Panpsychism, Emergence, and Pluralities: Reply to Bohn

ABSTRACT

Einar Bohn [AJP 2019] has proposed a version of panpsychism on which consciousness is fundamentally a property of pluralities of basic objects. I argue that this pluralized panpsychism is structurally similar to emergentism, and faces the problem of explaining how a plurality of basic objects could be a subject of experiences. Because of these issues, pluralized panpsychism is not a substantial improvement on orthodox panpsychism.

KEYWORDS:

• consciousness
• panpsychism
• emergence
• pluralities
• plural collective properties

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 My page references are to this paper, unless otherwise indicated.

2 Bohn is not committed to this assumption, but this will not matter for present purposes.

3 A plural distributive property is possessed by all members of the plurality and also by each of them.

4 Tom can exist without the plurality existing, but not vice versa; and the identity of this specific plurality is determined in part by the identity of Tom, but not vice versa (on the relevant notions of existential and identity dependence see Tahko and Lowe [2020]).

5 While Bohn cites Barnes, it is not part of her conception of emergent properties that they are instantiated first and foremost by non-fundamental entities.

6 Which is not to say that it should be so understood: for instance, it might be a fundamental relation [Morganti 2009].

7 This is true even if distinct subjects can share the same token experience [Roelofs 2016]. In that scenario, the multiple subjects would distributively, not collectively, have this experience.

8 yy grounds a composite entity x that instantiates the same consciousness property, M. Could x be the subject of yy’s instantiation of M? This proposal creates a tension between the essential subjectivity of consciousness properties and how the pluralized panpsychist wants to understand them. According to the latter, ‘consciousness properties are, most fundamentally, properties of pluralities of objects, not singular objects’ [386]. But if yy is not a subject, then, on the pluralized panpsychist’s proposal, what consciousness properties are, most fundamentally, has nothing to do with their being for a subject. At most, the instantiation of M by yy will be like something for a subject in a non-fundamental way (it will be like something for x, which is grounded in yy and whose instantiation of M is explained by yy’s instantiating M). It is not obvious how this is compatible with the essential subjectivity of consciousness properties.

9 If we did have such an idea, this would undermine the main motivation of panpsychism, since we would have reason to think that consciousness is in principle explainable by appealing to basic objects arranged in this way, without positing any basic consciousness properties.

10 Thanks to Einar Bohn and Luke Roelofs for comments.

Additional information

Funding

Work on this paper was supported by the project The Subject of Experiences: The Significance of its Metaphysical Nature in the Philosophy of Mind (Swiss National Science Foundation, project number 189031.