Panpsychism

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Illustration of the Neoplatonic concept of the World Soul emanating from The Absolute

In philosophy, panpsychism is the view that consciousness, mind or soul (psyche) is a universal and primordial feature of all things. Panpsychists see themselves as minds in a world of mind.

Panpsychism is one of the oldest philosophical theories, and has been ascribed to philosophers like Thales, Parmenides, Plato, Averroes, Spinoza, Leibniz and William James. Panpsychism can also be seen in ancient philosophies such as Stoicism, Taoism, Vedanta and Mahayana Buddhism. During the 19th century, panpsychism was the default theory in philosophy of mind, but it saw a decline during the middle years of the 20th century with the rise of logical positivism.^[1][2] The recent interest in the hard problem of consciousness has revived interest in panpsychism.^[1]

Etymology

The term "panpsychism" has its origins with the Greek term pan (πᾶν : "all, everything, whole") and psyche (ψυχή: "soul, mind") as the unifying center of the mental life of us humans and other living creatures."^[3] Psyche comes from the Greek word ψύχω (psukhō, "I blow") and can mean life, soul, mind, spirit, heart and 'life-breath'. The use of psyche is controversial due to it being synonymous with soul, a term usually taken to have some sort of supernatural quality; more common terms now found in the literature include mind, mental properties, mental aspect, and experience.

History

Ancient philosophy

Two iwakura — a rock where a kami or spirit is said to reside in the religion of Shinto.

Early forms of panpsychism can be found in pre-modern animistic beliefs in religions such as Shinto, Taoism, Paganism and shamanism. Panpsychist views are also a staple theme in pre-Socratic Greek philosophy.^[1] According to Aristotle, Thales (c. 624 – 545 BCE) the first Greek philosopher, posited a theory which held "that everything is full of gods."^[4] Thales believed that this was demonstrated by magnets. This has been interpreted as a panpsychist doctrine.^[1] Other Greek thinkers that have been associated with Panpsychism include Anaxagoras (who saw the underlying principle or arche as nous or mind), Anaximenes (who saw the arche as pneuma or spirit) and Heraclitus (who said "The thinking faculty is common to all").^[5]

Plato argues for Panpsychism in his Sophist, in which he writes that all things participate in the form of Being and that it must have a psychic aspect of mind and soul (psyche).^[5] In the Philebus and Timaeus, Plato argues for the idea of a world soul or anima mundi. According to Plato:

This world is indeed a living being endowed with a soul and intelligence ... a single visible living entity containing all other living entities, which by their nature are all related.^[6]

Stoicism developed a cosmology which held that the natural world was infused with a divine fiery essence called Pneuma, which was directed by a universal intelligence called Logos. The relationship of the individual Logos of beings with the universal Logos was a central concern of the Roman Stoic Marcus Aurelius. The Metaphysics of Stoicism was based on Hellenistic philosophies such as Neoplatonism and Gnosticism also made use of the Platonic idea of the Anima mundi.

Renaissance

Illustration of the Cosmic order by Robert Fludd, the World Soul is depicted as a woman.

After the closing of Plato's Academy by the Emperor Justinian in 529 CE, Neoplatonism declined. Though there were mediaeval Christian thinkers who ventured what might be called panpsychist ideas (such as John Scotus Eriugena), it was not a dominant strain in Christian thought. In the Italian Renaissance, however, Panpsychism enjoyed something of an intellectual revival, in the thought of figures such as Gerolamo Cardano, Bernardino Telesio, Francesco Patrizi, Giordano Bruno, and Tommaso Campanella. Cardano argued for the view that soul or anima was a fundamental part of the world and Patrizi introduced the actual term "panpsychism" into the philosophical vocabulary. According to Giordano Bruno: "There is nothing that does not possess a soul and that has no vital principle."^[5] Platonist ideas like the anima mundi also resurfaced in the work of esoteric thinkers like Paracelsus, Robert Fludd and Cornelius Agrippa.

Modern philosophy

In the 17th century, two rationalists can be said to be panpsychists, Baruch Spinoza and Gottfried Leibniz.^[1] In Spinoza's monism, the one single infinite and eternal substance is "God, or Nature" (Deus sive Natura) which has the aspects of mind (thought) and matter (extension). Leibniz' view is that there are an infinite number of absolutely simple mental substances called monads which make up the fundamental structure of the universe. The Idealist philosophy of George Berkeley is also a form of pure panpsychism and technically all idealists can be said to be panpsychists by default.^[1]

In the 19th century, Panpsychism was at its zenith. Philosophers like Arthur Schopenhauer, C.S Peirce, Josiah Royce, William James, Eduard von Hartmann, F.C.S. Schiller, Ernst Haeckel and William Kingdon Clifford as well as psychologists like Gustav Fechner, Wilhelm Wundt and Rudolf Hermann Lotze all promoted Panpsychist ideas.^[1]

Arthur Schopenhauer argued for a two-sided view of reality which was both Will and Representation (Vorstellung). According to Schopenhauer: "All ostensible mind can be attributed to matter, but all matter can likewise be attributed to mind".

Josiah Royce, the leading American absolute idealist held that reality was a "world self", a conscious being that comprised everything, though he didn't necessarily attribute mental properties to the smallest constituents of mentalistic "systems". The American Pragmatist philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce espoused a sort of Psycho-physical Monism which the universe as suffused with mind which he associated with spontaneity and freedom. Following Pierce, William James also espoused a form of panpsychism.^[7] In his lecture notes, James wrote:

Our only intelligible notion of an object in itself is that it should be an object for itself, and this lands us in panpsychism and a belief that our physical perceptions are effects on us of 'psychical' realities^[5]

A diagram with neutral monism compared to Cartesian dualism, physicalism and idealism.

In 1893, Paul Carus proposed his own philosophy similar to panpsychism known as 'panbiotism', which he defined as "everything is fraught with life; it contains life; it has the ability to live."^[8]
In the 20th century, the most significant proponent of the Panpsychist view is arguably Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947).^[1] Whitehead's ontology saw the basic nature of the world as made up of events and the process of their creation and extinction. These elementary events (which he called occasions) are in part mental.^[1] According to Whitehead: "we should conceive mental operations as among the factors which make up the constitution of nature."^[5] Bertrand Russell's neutral monist views also tended towards panpsychism.^[5]

The psychologist Carl Jung, who is known for his idea of the collective unconscious, wrote that "psyche and matter are contained in one and the same world, and moreover are in continuous contact with one another", and that it was probable that "psyche and matter are two different aspects of one and the same thing".^[9] The psychologists James Ward and Charles Augustus Strong also endorsed variants of panpsychism.^[10][11][12]

Sewall Wright endorsed a version of panpsychism. He believed that the birth of consciousness was not due to a mysterious property of increasing complexity, but rather an inherent property, therefore implying these properties were in the most elementary particles.^[13]

Contemporary

The panpsychist doctrine has recently been making a comeback in the American philosophy of mind. Prominent defenders include Christian de Quincey, Leopold Stubenberg, David Ray Griffin, and David Skrbina.^[1] In 1990, the physicist David Bohm published a paper named "A New theory of the relationship of mind and matter" promoting a panpsychist theory of consciousness based on Bohm's interpretation of quantum mechanics. Bohm has a number of followers among philosophers of mind both in United States (e.g. Quentin Smith) and internationally (e.g. Paavo Pylkkänen). In the United Kingdom the case for panpsychism has been made in recent decades by Galen Strawson,^[14] Gregg Rosenberg and Timothy Sprigge.

In the philosophy of mind, panpsychism is one possible solution to the so-called hard problem of consciousness.^[15] The doctrine has also been applied in the field of environmental philosophy through the work of Australian philosopher Freya Mathews.^[16] David Chalmers has provided a sympathetic account of it in The Conscious Mind (1996). In addition, neuroscientist Christof Koch has proposed a "scientifically refined version" of panpsychism.^[17]

Arguments for

Non-emergentism

The problems found with emergentism are often cited by panpsychists as grounds to reject physicalism. This argument can be traced back to the Ancient Greek philosopher Parmenides, who argued that ex nihilo nihil fit — nothing comes from nothing and thus the mental cannot arise from the non-mental.

In his 1979 article Panpsychism, Thomas Nagel tied panpsychism to the failure of emergentism to deal with metaphysical relation: "There are no truly emergent properties of complex systems. All properties of complex systems that are not relations between it and something else derive from the properties of its constituents and their effects on each other when so combined."^[1] Thus he denies that mental properties can arise out of complex relationships between physical matter. Opposing Nagel, emergentist philosophers Roberto Mangabeira Unger in The Religion of The Future and Alexander Bard & Jan Söderqvist in Syntheism - Creating God in The Internet Age have argued that the reality of time enables complex systems to have truly emergent (as in irreversible and irreproducible) properties, thereby replacing any need for panpsychism with a chronocentric, strong emergentism.

Evolutionary

The most popular empirically based argument for panpsychism stems from Darwinism and is a form of the non-emergence argument. This argument begins with the assumption that evolution is a process that creates complex systems out of pre-existing properties but yet cannot make "entirely novel" properties.^[1] William Kingdon Clifford argued that:

[...] we cannot suppose that so enormous a jump from one creature to another should have occurred at any point in the process of evolution as the introduction of a fact entirely different and absolutely separate from the physical fact. It is impossible for anybody to point out the particular place in the line of descent where that event can be supposed to have taken place. The only thing that we can come to, if we accept the doctrine of evolution at all, is that even in the very lowest organism, even in the Amoeba which swims about in our own blood, there is something or other, inconceivably simple to us, which is of the same nature with our own consciousness [...]^[18]

Thomas Nagel

In his book titled Mortal Questions, Thomas Nagel defines panpsychism as, "the view that the basic physical constituents of the universe have mental properties,"^[19] effectively claiming the panpsychist thesis to be a type of property dualism. Nagel argues that panpsychism follows from four premises:

(1) "Material composition", or commitment to materialism.

(2) "Non-reductionism", or the view that mental properties cannot be reduced to physical properties.

(3) "Realism" about mental properties.

(4) "Non-emergence", or the view that "there are no truly emergent properties of complex systems".

Nagel notes that new physical properties are discovered through explanatory inference from known physical properties; following a similar process, mental properties would seem to derive from properties of matter not included under the label of "physical properties", and so they must be additional properties of matter. Also, he argues that, "the demand for an account of how mental states necessarily appear in physical organisms cannot be satisfied by the discovery of uniform correlations between mental states and physical brain states."^[20] Furthermore, Nagel argues mental states are real by appealing to the inexplicability of subjective experience, or qualia, by physical means.

Quantum physics

Philosophers such as Alfred North Whitehead have drawn on the indeterminacy observed by quantum physics to defend panpsychism. A similar line of argument has been repeated subsequently by a number of thinkers including the physicist David Bohm, anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff and philosophers such as Quentin Smith, Paavo Pylkkänen, Shan Gao,^[21] and David Chalmers who, in his more recent work, has revisited his formerly negative views concerning quantum-theories of consciousness, and expressed sympathy towards the idea that consciousness be identified with the collapse of the wave-function. The advocates of panpsychist quantum consciousness theories see quantum indeterminacy and informational but non-causal relations between quantum elements as the key to explaining consciousness.^[1] Recent work on this approach has been also undertaken by William Lycan (1996) and Michael Lockwood (1991).

Intrinsic nature

These arguments are based on the idea that everything must have an intrinsic nature. They argue that while the objects studied by physics are described in a dispositional way, these dispositions must be based on some non-dispositional intrinsic attributes, which Whitehead called the "mysterious reality in the background, intrinsically unknowable".^[1] While we have no way of knowing what these intrinsic attributes are like, we can know the intrinsic nature of conscious experience which possesses irreducible and intrinsic characteristics. Arthur Schopenhauer argued that while the world appears to us as representation, there must be 'an object that grounds' representation, which he called the 'inner essence' (das innere Wesen) and 'natural force' (Naturkraft), which lies outside of what our understanding perceives as natural law.^[22]

Philosophers such as Galen Strawson, Roger Penrose (1989), John Searle (1991), Thomas Nagel (1979, 1986, 1999) and Noam Chomsky (1999) have said that a revolutionary change in physics may be needed to solve the problem of consciousness.^[1] Galen Strawson has also called for a revised "realistic physicalism" arguing that "the experiential considered specifically as such — the portion of reality we have to do with when we consider experiences specifically and solely in respect of the experiential character they have for those who have them as they have them — that ‘just is’ physical".^[1]

Arguments against

One criticism of panpsychism is the simple lack of evidence that the physical entities have any mental attributes. John Searle states that panpsychism is an "absurd view" and that thermostats lack "enough structure even to be a remote candidate for consciousness" (Searle, 1997, p. 48).

Physicalists also could^{[original research?]} argue against panpsychism by denying proposition (2) of Nagel's argument. If mental properties are reduced to physical properties of a physical system, then it does not follow that all matter has mental properties: it is in virtue of the structural or functional organization of the physical system that the system can be said to have a mind, not simply that it is made of matter. This is the common Functionalist position. This view allows for certain man-made systems that are properly organized, such as some computers, to be said to have minds. This may cause problems when (4) is taken into account. Also, qualia seem to undermine the reduction of mental properties to brain properties.^{[citation needed]}

Some have argued that the only properties shared by all qualia are that they are not precisely describable, and thus are of indeterminate meaning within any philosophy which relies upon precise definition according to these critics (that is, it tends to presuppose a definition for mentality without describing it in any real detail). The need to define better the terms used within the thesis of panpsychism is recognized by panpsychist David Skrbina,^[23] and he resorts to asserting some sort of hierarchy of mental terms to be used. This is motivation to argue for panexperientialism rather than panpsychism, since only the most fundamental meaning of mind is what is present in all matter, namely, subjective experience.

The panpsychist answers both these challenges in the same way: we already know what qualia are through direct, introspective apprehension; and we likewise know what conscious mentality is by virtue of being conscious. For someone like Alfred North Whitehead, third-person description takes second place to the intimate connection between every entity and every other which is, he says, the very fabric of reality. To take a mere description as having primary reality is to commit the "fallacy of misplaced concreteness".^{[citation needed]}

One response is to separate the phenomenal, non-cognitive aspects of consciousness—particularly qualia, the essence of the hard problem of consciousness—from cognition. Thus panpsychism is transformed into panexperientialism.^{[citation needed]} However, this strategy of division generates problems of its own: what is going on causally in the head of someone who is thinking—cognitively of course—about their qualia?^{[original research?]}

In relation to other metaphysical positions

Panpsychism can be understood as related to a number of other metaphysical positions.

Idealism

Panpsychism agrees with idealism that in a sense everything is mental, but whereas idealism treats most things as mental content or ideas, panpsychism treats them as mind-like, in some sense, and as having their own reality. Also, in contrast to many forms of idealism, it holds that there is for all minds, there is a single, external, spatio-temporal world.

In contrast to "idealism", as this term is often used, panpsychism is not a doctrine of the unreality of the spatio-temporal world perceived through the senses, or its reduction to mere "ideas" in the human or divine mind. The constituents of this world are, for panpsychists, just as real as human minds or as any mind. Indeed, they are minds, though, in large part, of an extremely low, subhuman order. Thus panpsychism is panpsychical realism; realistic both in the sense of admitting the reality of nature, and in the sense of avoiding an exaggerated view of the qualities of its ordinary constituents. "Souls" may be very humble sorts of entities––for example, the soul of a frog––and panpsychists usually suppose that multitudes of units of nature are on a much lower level of psychic life even than that.^[24]

Dualism

Panpsychists and dualists agree that mental properties cannot be reduced to physical properties. The difference is that dualists consider mental and physical properties to be qualitatively different, to belong to different categories with virtually nothing in common (for instance, Descartes' characterisation of matter and mind as "extension" and "thought"), whereas panpsychists view physical properties as lesser quantities of mental properties. For instance, a panpsychist would interpret the ability of a stone to move under an impact to be a highly diminished form of sensitivity, with no element of volition. This distinction also separates dual aspect theory from panpsychism: although dual aspect theorists can agree with panpsychists that everything has some mental properties, they also hold that everything has some physical properties, whereas panpsychists hold that physical properties are (lessened) mental properties.

Neutral monism

There are also varieties of monism that don't presuppose (like materialism and idealism do) that mind and matter are fundamentally separable. An example is neutral monism first introduced by Spinoza and later propounded by William James. Neutral monism is often coupled with dual aspect theory which maintains that mental and physical are two perspectives on a reality that is neither mental nor physical. Panpsychism, on the other hand, holds that the physical is the (attenuated) mental.

Physicalism and materialism

Reductive physicalism, a form of monism, is normally assumed to be incompatible with panpsychism. Materialism, if held to be distinct from physicalism, is compatible with panpsychism insofar as mental properties are attributed to physical matter, which is the only basic substance.

Holism

Panpsychism is related to the more holistic view that the whole Universe is an organism that possesses a mind (cosmic consciousness). It is claimed to be distinct from animism or hylozoism, which hold that all things have a soul or are alive, respectively. Gustav Theodor Fechner claimed in "Nanna" and "Zend-Avesta" that the Earth is a living organism whose parts are the people, the animals and the plants.

Panpsychism, as a view that the universe has "universal consciousness", is shared by some forms of religious thought such as theosophy, pantheism, cosmotheism, non-dualism, new age thought and panentheism. The hundredth monkey effect exemplifies the threshold for this applied cosmic consciousness. The Tiantai Buddhist view is that "when one attains it, all attain it".^[25]

Hylopathism

Hylopathism argues for a similarly universal attribution of sentience to matter. Few writers would advocate a hylopathic materialism, although the idea is not new; it has been formulated as "whatever underlies consciousness in a material sense, i.e., whatever it is about the brain that gives rise to consciousness, must necessarily be present to some degree in any other material thing". A compound state of mind does not consist of compounded psychic atoms. The concept of awareness "being in itself" allows for the idea of self-aware matter. Attempts have been made to conceptualize this primitive level of existence prior to associative learning and memory. In the way that the collection of self-aware matter constitutes a cognitive being, the collection of cognitive beings as a conglomerate entity, reflects panpsychism. Consciousness was not "nascent" but emergent due to a lack of abandon during the evolution of material awareness.^[26]

Similar ideas have been attributed to Australian philosopher David Chalmers, who assumes that consciousness is a fundamental feature of the Universe, what he refers to as the First Datum in the study of the mind. In the practice of non-reductionism this feature may not be attributable to any base monad but instead radically emergent on the level of physical complexity at which it demonstrates itself. Complex elegance is the further development of awareness that is self-aware. This we can call "post-intelligence" where "intelligence" is simple processing. The element of superiority might be that the post-intelligence is proto-experiential. These phenomenal properties are called "the internal aspects of information".^{[26]:162–170}

Emergentism

In philosophy, emergentism is the belief in emergence, particularly as it involves consciousness and the philosophy of mind, and as it contrasts (or not) with reductionism. A property of a system is said to be emergent if it is a new outcome of some other properties of the system and their interaction, while it is itself different from them.^[27] Emergent properties are not identical with, reducible to, or deducible from the other properties. The different ways in which this independence requirement can be satisfied lead to variant types of emergence.

Panexperientialism

Panexperientialism (or "panprotopsychism"), and "panprotoexperientialism" are related concepts. Panexperientialism is associated with the philosophies of Charles Hartshorne and Alfred North Whitehead, although the term itself was invented by David Ray Griffin in order to distinguish the process philosophical view from other varieties of panpsychism.

Whitehead's metaphysics incorporated a scientific worldview similar to Einstein’s theory of relativity into the development of his philosophical system. His process philosophy argues that the fundamental elements of the universe are "occasions of experience," which can together create something as complex as a human being. This experience is not consciousness; there is no mind-body duality under this system, since mind is seen as a particularly developed kind of experience. Whitehead was not a subjective idealist, and while his occasions of experience (or "actual occasions") resemble Leibniz's monads, they are described as constitutively interrelated. He embraced panentheism, with God encompassing all occasions of experience and yet still transcending them. Whitehead believed that these occasions of experience are the smallest element in the universe—even smaller than subatomic particles.

Panprotoexperientialism is a theory found in the works of Gregg Rosenberg. For his part, process philosopher Michel Weber argues for a pancreativism.^[28]

The ecological phenomenology carefully developed in the writings of the American cultural ecologist and philosopher, David Abram, is often (and quite appropriately) described as a form of panexperientialism,^[29][30] as is the "poetic biology" developed by Abram's close associate, the German biologist Andreas Weber.^[31]

In eastern philosophy

In the art of the Japanese rock garden, the artist must be aware of the rocks' "ishigokoro" ('heart', or 'mind')^[32]

According to Graham Parkes: "Most of traditional Chinese, Japanese and Korean philosophy would qualify as panpsychist in nature. For the philosophical schools best known in the west — Neo-confucianism and Japanese Buddhism — the world is a dynamic force field of energies known as qi or bussho (Buddha nature) and classifiable in western terms as psychophysical." ^[32]

East Asian Buddhism

According to D. S. Clarke, panpsychist and panexperientialist aspects can be found in the Huayan and Tiantai (Jpn. Tendai) Buddhist doctrines of Buddha nature, which was often attributed to inanimate objects such as lotus flowers and mountains.^[33] Tiantai patriarch Zhanran argued that "even non-sentient beings have Buddha nature."^[32]

Who, then, is "animate" and who "inanimate"? Within the assembly of the Lotus, all are present without division. In the case of grass, trees and the soil...whether they merely lift their feet or energetically traverse the long path, they will all reach Nirvana.^[32]

The Tiantai school was transmitted to Japan by Saicho, who spoke of the "buddha-nature of trees and rocks".^[32]

According to the 9th-century Shingon Buddhist thinker Kukai, the Dharmakaya is nothing other than the physical universe and natural objects like rocks and stones are included as part of the supreme embodiment of the Buddha.^[32] The Soto Zen master Dogen also argued for the universality of Buddha nature. According to Dogen, "fences, walls, tiles, and pebbles" are also "mind" (心,shin). Dogen also argued that "insentient beings expound the teachings" and that the words of the eternal Buddha "are engraved on trees and on rocks . . . in fields and in villages". This is the message of his "Mountains and Waters Sutra" (Sansui kyô).^[32]

Dzogchen

According to a common misunderstanding, in the Buddhist Dzogchen tradition^{[citation needed]}, particularly Dzogchen Semde or "mind series" the principal text of which is the Kulayarāja Tantra, there is nothing which is non-sentient, i.e. everything is sentient. Moreover, two of the English scholars that opened the discourse of the Bardo literature of the Nyingma Dzogchen tradition, Evans-Wentz & Jung (1954, 2000: p. 10) specifically with their partial translation and commentary of the Bardo Thodol into the English language write of the "One Mind" (Tibetan: sems nyid gcig; Sanskrit: *ekacittatva; *ekacittata; where * denotes a possible Sanskrit back-formation) thus:

The One Mind, as Reality, is the Heart which pulsates for ever, sending forth purified the blood-streams of existence, and taking them back again; the Great Breath, the Inscrutable Brahman, the Eternally Unveiled Mystery of the Mysteries of Antiquity, the Goal of all Pilgrimages, the End of all Existence.^[34]

It should be borne in mind, that Evans-Wentz never studied the Tibetan language and that the lama who did the main translation work for him was of the Gelukpa Sect and is not known to have actually studied or practiced Dzogchen.

According to the translation with commentary, "Self-Liberation Through Seeing with Naked Awareness", by John Myrdhin Reynolds, the phrase, "It is the single nature of mind which encompasses all of Samsara and Nirvana," occurs only once in the text and it refers not to "some sort of Neo-Platonic hypostasis, a universal Nous, of which all individual minds are but fragments or appendages", but to the teaching that, "whether one finds oneself in the state of Samsara or in the state of Nirvana, it is the nature of the mind which reflects with awareness all experiences, no matter what may be their nature." This can be found in Appendix I, on pages 80–81. Reynolds elucidates further with the analogy of a mirror. To say that a single mirror can reflect ugliness or beauty, does not constitute an allegation that all ugliness and beauty is one single mirror.

Adam Smith's Word

The notion that capitalism (which should be called the free market system) is based on glorifying greed is an old canard, and a dangerous one. It is simply the recognition that, if you give people individual liberty ("the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness") they will tend to act in the best interests of themselves and those/what they care about; and given that this is the strongest motivation of all humans possess, the greatest economic good for the greatest number will follow. As Adam Smith is famously quoted, "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we can expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest." And in case you think Smith only meant material acquisition only, he also said, "How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it."

---

Original link:  https://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2013/11/economic-history

Nov 1st 2013

by C.W. | LONDON

ADAM SMITH is known as the father of economics. Most people think of him as the archetypal free-marketeer. But Smith is often misquoted. This post will give a few examples of how people have misinterpreted Smith’s ideas—and show what he really meant. 

Smith sowed the seeds of his own problems. He tended to write pithy soundbites that left his ideas open to distortion. One of his best-known quips:

"It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we can expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest."

Journalists and economists frequently use this quotation. Most people think that Smith was advocating pure egoism. In fact, according to Athol Fitzgibbons, an economic historian, the reader can only understand the quotation within the context of the passage. And deeper analysis shows that Smith was making a subtle point, rather than advocating pure selfishness.

In the "Theory of Moral Sentiments", his second most famous book, Smith discusses the position of philosophers in society. He argues that it would be contradictory and unjust for them just to think about their self-interest. Instead philosophers needed to cultivate a sense of public duty in order to be any good at helping to solve the world’s most pressing problems. But butchers, brewers and bakers did not need such lofty aspirations—unlike philosophers, they could probably do their job well by acting selfishly. So according to Mr Fitzgibbons, when Smith mentions "their own interest", he is arguing that “not all occupations are pursued with the same low motive in mind”. Smith certainly did not intend to suggest that self-interest was the only driving force of human behaviour. 

And other evidence suggests that Smith had a more complex view of human action than most people give him credit for. This quotation appears on the very first page of the "Theory of Moral Sentiments":

How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.

Smith voices similar opinions when he mentions the “invisible hand”. The metaphor is used today for the idea that selfish individuals, operating independently, will bring about the best possible outcome. But this is a misinterpretation of Smith. The phrase "invisible hand" is used only three times (here, here and here) in Smith’s works. And according to Emma Rothschild, an expert on 18th century economic thought, its use was “ironical on each of the three occasions".

So much for selfishness. Smith’s ideas of the division of labour were revolutionary, says Tony Aspromourgos of Sydney University. Smith opens the "Wealth of Nations", his most famous book, with a discussion of a pin factory: 

[T]en persons [...] could make among them upwards of forty-eight thousand pins in a day…But if they had all wrought separately and independently [...] they certainly could not each of them have made twenty, perhaps not one pin in a day.

He reckoned that the “proper division and combination of [...] different operations” was a sure-fire way to business success. 

But Smith did not obsess over economic efficiency, as we have argued in another blog post. In fact, he thought that the division of labour could have negative effects—both for the individual and for society. In a later part of the "Wealth of Nations", Smith reckons that as a result of strict labour specialisation, the worker “has no occasion to exert his understanding or to exercise his invention”, and consequently “becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become”. To combat these risks, say Ms Rothschild and Amartya Sen, Smith advocated an extensive system of public education. It was possible, thought Smith, that “almost the whole body of the people” should be educated—even in the “sublime” principles of science. 

Smith also worried about the divisive effect that economic specialisation would have on human relationships. He wanted state expenditure on “publick diversions” which, he argued, would help to unite people of “rank and fortune” with those of “low condition”. And Smith thought that any civilised society should be able to afford philosophers as well as butchers, brewers and bakers—all of whom contributed to society in different ways—even if some of them were not economically productive. People refer to this as Smith’s “social division of labour”. 

None of this is to argue that Smith was anti-market—or a Marxist, as some have occasionally suggested. But his ideas are not suited to isolated quotation, which generally leads to big distortions in what Smith really wanted to say.

Philosophy of space and time

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Philosophy of space and time is the branch of philosophy concerned with the issues surrounding the ontology, epistemology, and character of space and time. While such ideas have been central to philosophy from its inception, the philosophy of space and time was both an inspiration for and a central aspect of early analytic philosophy. The subject focuses on a number of basic issues, including whether time and space exist independently of the mind, whether they exist independently of one another, what accounts for time's apparently unidirectional flow, whether times other than the present moment exist, and questions about the nature of identity (particularly the nature of identity over time).

Ancient and medieval views

The earliest recorded Western philosophy of time was expounded by the ancient Egyptian thinker Ptahhotep (c. 2650–2600 BC) who said:

Follow your desire as long as you live, and do not perform more than is ordered, do not lessen the time of following desire, for the wasting of time is an abomination to the spirit...

— 11th maxim of Ptahhotep ^[1]

The Vedas, the earliest texts on Indian philosophy and Hindu philosophy, dating back to the late 2nd millennium BC, describe ancient Hindu cosmology, in which the universe goes through repeated cycles of creation, destruction, and rebirth, with each cycle lasting 4,320,000 years.^[2] Ancient Greek philosophers, including Parmenides and Heraclitus, wrote essays on the nature of time.^[3]
Incas regarded space and time as a single concept, named pacha (Quechua: pacha, Aymara: pacha).^[4][5][6]

Plato, in the Timaeus, identified time with the period of motion of the heavenly bodies, and space as that in which things come to be. Aristotle, in Book IV of his Physics, defined time as the number of changes with respect to before and after, and the place of an object as the innermost motionless boundary of that which surrounds it.

In Book 11 of St. Augustine's Confessions, he ruminates on the nature of time, asking, "What then is time? If no one asks me, I know: if I wish to explain it to one that asketh, I know not." He goes on to comment on the difficulty of thinking about time, pointing out the inaccuracy of common speech: "For but few things are there of which we speak properly; of most things we speak improperly, still the things intended are understood." ^[7] But Augustine presented the first philosophical argument for the reality of Creation (against Aristotle) in the context of his discussion of time, saying that knowledge of time depends on the knowledge of the movement of things, and therefore time cannot be where there are no creatures to measure its passing (Confessions Book XI ¶30; City of God Book XI ch.6).

In contrast to ancient Greek philosophers who believed that the universe had an infinite past with no beginning, medieval philosophers and theologians developed the concept of the universe having a finite past with a beginning, now known as Temporal finitism. The Christian philosopher John Philoponus presented early arguments, adopted by later Christian philosophers and theologians of the form "argument from the impossibility of the existence of an actual infinite", which states:^[8]

"An actual infinite cannot exist."

"An infinite temporal regress of events is an actual infinite."

"∴ An infinite temporal regress of events cannot exist."

In the early 11th century, the Muslim physicist Ibn al-Haytham (Alhacen or Alhazen) discussed space perception and its epistemological implications in his Book of Optics (1021), he also rejected Aristotle's definition of topos (Physics IV) by way of geometric demonstrations and defined place as a mathematical spatial extension.^[9] His experimental proof of the intro-mission model of vision led to changes in the understanding of the visual perception of space, contrary to the previous emission theory of vision supported by Euclid and Ptolemy. In "tying the visual perception of space to prior bodily experience, Alhacen unequivocally rejected the intuitiveness of spatial perception and, therefore, the autonomy of vision. Without tangible notions of distance and size for correlation, sight can tell us next to nothing about such things."^[10]

Realism and anti-realism

A traditional realist position in ontology is that time and space have existence apart from the human mind. Idealists, by contrast, deny or doubt the existence of objects independent of the mind. Some anti-realists, whose ontological position is that objects outside the mind do exist, nevertheless doubt the independent existence of time and space.

In 1781, Immanuel Kant published the Critique of Pure Reason, one of the most influential works in the history of the philosophy of space and time. He describes time as an a priori notion that, together with other a priori notions such as space, allows us to comprehend sense experience. Kant denies that either space or time are substance, entities in themselves, or learned by experience; he holds, rather, that both are elements of a systematic framework we use to structure our experience. Spatial measurements are used to quantify how far apart objects are, and temporal measurements are used to quantitatively compare the interval between (or duration of) events. Although space and time are held to be transcendentally ideal in this sense, they are also empirically real—that is, not mere illusions.

Idealist writers, such as J. M. E. McTaggart in The Unreality of Time, have argued that time is an illusion (see also The flow of time, below).

The writers discussed here are for the most part realists in this regard; for instance, Gottfried Leibniz held that his monads existed, at least independently of the mind of the observer.

Absolutism and relationalism

Leibniz and Newton

The great debate between defining notions of space and time as real objects themselves (absolute), or mere orderings upon actual objects (relational), began between physicists Isaac Newton (via his spokesman, Samuel Clarke) and Gottfried Leibniz in the papers of the Leibniz–Clarke correspondence.

Arguing against the absolutist position, Leibniz offers a number of thought experiments with the purpose of showing that there is contradiction in assuming the existence of facts such as absolute location and velocity. These arguments trade heavily on two principles central to his philosophy: the principle of sufficient reason and the identity of indiscernibles. The principle of sufficient reason holds that for every fact, there is a reason that is sufficient to explain what and why it is the way it is and not otherwise. The identity of indiscernibles states that if there is no way of telling two entities apart, then they are one and the same thing.

The example Leibniz uses involves two proposed universes situated in absolute space. The only discernible difference between them is that the latter is positioned five feet to the left of the first. The example is only possible if such a thing as absolute space exists. Such a situation, however, is not possible, according to Leibniz, for if it were, a universe's position in absolute space would have no sufficient reason, as it might very well have been anywhere else. Therefore, it contradicts the principle of sufficient reason, and there could exist two distinct universes that were in all ways indiscernible, thus contradicting the identity of indiscernibles.

Standing out in Clarke's (and Newton's) response to Leibniz's arguments is the bucket argument: Water in a bucket, hung from a rope and set to spin, will start with a flat surface. As the water begins to spin in the bucket, the surface of the water will become concave. If the bucket is stopped, the water will continue to spin, and while the spin continues, the surface will remain concave. The concave surface is apparently not the result of the interaction of the bucket and the water, since the surface is flat when the bucket first starts to spin, it becomes concave as the water starts to spin, and it remains concave as the bucket stops.

In this response, Clarke argues for the necessity of the existence of absolute space to account for phenomena like rotation and acceleration that cannot be accounted for on a purely relationalist account. Clarke argues that since the curvature of the water occurs in the rotating bucket as well as in the stationary bucket containing spinning water, it can only be explained by stating that the water is rotating in relation to the presence of some third thing—absolute space.

Leibniz describes a space that exists only as a relation between objects, and which has no existence apart from the existence of those objects. Motion exists only as a relation between those objects. Newtonian space provided the absolute frame of reference within which objects can have motion. In Newton's system, the frame of reference exists independently of the objects contained within it. These objects can be described as moving in relation to space itself. For many centuries, the evidence of a concave water surface held authority.

Mach

Another important figure in this debate is 19th-century physicist Ernst Mach. While he did not deny the existence of phenomena like that seen in the bucket argument, he still denied the absolutist conclusion by offering a different answer as to what the bucket was rotating in relation to: the fixed stars.

Mach suggested that thought experiments like the bucket argument are problematic. If we were to imagine a universe that only contains a bucket, on Newton's account, this bucket could be set to spin relative to absolute space, and the water it contained would form the characteristic concave surface. But in the absence of anything else in the universe, it would be difficult to confirm that the bucket was indeed spinning. It seems equally possible that the surface of the water in the bucket would remain flat.

Mach argued that, in effect, the water experiment in an otherwise empty universe would remain flat. But if another object were introduced into this universe, perhaps a distant star, there would now be something relative to which the bucket could be seen as rotating. The water inside the bucket could possibly have a slight curve. To account for the curve that we observe, an increase in the number of objects in the universe also increases the curvature in the water. Mach argued that the momentum of an object, whether angular or linear, exists as a result of the sum of the effects of other objects in the universe (Mach's Principle).

Einstein

Albert Einstein proposed that the laws of physics should be based on the principle of relativity. This principle holds that the rules of physics must be the same for all observers, regardless of the frame of reference that is used, and that light propagates at the same speed in all reference frames. This theory was motivated by Maxwell's equations, which show that electromagnetic waves propagate in a vacuum at the speed of light. However, Maxwell's equations give no indication of what this speed is relative to. Prior to Einstein, it was thought that this speed was relative to a fixed medium, called the luminiferous ether. In contrast, the theory of special relativity postulates that light propagates at the speed of light in all inertial frames, and examines the implications of this postulate.

All attempts to measure any speed relative to this ether failed, which can be seen as a confirmation of Einstein's postulate that light propagates at the same speed in all reference frames. Special relativity is a formalization of the principle of relativity that does not contain a privileged inertial frame of reference, such as the luminiferous ether or absolute space, from which Einstein inferred that no such frame exists.

Einstein generalized relativity to frames of reference that were non-inertial. He achieved this by positing the Equivalence Principle, which states that the force felt by an observer in a given gravitational field and that felt by an observer in an accelerating frame of reference are indistinguishable. This led to the conclusion that the mass of an object warps the geometry of the space-time surrounding it, as described in Einstein's field equations.

In classical physics, an inertial reference frame is one in which an object that experiences no forces does not accelerate. In general relativity, an inertial frame of reference is one that is following a geodesic of space-time. An object that moves against a geodesic experiences a force. An object in free fall does not experience a force, because it is following a geodesic. An object standing on the earth, however, will experience a force, as it is being held against the geodesic by the surface of the planet. In light of this, the bucket of water rotating in empty space will experience a force because it rotates with respect to the geodesic. The water will become concave, not because it is rotating with respect to the distant stars, but because it is rotating with respect to the geodesic.

Einstein partially advocates Mach's principle in that distant stars explain inertia because they provide the gravitational field against which acceleration and inertia occur. But contrary to Leibniz's account, this warped space-time is as integral a part of an object as are its other defining characteristics, such as volume and mass. If one holds, contrary to idealist beliefs, that objects exist independently of the mind, it seems that relativistics commits them to also hold that space and temporality have exactly the same type of independent existence.

Conventionalism

The position of conventionalism states that there is no fact of the matter as to the geometry of space and time, but that it is decided by convention. The first proponent of such a view, Henri Poincaré, reacting to the creation of the new non-Euclidean geometry, argued that which geometry applied to a space was decided by convention, since different geometries will describe a set of objects equally well, based on considerations from his sphere-world.

This view was developed and updated to include considerations from relativistic physics by Hans Reichenbach. Reichenbach's conventionalism, applying to space and time, focuses around the idea of coordinative definition.

Coordinative definition has two major features. The first has to do with coordinating units of length with certain physical objects. This is motivated by the fact that we can never directly apprehend length. Instead we must choose some physical object, say the Standard Metre at the Bureau International des Poids et Mesures (International Bureau of Weights and Measures), or the wavelength of cadmium to stand in as our unit of length. The second feature deals with separated objects. Although we can, presumably, directly test the equality of length of two measuring rods when they are next to one another, we can not find out as much for two rods distant from one another. Even supposing that two rods, whenever brought near to one another are seen to be equal in length, we are not justified in stating that they are always equal in length. This impossibility undermines our ability to decide the equality of length of two distant objects. Sameness of length, to the contrary, must be set by definition.

Such a use of coordinative definition is in effect, on Reichenbach's conventionalism, in the General Theory of Relativity where light is assumed, i.e. not discovered, to mark out equal distances in equal times. After this setting of coordinative definition, however, the geometry of spacetime is set.

As in the absolutism/relationalism debate, contemporary philosophy is still in disagreement as to the correctness of the conventionalist doctrine.

Structure of space-time

Building from a mix of insights from the historical debates of absolutism and conventionalism as well as reflecting on the import of the technical apparatus of the General Theory of Relativity, details as to the structure of space-time have made up a large proportion of discussion within the philosophy of space and time, as well as the philosophy of physics. The following is a short list of topics.

Relativity of simultaneity

According to special relativity each point in the universe can have a different set of events that compose its present instant. This has been used in the Rietdijk–Putnam argument to demonstrate that relativity predicts a block universe in which events are fixed in four dimensions.^{[citation needed]}

Invariance vs. covariance

Bringing to bear the lessons of the absolutism/relationalism debate with the powerful mathematical tools invented in the 19th and 20th century, Michael Friedman draws a distinction between invariance upon mathematical transformation and covariance upon transformation.

Invariance, or symmetry, applies to objects, i.e. the symmetry group of a space-time theory designates what features of objects are invariant, or absolute, and which are dynamical, or variable.

Covariance applies to formulations of theories, i.e. the covariance group designates in which range of coordinate systems the laws of physics hold.

This distinction can be illustrated by revisiting Leibniz's thought experiment, in which the universe is shifted over five feet. In this example the position of an object is seen not to be a property of that object, i.e. location is not invariant. Similarly, the covariance group for classical mechanics will be any coordinate systems that are obtained from one another by shifts in position as well as other translations allowed by a Galilean transformation.

In the classical case, the invariance, or symmetry, group and the covariance group coincide, but, interestingly enough, they part ways in relativistic physics. The symmetry group of the general theory of relativity includes all differentiable transformations, i.e., all properties of an object are dynamical, in other words there are no absolute objects. The formulations of the general theory of relativity, unlike those of classical mechanics, do not share a standard, i.e., there is no single formulation paired with transformations. As such the covariance group of the general theory of relativity is just the covariance group of every theory.

Historical frameworks

A further application of the modern mathematical methods, in league with the idea of invariance and covariance groups, is to try to interpret historical views of space and time in modern, mathematical language.

In these translations, a theory of space and time is seen as a manifold paired with vector spaces, the more vector spaces the more facts there are about objects in that theory. The historical development of spacetime theories is generally seen to start from a position where many facts about objects are incorporated in that theory, and as history progresses, more and more structure is removed.

For example, Aristotelian space and time has both absolute position and special places, such as the center of the cosmos, and the circumference. Newtonian space and time has absolute position and is Galilean invariant, but does not have special positions.

Holes

With the general theory of relativity, the traditional debate between absolutism and relationalism has been shifted to whether spacetime is a substance, since the general theory of relativity largely rules out the existence of, e.g., absolute positions. One powerful argument against spacetime substantivalism, offered by John Earman is known as the "hole argument".

This is a technical mathematical argument but can be paraphrased as follows:

Define a function d as the identity function over all elements over the manifold M, excepting a small neighbourhood H belonging to M. Over H d comes to differ from identity by a smooth function.

With use of this function d we can construct two mathematical models, where the second is generated by applying d to proper elements of the first, such that the two models are identical prior to the time t=0, where t is a time function created by a foliation of spacetime, but differ after t=0.

These considerations show that, since substantivalism allows the construction of holes, that the universe must, on that view, be indeterministic. Which, Earman argues, is a case against substantivalism, as the case between determinism or indeterminism should be a question of physics, not of our commitment to substantivalism.

Direction of time

The problem of the direction of time arises directly from two contradictory facts. Firstly, the fundamental physical laws are time-reversal invariant; if a cinematographic film were taken of any process describable by means of the aforementioned laws and then played backwards, it would still portray a physically possible process. Secondly, our experience of time, at the macroscopic level, is not time-reversal invariant.^[11] Glasses can fall and break, but shards of glass cannot reassemble and fly up onto tables. We have memories of the past, and none of the future. We feel we can't change the past but can influence the future.

Causation solution

One solution to this problem takes a metaphysical view, in which the direction of time follows from an asymmetry of causation. We know more about the past because the elements of the past are causes for the effect that is our perception. We feel we can't affect the past and can affect the future because we can't affect the past and can affect the future.

There are two main objections to this view. First is the problem of distinguishing the cause from the effect in a non-arbitrary way. The use of causation in constructing a temporal ordering could easily become circular. The second problem with this view is its explanatory power. While the causation account, if successful, may account for some time-asymmetric phenomena like perception and action, it does not account for many others.

However, asymmetry of causation can be observed in a non-arbitrary way which is not metaphysical in the case of a human hand dropping a cup of water which smashes into fragments on a hard floor, spilling the liquid. In this order, the causes of the resultant pattern of cup fragments and water spill is easily attributable in terms of the trajectory of the cup, irregularities in its structure, angle of its impact on the floor, etc. However, applying the same event in reverse, it is difficult to explain why the various pieces of the cup should fly up into the human hand and reassemble precisely into the shape of a cup, or why the water should position itself entirely within the cup. The causes of the resultant structure and shape of the cup and the encapsulation of the water by the hand within the cup are not easily attributable, as neither hand nor floor can achieve such formations of the cup or water. This asymmetry is perceivable on account of two features: i) the relationship between the agent capacities of the human hand (i.e., what it is and is not capable of and what it is for) and non-animal agency (i.e., what floors are and are not capable of and what they are for) and ii) that the pieces of cup came to possess exactly the nature and number of those of a cup before assembling. In short, such asymmetry is attributable to the relationship between temporal direction on the one hand and the implications of form and functional capacity on the other.

The application of these ideas of form and functional capacity only dictates temporal direction in relation to complex scenarios involving specific, non-metaphysical agency which is not merely dependent on human perception of time. However, this last observation in itself is not sufficient to invalidate the implications of the example for the progressive nature of time in general.

Thermodynamics solution

The second major family of solutions to this problem, and by far the one that has generated the most literature, finds the existence of the direction of time as relating to the nature of thermodynamics.

The answer from classical thermodynamics states that while our basic physical theory is, in fact, time-reversal symmetric, thermodynamics is not. In particular, the second law of thermodynamics states that the net entropy of a closed system never decreases, and this explains why we often see glass breaking, but not coming back together.

But in statistical mechanics things become more complicated. On one hand, statistical mechanics is far superior to classical thermodynamics, in that thermodynamic behavior, such as glass breaking, can be explained by the fundamental laws of physics paired with a statistical postulate. But statistical mechanics, unlike classical thermodynamics, is time-reversal symmetric. The second law of thermodynamics, as it arises in statistical mechanics, merely states that it is overwhelmingly likely that net entropy will increase, but it is not an absolute law.

Current thermodynamic solutions to the problem of the direction of time aim to find some further fact, or feature of the laws of nature to account for this discrepancy.

Laws solution

A third type of solution to the problem of the direction of time, although much less represented, argues that the laws are not time-reversal symmetric. For example, certain processes in quantum mechanics, relating to the weak nuclear force, are not time-reversible, keeping in mind that when dealing with quantum mechanics time-reversibility comprises a more complex definition. But this type of solution is insufficient because 1) the time-asymmetric phenomena in quantum mechanics are too few to account for the uniformity of macroscopic time-asymmetry and 2) it relies on the assumption that quantum mechanics is the final or correct description of physical processes.^{[citation needed]}

One recent proponent of the laws solution is Tim Maudlin who argues that the fundamental laws of physics are laws of temporal evolution (see Maudlin [2007]). However, elsewhere Maudlin argues: "[the] passage of time is an intrinsic asymmetry in the temporal structure of the world... It is the asymmetry that grounds the distinction between sequences that runs from past to future and sequences which run from future to past" [ibid, 2010 edition, p. 108]. Thus it is arguably difficult to assess whether Maudlin is suggesting that the direction of time is a consequence of the laws or is itself primitive.

Flow of time

The problem of the flow of time, as it has been treated in analytic philosophy, owes its beginning to a paper written by J. M. E. McTaggart. In this paper McTaggart proposes two "temporal series". The first series, which means to account for our intuitions about temporal becoming, or the moving Now, is called the A-series. The A-series orders events according to their being in the past, present or future, simpliciter and in comparison to each other. The B-series eliminates all reference to the present, and the associated temporal modalities of past and future, and orders all events by the temporal relations earlier than and later than.

McTaggart, in his paper "The Unreality of Time", argues that time is unreal since a) the A-series is inconsistent and b) the B-series alone cannot account for the nature of time as the A-series describes an essential feature of it.

Building from this framework, two camps of solution have been offered. The first, the A-theorist solution, takes becoming as the central feature of time, and tries to construct the B-series from the A-series by offering an account of how B-facts come to be out of A-facts. The second camp, the B-theorist solution, takes as decisive McTaggart's arguments against the A-series and tries to construct the A-series out of the B-series, for example, by temporal indexicals.

Dualities

Quantum field theory models have shown that it is possible for theories in two different space-time backgrounds, like AdS/CFT or T-duality, to be equivalent.

Presentism and eternalism

According to Presentism, time is an ordering of various realities. At a certain time some things exist and others do not. This is the only reality we can deal with and we cannot for example say that Homer exists because at the present time he does not. An Eternalist, on the other hand, holds that time is a dimension of reality on a par with the three spatial dimensions, and hence that all things—past, present, and future—can be said to be just as real as things in the present. According to this theory, then, Homer really does exist, though we must still use special language when talking about somebody who exists at a distant time—just as we would use special language when talking about something far away (the very words near, far, above, below, and such are directly comparable to phrases such as in the past, a minute ago, and so on).

Endurantism and perdurantism

The positions on the persistence of objects are somewhat similar. An endurantist holds that for an object to persist through time is for it to exist completely at different times (each instance of existence we can regard as somehow separate from previous and future instances, though still numerically identical with them). A perdurantist on the other hand holds that for a thing to exist through time is for it to exist as a continuous reality, and that when we consider the thing as a whole we must consider an aggregate of all its "temporal parts" or instances of existing. Endurantism is seen as the conventional view and flows out of our pre-philosophical ideas (when I talk to somebody I think I am talking to that person as a complete object, and not just a part of a cross-temporal being), but perdurantists have attacked this position. (An example of a perdurantist is David Lewis.) One argument perdurantists use to state the superiority of their view is that perdurantism is able to take account of change in objects.
The relations between these two questions mean that on the whole Presentists are also endurantists and Eternalists are also perdurantists (and vice versa), but this is not a necessary connection and it is possible to claim, for instance, that time's passage indicates a series of ordered realities, but that objects within these realities somehow exist outside of the reality as a whole, even though the realities as wholes are not related. However, such positions are rarely adopted.