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The case for panpsychism: a critical assessment

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Abstract

According to panpsychists, physical phenomena are, at bottom, nothing but experiential phenomena. One argument for this view proceeds from an alleged need for physical phenomena to have features beyond what physics attributes to them; another starts by arguing that consciousness is ubiquitous, and proposes an identification of physical and experiential phenomena as the best explanation of this alleged fact. The first argument assumes that physical phenomena have categorical natures, and the second that the world’s experience-causing powers or potentials underdetermine its physical features. I argue that panpsychists are not entitled to these assumptions.

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Notes

  1. §5 also criticizes David Chalmers’s “Hegelian” argument for panpsychism.

  2. The distinction between strong and weak panpsychism is equivalent to Galen Strawson’s distinction between “pure panpsychism” and “psychism”: (Strawson, 2020, p. 317).

  3. Strong panpsychists aren’t committed to saying that every physical entity has a mental life: it’s consistent with strong panpsychism to say that a doormat, for example, is a complex of minds that do not constitute a further mind having the minds in the collection as parts.

  4. Chalmers distinguishes constitutive from emergent panpsychism in (Chalmers, 2017, p. 25).

  5. The classic source for Kantian noumenalism is Kant (1781/1998); see esp. (Kant,1781/1998, 350). Langton (1998) is a sympathetic interpretation of Kant along the lines sketched above. Recent defenses of the view that physical facts reduce to facts about experience-causing powers include (Robinson, 1982, pp. 108–123), Fumerton (1985), Foster (2008), Chalmers (2010), and Smithson (2017) (though unlike Kant, Robinson and Foster think we do know something about the nature of the source of experience, namely that it’s God).

  6. The classic source for phenomenalism is (Mill, 1865/1979, pp. 177–209). More recent defenses of phenomenalism include Price (1932), (Price, 1940, pp. 141–92), (Ayer, 1936, pp. 138–46), Ayer(1946–1947), Lewis (1946), and Pelczar (2019).

  7. Bain (2006) argues for a structuralist reduction of spacetime; Rovelli (2006) argues for an eliminativist stance on time and space.

  8. (Eddington, 1929, p. 276).

  9. This definition might need refinement to be useful for a wider range of philosophical applications, but for present purposes it should do. For more on intrinsicality, see Langton and Lewis (1998), Marshall and Parsons (2001), and Marshall (2016).

  10. See (Eddington, 1929, pp. 247–92), (Mørch, 2014, p. 28), (Strawson, 2017, pp. 57–60), and (Goff, 2017, pp. 135–64). “IP” stands for Incompleteness of Physics.

  11. Prominent defenses of structuralism include Russell (1927a), (Ladyman et al., 2007, pp. 130–89), Sider (2011), French (2014), and Tegmark (2014); see also Dirac (1938-1939), and, for what may be the earliest modern version of structuralism, Boscovich (1763/1922).

  12. For neutral monism, see (James, 1912, pp. 226–233) and (Russell, 1927b, pp. 287–302); for panprotopsychism, see (Chalmers, 1996, pp. 277–292); for a relevant form of non-standard materialism, see (Stoljar, 2020, pp. 220–221).

  13. What about things like quarks? More on these below.

  14. One possible view is that powers are themselves experiential phenomena: see, e.g., (Mørch,Mørch (2014),90-119). However, we can attribute things experience-causing powers without construing the powers as experiences.

  15. See (Goff, 2017, pp. 166–671) and (Strawson, 2017, p. 77).

  16. For arguments against categoricalism similar to the one given here, see McKitrick (2003) and Mumford (2006).

  17. (Armstrong, 1997, p. 79).

  18. (Handfield, 2005, pp. 452–456).

  19. For a full development of this tu quoque against Armstrong, see (Handfield, 2005, pp. 456–458) and Bird (2005).

  20. (Stoljar and Smith, 1998, pp. 90–99).

  21. (Stoljar and Smith, 1998, p. 87).

  22. See (Stoljar and Smith, 1998, pp. 96–99), where Smith and Stoljar argue that such an analysis is justified by the alleged fact that any difference or similarity between two possible worlds must be a difference or similarity in the worlds’ non-dispositional features.

  23. (Goff, 2017, pp. 137–138).

  24. (Goff, 2017, pp. 138–139).

  25. (Goff, 2017, p. 139).

  26. (Goff, 2017, p. 139).

  27. (Goff, 2017, p. 140). See also (Russell, 1927/1992, 325), (Eddington, 1929, p. 262), (Hartshorne, 1946, p. 413), (Foster, 1993, p. 295), (Adams, 2007, p. 40), (Strawson, 2008, p. 20), and (Chalmers, 2017, p. 26).

  28. Exceptions are Galen Strawson and Philip Goff, who explicitly invoke Occam’s Razor in this context: see Strawson (2003, pp. 75–76) and Goff (2017, pp. 169–171).

  29. See Eddington (1929, pp. 258–260) and Strawson (2008, pp. 57–59).

  30. According to some materialists, E1 is false, since the neural correlates of my experiences do differ from other physical phenomena in ways that explain why they have conscious qualities but other physical phenomena (like digestive states or meteorological states) do not; see, e.g., Armstrong (1968), Lewis (1972), and Jackson (1994). Panpsychists argue that we have to accept E2 on pain of saying that it’s just a brute, inexplicable fact that some physical phenomena but not others come with conscious qualities. However, it’s unclear that it’s less plausible to think that this fact is brute and inexplicable than to suppose that things like quarks are conscious.

  31. See Nagel (1979) and Strawson (2006, pp. 60–67).

  32. N1 is a “no emergence” claim that many mind-body dualists deny; it’s also unclear that emergentism, whatever its demerits, is less attractive than panpsychism: see Stephan (2017). N2 says, in effect, that the physical world has a bottom mereological level; this seems plausible, though it’s not obviously true. The idea behind N4 is that it’s reasonable to suppose that there’s no difference in kind between our own fundamental physical constituents and other fundamental physical entities; Barry Dainton challenges this claim in Dainton (2021).

  33. See Place (1956) and Smart (1959).

  34. See (Campbell, 1970, pp. 100–104), Kirk (1974), and (Chalmers, 1996, pp. 94–99).

  35. The first premise of the zombie argument is stronger than required for a modal argument against strong panpsychism. We could replace it with: We can imagine a world that contains all the rocks that our world contains, but no consciousness. Such a world is also impossible, according to strong panpsychists, since according to them actual rocks are made of consciousness.

  36. For refinements of Z2, see Chalmers (2002).

  37. See Stoljar (2001) (though Stoljar doesn’t advocate panpsychism) and (Chalmers, 2017, pp. 28–29) (quoted below). In Stoljar’s terms, the panpsychists’ objection to Z1 is that it’s true only on a “theory-based” conception of the physical, but not on an “object-based” conception of the physical.

  38. For the abductive argument against external world skepticism, see (Locke, 1694/1979, p. IV.xi), (Russell, 1912, p. 5), (Broad, 1925, pp. 140–220), (Mackie, 1976, pp. 662–669), (Jackson, 1977, pp. 141–151), Putnam (1982), Vogel (1990), (Davidson, 2001, p. 151), Vogel (2005), Chalmers (2010), and Huemer (2015).

  39. (Chalmers, 2017, pp. 22–23, 24–30).

  40. (Chalmers, 2017, pp. 28–29).

  41. (Chalmers, 2017, p. 26).

  42. Curiously, Chalmers himself appears favor of a kind of noumenalism in Chalmers (2010): see esp. (Chalmers, 2010, p. 479), where he suggests that “as long as a hypothesis involves some reasonable explanation for the regularities in our experience, then it will not be a global skeptical hypothesis.”

  43. I gratefully acknowledge valuable comments on previous versions of this paper from my colleagues at the National University of Singapore, and the anonymous reviewers for this journal.

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    Michael Pelczar

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Pelczar, M. The case for panpsychism: a critical assessment. Synthese 200, 312 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-022-03775-y

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