Panpsychism and the mind-body problem in contemporary analytic philosophy

ABSTRACT

Not so long ago, the idea that analytic philosophers would be taking panpsychism seriously would have been hard to believe. That is because in its early, logical positivist, stage, the analytic movement earned the reputation of being militantly anti-metaphysical. But analytic philosophy has come a long way since the heyday of logical positivism; and, in fact, the dialectic of recent debates on the mind–body problem among analytic philosophers has pushed many of them in the direction of panpsychism. In this paper, I want to explain how this has come about and take a look at some of the versions of panpsychism that have emerged. This will involve running through a quick history of debates on the mind–body problem since about 1960, focusing on how panpsychism has been proposed as a promising, though not unproblematic, way of breaking an apparent impasse that has emerged between more standard physicalist and dualist theories of mind. Along the way, I will also have occasion to comment on the prospects of panpsychism as a respectable scientific theory and how a number of scientists stand on this.

1. Introduction

Not so long ago, the idea that analytic philosophers would be taking panpsychism seriously would have been, for many people at least, hard to believe. But, in fact, the dialectic of recent debates on the mind–body problem among analytic philosophers have pushed many of them in that direction. In this paper, I want to explain how this has come about and take a look at some of the versions of panpsychism that have resulted, together with their various strengths and weaknesses. This will involve running through a quick history of debates on the mind–body problem since about 1960. So, in Sections 3 and 4, I explain how standard physicalist and dualist solutions to the mind–body problem proposed in the 1960s and through the 1980s resulted in an apparent impasse. As a result, in the 1990s, many philosophers began to seriously consider panpsychism as a way of breaking the impasse. This is explained in Section 5. But, as it turns out, panpsychism runs up against a serious problem of its own—the so-called combination problem—and different ways of trying to get around this have led to different versions of panpsychism, bringing us up to the present time. This is covered in Sections 6 and 7. In Section 8, I say a little about how a major contemporary neuroscientific theory stands on these matters. Concluding remarks come in Section 9. Before embarking on all this, however, some remarks about the relationship between analytic philosophy, metaphysics and science are in order.

2. Analytic philosophy, metaphysics and science

I said that not so long ago many would have found it hard to believe that analytic philosophers would be taking panpsychism seriously. That is because, in its early, logical positivist, stage, the analytic movement earned the reputation of being militantly anti-metaphysical—this on behalf of advocating the view that the only genuine form of knowledge is that that adheres to the scientific method. Metaphysical speculations were dismissed as not just wrong, but cognitively meaningless; so the only theories worth taking seriously were those that in no way transcend the empirical evidence (unless we can view the use of enumerative induction as a modest transcending of empirical evidence). This, it was held, was why science had been so successful, whereas metaphysics had gone around in circles for 2500 years. And what could be more extravagantly metaphysical than the thesis that mind pervades all of nature?

But analytic philosophy has come a long way since the heyday of logical positivism. It is now recognized that the positivists were being far too empirically rigorous in their account of what makes science tick. They were, if you will, trying to be more Catholic than the Pope: more empiricist than the scientists. That is not to say that the scientists themselves have all been of one mind on these matters. There always has been and continues to be debate on the proper method of inference from empirical evidence to theory and the role that extra-empirical factors such as simplicity, elegance and beauty should play in that process.Footnote¹In any case, there have been no lack of scientists and scientifically oriented philosophers who have taken panpsychism seriously. Three are worth mentioning here, as they are often cited by contemporary panpsychists. First, there is William James. James apparently waffled back and forth on whether or not panpsychism could be true, and he is sometimes hard to nail down on this. But the prevailing opinion is that, at the end of the day, he did embrace it.Footnote²Second there is Bertrand Russell.Footnote³Russell is not unfavorably disposed toward panpsychism; and, indeed, some commentators see him as a panpsychist. On the other hand, he characterizes himself as a neutral monist, though without making it clear, or so it seems to me, exactly what that means. Perhaps it’s best to see him as agnostic on this. In any case, he is credited with establishing the conceptual framework within which contemporary panpsychism has been developed. Finally, there is Sir Arthur Eddington, the British astronomer and theoretical physicist (and popular science writer).Footnote⁴Among his many accomplishments was his leadership of the team that, in photographing a total eclipse of the sun, confirmed Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. He independently established the just alluded to Russellian conceptual framework within which contemporary panpsychism has been developed; and, depending on how one reads him, can be seen as either a panpsychist or a panprotopsychist—this latter view to be defined further on.

All these scientists/philosophers lived just prior to, or in the early days of, the analytic movement (or at least they did their most important work in that time frame). Later I will have something to say on how some contemporary scientists stand on this.

So the idea that panpsychism is scientifically unrespectable and is not in keeping with an analytic philosophy mind set is not quite right. Be that as it may, panpsychism pretty much went underground, at least among analytic philosophers, from the early 20th century to the 1990s.Footnote⁵What led to a turnaround on this was a revival of interest in the mind–body problem, starting around 1960. That is not to say that there was no interest in what might loosely be called mind–body issues in the interim. There was a lot done on trying to work out the relationship between physicalist and mentalist language (see note 5). A lot of attention was also paid to the problem of other minds. One thinks here, e.g. of the later works of Wittgenstein and the huge amount of literature generated by his so-called private language argument and related issues.Footnote⁶The mind–body problem, as formulated by Descartes—i.e. whether mind is to be identified with some part of the physical body, presumably the brain, or is non-physicalFootnote⁷—didn’t get much attention. That all changed with the appearance of three articles in the late 1950s that revived interest in that problem.Footnote⁸Since then, this has arguably become the hottest topic in analytic philosophy.

3. The physicalist presumption

Since Descartes’s time, a lot had happened in the world, of course. Most notably, for our purposes, is the coming to fruition of the Scientific Revolution, one upshot of which was that, as it turned out, a (perhaps surprisingly) large number of natural phenomena could be explained in strictly physicalist terms. So, we don’t need an Unmoved Mover and final causes to explain why the planets move, or vital spirits or vital forces to explain the remarkable features of living matter, or a cosmic intelligent designer to explain why living organisms are so well designed.Footnote⁹Indeed, it was more and more beginning to look like the physical world constitutes a causally closed system—i.e. that there are no physical events that have non-physical causes. Or at least that there are no caused physical events for which there are not sufficient physical causes. So it was a natural assumption that this could be extended to the mind as well.

Applying causal closure to the mind means the following: In the causal sequence of events from stimulus to response, it’s all physical events. There is no gap in the sequence of such events that indicates the intervention of any non-physical mental events. Of course, the brain is such a massively complex organ that it’s hard to know for sure that there is no such gap: maybe future research will reveal such a thing. But it’s fair to say that that has not yet happened. That doesn’t quite mean that dualism is wrong; only that two-way interactionistic dualism is wrong. One could still be a dualist if one were willing to adopt epiphenomenalism. For that matter, one could even reconcile the current empirical evidence with two-way interactionistic dualism if one were willing to subscribe to causal overdetermination: There is some physical event or events in the sequence from stimulus to response that has (have) both sufficient physical cause(s) and sufficient non-physical mental cause(s). But that comes across as a pretty egregious violation of Ockham’s razor that most would not want to accept. As for epiphenomenalism, most find that to be a bit too hard to swallow too.

For all these reasons, then, the default assumption, when this renewed interest in the mind–body problem took off, was that some form of physicalism had to be true; and so, initially, a lot of effort was spent on formulating such a theory. A number of such theories were floated: type identity theory (this type of mental state is identical to that type of brain state), computational functionalism (a favorite mantra: the mind is to the brain as software is to hardware) and others. They all came in for various criticisms, but for a while most of them were in-house criticisms:Thisphysicalist theory can’t do justice to cognition, or language use, or sensation, or … but thisotherphysicalist theory can. But occasionally an argument would appear that had a more comprehensive import: There is a kind of mental phenomenon to whichnophysicalist theory can do justice, this mental phenomenon being consciousness. Thus we have what, following David Chalmers, has come to be known as the “hard problem” of consciousness.Footnote¹⁰

4. Anti-physicalist arguments and a dilemma

The article that is most often credited with kicking off the dissent from the physicalist consensus is Thomas Nagel’s memorably titled “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”Footnote¹¹As Nagel sees it, conscious experience has an essentially subjective nature to which physicalism cannot easily do justice. To capture this feature, Nagel adopts the expression “something it is like.”Footnote¹²There is something it is like to have conscious experience, or something it is like to be a conscious being. So there is something it is like to be a human being, or a porpoise, or an octopus or a bat. There isn’t anything it is like to be a rock. To see the problematic (for physicalism) nature of this, Nagel invites us to consider a creature which has a sensory system alien to us. The example he uses is a bat with an echolocation system that allows it to maneuver around in dark environments by emitting screeches and measuring how long it takes for the echoes to come back. We may understand the physics and neurophysiology of how this works, but we still don’t know what it’s like to have the associated experience.Footnote¹³So there is something essentially subjective about echolocation experience, and conscious experience in general, whereas the goal of the physical sciences is objectivity.

After going through all this, Nagel, somewhat curiously, hesitates to embrace an anti-physicalist conclusion. He wants to hold out for the possibility that something of physicalism can be salvaged, or at least he does so in this article. (He later goes on to argue that panpsychism deserves to be taken seriously as well.Footnote¹⁴) Other anti-physicalist arguments, however, have not been so indecisive.

So, there is Frank Jackson’s Knowledge Argument.Footnote¹⁵This argument is based on a thought experiment in which a character, dubbed “Mary,” is, for whatever reason, confined from birth to a black and white environment. But Mary is a brilliant individual who, upon reaching adulthood, becomes a specialist in the physics and neurophysiology of color experience. In fact, she eventually masters the whole field; she learns everything there is to know about this. So there is nothing more to learn; no more Ph.D. dissertations to write: the field is closed. Mary then collects her Nobel Prize (or whatever) and is then released from her black and white environment. The question Jackson now asks us to consider is: Does Mary thereby learn something about color experience she didn’t know before. Jackson hopes that we’ll share his intuitions that she does.Footnote¹⁶But by hypothesis she already knows all the physical facts pertinent to color experience. So the new facts she learns about must be non-physical, and we can conclude that physicalism is wrong. Here’s the argument.

1. Prior to release from her black and white environment, Mary comes to know all the physical facts about color experience.

2. Upon release from her black and white environment, Mary comes to know something about color experience she didn’t know before.

3. Therefore, there are non-physical facts—i.e. physicalism is wrong.

So, as Jackson sees it, we are forced to embrace dualism. This need not be Descartes’s substance dualism, however. In fact, most contemporary dualists favor property dualism: There are certain properties instantiated by complex neurophysiological systems that cannot be captured by a physicalist account. As for the physicalist appeal to causal closure, Jackson spends the bulk of his 1982 article trying to convince us that epiphenomenalism isn’t as unacceptable as it seems—hence, the title.

Another anti-physicalist argument is the conceivability argument, also known as the “zombie argument,” as formulated by David Chalmers.Footnote¹⁷The basic idea here is that, if physicalism is true, then the relation between consciousness and the appropriate physical entity (e.g. such and such brain activities) can’t just be contingent; it must be necessary. And not just causally necessary, but necessary in the strongest possible sense; a sense that makes it inconceivable (to an ideal conceiver) that that physical entity should exist without consciousness. Call this “metaphysical necessity.” Chalmers then introduces the idea of “metaphysical zombies”; creatures which are exact physical duplicates of us humans but lack consciousness. Are such creatures conceivable? Chalmers insists they are. So physicalism must be false. Here’s how the argument goes.

1. If physicalism is true, then metaphysical zombies are metaphysically impossible. (i.e. it is metaphysically necessary that our physical duplicates are conscious).

2. If metaphysical zombies are metaphysically impossible, then they are inconceivable (to an ideal conceiver).

3. Metaphysical zombies are conceivable (to an ideal conceiver).

4. Therefore, physicalism is false.

At this point one might raise the following query: Isn’t metaphysical necessity (and impossibility, etc.) the same as logical necessity (impossibility, etc.)? And isn’t logical necessity (impossibility, etc.) in effect the same as conceptual necessity (impossibility)? Taking this into account, we could simplify the argument.

But, as Chalmers sees it, things aren’t quite this simple. As he sees it, we start off by taking note of (what he calls) an epistemic gap—that there is a gap between the concepts of the physical and consciousness—and go on to establish a metaphysical gap—that consciousness is not identical with, reducible to, supervenient on … (or whatever we decide the right grounding relation is) anything physical. So, both premises 2 and 3 of the foregoing argument are needed. And logical necessity is an epistemic feature (knowablea priori); not a metaphysical one. This somewhat convoluted approach is necessary to take into account possible objections, in particular those based on Saul Kripke’s arguments that there are necessary truths that can only be knowna posteriori(which I won’t go into here).Footnote¹⁸

At any rate, as Chalmers points out, all the anti-physicalist arguments follow this pattern: Starting with an epistemic gap and going on to a metaphysical gap. In the case of Frank Jackson’s knowledge argument, it is a gap between pre-release Mary’s knowledge of the appropriate physics and neuroscience and her post-release knowledge of the nature of color experience to a gap between the reality of the physical and the reality of color experience. And in the case of Joseph Levine’s explanatory gap argument, it is a gap in explanatory lucidity to a gap in reality.

Which brings me to Levine’s explanatory gap argument.Footnote¹⁹The idea is that, starting with the neurophysiology of the brain and how it works, it’s possible to see how we might eventually be able to explain a lot of things: behavior in response to stimulus, intelligence, language use. But it’s hard to see how we could be able to explain the emergence of consciousness. Of course, it’s possible that there is a law of nature according to which, when neurophysiology reaches a certain level of complexity, consciousness just pops up. But this would just be brute fact emergence; not explanation—i.e. not something that follows just from what we know about the neurophysiology alone. For that reason, it wouldn’t really be physicalism, but a form of dualism. So, there is an explanatory gap here which undermines physicalism.

Physicalists have not taken all this lying down. A number of strategies have been adopted to answer these arguments. Some people have been convinced by one or another of these strategies, but quite a few haven’t. So, as these latter see it, a problem has emerged. There are compelling reasons to not be a dualist; namely, the abundant empirical evidence that the physical world constitutes a causally closed system or at least that there are no caused physical events without sufficient physical causes. This means that one can be a dualist only at the price of embracing epiphenomenalism or causal overdetermination. But there are also compelling reasons to not be a physicalist; as witness the foregoing arguments. So, it looks like we are faced with an impasse. This is where panpsychism comes into play.

5. Panpsychism to the rescue

Contemporary panpsychism among analytic philosophers goes hand-in-hand with a view known as Russellian Monism (R.M.), so let me begin by explaining that. R.M. takes as its point of departure a view once put forth by Bertrand Russell about the nature of physical theory.Footnote²⁰Contemporary expositions of this view differ in subtle ways, but glossing over these for now, we can say thisFootnote²¹: According to R.M., physical theory characterizes the entities in its domain (including properties) strictlyextrinsically, in terms of the causal, functional and generally mathematically describable relations in which they stand to each other (and to experience). So, e.g. an electron might be characterized as an entity that sometimes behaves as a particle and sometimes as a wave, that has a certain mass and carries a certain charge whereby it attracts protons and repels other electrons and generates an electro-magnetic field upon moving, that plays a given role in the binding of atoms into molecules, … and so on. All we have here is an account of causal and other relations in which electrons stand to other theoretical entities such as protons, electro-magnetic fields, mass, charge, atoms and molecules—which themselves are understood extrinsically. Nowhere in all this, according to R.M., does physical theory inform us of theintrinsic natureof the entities that are so interrelated. So, one could know everything that physical theory can tell us about a subject domain without knowing the intrinsic nature of anything in that domain. However (so it is argued) they musthaveintrinsic natures.Footnote²²So, there are things about the entities within its domain about which physical theory remains silent. So, it is not inconsistent with physical theory that these entities be irreducibly phenomenal; i.e. that they be states that are irreducibly conscious, albeit in the case of fundamental entities, at a very attenuated level. We would thereby have panpsychism. So, we can say that there is a sense of “physical” such that these entities would be non-physical. Following Emmett Holman, we could call this sense of physical “nm-physical” for fundamentally “non-mental” physical.Footnote²³I.e. an entity is nm-physical if it is either non-mental or is ultimately reducible to (or supervenes on, or is constituted by or  … whatever we decide the right grounding relation is) fundamental entities that are. So, these entities would be non-physical in the sense of being irreducibly phenomenal. This can be contrasted with physical in the sense of falling within the domain of physical theory, which, following Daniel Stoljar, we might call “t-physical.”Footnote²⁴So, an entity can be t-physical without being nm-physical. This allows that the irreducibly phenomenal—hence not physical in the sense of nm-physical—properties of consciousness can have causal powers without violating the causal closure of the physical in the sense of t-physical.

Given this, we don’t have to explain how consciousness emerges from the hugely complex goings-on in the brain. Consciousness doesn’t emerge at all; it’s there in the most fundamental entities right from the start. It’s then a matter of showing that these micro-phenomenal properties (we can call them) can provide the ground for ordinary macro-consciousness, and we’re home free. Among those exploring this approach—with greater or lesser degrees of confidence that it can actually be made to work—are Galen Strawson—its most vigorous, and one might even say militant defenderFootnote²⁵—Philip Goff (a student of Strawson), David Chalmers, Luke Roelofs, Gregg Rosenberg and William Seager. Some significant variations on this theme are explored by (again) Philip Goff, Miri Alhabari and Annaka Harris.Footnote²⁶

This project constitutes what Goff sees as an attempt to develop a “post-Galilean science.” As Goff sees it, the current impasse on the mind–body problem is a result of what he calls “Galileo’s error,”Footnote²⁷which, though an error, does have a good news aspect to it. The good news is that, in insisting that the new, developing science of the time be framed in mathematical terms, Galileo set in motion a process that has led to the spectacular success of science over the past several centuries. The bad news is that, in doing so, he, in effect, left the mind out of the picture. The goal now is to remedy that situation and Goff and others see going the panpsychist route as the way to do so.

But here it should be mentioned that this isn’t the only route being explored. There is a version of R.M. that is not panpsychist but (as it is put) “panprotopsychist.” According to this view, the intrinsic properties of the fundamental entities are not phenomenal, so are in a sense physical; i.e. nm-physical. But they are such that they can ground phenomenal properties at the macro level; hence are protophenomenal. Sam Coleman is the philosopher who is currently doing the most interesting work along these lines.Footnote²⁸This doesn’t quite have the elegance of the panpsychist version, but it does avoid panpsychism’s most difficult problem, to which I now turn.

6. The combination problem

In order to make good on the panpsychist program, we have to make good on the last move mentioned above: Exactly how do we show that micro-consciousness grounds macro-consciousness? There are plenty of macro-objects— rocks, for example, or the chair I’m now sitting in, that are not conscious, even though, according to the micro-panpsychist view, they are composed of a huge number of micro-consciousnesses. And, of course, there are plenty of macro-objects—us humans, chimpanzees, bats and dolphins, for example—that are conscious. Why? What’s the difference? Clearly, we need a “mental chemistry,” as Sam Coleman puts it, to explain why sometimes combining micro-consciousnesses yields a macro-consciousness and sometimes it doesn’t. So, we run up against what has come to be known as the “combination problem.” And there are reasons to think this can’t be solved using routine methods; that we have here another hard problem comparable to Chalmers’s hard problem of consciousness.

Actually, as Chalmers points out, the combination problem is not one problem, but a family of problems.Footnote²⁹Chalmers highlights three in particular. First there is the quality combination problem. Macroconsciousness involves a huge number of macro-qualities across all the sensory modalities as well as emotional experiences: all the various colors, sounds, tastes, moods and so forth. But since the number of fundamental entities is relatively small, this great variety has to be constructed from a meagre supply of micro-qualities. How does this work? Then there is the structure combination problem. The macro-structure of consciousness does not neatly match the macro-physical structure of the brain. The latter is the result of micro-physical structure which, if micro-panpsychism is true, must be matched by—indeed, constituted by—micro-phenomenal structure. Yet the micro-experiences combine to yield the structure we find in macro-consciousness; not the macro-physical structure we find in the brain. How is this so? Finally, there is the subject summing problem. How can a vast number of micro-subjects of conscious experience combine to produce a new, separate subject that somehow incorporates them as components?

While the quality combination and structure combination problems are hardly trivial, there are reasons to think they are manageable. It’s the subject summing problem that seems to be a new hard problem; so, I’ll concentrate on that. This problem is often introduced by citing the following passage from William James:Footnote³⁰

Take a hundred of them [feelings], shuffle them and pack them as close together as you can (whatever that may mean); still each remains the same feeling it always was, shut in its own skin, windowless, ignorant of what the other feelings are and mean. There would be a hundred-and-first-feeling there, if, when a group or series of such feelings were set up, a consciousness belonging to the group as such should emerge. And this 101st feeling would be a totally new fact; the 100 feelings might, by a curious physical law, be a signal for its creation, when they came together; but they would have no substantial identity with it, nor it with them, and one could never deduce the one from the others, nor (in any intelligible sense) say that they evolved it.Footnote³¹

To get the subject summing problem from this passage, one has to do a little tinkering and ignore the overall context. First, the tinkering: replace “feelings” with “subjects.” Second, it turns out that this passage is part of a broader argument on James’s part that there really are no composite objects at all; there are just elementary particles and the idea of composite objects is just a metaphysical fiction. So, there is no combination problem that is unique to subjects. Still, one could reject this more radical thesis and see in the (tinkered with) passage the articulation of a problem thatisunique to subjects; and that’s what philosophers addressing panpsychism nowadays have done.

To capture the seriousness of the problem, Philip Goff offers a modification of David Chalmers’s conceivability argument, cited earlier.Footnote³²Recalling that: For physicalism to be true, there has to be a metaphysically necessary connection between the relevant physical entities and consciousness. But, since metaphysical zombies are conceivable, and such conceivability is linked to the lack of metaphysical necessity, this is not so. If panpsychism is to be an improvement on this, then there must be a metaphysically necessary connection between macro-consciousness and the right collection of micro-consciousnesses. But there isn’t, says Goff, and, to the end of showing this, he introduces the concept of a micro-experiential zombie.

A metaphysical zombie, recall, is a creature that is a physical duplicate of an actual human being. More precisely, to fine tune in light of a distinction recently introduced, it is at-physicalduplicate of an actual human being. So, everything that physical theory reveals about me it also reveals about my metaphysical zombie twin, and vice versa.ButI am conscious whereas my metaphysical zombie twin is not. Now my micro-experiential zombie twin is like my metaphysical zombie twin in being a t-physical duplicate of me. It is also like my metaphysical zombie twin in not being conscious; more specifically, in not instantiating any of the ordinary, macro-conscious states I instantiate. But it differs from my metaphysical zombie twin in one important respect: It is composed of t-physical ultimates, each of which instantiate micro-conscious states. Now the question becomes: Are micro-experiential zombies metaphysically possible? Goff argues that they are. Following the pattern of David Chalmers’s conceivability argument, he argues that they are conceivable, hence metaphysically possible. But then panpsychism no better explains ordinary macro-consciousness than does physicalism, so nothing has been gained by taking the panpsychist route. Of course, a new macro-subject might emerge from the microsubjects as brute fact. As James puts it: “the 100 feelings [i.e. subjects] might, by a curious physical law, be a signal for its [the 101st feeling’s/subject’s] creation when they came together.” But this would just be brute fact emergence, one that involved an explanatory gap. So, the microconscious subjects don’t explain the presence of the macro-subject any better than does physicalism. Furthermore, we can now ask if the radically emergent macro-consciousness has any causal role to play. If it does, then the causal closure of the physical—meaning the t-physical – has been violated. If not, then we have a strange kind of epiphenomenalism: The micro-conscious subjects are causally efficacious but the macro-conscious subject isn’t.

7. Strategies for solving the combination problem

As mentioned earlier, there is a panprotopsychist version of R.M. which avoids the subject summing problem, since it doesn’t take the fundamental entities to be conscious subjects. Of course, it then is faced with the problem of showing how macro-consciousness emerges from the proto-phenomenal properties. Sam Coleman’s account of all this is certainly worth looking at, but that goes beyond the scope of this paper, so I won’t pursue it here.

A number of panpsychist strategies for solving the subject summing problem are under consideration, some of them going off into pretty speculative heights. Space does not permit a close look at all of them. So let me mainly focus on the evolution of Philip Goff’s thinking on this. That should give us some sense of how these things go. I will then follow up with brief accounts of other strategies.

After presenting his micro-experiential zombie argument, Goff argues (in a subsequent work) that to see how micro-subjects might combine to produce macro-subjects, we need to take into account not just theexistenceof the micro-subjects, but any relations in which they stand to each other.Footnote³³This allows that there may be a relation—which he calls “phenomenal bonding”—that serves to do exactly what is needed—namely, to combine micro-subjects into macro-subjects in an explanatory non-gappy way. Compare: In order to see how hydrogen and oxygen—both gases—can combine to form water—a liquid—we need to take into account not just the existence of hydrogen and oxygen, but the chemical and physical bonding relations in which they stand to each other. It is the failure to do this, in the case of the micro-subjects, that creates the impression that micro-experiential zombies are possible. If we could take phenomenal bonding into account, we would see that such zombies aren’t possible.

But there’s the rub, says Goff:Ifwe could take it into account, because Goff offers reasons to think that we can’t, and, in fact, that it is beyond the capacity of our cognitive faculties to do so. But now this runs the risk of becoming avirtus dormativa. The phenomenal bonding relation is only understood as that relation whereby micro-subjects can combine to form macro-subjects. Beyond that we have no conception of what it is or knowledge that it exists. And, as Goff himself points out, the mainstream physicalist could make a similar move. S/he could postulate an inscrutable (to us) physical-to-phenomenal bonding relation that explains how complex neurophysiology—here understood nm-physically—can produce consciousness.

In fact, though Goff doesn’t point this out, one mainstream physicalist has proposed something like this. In the 1980s and 1990s, Colin McGinn argued that (mainstream) physicalism has to be true, but that our cognitive capacities are not up to seeinghowit is true.Footnote³⁴We are, as he puts it, “cognitively closed” to that. His view has come to be known as “mysterianism.” We could also call it a form of noumenalism, a term Goff sometimes uses. So, is there any reason to prefer Goff’s noumenalism/mysterianism to McGinn’s? Goff is not oblivious to this question and, after a back-and-forth discussion on this, acknowledges that it is a judgment call.

Subsequently, however, he has a bit more to say on what this phenomenal bonding relation might be and winds up with a less indecisive conclusion.Footnote³⁵He proposes that the phenomenal bonding relation amount to the micro-subjects standing in the right spatial relations to one another.Footnote³⁶This isn’t as vacuous as it may seem. As Goff sees it, there are reasons to think that the full nature of space is opaque to us anyway. Witness what we learn from the General Theory of Relativity: That space can be curved by massive objects. So there seems to be something substantive about space. It’s not “just empty space” as the saying goes. So, the idea that it might provide the wherewithal for the kind of phenomenal bonding that is needed, while speculative, is not completely without rational motivation. For this reason, Goff now takes the position that panpsychism enjoys an advantage over physicalism, whether of the mainstream or panprotopsychist variety.

It also, he thinks, enjoys an advantage over another move he thinks (still in the same book) the panpsychist can make. The panpsychist could hold that consciousness is an aspect of a broader property he calls “consciousness+,” some aspects of which are inscrutable to us. Were it not inscrutable, the combination of micro-subjects into macro-subjects would not be such a problem. This is not as good a solution as the spatial relations solution, says Goff, since we have reason to believe the full nature of space is opaque to us anyway; reasons apart from the combination problem. But it’s preferable to physicalism, of any variety, including, one assumes Goff would say, McGinn’s mysterianism/noumenalism. This is because, or so he holds, the mysterianism/noumenalism involved in the former is less stark than that involved in the latter.

Thus goes Goff’s judgment on all this. Not uncontroversial to be sure. And it is worth noting that, however one stands on this, all the answers commit us to some level of noumenalism—about phenomenal bonding/spatial relations or consciousness+. Maybe this is unavoidable in any case, but for another reason Goff moves on (though still in the same book).

The other reason is that he thinks there are compelling reasons to embrace what he calls “Direct Phenomenal Transparency.” Without going into all the relevant complex details of this, we can capture this as saying that phenomenal concepts are transparent, where phenomenal concepts are the concepts we use to refer to and think about conscious states when viewed from a first-person perspective. To say they are transparent is to say that they reveal the full nature of the conscious states they refer to. I won’t try to go into all the intellectual hoops Goff jumps through to show this, but I assume it has someprima facieplausibility. This means that if I, as a subject of experience, were composed of micro-subjects, phenomenal concepts would reveal this. But they don’t, so it seems panpsychism is wrong.Footnote³⁷

But not quite. What it shows is that which Goff calls “constitutive micropsychism” is wrong. But we don’t have to give up on panpsychism quite yet, because there is another form that is not vulnerable to this criticism.

So far, we have been assuming that the most fundamental entities are the smallest—what Sam Coleman calls “smallism.”Footnote³⁸So, ordinary macro-entities break down to the smallest micro-entities, and the features of the former can be explained in terms of the features of the latter in a non-gappy way. This is where the kind of panpsychism we’ve been looking at—constitutive micropsychism—gets into trouble. But some propose that there is another way of looking at things. In some cases, it makes sense to think of the whole as the more fundamental entity and its parts as “aspects” whose instantiations are dependent on the existence of the whole. Jonathan Schaffer, who is often cited by panpsychists, calls this “priority monism.”Footnote³⁹So, e.g. consider the substance–property relation in some object. We can’t really think of this as bringing substance and properties together and “connecting” them somehow. The substance and its properties can’t be instantiated apart from each other. Better, so it is said, to think of substance-having-property (the rose being red, the rock being hard) as being a fundamental whole with the substance and its properties being “aspects” of this whole. Similarly, any given color has hue, saturation and brightness. But it’s not as if those three things can be instantiated independently of each other and are then pasted together (somehow) to produce the colors they characterize. Better to think of the color as a fundamental whole in which the hue, saturation and brightness are grounded, or by which they are subsumed; the latter being aspects of the former. How about the whole of space and regions of space? Should we think of the former as consisting of the latter put together, as a brick wall consists of individual bricks put together? Maybe, but this is admittedly a strange way of looking at it. Maybe it’s better to think of the whole of space as the more fundamental, with the regions of space being aspects of the whole and thereby being subsumed by it.

So, we have these cases where, so it can be plausibly argued, the whole takes priority over (what loosely could be called) the parts, and so could thereby be seen as more fundamental. The move now is to take the whole universe as the most fundamental entity; and, in keeping with panpsychism, take its intrinsic nature to be consciousness. We thereby have a form of panpsychism known as “cosmopsychism”—as opposed to constitutive micropsychism—according to which there is one cosmic consciousness, and so one cosmic subject of consciousness that subsumes all the others. And so, we have finessed the subject summing problem.

Goff, who (among others)Footnote⁴⁰makes this move, insists that cosmopsychism is not the same thing as pantheism. Cosmopsychism only holds that the intrinsic nature of the universe is consciousness. This consciousness need not be accompanied or guided by intelligence. As he puts it, it may be “a complete mess.”

So, the subject summing problem has been finessed. But it’s not time to celebrate yet, because we are now faced with its flip side: the decombination problem. Given the self-enclosed nature of a subject (after all, that’s what subjectivity means), it’s hard to see, on the face of it, how we ordinary consciousnesses (“o-consciousnesses” as he puts it) could be aspects of a larger subject. Goff thinks this concern can be answered, but, as before, to do so we must go a noumenalist route. So, he proposes that consciousness is an aspect of a more all-embracing property, consciousness+, whose full nature is inscrutable to us. Were it not so inscrutable, we would see how o-consciousness could be an aspect of a cosmic consciousness+. Indeed, it would be inconceivable that it should be otherwise. And, as before, Goff thinks there are independent reasons for thinking that something like this must be so anyway. At least there are, if we assume that consciousness has causal powers. Such an assumption certainly seems to be the right one, and yet epiphenomenalism is conceivable. This shows, says Goff, that we have an incomplete understanding of a larger property of which consciousness is just a partial aspect. If we had a complete understanding of this larger property—consciousness+—epiphenomenalism would not be conceivable. This argument assumes, of course, that a Humean account of causal powers is not true. But Goff offers reasons for thinking that. He instead subscribes to what he calls a “power realist” view; according to which the causal powers of a property are intrinsic to it in such a way that a full understanding of the nature of that property reveals its causal powers.

Thus, Philip Goff’s journey through the pros and cons of panpsychism. As we see, it involves a good deal of metaphysical speculation and hypothesizing—informed metaphysical speculation and hypothesizing to be sure, but metaphysical speculation and hypothesizing nonetheless. So, the question remains whether this constitutes a clear advantage over a physicalist view, probably a McGinn-style mysterianism/noumenalism. Goff offers reasons to think that it does; but, as before, this seems to be a judgment call. In any case, we see that panpsychism, which at first glance seemed to offer an elegant solution to the mind–body problem, has its own hard problem.

It’s worth mentioning a few other approaches to dealing with this. William Seager has floated the idea of “diachronic fusion,” this being the idea that subjects can radically fuse in such a way as to create a new subject that does not contain the original subjects as components.Footnote⁴¹Rather, the original subjects, upon fusion, cease to exist. This may seem to be the kind of brute emergence that creates an explanatory gap and undermines the causal closure of the t-physical (or leads to epiphenomenalism), but Seager argues that it isn’t. Rather, he argues, it represents a third alternative between such radical emergence and the more conservative, constitutive model whereby a complex entity’s causal powers are derived from the causal powers of its components. In fact, Seager’s inspiration for this comes from some ideas in contemporary theoretical physics. First, there is what is called the “no hair” thesis about black holes, according to which we shouldn’t think of a black hole as composed of the matter that collapsed into it, but as, in a sense, a new, fundamental particle. So, the causal powers of the black hole don’t (on this thesis) derive from its components, since it has no components. Still, we don’t have here a brute, unintelligible emergence of the new causal powers, since the emergence of these powers can be derived from the relevant theory. Also, in quantum physics, quantum entanglement seems to create a whole new system which isn’t just the adding up of the parts. These are offered up just as analogies, of course; but Seager considers the possibility that subject combination may take something like that form.Footnote⁴²

The views looked at so far all make a tacit assumption: That consciousness requires a subject. This is an assumption that Miri Albahari, drawing from the Advaita Hindu tradition, questions.Footnote⁴³Rather, she proposes, following that tradition, that a cosmic subjectless consciousness is the one fundamental entity and hence constitutes the ground of all reality. So, we have a kind of cosmopsychism without a cosmic subject. Thus, the decombination problem has been finessed. And, of course, since ordinary macro-subjects, as well as micro-subjects, don’t act as fundamental building blocks of reality, the combination problem has been finessed as well. The task now is to show how this pure, subjectless consciousness can be the ground of all else. How do we get the everyday macro-subjects we are all familiar with, as well as the physical world—as it appears to us in experience, to be sure, but also as manifesting the causal and mathematical relations described by the physical sciences—from pure, subjectless consciousness as a ground? Albahari undertakes to show how this might work, arguing that it encounters fewer problems than micro-psychism (with its combination problem), a cosmopsychism that assumes a cosmic subject (with its decombination problem) not to mention traditional dualisms and physicalisms (with all their well-known problems). (Annaka Harris has recently proposed a view similar to this.Footnote⁴⁴)

There are other approaches to this problem,Footnote⁴⁵but I trust enough has been said to give people a sense of how things stand.

8. Back to analytic philosophy, metaphysics and science

And how things stand is this: What started out as a seemingly simple and elegant (though highly counter-intuitive) solution to the mind–body problem has evolved into something that is anything but. The metaphysical extravagancies—speculations about mysterianist/noumenalist features, appeals to extra-empirical criteria such as simplicity and elegance and judgment calls about which theories best incorporate those—have, it seems, gone overboard. One is tempted to dismiss this as the proverbial ivory tower philosophizing that has no grounding in legitimate science or reality. Indeed,Iam tempted to do so. But this is just my inner logical positivist intruding into the discussion; and, as indicated earlier, the logical positivist program failed. So, now it becomes a judgment call what extra-empirical extravagances become too extravagant. As indicated in Section 2, this is a matter over which the scientists themselves do not always agree. And, as also indicated in Section 2, scientific scruples have not prevented scientists and scientifically oriented philosophers from taking panpsychism seriously. I cited three such scientists/philosophers living just prior to or in the early days of the analytic movement. Let me now say a little something about how things currently stand in that regard.

Perhaps the hottest topic in neuroscience nowadays is Giulio Tononi’s Integrated Information Theory (I.I.T.). This is a theory that proposes a mathematically precise and scientifically testable account of the presence of consciousness in terms of integrated information. The idea is that regions of what the theory defines as maximal integration of information in the brain can be seen as what are called “neural correlates of consciousness.” But since what’s important here is the maximal integration of information, not being in the brain, this has generated some interesting discussion over the possibility that I.I.T. may fruitfully go hand-in-hand with panpsychism. This seems especially promising, since I.I.T. takes as its starting point essential characteristics of the phenomenology of consciousness and then tries to pinpoint the kinds of physical (t-physical) entities that could plausibly be signs of the instantiation of such characteristics. So, unlike traditional physicalism, it takes the first-person perspective seriously. So, these regions of maximal integration of information can be seen not just as correlates of consciousness but also as subjects of consciousness.

Thus, I.I.T. does seem to be a promising match with panpsychism. And, in fact, Christoph Koch, a sometime collaborator with Tononi, endorses panpsychism.Footnote⁴⁶And, in Tononi and Koch, the authors offer some thoughts on how two separate subjects of consciousness might combine to form a single subject of consciousness in an explanatorily non-gappy way.Footnote⁴⁷It is true that in that article and one of Tononi’s other articles, the author(s) disavow what they call panpsychism;Footnote⁴⁸but it’s clear that what they have in mind in such disavowal is a crude panpsychism according to which everything, including rocks and the chair I’m now sitting in, are conscious. This leaves open that the more sophisticated version of panpsychism which emerges from its wedding with R.M. may indeed fruitfully go hand-in-hand with I.I.T. But some see problems here. The philosopher Hedda Hassel Mørch has argued, that, as it stands, I.I.T. cannot in fact consistently match up with R.M. versions of panpsychism; but she does go on to propose some modifications to I.I.T. that may bring them in line.Footnote⁴⁹(See also Blackmon.Footnote⁵⁰)

9. Conclusion

Thus, we have the reason why panpsychism is being taken seriously by analytic philosophers these days. Thus, also do we see a representative sample of the forms that such panpsychism has taken and the problems encountered in finding a form that can fulfill the panpsychist promise. And, actually, all this can be seen as the latest chapter of a long story—namely, the symbiotic relationship that has existed between science and philosophy, arguably going all the way back to ancient Greece. Indeed, as I have indicated, it’s not just philosophers who have argued about the right balance between the straight and narrow empirical path and metaphysical speculation. Scientists have argued—and are arguing—about that too. So, in that sense, the current interest in panpsychism represents nothing new under the philosophical or scientific sun. Given that, maybe it shouldn’t be so surprising, after all, that some analytic philosophers, evenquaphilosophical standard bearers of the scientific method, should be considering the merits of panpsychism.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Emmett L. Holman

Emmett L. Holmanis an associate professor emeritus at George Mason Univeristy, Virginia, U.S.A. He has written numerous articles on epistemology, the mind–body problem and the ontology of the secondary qualities.

Notes

1 For some recent complaints coming from someone within the scientific community about physicists straying too far from the empirical straight and narrow path, see Hossenfelder,Lost in Math; Hossenfelder, “Physics Isn’t Pretty”. For an interesting historical case study of a debate on this issue, see Lindley,Boltzman’s Atom.

2 James, “Novelty and Causation”, inA Pluralistic Universe.

3 Russell,The Analysis of Matter.

4 Eddington,The Nature of the Physical World.

5 But what about that branch of positivism known as linguistic phenomenalism? That seems to be a form of panpsychism; and, in fact, Meixner, in “Idealism and Panpsychism” has argued that it is, presumably because it took sense data to be the foundations of both knowledge and language, with references to the physical being just a linguistic shorthand with no ontological significance. Perhaps Meixner is right, but that is not how the linguistic phenomenalists saw themselves. Their claim was that they were just analyzing language and eschewing all metaphysics, panpsychist metaphysics included. See Schlick, “Positivism and Realism”, for an especially vigorous articulation of this claim. So, even if, in retrospect, we want to say that linguistic phenomenalism is a form of panpsychism, at the time it wasn’t being presented or debated as such. Also, it might be mentioned that panpsychist ideas were floated by some non-analytic philosophers during this time. One thinks here of Alfred North Whitehead’s writings. But, whether fairly or not, none of this got much traction.

6 Wittgenstein,Philosophical Investigations,

7 Descartes,Meditations on First Philosophy.

8 Place, “Is Consciousness a Brain Process?”; Feigl, “The ‘Mental’ and the ‘Physical’”; Smart, “Sensations and Brain Processes”. The Feigl article is especially interesting for our purposes, since he embraces the earlier alluded-to Russellian conceptual framework for contemporary panpsychism. Feigl himself embraces panprotopsychism rather than panpsychism, however.

9 This quick run through of these examples admittedly glosses over the question as to what exactly counts as physical. I will address that question further on.

10 Chalmers,The Conscious Mind; Chalmers, “Facing up to the Problem of Consciousness”.

11 Nagel, “What Is It Like to be a Bat?”. Some credit should also be given to Saul Kripke’s 1970 lectures. See Kripke,Naming and Necessity.

12 Nagel is often credited with coining the expression, but it was actually earlier used by Farrell, “Experience”. Also, a referee has alerted me to the fact that T.L.S. Sprigge makes use of that expression in “Final Causes”.

13 Actually, it is now known that blind humans can do this at a very attenuated level, often without knowing it. So this isn’t really alien to us after all.

14 Nagel, “Panpsychism”.

15 Jackson, “Epiphenomenal Qualia”; Jackson, “What Mary Didn’t Know”.

16 Jackson later reversed himself on this—much to the shock of the philosophical community—for reasons that, to me at least, were never very clear. See Jackson,Mind, Method and Conditionals.

17 Chalmers,The Conscious Mind.

18 Kripke,Naming and Necessity.

19 Levine, “Materialism and Qualia”.

20 Russell,The Analysis of Matter.As mentioned in note 8, Herbert Feigl was an advocate of R.M. and he was apparently influenced by Moritz Schlick (a contemporary of Russell’s who developed ideas similar to his) on this. I also mentioned earlier that Sir Arthur Eddington came up with this conception of physical theory. See also Maxwell, “Rigid Designators and Mind-Brain Identity”, and Lockwood,Mind, Brain and the Quantum, both of whose works can be seen as lead-ins to the most recent panpsychist theories.

21 The following characterization of R.M. is largely taken from Holman, “Panpsychism, Physicalism, Neutral Monism and Russellian Theory”.

22 There are some who resist this move to intrinsic natures. See Ellis,Scientific Essentialism; Molnar,Powers: A Study in Metaphysics; Mumford,Laws in Nature; Bird,Nature’s Metaphysics: Laws and Properties. Also, insofar as this view depends on a distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic properties, it is not free from controversy. For a discussion of this matter, see Seager, “The ‘Intrinsic Nature’ Argument for Panpsychism”; Humberstone, “Intrinsic/Extrinsic”; Langton and Lewis, “Defining Intrinsic”. I’m bypassing these issues since my goal here is mostly an exposition of R.M. and panpsychism as developed by contemporary analytic philosophers, so I’m taking their starting assumptions for granted. 

23 Holman, “Panpsychism, Physicalism, Neutral Monism and Russellian Theory”.

24 Stoljar, “The Conceivability Argument and Two Conceptions”; Stoljar, “Two Conceptions of the Physical”.

25 A good introduction to the pros and cons of panpsychism can be found inJournal of Consciousness Studiesvol. 28, no. 10–11 (2006), the whole issue of which is devoted to this. The lead article advocating panpsychism is by Galen Strawson, with numerous commentators and a response by Strawson.

26 For a different way of getting to panpsychism, see Mørch, “Does Dispositionalism Entail Panpsychism?”.

27 Goff,Galileo’s Error.

28 Coleman, “Mental Chemistry: Combination for Panpsychists”; Coleman, “Neurocosmology”; Coleman, “Panpsychism and Neutral Monism”. See also Russell,The Analysis of Matter, Feigl, “The ‘Mental’ and the Physical”, and, depending on how one reads them, Eddington,The Nature of the Physical World, Maxwell, “Rigid Designators and Mind-Brain Identity”, and Lockwood,Mind, Brain and the Quantum.

29 Chalmers, “The Combination Problem”.

30 This despite the fact that James apparently wound up embracing panpsychism. See my remarks on this in Section 2.

31 James,Principles of Psychology, vol. 1.

32 Goff, “Why Panpsychism Doesn’t Help”; Goff,Consciousness and Fundamental Reality.

33 Goff, “Can Panpsychism Get Around the Combination Problem?”.

34 McGinn,The Problem of Consciousness.

35 Goff,Consciousness and Fundamental Reality.

36 Of course, we need to know what counts as the “right” spatial relation. As Hedda Hassel Mørch points out in “Is Integrated Information Theory Compatible with Panpsychism?”, just being spatially related—period—won’t do; since everything is spatially related to everything else. The result would be a bewildering proliferation of conscious subjects; including subjects that overlap with one another. That, one assumes, is not Goff’s idea here. (However, as we will see, he does go on to endorse cosmopsychism, which arguably has comparable counter-intuitive implications).

37 As a referee has pointed out, Goff’s argument could be questioned by adopting a “fusion” view of what happens when micro-subjects combine to form a macro-subject; a view proposed by William Seager. I will have something to say about that further on.

38 Coleman, “Being Realistic”.

39 Schaffer, “Monism: The Priority of the Whole”.

40 Among others who make this move are Shani, “Cosmopsychism”, and Nagasawa and Wager, “Panpsychism and Priority Cosmopsychism”.

41 Seager, “Emergent Panpsychism”; Seager, “Panpsychist Infusion”.

42 For a critique of this approach, and in particular the analogies and disanalogies with the physics examples, see Roelofs, “Can We Sum Subjects?”.

43 Albahari, “Beyond Cosmopsychism”; Albahari, “The Mystic and the Metaphysician”; Albahari, “Perennial Idealism”; Albahari, “Witness Consciousness”.

44 Harris, “A Solution to the Combination Problem”.

45 In particular, it is worth looking at Roelofs, “Can We Sum Subjects?”; Roelofs,Combining Minds; Rosenberg,A Place for Consciousness; Shani, “Cosmopsychism”.

46 Koch,Consciousness; Koch, “Reflections of a Natural Scientist”.

47 Tononi and Koch, “Consciousness: Here, There and Everywhere?”.

48 The other article being Tononi, “Consciousness and Integrated Information”.

49 Mørch, “Is Integrated Information Theory Compatible with Russellian Monism?”; Mørch, “Is Consciousness Intrinsic?”.

50 Blackmon, “Integrated Information Theory and Overlapping Systems”.

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