Panpsychism and the mind-body problem in contemporary analytic philosophy

ABSTRACT

Not so long ago, the idea that analytic philosophers would be taking panpsychism seriously would have been hard to believe. That is because in its early, logical positivist, stage, the analytic movement earned the reputation of being militantly anti-metaphysical. But analytic philosophy has come a long way since the heyday of logical positivism; and, in fact, the dialectic of recent debates on the mind–body problem among analytic philosophers has pushed many of them in the direction of panpsychism. In this paper, I want to explain how this has come about and take a look at some of the versions of panpsychism that have emerged. This will involve running through a quick history of debates on the mind–body problem since about 1960, focusing on how panpsychism has been proposed as a promising, though not unproblematic, way of breaking an apparent impasse that has emerged between more standard physicalist and dualist theories of mind. Along the way, I will also have occasion to comment on the prospects of panpsychism as a respectable scientific theory and how a number of scientists stand on this.

Notes

1 For some recent complaints coming from someone within the scientific community about physicists straying too far from the empirical straight and narrow path, see Hossenfelder, Lost in Math; Hossenfelder, “Physics Isn’t Pretty”. For an interesting historical case study of a debate on this issue, see Lindley, Boltzman’s Atom.

2 James, “Novelty and Causation”, in A Pluralistic Universe.

3 Russell, The Analysis of Matter.

4 Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World.

5 But what about that branch of positivism known as linguistic phenomenalism? That seems to be a form of panpsychism; and, in fact, Meixner, in “Idealism and Panpsychism” has argued that it is, presumably because it took sense data to be the foundations of both knowledge and language, with references to the physical being just a linguistic shorthand with no ontological significance. Perhaps Meixner is right, but that is not how the linguistic phenomenalists saw themselves. Their claim was that they were just analyzing language and eschewing all metaphysics, panpsychist metaphysics included. See Schlick, “Positivism and Realism”, for an especially vigorous articulation of this claim. So, even if, in retrospect, we want to say that linguistic phenomenalism is a form of panpsychism, at the time it wasn’t being presented or debated as such. Also, it might be mentioned that panpsychist ideas were floated by some non-analytic philosophers during this time. One thinks here of Alfred North Whitehead’s writings. But, whether fairly or not, none of this got much traction.

6 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations,

7 Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy.

8 Place, “Is Consciousness a Brain Process?”; Feigl, “The ‘Mental’ and the ‘Physical’”; Smart, “Sensations and Brain Processes”. The Feigl article is especially interesting for our purposes, since he embraces the earlier alluded-to Russellian conceptual framework for contemporary panpsychism. Feigl himself embraces panprotopsychism rather than panpsychism, however.

9 This quick run through of these examples admittedly glosses over the question as to what exactly counts as physical. I will address that question further on.

10 Chalmers, The Conscious Mind; Chalmers, “Facing up to the Problem of Consciousness”.

11 Nagel, “What Is It Like to be a Bat?”. Some credit should also be given to Saul Kripke’s 1970 lectures. See Kripke, Naming and Necessity.

12 Nagel is often credited with coining the expression, but it was actually earlier used by Farrell, “Experience”. Also, a referee has alerted me to the fact that T.L.S. Sprigge makes use of that expression in “Final Causes”.

13 Actually, it is now known that blind humans can do this at a very attenuated level, often without knowing it. So this isn’t really alien to us after all.

14 Nagel, “Panpsychism”.

15 Jackson, “Epiphenomenal Qualia”; Jackson, “What Mary Didn’t Know”.

16 Jackson later reversed himself on this—much to the shock of the philosophical community—for reasons that, to me at least, were never very clear. See Jackson, Mind, Method and Conditionals.

17 Chalmers, The Conscious Mind.

18 Kripke, Naming and Necessity.

19 Levine, “Materialism and Qualia”.

20 Russell, The Analysis of Matter. As mentioned in note 8, Herbert Feigl was an advocate of R.M. and he was apparently influenced by Moritz Schlick (a contemporary of Russell’s who developed ideas similar to his) on this. I also mentioned earlier that Sir Arthur Eddington came up with this conception of physical theory. See also Maxwell, “Rigid Designators and Mind-Brain Identity”, and Lockwood, Mind, Brain and the Quantum, both of whose works can be seen as lead-ins to the most recent panpsychist theories.

21 The following characterization of R.M. is largely taken from Holman, “Panpsychism, Physicalism, Neutral Monism and Russellian Theory”.

22 There are some who resist this move to intrinsic natures. See Ellis, Scientific Essentialism; Molnar, Powers: A Study in Metaphysics; Mumford, Laws in Nature; Bird, Nature’s Metaphysics: Laws and Properties. Also, insofar as this view depends on a distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic properties, it is not free from controversy. For a discussion of this matter, see Seager, “The ‘Intrinsic Nature’ Argument for Panpsychism”; Humberstone, “Intrinsic/Extrinsic”; Langton and Lewis, “Defining Intrinsic”. I’m bypassing these issues since my goal here is mostly an exposition of R.M. and panpsychism as developed by contemporary analytic philosophers, so I’m taking their starting assumptions for granted. 

23 Holman, “Panpsychism, Physicalism, Neutral Monism and Russellian Theory”.

24 Stoljar, “The Conceivability Argument and Two Conceptions”; Stoljar, “Two Conceptions of the Physical”.

25 A good introduction to the pros and cons of panpsychism can be found in Journal of Consciousness Studies vol. 28, no. 10–11 (2006), the whole issue of which is devoted to this. The lead article advocating panpsychism is by Galen Strawson, with numerous commentators and a response by Strawson.

26 For a different way of getting to panpsychism, see Mørch, “Does Dispositionalism Entail Panpsychism?”.

27 Goff, Galileo’s Error.

28 Coleman, “Mental Chemistry: Combination for Panpsychists”; Coleman, “Neurocosmology”; Coleman, “Panpsychism and Neutral Monism”. See also Russell, The Analysis of Matter, Feigl, “The ‘Mental’ and the Physical”, and, depending on how one reads them, Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World, Maxwell, “Rigid Designators and Mind-Brain Identity”, and Lockwood, Mind, Brain and the Quantum.

29 Chalmers, “The Combination Problem”.

30 This despite the fact that James apparently wound up embracing panpsychism. See my remarks on this in Section 2.

31 James, Principles of Psychology, vol. 1.

32 Goff, “Why Panpsychism Doesn’t Help”; Goff, Consciousness and Fundamental Reality.

33 Goff, “Can Panpsychism Get Around the Combination Problem?”.

34 McGinn, The Problem of Consciousness.

35 Goff, Consciousness and Fundamental Reality.

36 Of course, we need to know what counts as the “right” spatial relation. As Hedda Hassel Mørch points out in “Is Integrated Information Theory Compatible with Panpsychism?”, just being spatially related—period—won’t do; since everything is spatially related to everything else. The result would be a bewildering proliferation of conscious subjects; including subjects that overlap with one another. That, one assumes, is not Goff’s idea here. (However, as we will see, he does go on to endorse cosmopsychism, which arguably has comparable counter-intuitive implications).

37 As a referee has pointed out, Goff’s argument could be questioned by adopting a “fusion” view of what happens when micro-subjects combine to form a macro-subject; a view proposed by William Seager. I will have something to say about that further on.

38 Coleman, “Being Realistic”.

39 Schaffer, “Monism: The Priority of the Whole”.

40 Among others who make this move are Shani, “Cosmopsychism”, and Nagasawa and Wager, “Panpsychism and Priority Cosmopsychism”.

41 Seager, “Emergent Panpsychism”; Seager, “Panpsychist Infusion”.

42 For a critique of this approach, and in particular the analogies and disanalogies with the physics examples, see Roelofs, “Can We Sum Subjects?”.

43 Albahari, “Beyond Cosmopsychism”; Albahari, “The Mystic and the Metaphysician”; Albahari, “Perennial Idealism”; Albahari, “Witness Consciousness”.

44 Harris, “A Solution to the Combination Problem”.

45 In particular, it is worth looking at Roelofs, “Can We Sum Subjects?”; Roelofs, Combining Minds; Rosenberg, A Place for Consciousness; Shani, “Cosmopsychism”.

46 Koch, Consciousness; Koch, “Reflections of a Natural Scientist”.

47 Tononi and Koch, “Consciousness: Here, There and Everywhere?”.

48 The other article being Tononi, “Consciousness and Integrated Information”.

49 Mørch, “Is Integrated Information Theory Compatible with Russellian Monism?”; Mørch, “Is Consciousness Intrinsic?”.

50 Blackmon, “Integrated Information Theory and Overlapping Systems”.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Emmett L. Holman

Emmett L. Holman is an associate professor emeritus at George Mason Univeristy, Virginia, U.S.A. He has written numerous articles on epistemology, the mind–body problem and the ontology of the secondary qualities.