This strange book demonstrates competence and expertise in the several disciplines upon which it draws, including neuroscience, philosophy, and information science.
The author begins by embracing what is surely panpsychism, but with only the briefest mention of that tradition's name. That choice may have been motivated by a desire for a fresh hearing, but it does little to jettison the conceptual baggage which panpsychism has accumulated. At points he seems at pains to disavow the panpsychist tradition as if it always and everywhere required matter to be conscious, like a wakeful human---whereas most panpsychist reasoning is quite prolix about how minimal, rudimentary, and basic must be the form of elemental experience which its authors dare attribute to trees and (even) stones.
Pepperell starts by embracing panpsychism, but with only the briefest mention of that tradition's name. That choice may have been motivated by a desire for a fresh hearing, but it does little to jettison the conceptual baggage which panpsychism has accumulated. The central problem with panpsychism in the context of consciousness studies is one that I have critiqued elsewhere (notably in my review of the 2024 book by Christof Koch, Then I Am Myself the World, which is forthcoming in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association). Simply, one cannot have one's proverbial cake and eat it, too. Theorists of consciousness who wrestle with the Hard Problem---of how matter can produce mind, how brains can be conscious---are motivated to appeal to panpsychist ontology by one reason: it provides a ready-made but partial solution, by declaring that all matter, not only healthy brains, is already somehow mental. If this seems absurd, the remedy is to imagine an ever more basic form of mentality until there remains only the dimmest glimmer of sentience in the bowling ball, or the lump of coal, or the proton, that is your exemplary physical object. Let the proton's level of "mind" be low enough, and you can secure the prize of explanatory power without paying the price of an utterly counterintuitive solution. Brian Eno mocked this sort of thinking in the last verse of his 1974 song, Put A Straw Under Baby: There's a brain in the table, / There's a heart in the chair / And they all live in Jesus, / It's a family affair.
Of course, such mockery is as easy as solving the Hard Problem is difficult. The "psychophysical parallel of experience and energy" at the heart of this book is not what troubles me; it's the insistence that the well-known unsolved problems of panpsychism have been overcome by a distinction between "consciousness" and mere "experience" that seems to me semantic, a distinction without a difference. And if we do develop the difference, say, by citing Damasio's more robust distinction between self-consciousness and core consciousness, well, we can find sophisticated panpsychists who already had such distinctions in their arguments decades ago.
Now, I don't regard panpsychism as a trivial position. It has been held by some brilliant minds in various disciplines and centuries, including Christ Koch, Galen Strawson, and (arguably) Leibniz and Ernst Mach. But it is often called a "slippery slope," and this doesn't only refer to the way one can find oneself widening the scope of "the mental" until it includes quite all material objects---and even all of spacetime, including the empty spots. The slipperiness lies in the way panpsychist thought can seduce us into holding two contradictory ideas at once. On the one hand, we attribute some super-basic degree of mentality to everything, even to stuff we cannot quite respect as in any way experiential, like rocks. But on the other hand, when we go to deal with that deep-seated prejudice, we finesse-away the trouble with a sleight of hand that find us claiming rocks can be "mental," or "subjective," or "experiential," or "inward," or "intrinsic," without being conscious.
Mark Solms, by contrast, is not a panpsychist, and together with Karl Friston he has developed a theory of consciousness called "Felt Uncertainty" (see Solms' superb 2021 book, The Hidden Spring: A Journey to the Source of Consciousness). It begins with the axiom that consciousness is not fundamentally cognitive nor perceptual, but affective: feelings are the basis of all experience. They are always motivated feelings, grounded in every organism's evolved need to behave in ways that will optimize survival. What will help me survive feels good; what will endanger me feels bad, urgently motivating me to change my relationship to the threat until I enjoy the sweet relief of renewed safety. And dangers consist in departures from the normal parameters within which alone I can hope to live and thrive---thermoregulation, for example, is the art of staying not-too-hot and not-too-cold. Temperature, blood pressure, oxygen levels, energy supplies, social connection---whatever the parameter, homeostasis is the name of the game by which we act to remain within the parameters that our survival requires. So Solms is absolutely clear and explicit about the central pillar of his theory: consciousness is feelings, and feelings are conscious by definition. Such a theory has no use for panpsychism, not even for its more subtle flavors, such as pan-proto-psychism, which bets everything on that little Greek root proto, loading it with the implication that a sufficiently thin sliver of mind can slip past the binary distinction between consciousness and its lack.
I have seen this troubling equivocation before, in Koch's 2024 book and elsewhere (such as in the panpsychist text by Clarke that I reviewed in my previous post on this blog). Pepperell's new book does the same business by "distinguishing between unconscious and conscious experience." That way of putting it creates the impression that the two modifiers are not equally modifying the noun "experience," but they are. So we have to ask what could possibly be meant by "unconscious experience." Blindsight comes up, as does the unconscious nature of plenty of brain processes entailed in cognition and perception. But the bulk of Pepperell's handling of the issue takes the form of quotations from original texts in the history of physics where psychological language is employed metaphorically to describe events in the physical world, like collisions in dynamics, or heat transfer in thermodynamics, or the behavior of light in optics. A mass "experiences a force" when acted on gravitationally, et cetera.
When Pepperell is at the task of establishing the reasonableness of panpsychism, he enlists this abundant metaphorical usage of the term "experience" from the history of physics and insists that it should instead be taken literally. That way, Sir Isaac Newton, too, is among the panpsychists (and What Matter Feels includes ample evidence suggesting that Newton was a panpsychist indeed). But when it comes time to enhance the credibility of Pepperell's own theory by "distinguishing between unconscious and conscious experience," we are asked to keep on going with our acceptance that rocks quite literally "experience" collisions, while quietly subtracting precisely the bit that made the word literal instead of metaphoric, namely, consciousness. If I eat the cake, it is gone; if the cake is still there, I have not eaten it.
The main new thing in Pepperell's unusual book is a system of new terms describing what the experience of an inanimate object might be, if panpsychism were true. If we shelve What Matter Feels in the part of the library where Conceptual Art belongs, then the book appears as a creative gesture with ample cleverness and novelty. As a contribution to consciousness studies, it seems to me bizarrely naive about the circularity of its own procedure.
Why? Because the author starts by establishing a "psycho-physical parallelism," where a unit of energy (one joule) corresponds to one unit of experience (one "emp"). Whatever experiments we devise for testing the hypothesis will be the same old physical experiments, this time with new labels that posit, hidden in the billiard balls, experiences that exactly match the observable events of the experiment. We have not actually rendered the inner feelings of a bowling ball "measurable"; we have merely insisted that for every joule of energy beaten into it by a hammer, it experiences a corresponding number of emps of distress at being suddenly pushed out of its previous state of peaceful stasis.
The parallelism defines the physical and the psychological as exact quantitative equivalents, so the measurements of the one are always easily flipped into serving as identical measurements of the other. Dual aspect monism is an ontology, not a piece of empirical methodology, because it says the mental and the material are two aspects of one underlying entity that remains mysterious. Transposing units of measurement from the material side to the mental side does not diminish the mystery of that elusive third thing. Only on pages 92-93 is there a hint of some eventual falsifiability or experimental testing of the book's ideas, whereas this is promised on many pages, quite repeatedly.
Another odd lacuna is the total lack of reference to Arthur Schopenhauer, in a book that continually attributes "Will" to non-biological objects. Further, the author claims that consciousness is the subjective aspect of a process of energy transfer, so that a static system could not be conscious. This implies that a stone only possesses "Will" if it is being actively impinged on by some event, whereas Schopenhauer seems to have regarded the will as an intrinsic property of everything that exists, regardless of circumstances, and without which no entity could exist at all.
Last, I note that Pepperell adopts from Freud, Solms, and others the notion that pleasure is primarily associated with homeostatic equilibrium and its restoration, which Freud sometimes called "nirvana," and Pepperell calls "Repose." But there are also pleasures of arousal and the disequilibrium we call excitement, while repose can sometimes be stagnant and boring.
Pepperell is quite a good writer, and his history of science has real merit in my view. It is stimulating to learn about geniuses like Mach and Faraday--but Schopenhauer is so precisely the needful predecessor here that it was almost painful to search in vain for any mention of him.
It's hard (for me, at least) to see just how any experimentalist could utilize Pepperell's innovate but bizarre set of new quantitative units for the unobservable "experience" of material objects. What Matter Feels is a unique work that succeeds rather smashingly in what I see as an artistic ambition to invent and depict an impossible science of panpsychism. Whether the author believes himself to have made such an artwork, or instead to have constructed such a science indeed---I cannot tell.
I heard of this book because it quotes an original scientific paper by my own father, the physicist Eugene Hecht. But the quotation contains the word "experience," and Pepperell has taken advantage of this to create a misleading impression that my Dad shares his panpsychism---a metaphysical view that Pop would not endorse in a million years (or at least, a few thousand). Endearingly, it turns out that this eloquent British polymath has even gone the length of creating a painting in tribute to my father's insight, and this I appreciate, and respect. Here is the image, with the quotation:
I posted a somewhat crankier draft of this review on Amazon earlier this month, and to his credit, Pepperell reached out to me directly, apparently unperturbed, and invited correspondence. So I set to work, and I've just sent him a 5,000 word essay about his book. With his approval, perhaps I'll post it here.
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