An Argument Against Panpsychism
An Argument Against Panpsychism
Panpsychism holds that elementary particles have mentality, attenuated perhaps, but capable of yielding consciousness as we know it. Yet particles don’t generally instantiate many properties—mass, charge, spin, motion, and that’s about it. So, if they also instantiate mental properties, these too must be few in number—say, three or four (or maybe just one). But how do we get the full range of mental properties out of such an exiguous basis? It looks impossible. Therefore, panpsychism is false as an explicative-reductive doctrine. We might decide to espouse it out of whimsical largesse, but it won’t work to explain the existence and nature of the conscious mind as it presents itself. The particle will be too mentally impoverished. To this argument it might be replied that physical objects display a similar variety of kinds at the macro level and yet the constituent particles also have a small number of basic properties. True, but we can bridge the gap mereologically by invoking an agglomeration relation: the particles combine to generate the full range of natural kinds (e.g., animal species). This is perfectly intelligible and indeed we have good theories of how it works (it’s like a jigsaw puzzle). But in the case of the mind this is precisely what is lacking: we don’t understand how a small number of primitives (mental or physical) can produce the full range of mental phenomena. Therefore, the original argument still holds. How could the elementary bits of mentality be arranged side by side so as to produce the manifold varieties of consciousness? We could, of course, declare it a mystery, but then we have abandoned all claim to explanatory adequacy; and that is really all that can be said in panpsychism’s favor, since it lacks any other independent warrant. Realistically, it is hard to see how there could be more than one proto-mental property of particles; but then, the task of generating all of consciousness from this scanty foundation looks impossible.[1]
[1] I think that panpsychism, seductive though it may be, provides only an illusion of understanding, even if true in some form. The same basic problem of emergence keeps cropping up. Still, it is an excellent theory to think about.
It is such a patently absurd doctrine that I have never paid it any attention.
True, but in consciousness studies all we have are absurd doctrines (except mine).
Remind me of your doctrine
Mysterianism.
Do you have a link to an article or title of a book pls.
Google says *The Mysterious Flame: Conscious Minds in a Material World*
Yes, among several others. There is a lot on this blog if you search under Mystery. I generally make people swear to join the cult of the Mysterians as a condition of coming on this blog.
An other problem with panpsychism: the existence of bodies without any mental properties like stones and chairs. So the mental properties must come after the constitution of the bodies (like fishes, cats or humans) and not before
See my “Problems with Panpsychism” for that and other problems.
Merci !
Emergence theories of consciousness are more promising than panpsychism. Here is one which claims to be consistent with evolutionary biology – it is not mystery free but it contradicts the common sense way less. https://royalsocietypublishing.org/rstb/article/380/1939/20240310/235145/Consciousness-its-goals-its-functions-and-the
Something like this has to be true, if only we knew how. I notice these authors make no refer to any philosophers apart from Dennett.
Eva Jablonka, one of the authors is a philosopher of biology. In the paper’s references there are mentions of some other philosophers such as P.Godfrey-Smith, K.Popper, N.Humphrey, W.James.
But nobody recent who has contributed to the subject, not even Nagel. Humphrey is a psychologist.
When you are right you are right admin
You can call me Colin.
While consciousness may resist theoretical integration into the natural order, it is nevertheless transparent in a transcendental sense: without it, nothing—mathematics, physics, normativity, or even consciousness itself—could be recognized or understood at all.
Can’t there be unconscious ratiocination?
Unconscious ratiocination may occur, but it doesn’t amount to recognition. A process can be unconscious, but nothing can be understood unconsciously. My claim concerned the conditions under which anything becomes intelligible to a subject, not the sub-personal machinery that may operate without awareness.
Can’t people solve problems in their sleep?
They can—but that’s another case of unconscious processing rather than understanding. A solution may occur during sleep, but its status as a solution is only recognized, grasped, or evaluated once the person is awake and conscious. My point concerns that moment of intelligibility, not the sub-personal or offline processes that may precede it.
I don’t know why you say understanding can’t be unconscious. Don’t people understand their language while asleep and many other things? You seem to be begging the question. Also, pattern recognition can occur unconsciously. But I still don’t know why we are discussing this– what does it have to do with panpsychism?
I don’t know why we are discussing this, but you must be aware of subliminal recognition experiments and blindsight cases. I don’t know why you are so confident that nothing can be understood unconsciously, as when scientists discover answers to problems in their sleep.
You’re right — we’ve drifted into a different domain. My interest is simply this: Why is the world intelligible at all? What makes recognition, understanding, and grasp possible? What must be in place for anything to count as a solution, a reason, or a truth? Those are questions empirical psychology can’t answer, and that’s the level I was trying to speak to.
Laws.
@Jack:
A conjecture: The “activity of the categories” is a functioning system that is ongoing as long as an organism is alive. What you have to be awake to do (if you are a human being) is to express this activity, i.e., its content, firstly to oneself. (Two different kinds of activity; the hypothesis that there are these two possible kinds of activity I’m a little more confident about.) The world provides plenty of triggers to this activity; language provides more organized ones. A lot happens on the level of the activity of the categories independently of the conscious activity of expression, but the conscious mind can set problems that the activity of the categories can work on during sleep. The function of the activity of the categories is to “hook on to the world” and make sense of it; the function of the expressive activity is to make the results known to the subject and to others, by enabling the production of an equivalent expression. All that is conjecture. Whether psychology finds out that something like this is what is the case, I don’t know. Whether the administrator judges that this is all rubbish, also I don’t know; but anyway I just put it out there as a possible answer to your puzzle. (It doesn’t express a prior-held belief, but is simply a response to the post and your comments.) (The question “what are these categories that you say are active?” I think I can venture an answer to, but it would take a lot of preparation.)
Thanks — I appreciate the way you framed that. I agree that a lot can happen at the sub-personal level, and your distinction between background activity and conscious expression is an interesting one. My own focus here was just on the conditions of intelligibility themselves — what makes understanding possible in the first place — rather than on the cognitive mechanisms that might operate beneath that level. But I found your way of putting it helpful
The April 3 TLS has two letters to the editor about panpsychism, one from Galen Strawson defending it. https://www.the-tls.com/regular-features/letters-to-the-editor/letters-to-the-editor-april-3-2026. I will paste them here for non-subscribers:
When Tim Crane talks of “the lunatic fringe of panpsychism” (in his review of A World Appears: A journey into consciousness by Michael Pollan, March 20), we who are on or beyond the fringe chuckle and remember William James: “First, you know, a new theory is attacked as absurd; then it is admitted to be true, but obvious and insignificant; finally it is seen to be so important that its adversaries claim that they themselves discovered it”. We few, we happy moonstruck few, know – again with James – that a genuinely comprehensive understanding of the theory of evolution heavily favours (effectively mandates) some version of panpsychism. We know that there are many deep reflex habits of mind that prevent people from seeing this; and that very few even know what serious versions of panpsychism look like. (As Crane rightly says, it’s a theory about the fundamental nature of matter, physical stuff.) We know, also, that some people think panpsychists believe that tables, chairs, camshafts, bagels and so on are conscious, and we chuckle again, for this is no part of our panpsychism.
We know that the only goings-on in the universe whose intrinsic non-structural nature we know for sure are conscious goings-on. We know, with Arthur Eddington, Bertrand Russell and a good number of winners of the Nobel prize in physics, that nothing in physics offers any support to the hypothesis that matter is fundamentally non-conscious. We know that this hypothesis not only fails to confer any theoretical advantages, and is therefore vulnerable to Occam’s razor, but also creates a massive theoretical problem – the so-called hard problem of consciousness – that simply doesn’t exist on the supposition that some version of panpsychism is true. So we smile cheerfully – not even ruefully – when we’re lampooned, even as we sympathize with the great forgotten American philosopher Charles Augustus Strong (James believed him to be the best of his generation) when he writes, towards the end of his life, “that the difficulty of making people believe that there is in suns and atoms anything of the nature of feeling is so mountainous that I sometimes wish I had devoted my energies to something else, such as writing poetry or helping to bring about the millennium”.
Galen Strawson
University of Texas, Austin TX
Tim Crane fails to address the one aspect of the consciousness problem for which there is a probable answer – how did the phenomenon come about? Since consciousness confers a significant evolutionary benefit, the straightforward Darwinian answer is likely to be correct.
All creatures, while awake, receive a vast and continuous flow of sensory information that needs to be sifted, interpreted, assessed and possibly acted on. This will work to best advantage if deliberately or consciously driven with thought and intelligence by reference to experience. That, in turn, depends on memory. An extraordinary phenomenon in itself, it is therefore the likely origin of consciousness.
Rupert Marlow
Turnastone, Herefordshire
It isn’t easy to pin down precisely what panpsychism is saying.