Martin E. Rosenberg | Jazz Improvisation from I to WE: Examining the Emergence of Thought in Materialist Phenomenology and Panpsychism

𝐒𝐮𝐧𝐝𝐚𝐲, 𝐎𝐜𝐭𝐨𝐛𝐞𝐫 𝟐𝟎𝐭𝐡, 𝐚𝐭 𝟏𝟎 𝐚𝐦 𝐏𝐚𝐜𝐢𝐟𝐢𝐜 𝐓𝐢𝐦𝐞

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Jazz Improvisation from I to WE: Examining the Emergence of Thought in Materialist Phenomenology and Panpsychism

Taking the WE Turn associated recently with Yasuo Deguchi of the venerable Kyoto School of Japanese philosophy, as well as Rein Raud's recent Being in Flux as a point of departure, the question emerges as to how do we get from the “I” of the autonomous Western subject to a distributed “WE”, a perspective which has strong underpinnings in Zen Buddhism. Can we begin with WE? Using jazz improvisation as a thought experiment, I suggest how competing philosophies of mind might contribute to this inquiry:

I would like to compare the materialist phenomenology of Manuel DeLanda, with the approaches to panpsychism in the works of David Chalmers, Phillip Goff, Galen Strawson, Hedda Hassel Mørch, and others from the analytic tradition.  Reviewing my work on jazz improvisation will serve to situate the differences and commonalities of these “schools” embracing profoundly different assumptions. To the point, materialist phenomenology and panpsychism both address the problem of emergence: for DeLanda’s account of visual cognition, emergence involves a transformation from material to phenomenal processes involving hierarachies of agents and selves; many panpsychisms require a form of monism by which the phenomenal remains embedded with the material at all levels of existence, leading to an ongoing debate as to how the emergence of consciousness happens, with respect to the “combination problem.” Interestingly, both materialist phenomenology and several panpsychisms propose that these implied hierarchies of self-organization are reversible with respect to causality in the production of consciousness: there are top-down and bottom-up characteristics presented by both “schools. But both these Western approaches assume the the origin of consciousness and thought lie in the individual autonomous subject. What changes if we begin with WE?

Then I would like to open the discussion by asking: what does politics, have to, have to do with it?--with apologies to the late Tina Turner.

READINGS

1.    Deguchi, Yasuo.  Lecture notes from the recent lecture “The WE-Turn,” Tallinn ES Sept. 8, 2024.

2.    Raud, Rein.  2021.  Being in Flux: A Post-Anthropomorphic Ontology of the Self.  Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.

3.    Rosenberg, Martin.  2019. “Jazz as Narrative: Narrating Cognitive Processes Involved in Improvisation.” Narrative Complexity: Cognition, Embodiment, Evolution. Eds. Marina Grishakova, and Maria Poulaki. University of Nebraska Press: 338-364.

4.    ------     2021. “The Gift of Silence: Towards an Anthropology of Jazz Improvisation as

Neuro-Resistance.”  In Play and Democracy: Philosophical Perspectives. Edited By Alice Koubova et al.

5.    DeLanda, Manuel.  2022.  Materialist Phenomenology.  New York: Bloomsbury.

6.    Goff, Philip.  2017.  Consciousness and Fundamental Reality. London: Oxford UP.

7.    Seager, William, ed.  2020.  The Routledge Handbook of Panpsychism. London: Routledge.  Essays by Robert Howell, Philip Goff, Steven Horst, Yujin Nagasawa, Hedda Hassel Morch, Galen Strawson, David Chalmers.