discursive framework that bases human society and culture on a continuum not only with other life-forms, but also with things, natural phenomena, and any other way of existence, because only this, and not the premise of cutting us off from all other types of entities,6 makes it possible to describe what are the specifics, if any, of being ‘human’ in this world.
It should be clear by now that I am going to reject the set of methodological axioms of ‘hard’ physicalism (‘everything that is real can be most adequately described in the language of physics’), which is considered to be the prerequisite of scientific thought by a large number of philosophers. At the same time, however, I will admit the possibility of ‘weak’ physicalism (‘everything that is real can also be described in the language of physics’), without, however, considering it to be very informative. The problem with ‘hard’ physicalism consists in its self-centredness – I am going to argue that there are real phenomena with real causal powers that cannot be adequately accounted for by their reduction to underlying specific physical processes, while a physical description, albeit often a clumsy one with little or no explanatory power, can nonetheless be constructed for them.
In other words, I will argue that the mental and physical vocabularies we normally use need not match each other on a one-to-one basis. Moreover, we need to be very wary about the tacit conceptual luggage the opposite view often brings with itself. For example, we may freely admit that all mental processes that we can think of are somehow also physical processes that occur in the brain – that is, individual mental events have an equivalent in the physical structures of the brain. But this fact does not mean that we are entitled to posit a self-same ‘neural correlate’ for any occurrence of a (similarly reified) particular ‘mental state’ or experience processed by the mind. More importantly, it does not follow from this that each aspect of the mental process we are accustomed to identify as one of its recurring elements has a precise, always co-occurring neural correlate across individuals – so that all fans of a specific football team, for example, have a number of neurons of exactly the same type associated with one another in exactly the same way located in exactly the same area in their brains. A claim of this type, put forward in the nineteenth century by the amateur physiologist and philosopher George Henry Lewes (1877: 313) as a conjecture, has indeed not been substantiated by neuroscience, and yet the impression one often gets from neurocentrically oriented philosophical literature is that this is how things really are.7
Another often-met presupposition that the present inquiry will do its best to avoid is the Aristotelian view that any particular individual, thing or object as such pre-exists any relations it may enter into and should therefore be most adequately analysed on its own, removed from the context that entangles it in contexts that compromise the purity of its being.8 I will be joining those who advocate the opposite view, according to which things without context are like the unstable chemical elements that can be extracted from compounds in laboratory circumstances, but are not actually met in nature. Or, from another angle, they are like words in a dictionary, which can be supplied with definitions, but which only acquire real, functional meaning in phrases that are actually uttered and interpreted. A cleansing of contexts is not providing us with more clarity, but, on the contrary, obscuring our view. ‘Things’, in other words, should be viewed not as independent entities by themselves, but as elements of processes, where they are determined by their relations with other things, which they determine in turn. A theory that strives to account for things as they actually occur in reality cannot cast aside the embedded nature of their being in their world. Nor can we do that to ours.
A person, it follows from this, does not need to be continuous in time as a substance or ‘thing’, or even as a pattern, which persists even when the parts it arranges are replaced one by one, until nothing from the original remains. The only kind of ongoing stability that selfhood must have, on this view, is what I have called ‘processual continuity’, or significant overlap with immediately preceding and immediately following stages. The significance of this overlap, as I will be arguing in Chapter 1, is for any process inevitably bound to a vantage point, from which it can be observed and conceptualized. Such a vantage point, comprising the parameters according to which we can call something – a segment of a process, a part of the reality flux – an entity in the first place, need not be occupied by a real observer. It can be completely heuristic, such as the imaginary gaze that moves around among quarks and bosons, or travels in space at nearly the speed of light, or describes to us from the inside the life in an anthill or a bee swarm. Nonetheless, we need to conjure it as the perspective from which certain phenomena can in principle be observed and evaluated. To repeat: one of the central claims of this book is precisely that the human perspective – complete with the speeds, sizes and observed differences between, say, solid and liquid things – is just one of such perspectives among many, and the reality in which we are inextricably immersed can, in theory, legitimately be described from an infinite multitude of vantage points and not just the one our perceptual apparatus is suggesting to us. Moreover, it is our immense privilege that our mind enables us to transcend the boundaries of our own conceptually structured environment and at least wonder what is it like to be a different kind of creature or entity, as Thomas Nagel (1974) and David Chalmers (1996: 293) have famously done for bats and thermostats, respectively.
It is perhaps trivial to observe that things do not, in fact, pre-exist the reality that they are a part of, and should therefore not be described as standing still in an imaginary vacuum. Nonetheless, this is a circumstance often acknowledged and then immediately forgotten. It has been my ambition to present an argument that would consistently adhere to the habit of seeing things in flux, as parts of processes, frozen into bounded entities not prior to, but during their interaction with other parts of their reality, which come to appear as continuous things to them in turn. A process ontology, discussed in detail in Chapter 2, is also more compatible with contemporary theoretical physics than our common-sense view of material thingness as the paradigmatic case of ‘being’. We know that, at the ground level of being, physics no longer claims to see indivisible, but nonetheless material and graspable, object-like building blocks, and philosophy should not so so either.
Building up from that base level, and always emphasizing the vectorial character of minimal instances of being as well as their selective openness towards some, but not all, of their others, I introduce a version of process ontology that develops certain insights of Alfred North Whitehead, Henri Bergson, Nicholas Rescher and other process theorists into a broader discourse that includes accounts of internality, individuality, temporality, causality and other relevant phenomena. This discourse credits only the immeasurable ‘now’ with absolutely real, material existence, which nonetheless contains the past as traces of causal processes and the future as a range of possibilities. From any perspective, this ‘now’ is disclosed not as an organized structure, but as a field of constitutive tensions – a field without a stable centre, but with a multitude of points vying for this role. Just as, in the cultural semiotics of Yuri Lotman, a work of art cannot be captured in full by any particular reading of it, but exists as a space of multiple contradictory interpretations (1970: 86–7), the momentary state of any entity always consists in both striving for balance and falling out of it at the same time.
Process ontology has a long-standing association with theories of selfhood, as our own subjectivity can be seen as a process, the only process to which we have privileged access from the inside (Seibt 2018). Selfhood is thus the topic that I will address in Chapters 3 and 4, first turning to some presently widespread views of the mind, in particular its relation with the physical brain. Following the critical, but currently still minority, view that rejects the physicalist theories of mind and advocates a broader perspective, I present a number of arguments in defence of this position, while also claiming that a process-ontological stance is better equipped to account for the various phenomena collectively called ‘the mind’ in the first place. I then move to briefly discuss several recent theories of selfhood and subjectivity in the context
