Abstract
Taking their motivation from the perceived failure of the reductive physicalist project concerning consciousness, panpsychists ascribe subjectivity to fundamental material entities in order to account for macro-consciousness. But there exists an unresolved tension within the mainstream panpsychist position, the seriousness of which has yet to be appreciated. I capture this tension as a dilemma, and offer advice to panpsychists on how to resolve it. The dilemma is as follows: Panpsychists take the micro-material realm to feature phenomenal properties, plus micro-subjects to whom these properties belong. However, it is impossible to explain the generation of a macro-subject (like one of us) in terms of the assembly of micro-subjects, for, as I show, subjects cannot combine. Therefore the panpsychist explanatory project is derailed by the insistence that the world’s ultimate material constituents are subjects of experience. The panpsychist faces a choice of giving up her explanatory ambitions, or of giving up the claim that the ultimates are subjects. I argue that the latter option is preferable, leading to neutral monism, on which phenomenal qualities are irreducible but subjects are reducible. So panpsychists should be neutral monists.
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Notes
Cf. Stoljar (2006).
As Nagel and Strawson in particular make clear, if the phenomenal can only derive from the phenomenal, then ultimate entities (e.g. basic particles) must be phenomenal: since were phenomenality to first arise at any non-basic level, it would derive from the non-phenomenal.
As compared with a wait-and-see solution like Stoljar’s (2006). Stoljar believes we should await the discovery of a non-mental intrinsic nature to matter which would make the instantiation of macro-consciousness intelligible.
The argument assumes a robust realism about human subjects—that there really are such subjects, and that they are not merely (in some sense) splinters of a greater, universe-sized subject. I take this premise to have empirical support—we experience ourselves as such subjects (cf. James 1912/2005:13–14). But I don’t expect others to find this evidence uncontroversial, and am therefore prepared to accord this realism the status of mere assumption. The assumption prevents the panpsychist’s dilemma branching into a tetralemma: we can rule out subject monism or nihilism as options. Thanks to Luke Roelofs for discussion of this point.
Humans might not be intelligent enough to carry through the derivation, for example.
See e.g. Humphreys (1997).
See e.g. Brüntrup (1998).
The usual restrictions apply: ideally conceivable for an idealised reasoner. See Chalmers (2002) for explanation of these ideas.
1979:182.
2006:15.
2006:13.
Cf. Van Cleve (1990), who responds to Nagel by arguing that emergentism is preferable to panpsychism as an outcome of his argument.
1990:218.
The name is due to Chalmers (talk at Hochschule of Philosophy, Munich, June 2011).
The example is Goff’s (2009).
For one thing, there will have to be some sort of qualitative blending or pooling among the qualities carried by each ultimate: if each ultimate’s quality showed up as such in the macro-experience, it would lack the notable homogeneity of (e.g.) color experience, and plausibly some mixing of basic qualities is required to obtain the qualities of macro-experience. I revisit these issues from Sect. 4 onwards, arguing that they are not terribly problematic for panpsychist models of combination.
Wong and O’Connor’s characterisation requires that the components not possess the higher-level property. This requirement is met in the present case: the higher-level property is of experiencing coldness and tiredness and roast beef smell, and no ultimate possesses this conjunctive property.
This, and related phrases (e.g. ‘what-it-is-likeness’) commonly used to evoke phenomenal consciousness derive from Nagel (1974).
Goff (2009:301).
See his 2006.
Seager (1995).
MS:6.
I note that some (e.g. Kriegel 2009) believe there to be a distinctive ‘me-ness’ quality present in experience. If this is right there is at least one qualitative element that can’t be specified without mentioning the subject. I’m not acquainted with the ‘me-ness’ quality, however.
Perhaps it isn’t. But then I am at a loss to reconstruct the difficulty James has in mind.
For, recall, weak emergents are in principle fully explicable.
Goff’s (2006), for instance, employs the example of the combination of ten slight pains into a single severe pain. At times Goff talks as if the problem is understanding the qualitative combination (since ten slight pains are not the same thing as one severe pain) and elsewhere he seems to suggest that what blocks combination is the fact that each pain is associated with a distinct subject.
This is not to say the rules will be graspable just from consideration of uncombined qualitative ingredients. We had to study chemical reactions to understand the generation of the properties of NaCl from its antecedents, for example (at the time he writes, Broad (1925) considers chemical properties emergent). But after the fact we are able to see how the high-level properties are structurally produced. It may well be the same for macro-qualitative combination.
Goff (2009).
A conceptual connection salient in Nagel’s work, for example the second half of his 1979.
Cf. Russell’s ‘cameras’ (1927b:122). What must also help fix the range of qualities a subject is capable of is the subject’s own physical constitution.
Thanks to a reviewer for this suggestion.
Whether both of the original points of view are eliminated depends on whether we construe the survivor as identical to one of the originals, or as a descendant inheriting a point of view. But since points of view correspond to subjects, it seems that the survivor will be identical with one of the originals: whosoever donates the surviving point of view.
The proposal that some subjects are eliminated in combination might not seem so terrible to panpsychists, even if it doesn’t qualify as ‘combination’ under our rubric. In the next section I explain why this option (unacceptably) implies emergentism.
It’s true that in describing combination we noted that constituents are modified in combining, so it may be unduly artificial here to consider Red and Blue’s pre-combination perspectives in unmodified form (i.e. as filled with unitary red and unitary blue, respectively). Perhaps the right picture has Red and Blue interacting to produce Ub, with all three now experiencing purple. But this does nothing to get around the problem the artificial setup serves to highlight: if the subjects survive, as they must, there will be three actual experiencings of purple. It’s not possible to imagine Ub’s unified point of view as comprising two synchronous experiencings of purple (pertaining to the perspectives of Red and Blue).
Nagel apparently spies the problem: ‘How could a single self be composed of many selves?’ (1979:194). The preceding section, and the next, seek to bring Nagel’s difficulty into focus.
Humphreys (1997).
Humphreys allows fusion of properties and fusion of things.
‘Perhaps we can regard the parts as infusing their properties into the whole and by so doing effacing themselves.’ (MS:14).
2009:308.
Someone might dispute this as an example of fusion—it might be thought the mass of the chunk is a straightforward combination: perhaps the product of the (persisting) masses of the ingots, or the masses of constituent gold molecules, which certainly do not cease to exist. Not much hangs on the choice of case, however. The example is only illustrative of the deeper point developed below: that for a structural (i.e. non-emergent) property to result, whether by fusion or otherwise, there needs to be an intelligible contribution by the antecedent properties to the product.
Nagel, recall, says ‘All [non-emergent] properties of complex systems…derive from the properties of its constituents and their effects on each other when so combined’ (1979:182, my emphasis). These interactions between constituents of the system are expressions of their metaphysical nature, i.e. of their characteristic powers.
2006:13.
With liquidity a ‘deeper’ (dynamic) property base explains why the liquid can be the structuring of the non-liquid. Similarly, when ocean waves meet to form a bigger wave, it is not their being waves that contributes, but their being composed of units that can be recombined into a single wave. The smaller waves are destroyed, qua waves, and their components made into the larger wave. Thus it is the properties of these lower-level components that are operative in the formation of the big wave (it is not just from waves of these components that you could generate the big wave). This ‘bypassing’ option is not available in the case of subjectivity, since the panpsychist posits subjectivity as a fundamental property, and fundamental properties are directly involved in producing their higher-level instances. After all, the reason the panpsychist posited fundamental subjectivity was to account for its higher-level instantiations. If a deeper, non-subjective, nature accounted for macro-subjectivity, this would make the panpsychist’s micro-subjects explanatorily—hence ontologically—superfluous.
With respect to the micro-subjectivities: it might be structural with respect to some other lower-level property—but that would leave the micro-subjects explanatorily otiose, see previous note.
2005:10–11. This isn’t to say that causal generation of properties is a necessary condition for emergence, only a sufficient condition. See Wong (2006) for helpful classification of varieties of emergentism. Another point to note is that the causal production envisaged in this formulation of emergentism may well be synchronic causation, which perhaps fits better with traditional construals of emergence.
There was perhaps a cheaper way of getting to this conclusion, via the fact that Humphreys explicitly intends fusion to be a variety of emergence. What this cheaper way would not have purchased, however, was detailed explanation of what was wrong with the proposal for panpsychists in particular.
The contradiction is performative or methodological rather than strictly logical: in attempting to evade emergentism the panpsychist who posits micro-subjects flees into the arms of another emergentism.
MS:4.
There are panpsychists whose main motivation is not aversion to emergence. Some are moved by Russell’s idea that physics doesn’t describe the intrinsic natures of its theoretical postulates, and that phenomenal properties provide a parsimonious way of filling this gap (e.g. Rosenberg 2004). Such theorists might evade the thrust of my argument; however it is clear that the ‘intrinsic nature argument’ (see Seager 2006) is highly controversial—far more so than the mundane thought that conventional physicalism lacks the conceptual resources to account for consciousness. Moreover the explanatory (anti-emergentist) motive has been by far the main driver for panpsychism historically, so most panpsychists are vulnerable to the present argument.
Someone might claim that since panpsychist emergence at least occurs within a class of properties, i.e. the emergence of (unified) subjectivity from (plural) subjectivity, such emergence is in better shape than ‘physicalist emergence’—and not the unacceptable option I deem it. But the relevant contrast is between structural and non-structural generation of a property. Macro-subjectivity is not a structural property with respect to the postulated micro-subject base. ‘Structurality’—or non-emergence—is an all or nothing affair; once we say a property is non-structural, it doesn’t matter what it happens to have in common with its base (it will also have ‘being spatio-temporal’ in common, if we are non-dualists; in the physicalist case both properties count as cognitive, on the assumption that phenomenal consciousness is cognitive). The point is that the new property is not derived from its base; its instantiation is more than a matter of the organization of the basal items. Panpsychist and physicalist versions of emergence equally violate the structurality requirement, and once the panpsychist relinquishes this she has no solid ground upon which to dismiss the physicalist version, which, lest it be forgotten, is ontologically cheaper in not positing all-pervading micro-subjects. To this soft reply might be added a harder one: talk of ‘subjectivity’ at higher and lower levels disguises the deeper contrast—what really is required to emerge is essential unity from essential diversity, and this shatters the illusion of ‘intra-property emergence’.
See e.g. Tye (2009).
A neutral monist, like a panpsychist, doesn’t have to be an indirect realist about perception; nevertheless, these views seem naturally to go with indirect realism, given their emphasis on the reality and irreducibility of qualia.
Cf. the particulate imaginings of Unger (2005). There are theorists for whom the subatomic entities postulated by physics stand in need of a categorical nature, to underpin the relations physics catalogues with its equations (see Russell 1927a for an influential account of this idea). On neutral monism, this nature is constituted by (subjectless) qualia.
2008:152.
For HOTT see e.g. Rosenthal (1991).
Papineau (2002).
It is worth noting that unrepentant panpsychists will require their own mechanism to explain macro-subjectival awareness, since they don’t hold that every ultimate makes it into a subject’s experience. Panpsychists don’t typically think we experience the ultimates in our toenails or in Saturn’s rings, so some relation amongst the privileged ultimates (in the brain?) will have to account for our awareness only of that limited set. Neutral monism is simply more parsimonious in having that awareness-constituting relation do duty for ‘consciousness’ as well. Another model of awareness that suggests itself is the self-representational theory, see e.g. Kriegel 2009—though I doubt he would have much time for irreducible qualia (for an argument that irreducible qualia are compatible with physicalism see Coleman 2013).
Thanks to Giovanni Merlo for the microscope metaphor. The self-representational model of neutral monism perhaps even more neatly explains the limited scope of subjectivity.
For much more on neutral monism and its varieties see Stubenberg’s admirable article (2010).
1979:194.
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Acknowledgments
Thanks to Gregg Rosenberg in particular for helpful comments on this paper, as well as the attendees of the ‘Panpsychism on the Reef’ conference of July 2012 organised by David Chalmers, and an anonymous referee for this journal.
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Coleman, S. The Real Combination Problem: Panpsychism, Micro-Subjects, and Emergence. Erkenn 79, 19–44 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-013-9431-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-013-9431-x