989. If there is "no way to distinguish . . .

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If there is "no way to distinguish between cases of emergent synthesis, or creativity, which are experiences of some sort (however different from the human) and cases which are just not experiences of any kind" (WP: 163), how can one take this to accrue to the advantage of the psychicalist without begging the question?

That Hartshorne, in fact, begs the question in turning it to the psychicalist's advantage seems clear. For note what he says: "When given, an entity is taken into the unity of one or more experiences, and this unity is a case of 'feeling of feeling,' not a case of the subject's feeling the merely insentient as such" (WP: 163). Thus he says later in the same essay, "experience is never merely of some insentient 'object,' but is always experience of others' experience" (WP: 168). But whether our experience is always and in all cases a feeling of feeling, or a feeling of other's experience, is just the issue: That it is so in some cases—namely, in our experience of our own experiencing—is clear enough. Yet that what is given in experience is taken into the unity of experience does not imply that it itself is experience but only that, whatever it is, it is such that it can be integrated into experience. Of course, this is in no way to imply that our feeling is ever a feeling of "the merely insentient as such," or of "some insentient 'object'." But there is no valid inference from allowing this to the truth of psychicalism.

I see no inconsistency in saying: (1) that dogmatic materialism is evidently false, since, whatever we experience, we definitely do experience, and we experience ourselves as experiencing, and hence as experiencers; (2) that dogmatic dualism is, in addition to having the problems of any dualism, not confirmed or confirmable by experience—there being, as Hartshorne rightly says, no way in experience to distinguish the utterly insentient as such; and (3) that dogmatic psychicalism, while not known to be false, also cannot be known to be true, for the same reason that dogmatic dualism cannot be known to be true, i.e., because there is no way to distinguish cases that are experiences of some sort, however different from the human, from cases that are just not experiences of any kind.

October 1977