Abstract
A new philosophy of nature is urgently needed. The received ontological view, physicalism, is unable to account for experiential phenomena and in particular for consciousness in all its varieties. We shall outline the concept of experiencing which should figure as a new conceptual primitive in natural philosophy. Experiencing refers to a process which comprises the interaction of an agent with its world through action based on phenomenal experience. This process can be viewed under two different aspects. One regards the subjective aspect of experiencing, the other one regards it in terms of physical objects. The first case illustrates the “what-it-is-likeness” of experiencing, the second illustrates how experiencing gets “objectified” in nature. We furthermore wish to delineate our concept of experiencing from the concept of (meta-cognitive) awareness. Scientific theories that explain how awareness comes about in sufficiently organized brains should respect the distinction between experiencing and awareness. We also sketch how experiencing could be related to theoretical biology in terms of information processing by organisms. Experiencing is non-exclusive; it refers to a primitive and a-personal natural process and not to a property possessed only by humans or other persons.
Highlights
Natural philosophy fell into oblivion in the course of the 20th century, because it appeared that the natural sciences—an outgrowth of natural philosophy which originated in the 17th and 18th century—could in principle account for any natural phenomenon
How best to conceive of such a new philosophical world view? In contrast to mainstream physicalists, we propose that nature is only intelligible in terms of processes which comprise subjective experience and decisions and actions
A novel philosophy of nature should overcome the impasse of our current naturalist world view. This is the inability to account for subjective experience, in particular consciousness in all its forms, as natural property of the world
Summary
Natural philosophy (philosophia naturalis) fell into oblivion in the course of the 20th century, because it appeared that the natural sciences—an outgrowth of natural philosophy which originated in the 17th and 18th century—could in principle account for any natural phenomenon. Any notion of consciousness which is (i) adequate to its phenomenology and (ii) conceives of it as referring to a natural phenomenon should be able to consistently relate a subjective 1st-person and an objective 3rd-person perspective without reducing one to the other. We call this the “consistency requirement” for studying consciousness, and we propose that the resolution of the distinction “subjective-objective” shall be found on a higher, ontological level. Our model bears some formal similarities to established approaches in theoretical biology; the concepts that underlie it are quite different
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