It is at this point, when we consider the difference between macroexperiential and microexperiential phenomena, that the notion of emergence begins to recover some respectability in its application to the case of experience. For it seems that we can now embrace the analogy with liquidity after all, whose pedagogic value previously seemed to lie precisely in its inadequacy. For we can take it that human or sea snail experientiality emerges from experientiality that is not of the human or sea snail type, just as the shape-size-mass-charge-etc. phenomenon of liquidity emerges from shape-size-mass-charge-etc. phenomena that do not involve liquidity. Human experience or sea snail experience (if any) is an emergent property of structures of ultimates whose individual experientiality no more resembles human or sea snail experientiality than an electron resembles a molecule, a neuron, a brain, or a human being. Once upon a time there was relatively unorganized matter, with both experiential and non-experiential fundamental features. It organized into increasingly complex forms, both experiential and non-experiential, by many processes including evolution by natural selection. And just as there was spectacular enlargement and fine-tuning of non-experiential forms (the bodies of living things), so too there was spectacular enlargement and fine-tuning of experiential forms.

This is not to advance our detailed understanding in any way. Nor is it to say that we can ever hope to achieve, in the experiential case, the sort of feeling of understanding that we achieve in the liquid case.51 The present proposal is made at a very high level of generality (which is not a virtue); it merely recommends a general framework of thought in which there need be no more sense of a radically unintelligible transition in the case of experientiality than there is in the case of liquidity. It has nothing to offer to scientific test.

One can I think do further work on this general framework, by working on one’s general metaphysics. The object/process/property/state/event cluster of distinctions is unexceptionable in everyday life but it is hopelessly superficial from the point of view of science and metaphysics, and one needs to acquire a vivid sense that this is so. One needs a vivid sense of the respect in which (given the spatio-temporal framework) every object is a process; one needs to abandon the idea that there is any sharp or categorial distinction between an object and its propertiedness. One needs to grasp fully the point that ‘property dualism’, applied to intrinsic, non-relational properties, is strictly incoherent (or just a way of saying that there are two very different kinds of properties) insofar as it purports to be genuinely distinct from substance dualism, because there is nothing more to a thing’s being than its intrinsic, non-relational propertiedness.

We are as inescapably committed to the discursive, subject-predicate form of experience as we are to the spatio-temporal form of experience, but the principal and unmistakable lesson of the endlessness of the debate about the relation between objects and their propertiedness is that discursive thought is not adequate to the nature of reality: we can see that it doesn’t get things right although we can’t help persisting with it. There is in the nature of the case a limited amount that we can do with such insights, for they are, precisely, insights into how our understanding falls short of reality, but their general lesson — that the nature of reality is in fundamental respects beyond discursive grasp — needs always to be borne in mind.

Many takeaways …

One is that our fantasy of the micro is off. It is, in fact, copied from our experience of the macro. The macro bequeaths vague abstracta capable of magical feats; specifically, all the feats performed by “universals” in “logical operations.” Language and its fantasy theater. Blue, for example. Or ball. We conceive of micro-properties as tiny instance-bits of blue, and of substances as tiny balls of homogenous clay. False and false, both of them. The tiny things are dancing from their own interior energy. They are always already self-surpassing. They are striving, and they are alive.

It seems strange that the mere act of picturing things would kill them, but it does. The act of image positing makes from the subject, true; but what is made is intended as dead as possible, for the sake of intelligibility (cf. Parmenides).

Pebbles and clay. Our take on the micro (like all takes) is metaphorical.

Galen’s point here is that we cannot pass judgment on the viability of emergence of (high level) mind of physical (spatiotemporal-energetic) stuff without picturing this stuff accurately. Geometric figures are intended to be maximally dead. We superimpose dead ideal figures over our macro perceptions and they fit. So we think,

Here a circle is instantiated. Here, blue is instantiated. Here, the clay of material nature, tohu wa-bohu, takes-on or participates in the ghostly universal substances of circle and blue.

The separability of properties and substance(s), the lifting away of predicates, as Kant argued, is indistinguishable from the generation of properties. The metaphysical property is itself a reified abstraction from the process of imaginary segregation and then (even more fantastical) actual separation. The property is born, and is entirely imaginary—its content, the method of its determination, its “relation” to objects, its co-fantasy (substance). But we have never encountered a floating property. We cannot imagine a property (a trope is not a property). It is worse than imaginary, it is a determining of imagination from something outside it—something outside our horizon of epistemic access! Anything outside imagination, how can we imagine it?

• Galen’s Gospel: The mind–body problem disappears as our fantasy about the micro becomes increasingly accurate.

We need to see that matter is not rocks, but fire. Otherwise, we’d just be P-zombies. That is, the objective descriptors (position, momentum) would transmute across different physical objective carriers—and it would always be objective. The objective material motion would never reach home and hit consciousness. Unless the soft center of matter itself was experiential.

Is this what Galen is saying?

Galen’s method is actually like ordinary language philosophy!

1. Nothing is more real than experience.

• Nothing is more physical than experience.

The objects of physics (bodies, waves, momenta) are concrete and real—really there in the sense of staking out volumes of space, occupying space with exclusionary-repulsive power, power that is positive of itself and overly positive by being rejective of other (competing) beings(s).

Or …

1. Nothing is more concrete than experience (True. After all, if the real goods of materialism are to be enjoyed, things like solidity and the counterforce or counterpressure of mass that we ultimately schematize as counter-effort is valid, the vehicle that delivers it is even more valid. Again—and we’re getting like Hume now, who was the master of sticking with the Order of Discovery—if physical things exist, then the sensations that deliver them really really exist.)
2. Concreteness is the higher-order essence of “the physical”; the physical is just the way that “the concrete” get schematized in spacetime. Every extension is lawful, and every law operates on extension, or has extension as its domain.

• Consciousness (the most concrete) is physical (the most concrete).

What is missing? Why does this identity statement “occur” like an instance of the mind–body problem? The answer (and Galen is right here too) is poor education. Our imaginations have not adapted the latest best models.