Introduction
In the article Temporal naturalism by Lee Smolin (2013) and his related joint work with Roberto Mangabeira Unger (The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time, 2014), Smolin conjectures that the physical correlates of qualia are the so-called unprecedented events, whereas their experiential aspects at least partially involve intrinsic, i.e. non-relational properties. In this essay, I will use Smolin’s philosophy of mind to argue for a form of Russellian constitutive cosmoprotopsychism which can potentially solve multiple puzzles on the nature of consciousness, such as the hard problems of consciousness concerning mechanism, duplicates and qualia (Tye, 2007) as well as the mind-evolution problem (Chalmers, 1995).
In the argument, I will utilize ideas from Davidson (1970), Fodor (1974), Kim (1992), Block (2002), Nagel (1974), Jackson (1982), Dennett (1997), Chalmers (TED, 2014), Brentano (2015) and Millikan (1989) in the course readings of PHIL 255 (Philosophy of Mind) offered at the University of Waterloo. Additionally, I will refer to Smolin’s peer-reviewed article and his co-authored book with Unger mentioned earlier; the peer-reviewed publications On the place of qualia in a relational universe (Smolin, 2020), Panpsychism and Russellian Monism (Torin Alter & Sam Coleman, 2018), Panpsychism (Goff, 2007) and Philosophical Problems of Consciousness (Tye, 2007); and finally, related articles from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Temporal naturalism: evolution over structure
Temporal naturalism commits to three theses 1:
The inclusive reality of time
The singular existence of the universe
The selective realism of mathematics
Inclusive reality of time
The inclusive reality of time entails that causal relationships ordered in time are an irreducible aspect of the universe. This is supported by the ‘phenomenal particularity of time’, which cannot be rejected via the premise that the laws and causal types of the universe seem to be time-independent, as such features of cosmic evolution conceivably fail in the hot, dense, unstable state of the universe (the Big Bang) even in the traditional standard model of particle physics. Furthermore, mathematics only selectively describes non-temporal and non-phenomenal aspects of the world, and therefore leaves out qualia; hence, if qualia are structurally absent in mathematics, instead of rejecting the reality of qualia (which is arguably epistemically more certain than supra-experiential commitments of physics), natural philosophy should positively tackle qualia and the phenomenal particularity of time in a manner that is revisionary for traditional physics and physicalism.
Singular existence of the universe
Since according to the above thesis, time is a global ‘stuff’ of the cosmos (which does not contradict general relativity in careful reformulations such as shape dynamics) and timeless laws are merely a stable mode in the cooled-down state of the universe, explanatory power for relational events 2 is to be found in a historical, evolutionary description of structure formation and not symmetry-involving, fixed-structure laws which are only effective in the stable states of the universe (this can be captured in the maxim, “cosmology should study the evolution of structure, not the structure of evolution”). This means that historically causally connected regions constitute a single universe and any regions forever causally disconnected from such a universe form other universes, but with no explanatory power in the former universe. Therefore, genuine science with explanatory closure and empirically falsifiable implications cannot involve a multiverse of eternally causally disconnected regions, contrary to traditional anthropic approaches to questions such as ‘why these cosmic initial conditions and laws?’. Instead, the effective laws of the current stable state of the universe must emerge via self-organization of the singular 3 universe as it evolves in cosmic time. The untapped explanatory power of this scheme is analogous to that of evolution theory in the context of how complex lifeforms can self-organize while satisfying explanatory closure of the biosphere (such as Kauffman’s far-from-equilibrium dynamics).
Selective realism of mathematics
The selective realism of mathematics is the unequivocal consolidation of the above insights that the temporal character of the universe is fundamental, while its seemingly eternal character, captured in mathematical models, is only a partial feature emergent in stable phases of the universe. Seriously considered in conjunction with the inclusive reality of time, this gives rise to the thesis that novel structures can temporarily self-organize in various phase-transitions of the universe from one mode of evolution to another, but nevertheless cannot remain indefinitely stable, due to flux. The relational aspects of the world captured in mathematical models are selectively real; a full-blown realism wherein mathematical structuralism precedes historical explanation is not justified a priori.
Smolin’s Principle of Precedents (PoP)
It will now be seen that Smolin’s principle of precedents (PoP) is a simple cosmological principle that is compatible with temporal naturalism, while also explaining the self-organization of stable, lawlike states of the universe.
An event-ontological interpretation of PoP is the following. Let a system refer to any collection of simultaneous events with distinct descriptions of relational properties (by Leibniz’s law, these must be distinct events). The input of a system is the set of all events in the causal past of (the events in the) system; similarly, the output of a system is the set of all events in the causal future of the system. Finally, the precedents of a system refer to all systems in its causal past such that they are its copies. A system is a copy of another if and only if:
their events are one-to-one correspondent (i.e., bijective, and having the same number of events, if finite).
every pair of corresponding events across the similar pair exhibits identical descriptions of relational properties.
Putting the above together, a rough analogy from functionalist terminology would be that a precedent of a system is any past instantiation of its causal profile, which would encode number of simultaneous events and their input/output events and their relational properties.
Now, the principle of precedents can be stated as follows:
The singular universe evolves in cosmic time, such that for any given system \(S\) and input state \(\psi\), its output state \(\varphi\) is randomly chosen from the corresponding output states \(\varphi', \varphi'', \dots\) of its precedents characterized by corresponding input states \(\psi', \psi'', \dots\) and so on.
Clearly, PoP, by minimally committing to a singular, temporally evolving universe with stochastic (i.e., non-deterministic/random) evolution agrees with the basic premises of temporal naturalism.
It follows from PoP that the more time passes since the occurrence of a system, the more choices does its most recent instantiation have for choosing its output from precedent outputs. Therefore, statistically speaking, the typicality of precedent outputs in being chosen as new outputs evens out with time. In modified Humean terms, this has the far-reaching consequence that the distant future (with respect to an unstable cosmic state) begins to look like its past! Moreover, if there are multiple simultaneous instantiations of a system, the statistical differences in their evolution begin to disappear, making causal types emerge. Hence, the regularity and universal character of causation in the nomic conception of physical systems can be explained as an emergent property in a temporal universe.
The reader may be wondering how temporal naturalism and PoP relate to the philosophy of mind. The next section will consider speculations on qualia being potentially correlated to unprecedented physical systems and how a suggestion of the intrinsic character of such qualia as being grounds for categorizing relational properties amounts to Russellian monism (Alter & Coleman, 2019) and in particular, a form of cosmoprotopsychism.
Interlude: Russellian constitutive cosmoprotopsychism
Russellian monism
Physics, whether in the traditional or temporal naturalist dressing, seems to describe a causal chain of relational properties pertaining to events. In the philosophy of mind, these relational properties have been frequently called ‘dispositional properties’ with causal profiles dictated by nomic laws. In the context of the selective realism of mathematics in temporal naturalism, a restricted view of traditionally physical quantities is that they are the relational residue of extrinsically-accessible properties. Even if the relational nature of such extrinsic properties is non-nomic, as is possible in unstable states of the universe, the inconceivability of the perspectival, intrinsic character of qualia in the currently relational framework of physics is unaltered.
Russellian monism, at least in one form, is a revisionist program which hopes to broaden physicalism to include intrinsic properties of events and systems i.e. properties which cannot be merely explained in relation to events external to the system concerned. Consciousness, then, might be explainable, at least partially, in terms of intrinsic properties. Since intrinsic properties need not be internal (i.e. lack causal efficacy), Russellian monism avoids the pitfalls of property dualism. However, a caveat is that such a monism can, in the manner of substance dualism, run into causal overdetermination issues, such as Howell’s 2014 modified exclusion principle, modelled based on Kim’s famous 2005 causal exclusion principle. Although I believe one can argue against this using the powerful tools of temporal naturalism, addressing this issue directly is beyond the scope of this essay.
Panprotopsychism and cosmoprotopsychism
A popular form of Russellian monism is panprotopsychism, which in the ‘smallist’ scheme (the commitment that properties of any collection of entities are entailed, whether constitutionally or causally, by the fundamental entities) is the view that all fundamental entities in physicalism 4 have protophenomenal 5 intrinsic properties, which causally accumulate over complex systems to give rise to phenomenal, internal properties. One could also suppose it is internal protophenomenal properties that give rise to internal macrophenomenal states, however, the former notion seems difficult to defend given the successes of physics when it comes to microcausal explanatory power. Furthermore, due to the transitive nature of causal connection, it is difficult to see how micro-internal properties can explain macro-intrinsic properties, without involving some form of emergentism, which would prima facie run into causal overdetermination issues assuming causal closure.
An alternative to smallism is priority monism, which may be interpreted as saying that ultimately, the most stable natural kind is that of physical membership in the singular universe. In other words, properties of subsystems of the universe are entailed by those of the universe. A psychic implication of this is cosmoprotopsychism: parts of the universe being phenomenally conscious is entailed by the universe being protoconscious. Once again, taking causal closure to be a reasonable hypothesis, constitutive cosmoprotopsychism is an attractive view, wherein said cosmic entailment is non-causal.
It is worth noting that Russellian constitutive cosmoprotopsychism, which we will call cosmic middle-range theories or CMR theories in short (as the minimal commitment is that fully phenomenal consciousness emerge at a level smaller than that of the protoconscious cosmos, without there being protophenomenal or phenomenal aspects to maximally fundamental i.e. small entities) are a form of Russellian monism that possess its virtues such as avoiding the duplicate objection, i.e. conceivability of zombie worlds, by furnishing missing phenomenal information with intrinsic physical information. Furthermore, CMR theories inherit the pros of panprotopsychism, such as being ‘gentle’ with regard to the combination problem, without immediately running into the cons of emergentism, property dualism, traditional physicalism or smallist panprotopsychism.
Nonetheless, two relatively model-dependent issues remain open. Firstly, how would a CMR theory deal with the cosmic version of the combination problem, called the decombination problem — i.e., how does a protoconscious universe entail phenomenally conscious mid-range structures? Secondly, does such an entailment imply the same anti-physicalist connotation as epiphenomena on a physical substrate? (in the spirit of Kim, 1992).
Temporal qualia in a speculative CMR hypothesis
Qualia as correlates of novel events
We return to empirical terra firma, or its closest cousin in temporal naturalism. In Smolin’s writings on the framework, he posits a philosophy of mind, which is elaborated with personal interpretations as follows.
Firstly, consider the categorization of dispositional systems based on whether they internally contain precedents, in the sense of the principle of precedents. Associate to the two possible ensemble-level answers of yes/no the properties of proto-nomic and novel respectively. Such a categorization, although built using relational notions, is not relational at the level of organization of ensembles of precedents:
Either such an ensemble is a unital class, hence contains a system without precedents, hence is novel, or,
The ensemble is a non-unital class, hence contains a maximal system with multiple precedents, hence is proto-nomic.
In both the cases above, the property of novelty of an ensemble is judged with respect to its own elements, and not those of any other. Since ensembles are equivalence classes, they are also partitions, therefore, the elements of an ensemble that enter novelty evaluation cannot belong to a distinct ensemble, by virtue of partitions being mutually exclusive. Therefore, ensemble novelty is a unary property.
An implication of this is that temporal naturalism with PoP admits a non-relational categorization of dispositional systems (specifically, ensembles), which resembles Russellian monism! Furthermore, since universal membership is the only necessarily stable physical type given the singular existence of the universe and the inclusive reality of time, and since proto-nomic systems increasingly become deterministic, effectively relapsing to the non-intrinsic character of pure relationalism, a natural series of psychophysical hypotheses is motivated as follows:
The universe has at least a single protophenomenal, intrinsic property in at least some relatively stable state of the universe.
Increments in phenomenal character are associated with increments in novelty.
In other words, phenomenal consciousness supervenes on novel events, in a monotonical manner. Hypothetically, events with high novelty would, at some stage of novelty and complexity, become temporal qualia.
Self-organization of CMR structures
The question of how mid-range phenomenal consciousness self-organizes from cosmic protophenomenal consciousness in some semi-stable cosmic state then reduces to: how do novel systems accumulate internal properties from a universal intrinsic property? If a mechanism satisfies the condition affirmatively, it could avoid the hard problem of mechanism while allowing further avenues to be opened for solving the hard problems of qualia and their evolutionary origin.
The first problem has a straightforward solution given the power of PoP. If a property is intrinsic by virtue of universal membership, every system possesses the property. Now, novelty is naturally selected in the following manner: if a system is highly novel, it is highly likely that it has no precedents at a given time. Therefore, it will evolve stochastically, likely producing a new state which is even more novel, and so on. In fact, if a novel system contains a subdued proto-nomic part, this stochastic process will introduce noise, likely reducing the nomicity of all its parts. It follows that novel systems will likely keep accumulating novelty and hence, phenomenal particularity originating from an initial universal protoconsciousness. Exceptionally, the proto-nomic may become a source of counter-noise and eventually destroy the stable novel structure, in accordance with the inclusive reality of time.
However, this still does not explain how such phenomenality will satisfy causal internalism. A possible explanation is that as a novel system self-organizes into an increasingly novel system, it loses clumps of proto-nomic parts via the above natural selection, thereby entering such causal relationships with proto-nomic parts of the universe that they differ significantly (such as in time scale) from the causal connection between proto-nomic parts among themselves. Without the availability of specific models, it is unfortunately possible to form logically valid counter-intuitions, such as, couldn’t novel systems causally interact to a considerable degree to form a more novel system and so on? This is a return of the problems of ownership and combination.
Here, I will speculate that perhaps a missing element of the argument is that in certain circumstances, causation can effectively be approximated by local processes, for example, when the degree of organization in a causal network with locality is so high that such a property gets naturally selected for its increasing nomicity. However, such stability is temporary, as a central feature of a temporal, in-flux cosmos is that it is perhaps never a priori predictable when novel increments in the nomic or novel character of a region will amplify instead of descending into chaos. Such stable and chaotic conditions might constrain how novel systems causally interact. In one extreme case, they may effectively lose causal efficacy (but only for non-cosmic periods of time) with respect to other relatively stable systems, thereby giving rise to temporal qualia.
Notice how, again at an effective i.e. approximate, era-level (as opposed to cosmic-time-scale-level) description, such qualia are similar to epiphenomena but can still possess causal efficacy over long periods of time. In general, the multifarious possibilities of temporally naturalized models of qualia evolution should allow one to impose constraints that give rise to effectively different kinds of mind-body relationships, at least prima facie. It should then be an important theoretical standard for such a framework to account for both the physical and mental phenomena which have coevally self-organized in this stable phase of the universe, in terms of ontologically prior entities (whether events or not) which are psychophysical.
Conclusion: Biosemantics
Temporal qualia, as hypothesized above, significantly bridge the explanatory gap between the questions ‘why do qualia exist?’ and ‘how do qualia form in physical systems?’. This bridging was a direct result of temporal naturalism’s ability to express ‘why these properties?’ in the form of ‘why the self-organization of such properties?’, which illustrates the explanatory power gained by holding causation and protopsychic properties to be universal properties.
It is historically interesting to remark that a common inspiration for Smolin’s temporal naturalism as well as the field of biosemiotics itself is Charles Sanders Peirce, whose concept of matter being “effete mind, inveterate habits becoming physical laws” is an anecdotal summary of the principle of precedence.
That said, besides so many others, an important part of the mind-evolution problem still lies open: namely, the biological aspect, concerning questions such as,
Why do gene-transmitting, reproducing structures form temporal qualia? Does this help in their survival, at the teleolonomical level of organization?
Why does the mentality of such structures involve intentionality?
For now, I will speculate on the second possibility as being a window to the first, as follows. Taking intentional, phenomenally conscious systems as data, temporal naturalism is a successful candidate for constructing philosophies of mind only if intentionality is somehow connected to novelty. It is clear that intentional systems, even at an abstract, symbolic level of organization, can involve correlations between intentional states and external structures. Due to the singular existence of the universe, we cannot ‘pre-encode’ intentionality at a cosmic level, but would rather want to demonstrate how it emerges effectively at the purely relational, subsystem level. Fortunately, intentionality, in its semantical-informational aspect, seems to be relational. Therefore, it is possible that details can be laid out about how intentional systems, being complex, specifically invoke novelty and hence temporal qualia, potentially bringing together access and phenomenal consciousness in a Russellian monistic expansion to traditional physicalism.
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For brevity of explanation, the first and second theses have been exchanged with respect to their order in Smolin and Unger’s writings. ↩
As Smolin uses the terms, relational events are those whose properties can be explained by the properties of other events, in an event ontology. On the other hand, intrinsic events are non-relational but can enter causal relationships in their own right; lastly, internal events are intrinsic and do not enter causal relationships, resembling the quiddities of Russellian monism. ↩
I.e. non-plural; not to be confused with mathematical singularities, which by virtue of the selective realism of mathematics, are not committed to with regard to physical existence, in temporal naturalism. ↩
such as events in an event-ontological realization of temporal naturalism. ↩
Chalmers (2015) characterizes protophenomenal experience as lacking the quality of to be like something in the sense of Nagel (1974) while being positively intrinsic. ↩