[marginalium]
Strawson on panpsychism
8 May 2025
Strawson on panpsychism. I think panpsychism—the idea that everything is trivially ‘conscious’—is disappointing:
Panpsychists say that, perhaps, consciousness is what things are. Consciousness is the intrinsic nature of all things. Rather than being a “small part of the vast universe, residing in the central nervous systems of living things … the panpsychist claims that consciousness is everywhere”.3 Down to the smallest components of the material world, everything has some capacity for experience, no matter how simple.
And then they sort of stop. Panpsychists are basically agnostic on what this might mean. No one really broaches the subject of what it might mean for an atom to have experience in some unimaginably tiny form. No one has ideas about how all these smaller capacities for experience coalesce into the complex form we experience day to day. It’s the very same gap we were left with before.
Anyway, here’s Galen Strawson on it, which makes me feel slightly less exasperated but still only leaves one with questions. So first the recap:
Let me give you what I see as the kind of the basic argument for panpsychism, if you’re already a materialist or a monist. It goes like this. 1) Materialism is true — everything in the universe is wholly physical. 2) Consciousness certainly exists. (The first two premises are the same as before). 3) No radical emergence: Consciousness could not possibly arise from something that was in its fundamental nature wholly and utterly non-conscious. So, conclusion: Consciousness must in some way be already there at the bottom of things.
Then his answer for my annoyance:
What I think about the stuff [things are] made of is what some people say is best thought of as simply energy; I think of that kind of energy as already intrinsically consciousness-involving.
One more thing I should say straightaway: You can think that — let’s just talk in terms of electrons — the electrons that make up the chair are (in the sort of fizzing energy that constitutes their being) somehow consciousness-involving without thinking that when you put them together into the shape of a chair you get a new, as it were, subject-of-experience.
It no more follows from the fact that there’s a sense in which the stuff the chair is made out of is consciousness than it follows that a football team is a conscious subject because it’s made up of conscious subjects.
…
partly because I think that interesting animal consciousness biologically evolved for a purpose, and that wouldn’t happen in the case of the chair.
Which feels like it makes sense for a few seconds. But then you’re still left with the gap between whatever the experience-stuff is and this new ‘consciousness’ stuff. So why bother inventing a new medium? Doesn’t feel super different to dualism, posed like this.
Anthologies: Gratification, Connection, Spiritual Architecture, On the Nature of Things, Humans Aren't Special, Great Thinkers