Panpsychism - for and against

Posted by Simon Raggett on 13 January 2010 | 0 Comments

Tags: panpsychism, consciousness, conscious experience, emergent properties

Panpsychism - for and against

I have recently had a chance to look at some of the work of the philosopher, Galen Strawson, who argues for panpsychism as a way of explaining how consciousness arises. Interestingly, his argument as to the difficulty of extracting consciousness from physical matter is almost the same as the reasoning that has caused other researchers to look to quantum theories of consciousness for an explanation.

Strawson starts from the assumption that the universe is entirely physical, with consciousness as a part of this physical universe. He accuses mainstream thinkers and particularly Dennett, of being closet Cartesians, in that they have an underlying assumption that consciousness is non-physical. This means that because they believe that nothing other than the physical exists, they are forced to deny the existence or at least the efficacy of consciousness. However, if we really view the universe as wholly physical, consciousness cannot be treated as a separate category of existence. Strawson says that when matter is put together in the particular way that occurs in brains, conscious experience occurs. Given the fact that subjective experience arises out of a particular conformation of matter, he argues that there must be something experiental in matter.

Strawson also attacks the fashionable idea of consciousness as an emergent property. These are common in physics, and Strawson examines the classic example of the liquidity of water. Liquidity is not a property of individual water molecules, nor their constituent atoms, nor the sub-atomic components of the atoms. It only arises when a number of water molecules slide past one another in a manner governed by the elctromagnetic force. Strawson argues that, if conscious experience emerges from non-experiental matter, it should be explained in a similar manner to liquidity, that is by reference to the underlying forces of nature. The only way out of the matter-consciousness problem that Strawson can see is the panpsychist approach of endowing all matter with an experiental quality.

The main problems with the panpsychist position are the lack of direct evidence for anything experiental in inanimate matter, and the difficulty of binding all the experiental particles together into a conscious mind. Strawson's view is that just as the physical laws allow liquidity to arise from water, there is no reason why forces should not exist that allow experience to arise in a similar way. This seems logically possible, but leaves a considerable gap between existing knowledge and what we are looking for.

At least some versions of quantum consciousness may claim to deal with the problems in panpsychism. In quantum theories, the quanta can reasonably be seen as proto-experiental, in that while not being conscious in themselves, they have the potential to give rise to consciousness. At least in the Penrose-type versions, quantum consciousess also gets over the problem of how many small experiental or proto-experiental particles bind together into a mind, by proposing the existence of macroscopic quantum features in the brain.