsychism, Keith’s version of illusionism, and how these positions bear on the nature of consciousness and meaning.

Keith sent me a few articles to read in advance of our conversation, including this magazine article introducing the illusionist alternative to what he calls the “Cartesian sideshow.”

The good news is that we both want to do away with the idea of Cartesian mental representations and private qualia. I think the concept of “qualia” concedes way too much to the bifurcated image of nature underlying contemporary physicalism.

Keith began our dialogue by asking me to lay out what I think the main differences are between our perspectives. I emphasized what we have in common: we both agree consciousness should not be defined as private, intrinsic, non-relational, and non-functional.

Drawing on Whitehead’s cosmological scheme, I offered a condensed introduction to his dipolar ontology of “actual occasions of experience”—basic events integrating physical (efficient causality) and mental (potentiality) aspects.

I also introduced his key concepts of prehension (relational feelings between entities, actual and potential) and concrescence (the experiential integration of real potentialities into actual unity), though I admit much could not be adequately unpacked in our short conversation. Anyone seeking a fuller introduction to these concepts can watch my diagrammatic explanation of prehension and concrescence in this lecture (timestamped):

I argued that a degree of agency and something analogous to “decision” are basic ingredients in all physical processes. Keith remained unhappy with my attribution of what he believes are exclusively human or at least biological concepts like agency and decision to inanimate matter at micro- or astro-physical levels. For him, what we perceive as “consciousness” is a narrative construct or “user illusion” (Dennett) generated by subpersonal brain activity. He advocates for a purely functionalist, third-person description of cognition. Notions like agency or purpose only gain coherence after living, self-replicating systems have emerged.

He then drew on W. Sellars’ distinction between the “manifest image” (our everyday perception of the world) and the “scientific image” (a theoretical account stripped of human-centric biases). He emphasized the importance of reconciling these perspectives without granting the manifest image ontological primacy.

Despite important disagreements about fundamental issues, we both agree that experience is not some sort of isolated pure phenomenality but emerges relationally and evolves through dynamic transactions. We both reject sharp ontological boundaries (e.g., between life and non-life, conscious and non-conscious systems). I tried to leverage this agreement to insist on a continuum of agency and experience from atoms to animals to human beings. All self-producing systems at whatever scale are enduring organisms (ie, more-or-less unified processes of regeneration preserving pattern across time and space), and are themselves composed of actual occasions of experience whose job (or joy) is the integration of the actualized past with all that remains possible moment by moment (here I am carrying forward Whitehead’s distinction between societies or historical routes and actual occasions). Whitehead’s process of integration or concrescence can be understood in topological terms as the atomization of the continuum.

In response to Keith’s characterization of science as objective and neutral, I emphasized the role of cultural and evolutionary scaffolding in shaping human cognition. I referenced Merlin Donald’s model of cognitive evolution (from mimetic to narrative to theoretical stages) as evidence that science remains deeply rooted in human experience. I first learned of Donald’s ideas in Robert Bellah’s book Religion in Human Evolution (you can read my chapter comparing Bellah and Whitehead here).