© 2003 Charles Birch
© 2003 The Brotherhood of Man Library
From “Feelings” by Charles Birch
The basic distinction that has to be made is not primarily between mind and matter but between the objective and the subjective.
Things are experienced either internally or externally. When we see, touch, smell, or hear something our primary experience is external. When we think about things the experience is internal. But our senses do not bring us direct knowledge. All sensory signals arrive in the brain as modulated electrical signals that must be integrated and deciphered.
My own consciousness is the only thing in all the universe of which I have direct knowledge. Everything other than consciousness is inferred.
I experience the world as a world of objects through my five senses. I also experience life as inner awareness.
Feelings are the subjective side of life. Outward events are the objective aspect.
The present dominant view claims that mind is something that emerges in the course of the evolution of life. It is given the name emergentism.
A second view is that there is no such thing as mind, all is mere matter (physicalism or materialism).
A third view says that, in some sense, mind is part and parcel of all the entities in the evolution of the cosmos and the evolution of life. Thus mind and matter are two aspects of the one thing (panexperientialism). The question we are really asking is what is the nature of nature? Is it a machine, or is it something other.
When did mind arise in cosmic evolution?
Physicalism says mind is not real— the only real things are insentient bits of matter.
Panexperientialism asks: How could that which is arise from that which is not? It says mind (in some form) and matter always existed together all the way back to the Big Bang and even beyond. It avows that mind never arises from no mind.
The exponents of mechanism have declared that nature is not ‘alive,’ that not even taste, color, or odor belong to it. All that is real is the primary qualities of bits of matter to which nature can be reduced. The real world is matter in motion and nothing more. For mechanists, the machine replaces the organism as a model for understanding the nature of matter. Whitehead[1] scathingly called this the, ‘doctrine of vacuous actuality.’
The most common view held by biologists on the origin of consciousness is that it came into existence in mammals, possibly in birds, and even possibly in all animals that have a central nervous system. Some even extend the range of consciousness to protozoa because of the obvious responsiveness of these organisms to physical stimuli.
Emergence is a common doctrine in evolutionary thinking about the origin of organs. For example, the five-toed limb is said to have emerged from fish that had no such limbs but had fins. Analogously, minds are said to have emerged from no minds. This step contains a serious flaw, a category mistake. Mind is in a quite different category from limbs, feathers, scales, etc., which are external properties knowable to sensory experience. Mind is not knowable in this way.
There are two forms of the doctrine of emergence, a dualist and a physicalist form–one holding that once the mind emerges it is as a fully actual entity with power to affect the body, the other holding a physicalist view in which mind is without power to exert causation on the body.
Your soul cares only about what you’re being while you do what it is you’re doing.
A goal in life? How about knowing the highest part of self, and staying centered on that.
The materialist, physicalist, or mechanical view of the universe is reductionist.
Reductionists try to explain the properties of complex wholes in terms of the most basic units from which they are composed. They would argue that the properties of say, a protein molecule, are completely explicable in terms of the properties of its atoms, electrons, protons, etc.
But if complex things such as living organisms can be broken down into their component parts, how is it that the whole has properties that none of its components have? Can we really expect to explain a tune that somebody whistles in terms of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, phosphorus, and oxygen molecules? Or can we ignore the tune by saying it isn’t real?
The proposition of panexperientialism is that subjectivity (feeling of some sort) exists in individual entities such as electrons, atoms, cells, and organisms. But in saying that an electron is attracted by a proton we mean that the electron takes into account internally the proton in its environment. All entities, be they electrons, protons, cells or humans, do have internal relations. Hence all entities can be called organisms. Thus the definition of an individual entity is that which acts and feels as one.
When using the word feeling in relation to an electron we are not proposing that the electron is conscious. Feelings may be conscious, as in ourselves, or unconscious and perhaps highly attenuated, as in an electron.
Panexperientialism means the presence of experience in some form all the way down to the most fundamental particles. To be real, an entity must ‘feel.’
[Anything having sufficient substance to be considered as individual rather than compound is an entity that must feel. Thus even the gluons that hold quarks together in the atomic nucleus must be feeling entities–this despite the fact that gluons, in mediating the switch of ‘up’ and ‘down’ properties of quarks, pop out from the vacuum, do their thing in less than a billion billionth of a second, then return to the vacuum.]
A distinction has to be made between individual entities and aggregates of individual entities such as a chair, a table, a pile of sand, a rock. An aggregate is a grouping of entities that does not lead to a higher order of unified experience. The pan in panexperientialism means that all things are either experiences or are aggregates of individuals that are experiences. A molecule (its atoms interact with one another) is an example of an entity having experiences. A rock and a car are examples of aggregates–are without feelings. It is possible to have a high degree of organization without having any unified experience.
Panexperientialism generalizes experience (feeling) to all individual entities such as electrons and compound individuals like cells. Consciousness is understood as a high-level experience. It involves memory of the past and anticipation of future events. At its highest level it involves richness of experience that may have components of zest and harmony.
Science, for the most part, studies aggregates. And when it does study individual entities or their compounds, it does so as if they were aggregates–machines that have no internal relations, no feelings, no subjectivity. For the most part, this is appropriate for the purposes of studying how a thing works. However to interact with an elephant as a machine rather than an elephant having real feelings and idiosyncrasies could be courting personal disaster.
Fear is the energy that contracts, closes down, draws in, runs, hides, hoards, harms. Love is the energy that expands, opens up, sends out, stays, reveals, shares, heals.
Expectations ruin relationships.
Human experience is a higher level exemplification of reality. Instead of looking at nature from the bottom up as do the reductionists, panexperientalists look from the top down. In doing so, they look from the aspect of nature that they know most directly–their inner life experience, experience that is known in a way nothing else is.
Classical biology sees all organisms as machines. Classical physics does the same with its particles. An alternative is to interpret all in the light of that aspect of reality that we know most intimately. This leads to the panexperiential view of nature.
The proposition is not that atoms and molecules are conscious, but that there is, even at their level, something akin to sentience that takes the environment into account internally.
For example, we can talk about a richness of experience that is markedly different for a mosquito compared with a human being. Hence it is proper to speak of an ‘evolution of experience’ that at some stage becomes consciousness. Thus, beings with consciousness may be said to have evolved from forebears in which experience was not conscious.
The effect of the doctrine of internal relations on the understanding of nature is radical. It destroys the notion of ‘material substances’ and substitutes that of ‘events.’
The notion of substance is something that exists independently of anything else. According to classical physics, atoms and molecules are substances that behave in certain ways.
But in ‘event’ thinking, ‘events’ come first and are more basic. The world is made of ‘events’ and not substances. A hydrogen atom is an event and so are all the so-called fundamental particles. Modern physics recognizes this but still tends to use the language of substance thinking–as illustrated by the example of the gluons as previously described.
The events that constitute the ‘being’ of any particle are their internal relationships. An internal relation, unlike an external relation, is constitutive of the character, even the existence of something.
Our proposition is that we need to study phenomena at each level as they are shaped by phenomena at a higher level (the reverse of the reductionist approach). All reality from protons to people is process. The process moreover is one of feeling or experience. The ultimate entities of the world are not objects but subjects–and are the final real things of which the world is made.
The word feeling or experience for an elementary entity–such as an electron, an atom, or for events in the minds of humans–are examples of the thoroughgoing unification which the Whitehead system1 seeks to achieve.
‘Feeling’ or ‘experience’ means any kind of acting, or being acted upon, in such a way that the make-up or constitution of the subject is affected.
Another way of putting this is to say that the entity takes account of its environment in such a way that it itself is constituted, at least in part, by that internal relationship. The analogy with human experience is complete. We are what we are by virtue of our internal relations changing our constitution moment by moment and day by day (but it is important to note that not all of the internal relations are conscious activities–there are different degrees of consciousness shading off to unconsciousness with which these relations are associated).
Do not dismantle the house. Look at each brick and replace those that appear broken.
Seek not tofind out who you are. Seek rather tofind out who you want to be.
What is the origin of this subjectivity, (feelings), in nature? Asked how they feel about it, materialists often feel they must blindly deny they have feelings.
As far back in time as the physicist can take us, about 13.6 billion years, there was the Big Bang–indicating that somewhere there must have existed the potentiality for our universe to become. This general potentiality Whitehead called the “the mind of God”–meaning the unrealized possibilities, values, purposes, and feelings that were yet to be.
The proposition that the universal existence of subjectivity requires the existence of cosmic mind appears to be unavoidable–the alternative is to simply ignore the problem.
Physicist Paul Davies[2] made the case for the existence of the laws of physics before there was any physical universe. Thus the laws of physics must be eternal and omnipotent. Other thinkers have argued that these laws came into existence with the universe. But then these laws cannot explain the origin of the universe as they would not have existed. Davies answer is they were in the mind of God.
But Davies, Pascal, and many others differentiate between the God of the philosophers and the God of mankind’s religions. The ideas associated with omnipotence, intervention, law-giver, and judge are not part of the thought we are trying to convey–which is God as persuasive love as opposed to coercive power. Three propositions are put forward:
God acts by being felt by God’s creatures, the individual entities of creation. And God’s envisagement of possibilities elicits a response from the individual entities of creation.
God acts in human life by being felt by us as persuasive love that is transforming. We are tuned to resonate to the lure of God. When God is felt by individual entities, God enters into their constitution. God is lure. God is persuasive love, ever confronting the world, as it is, with possibilities of its future.
The life and mission of Jesus would not have been possible except in a society that, through its history, had reached a certain critical point. Jesus was able to show men and women what human life could be.
God confronts what is actual in the world with what is possible for it. This is the compassion of God for the creation. God acts by being and by having purpose.
God cannot choose from time to time to interfere coercively here and there, at will. This is at the heart of the difference between classical theism and panentheism or neoclassical theism. God does not put up special umbrellas to protect the faithful against this or that disaster, nor does God authorize any particular disaster. Such concepts suppose a providence in which God is in total control, either determining all events, or selectively determining some events.
You cannot lie to yourself. Your mind knows the truth of your thoughts.
Your soul is such that it seeks the highest of the high. And the highest of the high is perfect love.
God’s directing creativity always creates through the spontaneity and structural wholeness of all creatures. Providence is not interference, it is creation. Providence is a quality that lures towards fulfillment. The person who believes in providence does not believe that a special divine activity will alter conditions of finitude and estrangement. They believe and assert with the courage of faith that no situation can frustrate the fulfillment of their ultimate destiny, that nothing can separate them from the love of God.
The concept of an all-powerful, almighty, all-controlling God is antithetical to the reality of the world. In such a world, free will would be impossible. The nature of the world is consistent with the concept of God as persuasive love that is never coercive.
Faith in divine providence is faith that nothing can prevent us from fulfilling the ultimate meaning of our existence. Circumstances need not destroy us. What matters is our attitude to circumstances. No person, nor any situation, need ever have an unbreakable grasp upon us. Faith makes it possible to act creatively in any situation.
Every life has two aspects, the objective and the subjective. It is mainly our inward subjective contribution that in the end determines what life means to us. “I have overcome the world,” said Jesus. His victory was inwards.
Prayer is not the endeavor to get God to do what we want. It is the endeavor to put ourselves in such a relationship with the God-Within that the possibilities of God for our lives become concretely real in our experience.
This view of the nature of God’s activity is not only a view of the nature of goodness but also of the nature of evil. Evil springs not from providence but from freedom and chance. If there was no good, there would be no contrasting evil. If God gives us the freedom to choose his goodness and his love, then we also have the freedom to reject–and the possibility of perpetrating evil.
Plato spoke of undimmed and unwearied passion as the only adequate response. Tillich plummed for infinite passion. Hartshorne[3] chose to be creative and foster creativity in others.
The creative evolution of the cosmos is a consequence of the combined creative activity of the individual entities of the universe. Some kind of tendency (lure) to the realization of further possibilities must belong to the individual entities of the world. Otherwise evolution and life is unintelligible–a sequence of chance events of preposterous improbability. At the human level this lure is felt as an imperative. And the response to the divine lure is passionate.
We open our lives to being grasped by something greater than ourselves which becomes part of ourselves. This is the full meaning of incarnation, literally meaning ‘becoming flesh’–which is becoming concretely real instead of remaining a possibility.
Only when youfind the power to say, “I did this,” can you also find the power to change it.
There is a divine purpose behind everything, and therefore a divine presence in everything.
Thus God is pictured, not as a static being, but as in the process of becoming. By contrast, the classical view pictures God as being loving, yet without emotion, feeling, or sensitivity to the feelings of others. Aristotle stated, “God is the mover of all things, unmoved by any.” Aristotle’s God is unaffected by what happens in the world–so also is the god of Saint Anselm and Thomas Aquinas.
The median view is that God is loving in the sense of feeling the feelings of all others, taking into himself the immediacy of all other currents of feeling, moment by moment. Hartshorne says:
‘God alone not only knows but feels, and finds his own joy in sharing our lives, lived according to our own free will decisions, not fully anticipated by any detailed plan of God’s own.’
Whatever we do makes a difference to God. Only such a view is a coherent, intelligible way of conceiving God. A love that leaves the lover unmoved by the joys and sufferings of the one who is loved is not worthy of being called love at all.
It is really quite extraordinary how rarely God is conceived both to suffer with and to rejoice with the creation. God is represented as judging, punishing, sometimes sentencing his earthly children to torment. Real love is neither judgmental nor condemnatory. Instead it comes alongside and experiences the suffering and the joy of the one who is loved. Many of us can believe in a God like that.
God’s creative activity inspires the individual entities of creation to themselves be creative. Their experiences are saved in the experience of God. In Whitehead’s language: ‘What is done in the world is transformed into a reality in heaven–and the reality in heaven passes back into the world.’
This is an interesting speculation in that the world not only makes a difference to God but that the difference made to God floods back into the world as new possibilities. In this way a flow of feeling is established between God and his creatures, a flow that enriches both.
In this vision of a deity who is not a supreme autocrat, but a universal agent of persuasion and responsiveness whose power is the worship he inspires, and who feels all the feelings of the world, some of us find not only a new way of understanding the world but a new way of facing the tasks of today.
Every circumstance is a gift, and in each experience is a hidden treasure.
Love is the ultimate reality. It is the only, the all. The feeling of true love is your experience of love.
The universal existence of subjectivity in the individual entities of creation requires–demands–the existence of cosmic mind at the heart of the universe. Cosmic mind–God–is not conceived of as an omnipotent, supernatural, legalistic ruler of the universe. Cosmic mind is not supernatural but natural.
God acts in the world by compassionate persuasive love, never by coercion.
Individual entities from protons to people experience God through their natural internal relations. This is the nature of the ‘within of things.’ God acts by being ‘felt’ by the individual entities of the creation as they take account of their environment internally. For us humans this is felt as values and purposes.
God is not the sole cause of happenings. God’s causality is always exercised in relation to individual entities that have their own measure of self-determination. So ‘divine purpose’ is a better description than ‘divine design’ which gives the impression of a preordained blueprint— whereas the future is open-ended.
The only adequate human response to God’s persuasive love is infinite passion.
The proposition is that all actual entities experience the divine persuasion and the only appropriate response on our part is with infinite passion. It is the response to divine persuasion that gives order to the societies of individual entities from protons to people. All this ordering leads to novelty in the creative process.
God responds to the world with infinite passion.
God is both cause (in creating the world) and effect (in experiencing the world).
Whereas the God of Aristotle and of classical theism is totally unaffected by what happens in the world, the God of process thought feels with unique adequacy the feelings of all others. Responsiveness and not immutability is the nature of perfection.
‘A love that gives but does not respond to the joys and sufferings of the world is not worthy of being called love at all.’