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Radical Nature: Rediscovering the Soul of Matter

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As a lover of animals (I run Ireland's newest, state-of-the-art boarding kennels...), I have always believed that animals have consciousness, and I've been amazed at the narrow-mindedness of scientists who want us to believe otherwise. In this book, Christian de Quincey takes those blinkered scientists to task and shows how absurd it is to believe that humans are so special. What I wasn't prepared for was how much further Dr. de Quincey takes us. Using the power of philosophy he lays out a convincing case that "consciousness goes all the way down"--that not only do animals and plants have consciousness or souls, but that all matter does (perhaps even rocks). I've never read a book that has so deeply challenged my view of things. And it's so rewarding to be taken to new levels of understanding. I was also surprised at how easy he makes it to read deep philosophy. Read this book and be prepared to be swept away into regions of your mind you never knew you had. He makes nature come alive. He saysit just right: "Nature has a mind of its own." Bravo!

Radical Nature: Rediscovering The Soul Of Matter by Christian de Quincey (Professor of Philosophy and Consciousness Studies, John F. Kennedy University) is both a scientific and a spiritual treatise that meditates upon the essence of the soul and the spiritual existence of all life forms, including trees, animals, and of course humans. Presenting Professor de Quincy's conviction that consciousness exists down to the level of single-cell animals and beyond, Radical Nature is a intriguing study offering a transcendental viewpoint of living things. Radical Nature is very highly recommended reading for students of philosophy, metaphysics, spirituality, the nature of nature, and how the phenomena of consciousness is present in the physical world around us.

Finally, an explanation of mind-body phenomena that is understandable and applicable to any field of endeavor --physics, psychology, medicine, ecology and beyond. I read this book cover-to-cover and was enthralled start to finish. de Quincey takes on all the great thinkers in the mind-body field, historical and contemporary, and then blends in his careful definitions of terms and unique ideas of sentient matter to formlulate his theory of radical naturalism, which posits that matter is not just "dead stuff" but is ensouled. The result is a blessing for anyone interested in the convergence of mind and body, matter and consciousness, and of the concrete with the spiritual.

This book offers a new and essential foundation stone for my own work in soul-body healing, and I have already recommended it to friends and colleagues in medicine, psychology and philosophy. It is a "must-read" addition to the ongoing literature on consciousness and mind-body phenomena.

Radical Nature: Rediscovering the Soul of Matter is a brilliant attempt by De Quincey to (re)solve many of the most essential and most meaningful enigmas of philosophy via his own unique synthesis of process philosophy. He intelligently and creatively grapples with most of the great (and ultimately the only really worthwhile) ontological and epistemological questions that mankind has pondered since the pre-Socratic philosophers. But of equal importance to the general reader (who usually finds philosophical explanations to be either too complex or too boring) De Quincey perspicuously explains his solutions in an intriguing, comprehensive and comprehensible way. He may actually make philosophy fun again, or should I say for the first time for most people. This compelling book deserves a very wide audience. I eagerly look forward to more creative syntheses from this astute multidisciplinary author.

Christian de Quincey is a philosopher in the original meaning of the word--a "lover of wisdom--and he is not afraid to follow where wisdom leads. In the world revealed by de Quincey's impeccable philosophical eye, the feelings in our bodies are reliable sources of information and higher intelligence is to be found deep within the world around us. If you are interested in the evolution of consciousness and are willing to think outside the box, you'll love this book.

Clarity and depth are two of the most important measures of a book's success. Unfortunately, in most books I have read, these qualities seem to be mutually exclusive. In my experience, the more profound a book is, the denser and more difficult it is to grasp; conversely, the more comprehensible the book, the more superficial.

Christian de Quincey's RADICAL NATURE is a happy exception to the rule. De Quincey probes deeply into the most basic philosophical questions of our time. He explores the relationship between mind and matter, the meaning of consciousness in the natural world, and the need for a new way of thinking and being in these times of fragmentation. In his integrative vision, he surpasses both dualism and monism, both the old-time idealism and the old-time materialism. And de Quincey does all this in a brilliantly lucid and original way. So, on a ten-point scale based on clarity and depth, I give Christian de Quincey's RADICAL NATURE a ten.

This book explorers an old "one substance" view of nature where phenomenal or protophenomenal properties of consciousness are intrinsic properties of fundamental physical entities. This view is usually called panpsychism, panprotopsychism, or panexperientialism.

The author writes well, with passion and against the currently dominant materialist view so the work is polemical.

A drawback of the book is the inadequate discussion of the more recent history of this position. Panpsychism was a popular view in the 19th century and the competing position to an "emergence" view associated with materialism. I find materialistic "emergence" as a nonsense doctrine when it comes to things like the "hard problems" of consciousness, leading either to a denial of the data that needs to be explained (eliminativism), or at best ad hoc and mysterious, and at worst incoherent (epiphenomenalism). Others like Ernst Hackel and William Clifford found it unsatisfactory as an underlying philosophy for Darwinian evolution, preferring the panpsychist alternative instead. In the early twentieth century the debate between panpsychists and materialists was cut short as the supposedly anti-metaphysical philosophy of logical positivism/empiricism became dominant. Later on as positivism fell out of favor, materialism became the fallback position in many sciences. Interestingly, the twentieth century also witnessed the death of classical physics with the advent of quantum theory (QT), and the standard formulation of QT encourages that the microphysical realm is not causally closed, no purely physical criterion will work to close it (physical nondeterminism), and allows consciousness a dynamical role. QT is very compatible with a nonreductive world view! Physicists may reject this interpretation because it is dualistic but this carries little force when there are independent reasons to hold that consciousness maybe fundamental. Ironically, philosophers that reject nonreductivism mostly do so on the grounds that it is incompatible with an outdated and incorrect classical physics, while physicists reject it on inadequate philosophical grounds.

Now, there maybe many forms of panpsychism and they are not all satisfactory. This is another problem with this book, it lacks self-examination by not adequately survey it's own views and their problems. I was at a talk given by the author for the books promo and he seemed to favor a "mind-dust" view of panpsychism. Maybe this is the only version he considers as true panpsychism and it does provide an integrated view of nature but it has a serious problem.

William James in "Principles of Psychology" (1890) raised an objection called the "combination problem" to the "mind-dust" view of panpsychism:

"Take a sentence of a dozen words, and take twelve men and tell to each one word. Then stand the men in a row or jam them in a bunch, and let each think of his word as intently as he will; nowhere will there be a consciousness of the whole sentence ...

Where the elemental units are supposed to be feelings, the case is in no wise altered. Take a hundred of them, shuffle them and pack them as close together as you can (whatever that might mean); still each remains the same feeling it always was, shut in its own skin, windowless, ignorant of what the other feelings are and mean. There would be a hundred-and-first feeling there, if, when a group or series of such feelings were set up, a consciousness belonging to the group as such should emerge. And this 101st feeling would be a totally new fact; the 100 original feelings might, by a curious physical law, be a signal for its creation, when they came together, but they would have no substantial identity with it, nor it with them, and one could never deduce the one from the others, or (in any intelligible sense) say that they evolved it"

To paraphrase David Chalmers, here's another way of stating the combination problem. Our experience is unified, bounded, has different aspects with many having an underlying homogeneity, and appears to have a single subject of experience. One expects that a large distribution of individual microphysical systems, each with their own phenomenal properties would give a disunified, jagged collection of phenomenal spikes. How could this distribution add up to our rich and structured experience? One answer seems to require principles in which phenomenal properties can be composed or constituted from underlying protophenomenal properties. Another answer that tries to avoid the combination problem could be that phenomenal properties are the intrinsic properties of high-level physical dispositions like neural states, and need not be constituted by intrinsic properties of microphysical states. But this seems untenable, if the low-level network is causally closed and the high-level intrinsic properties are not constituted by low-level intrinsic properties, the high-level intrinsic properties will be epiphenomenal all over again. The only way to embrace this position would seem to be in combination with denial of microphysical closure, holding that there are fundamental dispositions above the microphysical level, which have phenomenal properties as their grounds. But such a view would be indistinguishable from dualism.

For a good online review of this position, see the entry "Panpsychism" by William Seager in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

If you love nature, animals, plants, planet and cosmos, you've got to read this book. Yes, it takes you deep into philosophy but the poetry of the language makes it come alive in your hands. You will feel you live in a different world once you immerse yourself in the ideas. The author clearly knows what he is talking about, and you will wonder why so many scientists still think that nature is mindless. I used to wonder why humans have made such a mess of the environment, now I know why. And de Quincy lays it all out step by step about how we can get back on the right track. It's a book about nature. It's a book about consciousness. It's a book that vibrates with spirit and soul. It's a book about the power of stories. As he says, "stories matter, and matter stories." Excellent.

In Radical Nature, Dr. Christian de Quincey leads the reader on a deep inquiry into the nature of reality and matter. He looks at some of the problems of consciousness and how panpsychism addresses some of the most difficult questions that come up in philosophy with eloquence and compelling arguments.

I particularly like this book because it is written in a spirit of inquiry, with respect for the sacred nature of the material world and for the importance of relationships. By that I mean, our relationship to each other, the earth and the cosmos.

I also like the book because it is not simple repetition of pop New Age chatter. Dr. de Quincey is a real philosopher who applies rigor to the position he is presenting without sacrificing his humanity on the altar of the need to be right at all costs, a fault that is not uncommon among academic philosophers. In other words, the book is rigorous, but at the same time it has heart.

Interestingly and happily, this book will appeal to both educated lay people and academic philosophers. While it might be a bit of an intellectual stretch for the average lay person, it is still challenging enough for most discerning audience in the area of philosopy and consciousness. It is also so thought provoking that even someone without a strong background in philosophy will find it difficult to put down.

While I don't necessarily agree with everything that Dr. de Quincey says, I enjoy his approach, he asks the right questions and he presents very likely stories about age old problems. His whole approach communicates his respect for the material world, the reality that is behind it and his genuine enthusiasm for his topic.

The first criteria by which a philosophical work is often judged is its content. Are its arguments firm or assailable? Does it explain what it purports to explain?

I am not an academic philosopher and do not feel qualified to make such judgments here. But they are not the only relevant ones. De Quincey has woven for us not only a philosophy that seeks to reconnect us with the living world, but one of kinship, humanity, embodiment, and humor--and he has done this in clear, readable language.

His aim can be expressed by Steven Rosen's term "epistemotherapy": healing the artificial split between mind and matter, self and world, thought and nature. As De Quincey explains about the story we are told of a soulless world of mindless matter and chance events,

"It is a story that separates psyche from physis, and prevents human consciousness from participating intimately with nature. Our alienation runs deep....The defining problem of our times is a human creation. It flows from a particular worldview we have taken on and is shaped by the dominant story we tell ourselves....We need to tell ourselves a new story, a healing story that replaces split and schism with holism and integration."

In other words, we need to realize that consciousness, normally thought a prerogative of human brains, spreads not only throughout the rest of animal and plant life, but runs all the way down as a dimension of subjectivity--a "within of things," as the scientist-priest Teilhard de Chardin put it. To express this in terms I use when I teach, we need to replace the old Big Machine paradigm with that of the more encompassing Deep Web, a paradigm with roots in prehistory but possibilities for evolving in the present.

An additional value of the book is its overviews of what the applicable philosophical traditions have said about nature, matter, and the mind-body problem.

Several times De Quincey singles out Descartes' philosophical splitting of mind from world as a key event in estranging us from nature. I would push this back through monotheism and Plato to the first Fertile Crescent fences separating domesticated from wild. Doing so would allow us to see Descartes more as a spokesman for a gap opening wide in collective consciousness than as having more of an impact than I suspect he had in his day. Ideas and philosophies certainly matter, especially as our means of conceptual navigation through the world, but they also announce and symbolize shifting currents lurking far below the realm of conscious intellectual history.

De Quincey added an interesting epilogue to discuss Nicholas Humphrey's materialist solution to how subjectivity could evolve in a purely objective universe. What Humphrey has done (it seems to me--but I could be missing something!) is argue convincingly that the higher-order operations of consciousness evolved: for instance, a capacity for storing internal representations of the world. To my mind this argument does not refute the notion that the dimension of interiority was present to start with. We would expect interiority to increase in complexity and utility as organisms and nervous systems evolved to amplify it in the interest of adaptation. Humphrey's argument is analogous to maintaining that the third physical dimension evolved from selection pressures exerted upon the second and first dimensions.

This is the first of De Quincey's books I've read, and I look forward to seeing what he has to say in his other books.