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Panpsychism and ensemble explanations

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Abstract

Panpsychism claims that the vast majority of conscious subjects in our world are inanimate and physical. Ensemble explanations account for striking phenomena by placing them within an ensemble of outcomes, most of which are not striking. This paper develops an explanatory problem for panpsychism: panpsychism renders two appealing ensemble explanations unsatisfactory. Specifically, we argue that panpsychism renders unsatisfactory the multiverse explanation of why a universe supports life and the many-planets explanation of why a planet supports life.

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Notes

  1. On the stringency of conditions under which planets permit life, see e.g. Ward and Brownlee (1999). On the stringency of conditions under which universes permit life, see e.g. Leslie (1989).

  2. See Leslie (1989) for a well-known presentation of the multiverse explanation. See Bostrom (2002) for further discussion of this ensemble explanation, and how such reasoning applies to many-planets explanations. See Hart (1982) for a presentation of the many-planets explanation for the existence of a life-supporting planet.

  3. For objections to multiverse explanations, see White (2000) and Hacking (1987). For replies, see Bostrom (2002: Ch. 2), Epstein (2017), and Juhl (2005).

  4. While this is a terminological stipulation, the problem we raise for panpsychism makes substantive assumptions about which conscious subjects observation selection effects apply to. We consider some ways of defending panpsychism by contesting these assumptions below.

  5. N.B. panpsychists need not embrace this hypothesis. Thus, the motivation on offer is not that panpsychism by itself offers an intelligible response to the silence of physics while rival views fail to do so. Rather, the motivation is that whereas panpsychists can generate such a response by embracing an auxiliary hypothesis, opponents of panpsychism cannot (or it is at least unobvious that they can).

  6. See Strawson (2006, 2017: 385).

  7. See Chalmers (2015).

  8. A variant of this proposal can be used by panpsychists who prefer to use ‘physical’ in a way that applies to any state that occupies a causal role specified by a physical theory—see ibid. Such theorists can hold that experiences non-redundantly occupy such roles and that, since occupying such roles qualifies experiences as physical, they do not violate the causal closure of the physical. And such theorists can give the alleged intuitive possibility of zombies its due by holding that we mistakenly suppose that experiences do not occupy such roles when we try to conceive of zombies; consequently, while we may indeed be intuiting the possibility of something, we err in taking that something to be a zombie.

  9. Like all proposed theories of consciousness, panpsychism faces known problems. The most discussed of these is the combination problem—roughly the problem of explaining how experiences and minds at lower levels could combine to help yield minds and experiences like ours—which threatens to undermine panpsychism’s ability to at once accommodate the possibility of zombies and provide a constitutive account of experiences like ours; see Chalmers (2016).

  10. See Goff et al. (2017) for a recent overview of the literature on panpsychism and for other motivations for it.

  11. See White (2005: 2).

  12. These conditions are adapted from White (2005: 2–5), who identifies stability and urgency-reduction as criteria for good explanations of phenomena that call out for explanation.

  13. For ease of exposition, we will sometimes leave implicit the contrastive elements of these explananda. But, as we will see in Sect. 5, understanding the challenge in terms of these elements is crucial to understanding why certain responses to the challenge are misguided.

  14. As defined, the biological view is consistent with the existence of some non-living observers (perhaps, for example, God or GPT-3). As a result, the biological view is consistent with planets that violate the conditions for life while hosting (non-living) observers. However, such observers are compatible with the biological view only if they are exceedingly rare. As such, they would not be relevant counterexamples to the suggested necessary condition in the discussion that follows—hence the ‘in effect’ qualification. So, we will ignore them.

  15. For an in-depth discussion of observation selection effects in the context of ensemble explanations, see Bostrom (2002).

  16. If an observation selection effect were shown to satisfactorily explain your observation in the lottery case while cohering with the many-tickets explanation of why someone won, then the analogy would be restored. However, this would only go to show that, contrary to the challenge, the analogy does not threaten the many-planets explanation of why some planet meets the conditions for life.

  17. See Goff (2014) for an argument for macroscopic panpsychism.

  18. If the ensemble of planets is not vast and varied enough to yield an urgency-reducing explanation of why there is a life-supporting planet, then the many-planets explanation will be unsatisfactory and this challenge to panpsychism will not arise. In that case, a parallel challenge could still be raised using a multiverse explanation of why a life-supporting universe exists or of why a life-supporting planet exists. If there turns out to be no satisfactory explanation of why a life-supporting planet exists, panpsychism would not necessarily be in the clear: panpsychism will still be at an explanatory disadvantage if it alone leaves it mysterious why we are observers on a life-supporting planet.

  19. We put the first and second panpsychist objections in terms of intelligence. But objections of these sorts could be run with various properties aside from intelligence, such as being alive, having sense organs, or having two thumbs. Our responses apply mutatis mutandis to these objections.

  20. Alternatively, the objection could be put in terms of a failure to explain why the planetary observations we make are made by us rather than by other possible observers. Our below response applies to that version of the objection mutatis mutandis.

  21. E.g., see van Fraassen (1977: 147).

  22. We are not assuming that asking any question that panpsychists cannot answer is enough to raise a challenge for panpsychism. To pose such a challenge, a question needs to pose a striking explanandum. We have assumed throughout that that requirement is met by “Why are we observers on a planet that supports life rather than observers on a planet that does not?”. But it is open to panpsychists dispute that assumption. This response may merit development. However, since developing it would require taking on the issue of what makes phenomena cry out for explanation—an issue that lies beyond the scope of this paper—that is a task for future research.

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Acknowledgements

For helpful feedback, we are grateful to David Christensen, Andrew Y. Lee, and anonymous reviewers. This publication was made possible through the support of a grant from the John Templeton Foundation. The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the John Templeton Foundation.

Funding

The Funding was provided by John Templeton Foundation (Grant Number 61516), Universiteit Utrecht, Sentience Institute, University of Texas at Austin, Brown University, European Research Council (Grant Number 726251).

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Correspondence to Bradford Saad.

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Li, H., Saad, B. Panpsychism and ensemble explanations. Philos Stud 179, 3583–3597 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-022-01851-0

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