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39 of 39 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Clear, systematic treatment of the mind-body problem., July 18, 1998
By A Customer
This review is from: Unsnarling the World-Knot: Consciousness, Freedom, and the Mind-Body Problem (Hardcover)
We live in a world where common sense often is at odds with contemporary theories about mind, body, spirit, consciousness, and freedom. In addition, there are many who feel that our fragmented ideas about the nature of reality underlie the psychological fragmentation which produces incredible psychic distress in a vast number of psychotherapy clients. Our current conceptual architecture has created a house where the mind, the body, and the spirit each has a separate room without adjoining doors or even widows. Yet our common sense tells us that these are simply different facets of the same reality. What is needed is a new conceptual architecture which can support this deeply felt sense of the unity of reality. Griffin's latest book goes a long ways toward articulating this new conceptual architecture in a manner that is generally clear and persuasive. Citing both empirical research and numerous contemporary and historical philosophers, he offers up a number of compe! lling arguments which aim at resolving once and for all times the paradox of how mind emerges from a seemingly material or physical universe. Drawing from his extensive background in the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead's, Griffin makes it clear any number of times that the process cosmology is able to bring physical dynamics and mental dynamics together into each and every core unit of reality. This is a radical idea which works its way into the reader's consciousness from any number of points of view. For example, most scientific analyses of reality, and the philosophies which build upon them, exclude anything to do with mentality. This means that mental elaborations of direct physical experience are banished from consideration. This, in turn, makes it impossible to clearly understand how mind is in any way connected to the natural world. Whitehead's Process Philosophy, however, understands the physical and the mental as integral aspects of every component of! reality. This alone, if at least tolerated, makes it much ! easier to have an appreciation of how mind can be a part of nature. Secondly, by reversing the emphasis of the above, Griffin shows how mind also can influence the body built by nature. This challenges the complementary assumption of most scientific analyses of reality, namely that mentality either does not exist, or if it does, it is at best an epiphenomenon without efficacy in the real world. Whitehead's perspective is that all of the events which constitute what we call mind have a physical component and therefore are capable of being causally efficacious in the real world, just as all of the so-called physical world has at least a low-grade mental elaboration of the physical experience. Thirdly, Griffin shows how the idea of a presiding mentality of the level of the human mind is foreshadowed for many millions of years in the kind of organization to be found in cells, organelles within those cells, and even down to macromolecules, ordinary molecules, and atoms. Whereve! r there is "behavior [which] seems to require a central agent with an element of spontaneity or self-determination," one has the potential for a presiding event which has emerged in response to the necessity of providing organizational unity and flexibility of response (even if very minute). The human mind, while unique in some very important respects, is not at all discontinuous with the natural world. If there is any significant criticism of this book, it might be that the issues and dynamics of spirituality are not as vigorously developed as the other major themes. The Whiteheadian perspective supports this fully integrated discussion. However, for purposes of this book and its primary audience, a fuller discussion of spirituality could well have been an unnecessary impediment to an already challenging work. Overall, Griffin's arguments are numerous, varied, both complex and direct. Even the most committed materialist or dualist will find something disturbing ! in this work, will encounter some argument or appeal to dat! a which cannot be easily dismissed. For those of us wishing to be systematically persuaded that we live in a single reality that includes atoms, consciousness, and spirit, his systematically developed book is very helpful.
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16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Crazy enough to be true, January 9, 2006
This review is from: Unsnarling the World-Knot: Consciousness, Freedom, and the Mind-Body Problem (Hardcover)
"Untangling the World-knot" systematically explores an approach to the mind-body problem that mainstream scientists and philosophers alike are too scared to touch. The doctrine in question is the idea that, at a fundamental level, all matter may have a mental aspect. Even scholars whose discussion of consciousness leads them to this idea, like Chalmers (in "The Conscious Mind"), allude to it briefly and then hurry on to other matters lest they be taken too seriously.
Griffin reviews the problems with the two traditional approaches to the mind-body problem: dualism and materialism. From his perspective, both of these alternatives make the same error that leads to intractable problems: that is, both theories postulate that matter has no mental aspect. The proposed solution is so conceptually simple as to seem trivial: allow the fundamental material units to carry a mental aspect.
Griffin takes pains to develop a plausible "panexperientialist" model and to distinguish it from "straw man" panpsychist models. For example, his scheme is not just "parallelism" between a mental and a physical aspect of matter. Such parallelism would deny causal efficacy to the mental, if the system's dynamics are completely determined by the physical. Similarly, he revives a crucial distinction (from Leibneiz and Whitehead) between "mere aggregates" and "genuine individuals" to form a model in which "rocks do NOT have feelings," in accord with our intuition. In general, Griffin does a good job of countering the knee-jerk reasons for dismissing panpsychism.
One potential source of confusion in Griffin's argument, however, stems from his non-standard usage of the terms "experience" and "consciousness" in which "consciousness" is a relatively high-level construct, so that the "awareness" of "experience" can be "unconscious." This led at least one reviewer to conclude that Griffin's analysis is useless because the "hard problem" of generating consciousness from unconsious matter (in traditional theories) is simply replaced with another "hard problem" of generating consciousness from "unconscious experience." I don't think this criticism does justice to Griffin's proposal. I think the distinction between the panpsychist theory and the materialistic theory can be recovered, or clarified, by reading "low-level consciousness" for "experience," and "high-level consciousness" for "consciousness" in Griffin's exposition.
Griffin's book is refreshing in its open-mindedness and relative fearlessness. He takes seriously several possibilities that most scientists would not seriously consider, such as human free will and parapsychological effects like telepathy or telekinesis--thus he will probably be dismissed by scientific experts who read him cursorilly. Moreover, to address two problems that do NOT get automatically solved by adopting a panpsychist model (the binding or "combination" problem, and the problem of a causally efficacious free will), Griffin resorts to principles of quantum physics. Quantum physics is another from the short list of the most annoying topics to mainstream scientists studying consciousness. This is probably why Griffin does not emphasize his apparent conclusion (in a footnote!) that a quantum coherent state is the only candidate for a neural substrate of a unified consciousness. (Were he to emphasize the role of quantum physics, he would have to stray far from his main topic of panpsychism, to respond to the list of knee-jerk reasons people dismiss the possibility of macroscopic quantum effects in the brain, which is not his area of expertise. The number one objection, as quantified and published by Tegmark, is that the brain is too hot to sustain a macroscopic quantum coherent state. That calculation assumes the brain is at thermodynamic equilibrium, which it is not. A rigorous model by Frohlich shows how quantum coherence can emerge at high temperatures when (metabolic) energy is pumped through a system--it was not considered by Tegmark. A regular laser-pointer shows that by pumping energy through a system quantum coherence can be achieved at room temperature.)
Readers new to the subject may be put off by his extensive discussion of other authors in the initial chapters, but overall this is an excellent, thoughtful book on the mind-body problem from a non-traditional perspective. Of the many recent books about consciousness, most describe variants of functionalism. If you've read one book about functionalism you've pretty much read them all. Griffin's book is clear treatment of a genuinely different alternative.
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10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Life-changing work in philosophy of mind and ontology, July 20, 2008
Books like this don't come along too often. I've been reading about consciousness and physics for about twenty years as an adult and this work was life-changing for me. This is the case because it presents the most thoughtful, non-paradoxical and commonsensical approach to the "hard problem" of consciousness that I have yet to encounter. It also inspired me to start work on my own book on similar (but broader) topics, with the panexperientialism paradigm as my foundation.
David Chalmers' own wonderful work, The Conscious Mind, first introduced me to the notion of panpsychism. Yet, as another reviewer points out, Chalmers does not focus on this discussion and I am not aware of him having returned to it since.
Griffin's work is, while fairly difficult itself, a great introduction to the staggering works by Alfred North Whitehead, which are generally extremely difficult to read and comprehend. Whitehead famously did not spend much time editing or re-working his own drafts and it shows. While he has a knack for one-liners at times, he was certainly not writing for easy comprehension. Griffin and his colleagues in the "process philosophy" school of thought have done much over the last 80 years to make Whitehead's ideas more accessible.
With Griffin's own body of work growing quite large, I am at a loss to explain why he is not better known. He certainly deserves more recognition and I am very happy to see this new paperback of a book that was heretofore practically impossible to find since its original 1997 publication.
For anyone with a serious interest in the philosophy of mind and ontology (metaphysics), this book is a must-read. And I hope others are inspired enough to put pen to paper and start spreading the panexperientialist worldview because it is a much grander, welcoming and compassionate worldview than the current physicalist/scientistic worldview.
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