Whitehead and Analytic Philosophy of Mind
Authors: Shields George W. 
Published: December 2022

My purpose in this essay is to provide a critical survey of arguments within recent analytic philosophy regarding the so-called "mind-body problem" with aparticular view toward the relationship between these arguments and the philosophy of A.N. Whitehead (and Charles Hartshorne’s closely related views). In course, I shall argue that Whitehead’s panexperientialist physicalism avoids paradoxes and difficulties of both materialist-physicalism and Cartesian dualism as advocated by a variety of analytic philosophers. However, and I believe that this point is not often sufficiently recognized, analytic philosophy of mind is no monolith, and there are those who have found some form of panexperientialism to be attractive enough to merit serious consideration or even full-fledged acceptance (David Chalmers, Thomas Nagel, Ralph Pred, William Seager, and Galen Strawson among them). A critical discussion of such thinkers should be included in any adequate survey of the relation between process panexperientialism and the analytic tradition. Moreover, the revisionary strain of the analytical tradition which looks to natural science for its construction ofworldviews (Broad, Russell, Bunge, Carnap, Quine, etc.) would move us in the direction of examining arguments concerning Whitehead’s view and contemporary empirical scientific considerations. (For a discussion of the basic nature of analytic philosophy and the descriptive and revisionary approaches contained within it, see my Process and Analysis, 5-9, 12-13, 57; and McHenry.) Here I shall argue that Whiteheadian panexperientialism very naturally accommodates important aspects of quantum theory, including the top-down causation involved in neuroplastic phenomena under a quantum mechanical interpretation of brain processes and in so-called Quantum Zeno Effect. The overall picture which emerges is that Whitehead’s position is (at the very least) a strongly plausible alternative in philosophy of mind. While I must confess that this essay can only represent the merest sketch—indeed an adequate treatment of the richly complex interpretive, comparative, and substantive philosophical issues here requires at the very least a monograph—I nonetheless hope to present a coherent and useful précis of major arguments and comparative conceptual relationships, especially for the reader who may not be readily familiar with this terrain. I thus hope that this essay will serve as a short expository and critical introduction to the interface between process and analytic philosophy of mind, and a presentation of the several theoretical advantages gained by listening to Whitehead’s theory as it connects with concerns of analytic philosophers. I shall proceed by first working though the main outlines of John Searle’s important and widely reaching "The Recent History of Materialism," an essay which exposes critical flaws in a variety of materialist theories in ways which Whiteheadians should find especially fitting and congenial. I shall then examine defenses of dualism and the relation of Whitehead to such defenses, followed by a separate section on Chalmers, Nagel, and Pred. I will then consider a number of important objections to process panexperientialism, including objections arising from the work of Jaegwon Kim and John Searle. I close with a discussion of the mentioned empirical scientific arguments.