The Mental As Fundamental

Michael Blamauer (Ed.
)
The Mental as Fundamental
New Perspectives on Panpsychism
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Michael Blamauer (Ed.)
The Mental as Fundamental

New Perspectives on Panpsychism
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Table of Contents
Michael Blamauer
Introduction: The Mental as Fundamental 7
1. Godehard Brüntrup
Panpsychism and Structural Realism 15
2. Pierfrancesco Basile
The Last Man Standing Argument for panpsychism: A rejoinder 35
3. David Skrbina
The Man Still Stands: Reply to Basile 53
4. Ludwig Jaskolla
“Mind Matters...” – Towards a concept
of proto-mental causation 57
5. Riccardo Manzotti
The Spread Mind: Phenomenal Process-Oriented
Vehicle Externalism 79
6. Michael Blamauer
Taking the Hard Problem of Consciousness Seriously: Dualism,
Panpsychism and the Origin of the Combination Problem 99
7. David Skrbina
Mind Space: Toward a solution to the combination problem 117
8. Philip Goff
There is no combination problem 131
9. Freya Mathews
Panpsychism as Paradigm 141
10. Matthias Rugel / Benjamin Andrae

Not bound to feel everything?
A dialog on the scope of experience 157
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Introduction: The Mental as
Fundamental
Michael Blamauer (Vienna)
In recent years one could notice a revival of panpsychistic

considerations of the mind’s place in nature.1 In his already classic
essay, Panpsychism, Thomas Nagel defined this position as “the
view that the basic physical constituents of the universe have mental
properties, whether or not they are parts of living organisms” (Nagel
1979, 181). Thus, mental properties are considered to be ubiquitous.
This of course stands in opposition to our common-sense view of the
world, which strictly separates things that are deemed conscious
from those deemed not conscious. Yet even in the field of
philosophical reflection, panpsychism is often regarded with
skepticism and for some philosophers, such as Colin McGinn, it is
merely a “comforting piece of utter balderdash” (McGinn 2006, 93).
However, despite, or perhaps precisely due to this skepticism,
panpsychists supply rather strong arguments in defense of their
position. The essays assembled in the present collection2 aim to
contribute positively to this discussion by providing new
perspectives on panpsychism, shedding new light on the arguments,
problems, and impacts of this view.
For the purpose of an introduction, I will attempt to offer some
reflections on the title of this book: “The Mental as Fundamental –
New Perspectives on Panpsychism.” Since it suggests a special kind
of association between the concepts of mentality, fundamentality and
panpsychism, it may be helpful to address this association by first
saying something about each concept.
In this context, mentality refers to consciousness considered as the
dimension of subjective experience. This dimension of experience,
manifest as phenomenal qualia, has been the subject of intense
debate in philosophy of mind over the last fifteen years. Whereas
reductive materialists have claimed that an exhaustive explanation of
all-there-is (including conscious experience) can be provided in
purely physical terms, and thus that the mental is really nothing
1
See e.g. the collections of Freeman 2006 and Skrbina 2009.
2
The initial idea for this collection goes back to a workshop that took place in
May 2010 at the Department of Philosophy of the University of Vienna.
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more than a special form of the physical, dualists have argued for the
opposite view. They hold that reality is not exhaustively accounted
for through purely physical descriptions in that these cannot explain
the qualitative way we experience this reality: Experience (with all
its phenomenal features) is not entailed by the physical facts about
the experienced reality. Thus, dualists commonly hold that there are
two fundamental aspects of reality, the physical and the mental, by
rejecting the possibility of reduction of either one to the other. The
most striking argument3 provided by dualists for the ontological
independence of mental properties from physical properties is their
free variability over the physical, which means – very briefly – that a
change of mental properties does not entail a change of physical
properties and vice versa.4 Yet if phenomenal facts do not consist in
physical facts, then phenomenal facts must be considered
fundamental and materialism is false – or so they argue.
Now, what is meant by fundamentality? David Chalmers provides a
definition of fundamentality in The Conscious Mind: “Fundamental
features cannot be explained in terms of more basic features, and
fundamental laws cannot be explained in terms of more basic laws;
they must simply be taken as primitive” (Chalmers 1996, 126). This
definition at first suggests an epistemological reading of the concept
of fundamentality. However, questions concerning the relationship
of mind and body and the possibility of reduction are primarily
questions of ontological dependence. Moreover, within the scope of
this discussion between reductionists and non-reductionists, the
paradigmatic interpretation of a fundamental feature strongly relates
to the definition of fundamental physical features of elementary
particles thus far discovered by physics (e.g. mass, spin, and charge).
Yet these physical features are not merely epistemologically crude –
they have ontological relevance in the first place by virtue of being
constitutive in the make-up of other physical objects. Hence,
whereas the epistemological concept of fundamentality (as I
understand it) proceeds only from the impossibility of conceptual
reduction, the ontological concept of fundamentality additionally
postulates the ontological priority, and hence constitutional
relevance, of certain properties of our world. Thus, if the mental is to
3
An excellent synopsis of several arguments for the irreducibility of
consciousness can be found in Chalmers 1996.
4
For an outline, especially of Chalmers’s version of the argument, see
Brüntrup, in this volume.

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be considered fundamental in the same sense as the physical, then it

must be understood in the stronger ontological sense of
fundamentality. This last consideration actually brings us to the third
and final question: Why panpsychism?
William Seager states: “To show panpsychism we need to show that
consciousness is both fundamental and ubiquitous” (Seager 2006,
137). I have just provided some preliminary cues concerning the
fundamentality claim – which is explored in much more detail in the
following contributions – so that we can ask: What reasons do we
have to proceed from the assumption of the fundamentality of the
mental to the assumption of its ubiquity? This question has received
various answers. I present one here in a very abbreviated form.
Fundamental mental properties are considered fundamental along the
same lines as fundamental physical properties. Paradigmatic
fundamental physical properties are – as I see it – ontologically
fundamental because they constitute physical objects. And, in that
every physical object supervenes on these fundamental properties,
they are ubiquitous as well. The conclusion to be drawn from this
definition of fundamentality of fundamental physical features with
respect to the fundamentality of the mental as argued by non-
reductive theorists of consciousness is obvious: If the mental is to be
understood as fundamental in this sense, then it is not ontologically
dependent on something more fundamental. Fundamental mental
features are on par with fundamental physical features. As Amy
Kind rightly put it: “Once you claim that the world contains
fundamental features that are non-physical it is hard to find a
principle way of limiting exactly where those fundamental features
are found” (Kind 2006, 2). Thus, the arguments for the
fundamentality of consciousness push in the direction of
panpsychism.5 Following this line of reasoning, mental properties
are best considered as ubiquitous too. However, given the
fundamentality of consciousness, a range of arguments exists in
favor of panpsychism, some of which are discussed in the present
volume.
In the opening article, “Panpsychism and Structural Realism,”

Godehard Brüntrup explores a classical argument for panpsychism:
the argument from intrinsic natures. With regard to Chalmers’s
5
See also my contribution to this book.

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formulation of the hard problem of consciousness, Brüntrup argues

for panpsychism as a viable option of accounting for consciousness
as a fundamental feature of reality. By rejecting structural realism as
an adequate scientific framework with which to describe reality, he
points to the necessity of intrinsic properties. He then argues that
phenomenal qualities would serve perfectly as the intrinsic carriers
of the relational properties of objects, as well as the criteria of their
individuation.
In the next article, Pierfrancesco Basile critically examines The Last
Man Standing Argument for Panpsychism, which was originally put
forward by David R. Griffin and reconsidered by David Skrbina in
his Panpsychism in the West (Skrbina 2005). The Last Man Standing
Argument is a negative argument that derives its force from the
rejection of alternative positions in order to cope with a certain
problem. Basile challenges it by asking: “Could it be that, contrary
to what is held by Griffin and Skrbina, panpsychism is not ‘the most
viable alternative’ [to the problem of consciousness, MB] after all?”
He thereby trades off the positive aspects of panpsychism against its
problematic ones, especially the so-called “combination problem,”
and asks for alternatives. He concludes that even if panpsychism
must overcome significant theoretical challenges, it is still a position
worthy of exploration with respect to the mind-body problem.
Basile’s contribution is followed by a reply by David Skrbina.
Another argument for panpsychism could be distilled through
examining the problems of mental causation. In “Mind Matters...”
Ludwig Jaskolla provides an idea of how proto-mental causation
could be positively treated within an overall pan-experientialistic
ontology. Starting with an evaluation of the classical problems of
mental causation in order to gain some basic conceptual distinctions,
he supplies reasons for the causal relevance of the mental in that “it
provides the formal constraints necessary for every act of causation.”
He then argues that a panexperientialistic metaphysics would serve
as the best framework to positively accommodate the causal
relevance of the mental.
In “The Spread Mind,” Riccardo Manzotti focuses on a critical
discussion of the internalism of experience and puts forward an
externalist process-orientated position, which he refers to as “the
spread mind.” Whereas internalism claims that phenomenal
experience occurs within our nervous systems, externalism holds
that experience is “identical to the occurrence of a process

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instantiated by causal relations in the environment.” The process-

orientated externalism put forward by Manzotti is a kind of
panpsychistic approach in that it proceeds beyond the borders of the
human body as the place wherein phenomenal experience occurs in
order to relate experience to universal physical processes in the
environment.
In my own paper, “Taking the Hard Problem of Consciousness
Seriously,” I attempt to show that the most effective arguments
against physicalism, which at first sight tend to lead to a kind of
dualistic world view, in their last consequence actually lead to
panpsychism. But I further argue that even if panpsychsim is a sound
way of treating the mind-body problem, the challenge of the
combination problem is a significant hurdle for panpsychism, which
must overcome if the latter is to made intelligible. The combination
problem of panpsychism is that of intelligibly explaining
consciousness in terms of adding single perspectives or experiences
to gain a composite conscious whole, i.e. a full-blown, human,
experiential perspective. And this may be one of the major problems
of formulating a theory of consciousness. I attempt to show that the
origin of the combination problem can be traced back to the dualistic
concessions of panpsychism, which emerged from its arguments
against physicalism in the first place. I conclude that to overcome
the combination problem, panpsychism must abandon these dualistic
concessions.
The next two papers offer definite solutions to the combination
problem. David Skrbina presents an answer in “Mind Space.” He
argues that, parallel to physical space (in which physical objects
exist), there exists an experiential space that he calls “mind space,”
which is constituted by experiential aspects of the ultimate particles
that are likewise resembled in physical space. The idea is that this
larger experiential space is not “composed of” lower experiential
units, but rather that “they combine to create a space of experiential
possibilities for the whole, allowing the existence of complex,
higher-order mind.”
Yet whereas most panpsychists find themselves facing a formidable
theoretical obstacle in the combination problem, Philip Goff tries to
untangle this Gordian Knot by simply cutting through it with a bold
stroke. In his paper of the same name, he argues that “There is no
Combination Problem” as such if the panpsychist is willing to accept
the idea of emergence. The problem of emergence of macroscopic

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subjects from their microscopic parts is not – as he states – the

combination problem, but the problem of defining a precise
scientific law that governs this emergence. Yet, if the definition of
the laws of emergence is scientifically questionable in that they
would be highly arbitrary, the default assumption “ought to be that
all combinations of fundamental particles form an emergent
macroscopic subject.”
In “Panpsychism as Paradigm,” Freya Mathews primarily deals not
with particular questions of the mind-body problem, but rather with
panpsychism as a viable metaphysical theory to explain the world as
such and our place within it. She develops a holistic view of the
universe as a self-actualizing “non-contingent unity” and explores
the question of how “local, individual minds come to differentiate
themselves within the matrix of a global mind.”
The book closes with an article by Matthias Rugel and Benjamin
Andrae. They set up a kind of platonic dialog on panpsychism
between two characters, M and B. Rugel and Andrae introduce
panpsychism by examining the question of the interrelationship
between things and the concept of experience as the paradigmatic
model of connection. B then vindicates the position “that every
individual is connected to all other individuals,” thereby following
Aristotle, Leibniz and Whitehead. In opposition, M argues that
“every individual is only connected to some and definitely not all
other individuals,” following Gregg Rosenberg’s theory of natural
individuals.
All of the contributions to this book – even those discussing

theoretic hurdles still to be overcome – point in one direction:
Panpsychism is a promising (and perhaps the most promising)
position from which to treat the mind-body problem, not only with
respect to the human species, but with respect to the evolution of the
universe as such. Only time will tell.
References
Chalmers, D. J. (1996): The Conscious Mind: In Search of a
Fundamental Theory, Oxford et al.
Freeman, A. (Ed.) (2006): Consciousness and ist Place in Nature.
Does Physicalism entail Panpsychism?, Exeter u. a.
Kind, A. (2006): “Panexperientialism, Cognition and the Nature of
Experience.” In: Psyche 12 (5): 1-15.

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McGinn, C. 2006. Hard Questions – Comments on Galen Strawson.

In: Freeman, A. (Ed.), Consciousness and ist Place in Nature. Does
Physicalism entail Panpsychism?, Exeter u. a.
Nagel, T. (1979): Panpsychism. In: Idem, Mortal Questions,
Cambridge.
Seager, W. (2006): The 'Intrinsic Nature' Argument for
Panpsychism. In: Freeman, A. (Ed.), Consciousness and ist Place in
Nature. Does Physicalism entail Panpsychism?, Exeter u. a.
Skrbina, D. (2005): Panpsychism in the West. Cambridge/Mass.:
MIT Press.
Skrbina, D. (Ed.) (2009): Mind that Abides. Panpsychism in the new
millenium. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

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Panpsychism and Structural Realism1
Godehard Brüntrup (Munich)
The Problem
Structural realism is a popular view among philosophers of science.
Definitely with the late David Lewis' paper on “Ramseyan Humility”
(Lewis 2009), if not earlier, it has become widely discussed among analytic
metaphysicians as well. It promises to avoid the pitfalls of both classical
scientific realism and scientific anti-realism by restricting realism to the
structural features of the world only. In the tradition of Whiteheadian
process philosophy, any form of structural realism, however, commits the
fallacy of misplaced concreteness. Structure alone will never suffice to
ground the existence of a concrete entity. Intrinsic properties that carry the
relational structure are needed. This line of argument lends support to a
kind of panpsychism if the grounding realizers of the structural and
relational properties are conceived to be intrinisic properties analogous to
the properties of the phenomenal mind. To the structural realist, it is by no
means obvious that he is committing a fallacy of misplaced concreteness.
On the contrary, the need for unobservable realizers of the mathematical
structures described by science is often flatly denied. If – by assumption –
all there is to matter is its relational or structural properties, then the
impetus to seek an intrinsic ‘background’ that underpins them obviously
evaporates completely. For the panpsychist in the tradition of process
philosophy, it is thus a pressing task to carefully and critically scrutinize
the prospects for structural realist metaphysics. Things are complicated by
the fact that there are many forms of structural realism. In what follows
some general features of the most important subdistinctions of structural
realism will be discussed.
What is Structural Realism?

Classical realism affirms that the nature of unobservable objects is at least
in approximation correctly described by our best scientific theories. Anti-
realism holds that truth is to be understood in epistemic terms either as
1 This paper was initially presented at the “Toward A Science Of Consciousness”

conference, Tucson, Arizona, April 2010, and again, slightly expanded, at the “The
Mental as Fundamental” conference, Vienna, May 2010. I wish to thank David
Chalmers, William Seager, Philip Goff, Sam Coleman and David Skrbina for critical
questions and commentaries.

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ideal rational acceptability or as maximal coherence; thereby any claim

about the correspondence between our theories and the mind-independent
world is avoided. Structural realism takes a middle position by maintaining
that we should commit ourselves to the structural and mathematical content
of our theories only. The standard example is the transition from Fresnel’s
ether to Maxwell’s electromagnetic theory of optics. What was carried over
in this theory shift was not the full theoretical content; there was rather a
continuity of form or structure. (Worall 1989, 117)
The best way to characterize structural realism is the standard Ramsey
method of eliminating theoretical terms. Each referring term in a given
theory is replaced by an existentially bound variable. The result is a claim
of the following general structure: There exist certain entities (represented
by variables only) that are configured structurally in a certain way. It is still
maintained that the theoretical entities exist; however, the theory does not
refer to them directly but rather by means of bound variables and the
relational structure that is (supposedly) known by observation. In one
reading of structural realism, the theoretical entities “in themselves”
remain unknown; only their structural interdependence is knowable.
Structural realism thus understood combines a Kantian anti-realist view
about the nature of things in themselves with a realist view about the
relational structure. More austere forms of structural realism embrace
radical eliminativism about anything non-relational. Before these different
positions will be discussed in greater detail, the most powerful and general
challenge to structural realism by the panpsychist will be presented: the
hard problem of consciousness. This problem serves as a backdrop for the
entire discussion presented here. Only then will the analysis of the various
strands of structural realism highlight the problems that the respective
structural realists have to face in a more fine-grained way. In conclusion I
will argue that the challenge of structural realism to panpsychism is real
but that it poses no serious threat to the viability of a panpsychist view.
The Incompleteness of Structure: A “Chalmersian” Presentation of the

“Hard Problem of Consciousness”
The key argument against any form of structural realism is that within it
the hard problem of consciousness arises in its toughest form: there is a
deep epistemological and ontological gap between relational structure and
phenomenal consciousness.
Following upon recent research in the philosophy of mind, the discussion
of the “hard problem of consciousness” has resulted in a widespread

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acceptance of the thesis that the qualitative mental properties of

phenomenal experience cannot be fully reduced to relational or structural
properties. It is the intrinsic qualitative aspect of the mental that cannot be
captured by the causal and functional concepts of the physical sciences.
Because of their intrinsic nature, qualitative mental states cannot be
captured by scientific analysis. The properties that science finds are all
dispositional. Dispositions require a categorical (non-dispositional) basis
on which they supervene. For present purposes, “intrinsic properties” will
refer to those properties that a thing has in itself, independently of its
relations to other things: the properties it could have even if it were the
only thing in the universe. The mental properties of the Cartesian thinking
thing are intrinsic in this sense because it can be conceived that all of its
mental states could exist even without a material external world. The
richness of its intrinsic properties is thus in principle independent of
external relations (maybe with the exception of God). In contemporary
philosophy of mind, functionalism has been criticized as capturing only the
relational aspects of mind, and as missing the intrinsic, qualitative mental
properties. Can physical properties be intrinsic in this sense? That is a
difficult question. Mass is considered by some to be an intrinsic property.
But then, having a mass of m is a property such that something that has
that property will play a certain functional role defined by a relation of
force and acceleration: m=F/ a. What about rest mass? It is a consequence
of general relativity that only an isolated system would have a coordinate-
independent mass. Since a non-isolated system is constantly exchanging
energy-momentum with its environment, the mass at a certain point in time
would depend on the simultaneity determinations of the observer. In
quantum mechanics, mass is ultimately explained by the Higgs
mechanism, which is clearly a functional concept. It seems as though, if
only we dig deep enough, even physical concepts that looked prima facie
like non-relational intrinsic properties, turn out to be defined relationally. It
is thus reasonable to ask: What is the intrinsic categorical nature of those
entities that are relationally defined by physics?
Many arguments have been advanced to show that facts about qualia are
not implied by physical facts. I will focus here on David Chalmers' famous
“zombie argument” because it helps to clearly indicate where in the logical
structure of the debate the physicalist is possibly forced to draw
panpsychist conclusions. The general form of the argument is this
(Chalmers 2002, 249):

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Let P be the conjunction of all micro-physical truths about the universe,

and let Q be an arbitrary phenomenal truth about the universe.
(1) P&~Q is conceivable.

(2) If P&~Q is conceivable, P&~Q is metaphysically possible.
(3) If P&~Q is metaphysically possible, materialism is false.
(4) Materialism is false.
But, says the standard scientific essentialist (type-B materialist), P&~Q is

only conceivable but not metaphysically possible. The mistake, according
to the type-B materialist, is that we are working with primary intensions
when dealing with epistemic possibility (conceivability), and with
secondary intensions when dealing with metaphysical possibility. In the
first case, we consider a world as actual; in the latter case we consider a
world as counterfactual (how things might have been but are not). If we
consider Putnam's XYZ-world as actual, then “water is not H2O” is true.
This is an instance of an epistemic possibility. If we rigidly hold the
meaning of “water”, as fixed by the actual world, and counterfactually
consider the XYZ-world, then “water is not H2O” turns out to be false.
Then “water is H2O” expresses a Kripkean necessary truth. Let us call
possibility associated with primary intensions “l-possibility,” and
possibility associated with secondary intensions “2-possibility.” In order
for Chalmers' argument to meet the challenge of type B-materialism, it
should rather look like this (Chalmers 2010):

(2) If P&~Q is conceivable, P&~Q is 1-possible.
(3) If P&~Q is 1-possible, P&~Q is 2-possible.
(4) If P&~Q is 2-possible, materialism is false.
(5) Materialism is false.
Here, the truth of (3) requires that both P and Q have primary and
secondary intensions that coincide. In the case of Q, this seems
unproblematic. If something feels like pain, it is pain. If something feels
like consciousness, it is consciousness. In the case of P, however, the issue
becomes much more problematic. Physical properties are functionally
defined. We can say that the primary intension of “mass” picks out
whatever plays the mass role in a given world. We can also say that the
secondary intension of “mass” is tied to the property playing that role in

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our world in such a way that in a world where something else plays the
mass role, this role filler is not mass. Premise (3) can be rejected on these
grounds. But what does that mean? In that case there would be possible
worlds that verify the structural description of our world in physical terms
without being an exact duplicate of our world. The physical structure of
those other worlds would be indistinguishable from our world, but the
intrinsic natures carrying those relations would be different. The most
interesting case would be worlds verifying P&~Q.
This leads to an interesting metaphysical picture: the structural properties
of physics in our world do not necessitate the Q-properties (phenomenal
properties); the Q-properties do not supervene logically on the structural
properties. However, the structural properties of physics together with
additional intrinsic properties necessitate the emergence of phenomenal
consciousness. This metaphysical picture has been eloquently expressed by
Astronomer Sir Arthur Eddington in his work “Space, Time, and
Gravitation”: “Physics is the knowledge of structural form, and not
knowledge of content. All through the physical world runs that unknown
content, which must surely be the stuff of our consciousness” (Eddington
1920, 200). Russell's “neutral monism” was based on similar intuitions:
“As regards the world in general, both physical and mental, everything we
know of its intrinsic character is derived from the mental side, and almost
everything we know of its causal laws is derived from the physical side”
(Russell 1927, 402). The structure of Chalmers' argument thus comes
finally down to this (Chalmers 2002):

(2) If P&~Q is conceivable, then P&~Q is 1-possible.
(3) If P&~Q is 1-possible, then P&~Q is 2-possible or Russellian
monism is true.
(4) If P&~Q is 2-possible, materialism is false.
(5) Materialism is false or Russellian monism is true.
Russell's intuition was that we lack information about the intrinsic nature
of the physical world, in virtue of which (plus the relevant laws) the
emergence of conscious mind can be explained. This is, of course, just a
conjecture, but it is certainly a possibility that knowledge of the intrinsic
properties of matter would help to overcome the puzzle of emergence. In
Russell's words: “The physical world is only known as regards certain
abstract features of its space-time structure – features which, because of

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their abstractness, do not suffice to show whether the world is, or is not,
different in intrinsic character from the world of mind” (Russell 1948,
240). To use Whitehead's term, the modern notion of matter presents us
with “vacuous” entities whose intrinsic nature is unknown (Whitehead
1929, 29). Inspired by Humean arguments, Peter Unger has recently
presented a visually compelling picture of this problem. Let us define two
worlds in purely structural terms, not assuming any intrinsic qualitative
properties. The first world is a classical Newtonian world of particles
moving about in empty space according to the laws of physics. Call this the
“particulate world.” In the second world there is a continuous material
plenum (a continuous field of matter) in which there are little, perfectly
empty spaces, or absolute vacua, or simply “bubbles.” Call this the
“plenumate world.” Now let us assume that the two worlds stand in an
isomorphic relation in such a way that for each particle in the particulate
world there is a corresponding bubble in the plenumate world (in the same
location, governed by the same laws). It is Unger's contention that these
two worlds are functionally equivalent (Unger 2006, 21-31). A structural
description would be unable to capture the differences between these two
worlds. The structural realist might regard it as a theoretical advantage that
his/her account abstracts away from the underlying differences and
concentrates on the isomorphic structure only. But, as this simple example
makes quite clear, the intuition that the structural description misses
something of great importance is powerful.
An alternative metaphysics would thus have to assume more than just
structure. One way of spelling this out could be a dual aspect theory: The
relational properties account for the structural form, but the absolutely
intrinsic properties account for the ultimate realizers of the relational
structure. One might even think of some kind of “hylomorphism” of the
relational and the intrinsic; both aspects together constitute a concrete
entity. Thus the relational and the intrinsic aspects of reality have basic
ontological status, without one having clear priority over the other.
Alternatively, a neutral monism can also serve as the metaphysical
framework. In this case, the basic properties of the world are neither
physical nor phenomenal; rather, the phenomenal and the physical are
constructed out of them. “From their intrinsic natures in combination, the
phenomenal is constructed; and from their extrinsic relations, the physical
is constructed” (Chalmers 1996, 156). In any case, this ontology implies
that something mental or proto-mental is a fundamental feature of the
world.

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Now, if the analysis sketched above is correct, then any form of structural
realism is misguided. It cannot be a complete realistic view of the world.
The panpsychist could stop right here and consider her case closed. But
this would seem to be rushing things. After all, there is no widely accepted
solution to the hard problem of consciousness. In not providing a
satisfactory solution to the hard problem of consciousness, structural
realism stands by no means alone. One can thus reasonably ask: Can the
panpsychist offer more than just this argument from the hard problem of
consciousness? Are there internal problems of structural realism that the
panpsychist might exploit to bolster her case? The panpsychist is thus well
advised to attempt a critical analysis of the different versions of structural
realism. For this purpose, I will distinguish epistemological from
ontological structural realism. Within ontological structural realism there is
the further sub-distinction of moderate and eliminative ontological
structural realism. (Cf. Ladyman 1998)
Epistemic Structural Realism

Epistemic structural realism remains agnostic about any properties of the
unoberservable realm that are not structural. The Russell of “The Analysis
of Matter” (1927) is a good example of this view. Russell argued for an
agnosticism concerning the physical world with the exception of its purely
formal and mathematical properties. The higher order properties of
physical theories can only be expressed in mathematical terms.
Epistemological structural realism limits the scope of scientific realism to
exactly these properties. But according to the epistemic structural realist
there is an objective world out there that contains unobservable objects. We
can, however, only know the relational properties of these objects. Thus we
only know the structure, ultimately only the formal structure, of the world.
It is immediately obvious that the panpsychist is not threatened by this
argument because she makes exactly this point, that the intrinsic nature of
objects “in themselves” is not known to us, except in the case of our own
consciousness. The panpsychist is thus not an agnostic about the ultimate
intrinsic nature of things. That puts her at a distinct advantage over the
epistemic structural realist in explaining the emergence of consciousness.
But the panpsychist's view does not contradict the account of the
epistemological structural realist who is simply silent on the intrinsic
nature of unobservable entities.

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Newman's Argument
The classic critique of epistemological structural realism is “Newman's
Argument” (Newman 1928), which was initially directed against Russell.
Newman's Argument is best understood as a reductio aimed at
epistemological structural realism, showing that it ultimately collapses into
anti-realism.
Two claims by Russel are relevant here; he argued:
1. “ … it would seem that wherever we infer from perceptions it is only
structure that we can validly infer; and structure is what can be
expressed by mathematical logic “(Russell 1927, 254)
2. “The only legitimate attitude about the physical world seems to be
one of complete agnosticism as regards all but its mathematical
properties” (Russel 1927, 270)
Newman argues that the existence of a mathematical structure is trivially
true of a set of objects. He gives the following example (Newman, 1928,
139f.):
What does it mean to say that “two systems of relations have the same
structure”? Assume, set A is a random collection of people, and R the two-
termed relation of “being acquainted”. A map of A can be made by making
a dot on a piece of paper to represent each person and then those pairs of
dots which represent acquainted persons are joined by a line. Such a map is
itself a structured system. This new system B has the same structure as A.
The structure-generating relation, S, is in this case "joined by a line". The
important aspect of this example is that it is not at all necessary for the
objects composing A and B, nor the relations R and S, to be qualitatively
similar. “In fact to discuss the structure of the system A it is only necessary
to know the incidence of R; its intrinsic qualities are irrelevant. The
existence of a structure is trivially true of a set of objects.”
According to Newman, a statement describing a certain structure with
regard to a number of objects is a trivial statement. Why is the existence of
a structure trivially true of a set of objects? Because, for Newman, a
structure is purely formal and mathematical and furthermore it is
independent of the intrinsic qualities of the objects. If only the structure is
known, then besides what is logically deducible from the properties of the
structure, it is only the number of constituting objects that can be known.
But if all we know about the objects is their cardinality, if we do not know
any properties of the objects that ground certain relations and exclude
others, then – mathematically – any system of relations over these objects
is as good as any other; all of them are instantiated. Relations are simply

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sets of ordered sequences of entities. Given the entities, all of those ordered
sequences will exist, as a matter of pure mathematics. There is only the
structural reality consisting of relations, and individual objects are points
defined by their place in the overall relational system. Another illustration
for this idea is mathematical graph theory. One could say that nature is like
a mathematical graph, in which relations obtain between point-like nodes
(Cf. Dipert 1997). There are no non-relational properties. Unless there is
something, as Newman says, “qualitative” (involving intrinsic properties)
about the relata that determines the nature of the relations, the relations, of
which the structure is supposed to be a formal abstraction, are in no way
determined. Without knowing what exactly is related, one does not know
what the nature of the relation is, except for its purely formal
characteristics.
The very idea of realism, describing nature as it exists independent of the
mind, is thus undermined. Epistemological structural realism is meant to
vindicate and not to revise the ontological commitments of scientific
realism. On this view the objective world is composed of unobservable
objects between which certain properties and relations obtain. But we can
only know the properties and relations of these properties and relations,
that is, the structure of the objective world. The problem gets even worse:
If Newman's argument is correct, we do not even know the objective
structure of the world in any realist sense of “objectivity”. Scientific
realism collapses into anti-realism. The same point can be made by
referring to Putnam's famous modeltheoretic argument (Putnam 1980). As
argued by Newman, given a number of objects, any relational structure
configuring them is already given. If we picture objects as mere nodes in a
relational graph with no intrinsic nature, then for each structure there are
many different relations between the objects that make the propositions
describing the structure true. What is the intended model of the structure?
Which one is the real relational structure of the mind-independent word?
There are too many ontological interpretations (models) of our theories.
Our scientific descriptions of the world are unable to single out the
intended model, i.e., the real world. Since science deals only with
mathematical structure, and not with real relations between objects (which
are determined by the qualitative intrinsic natures of the objects), we can
never know the one true story about the world in a metaphysical-realist
way. We have too many “truths.”
The panpsychist can thus argue that epistemological structural realism fails
in the attempt to provide a genuine alternative between classical scientific

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realism and anti-realism. It is rather a form of anti-realism. As such it

remains agnostic about the intrinsic nature of “things in themselves”, and is
thus no threat to panpsychism. A nice illustration for this is provided by
Kant. Even though Kant defended a version of epistemological structural
realism, he was still on a metaphysical level sympathetic to panpsychism
because “thinking” or something “analogous to thinking” was for him the
only reasonable candidate for the intrinsic nature of substances in space.
For Kant it was obvious that the only absolutely intrinsic properties we can
conceive of are taken from the mental realm. It is worthwhile to quote him
at length:
It is quite otherwise with a substantia phenomenon in space; its inner

determinations are nothing but relations, and it itself is entirely made up of mere
relations. We are acquainted with substance in space only through forces which
are active in this and that space, either bringing other objects to it (attraction), or
preventing them penetrating into it (repulsion and impenetrability). We are not
acquainted with any other properties constituting the concept of the substance
which appears in space and which we call matter. As object of pure
understanding, on the other hand, every substance must have inner
determinations and powers which pertain to its inner reality. But what inner
accidents can I entertain in thought, save only those which my inner sense
presents to me? They must be something which is either itself a thinking or
analogous to thinking. (CPR B321, transl. Norman Kemp Smith)
Kantian empirical agnosticism in regards to the intrinsic nature of

unobservable objects (as opposed the mere phenomena) is compatible with
metaphysical leanings towards panpsychism. The only alternative for the
epistemic structural realist might be to expand her notion of the observable
object, giving it more than just structural content. Thus it might be possible
to escape Newman's and Putnam's argument. But then epistemic structural
realism collapses into classical realism, which naively assumes that the
nature of things is directly discoverable by science.
Ontological Structural Realism

It should thus not come as a surprise that the “real” adversary of
panpsychism is ontological structural realism. An initial, and a still
somewhat superficial, reading of ontological structural realism asserts
simply that there is nothing more to the entities than their place within the
relational system. Below we will call this version “moderate ontological
structural realism”: According to this view, the Ramseyfication has to be

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interpreted ontologically. The bound variables in the Ramsey sentence

refer to objects that have no intrinsic nature. In other terms, it is not only
our description of the world that becomes like a mathematical graph, but
furthermore the nature of mind-independent entities is reduced to point-
like places within the structure. In the formalism of contemporary particle
physics, the ultimate units of matter are described as point-like. In quantum
mechanics individual particles have no clear identity conditions, no
intrinsic natures. Ontological structural realists argue that the nature of
physical reality as presented by contemporary physics is incoherent with
standard metaphysical views about the ontological relationship between
relations, individual objects, and intrinsic properties. Instead of
reformulating classical substance theory in a dynamic, process-oriented
way as Whitehead proposed, ontological structural realists argue that the
best interpretation of contemporary physics is that there is ultimately only
structure and all particular objects, if they are to be considered at all, are
point-like and void of any intrinsic properties.
The Newman/Putnam argument seems ineffective against ontological
structural realism. The objective mind-independent world is, according to
ontological structural realism, a complex structure. The epistemological
question, whether our theories correctly represent this structure, is
irrelevant. The relational world-structure is, so it seems, something
concrete, not an abstract mathematical object to which Newman's argument
would apply. It cannot be said that every possible relation between objects
is instantiated, only one particular set of relationals is concretely realized in
this world. But how is this possible within ontological structuralism?
Ontological structural realism might initially look like functionalism, but
there is supposedly a big difference. Functionalism requires that the system
of relations it specifies be implemented or realized by some appropriately
organized system of entities whose own properties permit them to ground
the functional specification of the system. Ontological structural realism
dispenses with the realization requirement: the system of relations all by
itself is enough to underpin the reality of the entities at issue.
The Carrier Problem

It is precisely this idea that the panpsychist needs to question. In his paper
“Pattern and Being”, John Haugeland assumes the traditional view that a
substance needs properties, which it has regardless of anything else. He
then considers the ontological status of the pieces in a chess game – say a
rook or a pawn – and claims that their very nature is determined entirely by

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how they move about in the chess game in relation to other pieces. A chess
game is a perfect example for a small structural world. Haugeland writes:
“No rook is a substance. ... Nothing about a rook is determinate, not even
its 'rookness,' apart from its participation in a chess game” (Haugeland
1993, 63). The situation is even more complicated. The formal definition of
a type in a chess game is circular. The nature of each type is completely
determined by the set of allowable moves it makes within the game as a
whole. The chess game as a whole, however, is defined by the
interdependent set of types that play functional roles in it. Each part of the
game presupposes the existence of the whole game, and the game
presupposes the existence of its parts. Why isn't this circularity of chess
categories vicious (Cf. Rosenberg 2004, 234)? How can chess games
actually and concretely exist? Rosenberg claims that there must be
something distinct from the formal structure that actually grounds the game
in concrete reality. In the case of a chess game we have physically distinct
objects that serve as stand-ins, or realizers, of the relevant types, thus
allowing for the existence of concrete tokens of those types. Of course,
there is much more to consider here, such as the concrete chessboard or the
physical position of the players in space. Without such “carriers” of the
formal structure, the game would remain too incomplete and abstract to
exist concretely. Rosenberg extends this thought to other, more complex,
conceptual systems such as those constructed by scientific theories which
are also merely abstract and circularly defined. Consider cellular automata
in computer science. Each cell is defined by its role in the entire system,
and the entire system is defined by the cells. Cellular automata may exist
as computational systems because there is something external to the formal
system that realizes or carries the computational system. The physical
states of the hardware are the carriers of the cellular automata. Biology, as
an abstract conceptual system, is carried by the mechanics of molecular
biochemistry, psychology by the dynamical properties of the neural system,
and economics by the needs and desires of individuals. The crucial
question is, however: What carries the most basic physical level? Physics
presents us a world of interdependently defined functional roles. Are there
any properties that can give this circularly defined conceptual system a
foothold in concrete reality? This is a puzzling question. Let us call it the
“ultimate carrier problem.” The ontological structural realist will have to
argue that there is in fact no carrier problem. However, Leibniz argued that
all extrinsic, relational properties have to be grounded in intrinsic
properties. Relations have to relate to something. This idea has strong

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intuitive force. How could it possibly be that all relational properties of

material objects be grounded in intrinsic properties? If grounding means
that the intrinsic properties are the constituting base of the relational
extrinsic properties, then we have a metaphysical system in which certain
fundamental entities with absolutely intrinsic properties constitute the
entire remainder of reality – a view that Leibniz famously argued for in his
Monadology. The key was to replace “mutual causal influence” with
“mutual information” (Seager 2006, 4). The whole of physical space was
constructed by giving each monad a spatial viewpoint, from which space
was constituted as experienced space. The idea of ultimate carriers can lead
directly to panpsychism. It is for this reason that the denial of the need for
ultimate carriers in ontological structural realism is a direct threat to
panpsychism. But the structural realist encounters a serious problem here.
If the ultimate relational system is not carried in any way, then it is a purely
mathematical abstract object. If this is the case, then Newman's argument
applies to this relational ontology after all: If there are no intrinsic
properties of the objects that ground certain relations and exclude others,
then – mathematically speaking– any system of relations over these objects
is as good as any other. All of them are instantiated. Relations are simply
sets of ordered sequences of entities. Given the entities, all of those ordered
sequences will exist, as a matter of pure mathematics. Thus Newman's
argument gets ontologized. It is no longer the epistemological question,
whether we know how a formal structure is realized in the mind-
independent world. The question at this point becomes, how does a mind-
independent world, which consists entirely of mathematical point-like
objects and where all formal relations between objects are trivially given,
singles out the appropriate relations, so as to constitute the concrete world
in which we live? This seems to be a case of the utterly unintelligible
emergence of the concrete from the abstract. So Newman's argument re-
emerges in an ontological reading. The only way to avoid this situation
would be to eliminate individual objects altogether.
At this point an important distinction needs to be made. The brand of
ontological structural realism which we have discussed up until this point,
was mostly moderate ontological structural realism. It has to be
distinguished from its more radical cousin, eliminative ontological
structural realism. The difference can easily be stated:
Moderate ontological structural realism defends a two-category ontology:
objects, relation. However, objects are bare of intrinsic properties.

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Eliminative ontological structural realism adopts a parsimonious, one-

category ontology: there are only relations.
Both versions of ontological structural realism will now have to be
interpreted separately.
Moderate Ontological Relationalism

This position tries to occupy space between two extremes. The first
extreme is the view that all relations have to be grounded in the intrinsic
properties of objects, thus granting ontological primacy to the objects. The
other extreme is the outright denial of the existence of anything other than
structure. The moderate ontological realist, however, places relations and
objects on equal footing. Both ontological categories are interdependent.
The relations unite the relata. The relata are the meeting points of the
relations. Relations require relata. One presupposes the other; they are
circularly defined (Cf. Eddington 1928). Objects are bundles of relations,
and relations are connections between objects (Cf. Esfeld 2008). The
challenge is to make sense of this initially appealing idea. If relations and
objects are circularly defined, why is this circularity not vicious or even
“deadly”? As we have seen, according to Rosenberg, such circularly-
defined differences are harmless because their existence is grounded in
something that carries those contrasts. Properties that are functionally
defined within a system are relative to this system and cannot carry the
relational structure of the system. Something external to the system is
needed (Cf. Rosenberg 2004, 237). In order to avoid an infinite regress of
ever more fine-grained systems, where each lower structure is serving as
the carrier of the next higher one, a stopper is required. There are good
scientific reasons to assume that nature has a lower size limit (Planck size
scale). Only a property that is intrinsic tout court and not relative to a
system could bring this about and serve as an ultimate carrier. Are there
properties that are not intrinsic to any system, but at least partly intrinsic to
themselves? The only candidates we know of are phenomenal qualities.
One cannot understand the nature of phenomenal qualities by knowledge
of their contextual relations alone. This radical intrinsicness is the very
nature of phenomenal qualia. Whatever grounds the structural-relational
properties of the world must have this radical intrinsicness. It might well
be that our own consciousness is the closest analogue we get to this
underlying reality. Now if objects and relations form such an
interdependent system, the carrier must be external to this system. Rather
than the intrinsic properties of the objects - whose existence the moderate

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ontological structural realist denies - there must be something else, out of

which objects and relations arise. And this ultimate reality had better have
the radical intrinsicness that stops the regress. This line of reasoning opens
up an argument for proto-mental properties in this underlying reality.
Another problem with moderate ontological realism is the idea of objects
that lack intrinsic properties. How can this notion of an object be spelled
out? A thing, that has no nature that makes it what it is, is indeed an utterly
mysterious thing. Even an omnipotent creator could not create a world in
which this thing existed just by itself. With regard to numbers, Russell
made this often quoted point in the “Principles of Mathematics”, which can
be extended to other individual objects as well:
It is impossible that the ordinals should be, as Dedekind suggests, nothing but
the terms of such relations as constitute progressions. If they are to be anything
at all, they must be intrinsically something; they must differ from other entities
as points from instants, or colors from sounds... Dedekind does not show us
what it is that all progressions have in common, nor give any reason for
supposing it to be the ordinal numbers, except that all progressions obey the
same laws as ordinals do, which would prove equally that any assigned
progression is what all progressions have in common. … His demonstrations
nowhere – not even when he comes to cardinals – involve any property
distinguishing numbers from other progressions. (Russell 1903, 249)
To be an individual object implies having intrinsic properties. Esfeld's

contention that objects are bundles of relations gives rise to similar
worries. How is such a bundle unified as an individual? Esfeld inherits all
the problems of the bundle theory of concrete particulars. There are far too
many bundles of relations co-present at any given point in time. What
distinguishes the true individual object from a random bundle of relations?
Esfeld cannot refer to a “haecceitas” or “thisness” as the individuating
property since this would obviously be an intrinsic property of the object.
It is not sufficient to attribute invariance under certain symmetric
transformations in the mathematical formalism of physics to individuate
things. Transformation invariance is an entirely structural property, which
is utterly silent on and has nothing to say about what is invariant during
transformation. What constitutes the nature of the entity that endures
during these transformations? Moderate ontological structuralism does not
provide an answer to this question.

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Eliminative Ontological Structural Realism

The most promising strategy for the structural realist might then be to
eliminate individual objects altogether. There is nothing but structure.
Newman's original argument against epistemological structural realism is
clearly not effective here. It is an epistemological argument and it builds on
the assumption that the number of objects is given. Also, an ontological
reading of Newman's argument is without force. If there are no individuals,
then arguments based on the requirement of intrinsic natures have no target
at which they can aim. It is futile to argue about the necessary properties of
individual objects if the theory denies their very existence.
However, there are other difficult challenges for the eliminative ontological
structural realist. The first one is grounded in a simple conceptual analysis.
Does the very notion of a relation make sense if there are no relata?
Formally speaking, relations are construed as n-place predicates. It seems
to be a conceptual truth that relations relate something. On the
metaphysical side even deeper problems arise. The eliminative ontological
structural realist has to deny the need for carriers of structures; otherwise
the carrier problem and the question of intrinsic properties carrying the
relational structure re-emerges. But if there are no carriers, then the formal,
mathematical structure is the ultimate reality. The eliminativist ontological
structural realist cannot give an account why the world is physical rather
than mathematical. (Cf. Ladyman/Ross 2007.) The original motivation for
structural realism was to abstract away from the unknown physical reality
and work only with the second-order structural description given by
mathematical physics. Thus there was a clear distinction between structure
on the one hand and what is being structured on the other. But according to
the eliminative version of structural realism, there is nothing but structure.
The contrast between structure and non-structure has been lost (Cf. van
Fraassen 2006). The distinction between classical scientific realism and
structural realism has collapsed. Eliminative ontological structural realism
is a classical metaphysical realism, which claims that the entire universe is
a complex mathematical structure of relations. The resulting picture is
Pythagorean in spirit. The entire universe emerges from formal structures.
Very few eliminativist ontological structural realists embrace this
Pythagorean view wholeheartedly (for example: Tegmark 2007), but this
consequence seems all but inevitable if one thinks the position through.
How the concrete physical world as we know it emerges from this
mathematical structure is a case of mysterious inter-attribute emergence, in
this case the emergence of concrete physical objects from abstract

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mathematical structures.
We began this paper with a Chalmersian argument for the incompleteness
of physics: The functionally defined physical facts alone cannot account
for the emergence of qualitative phenomenal facts. This problem gets
aggravated if the physical facts are ultimately nothing but mathematical
facts. Some structural realists have clearly acknowledged this problem,
Dipert even hinted at panpsychism as a solution:
There might at first seem to be no place in these cold graphs for minds,
consciousness, and other mental phenomena – unless, that is, everything is
mental. Although within the dialectic of this essay it is wild and possibly
irresponsible speculation, we should perhaps consider seriously the possibility
that something like the pan-psychism of Spinoza, Leibniz, or Peirce is true, and
that vertices are pure feelings (Peircean 'firstnesses'), constituting a distinct
thought or object only when connected to other such entities. (Dipert 1997, 358)
The question then is whether eliminative ontological structural realism is

capable of providing a realistic metaphysics of the nature. Galen Strawson
has in recent years mounted a critique of classical physicalism that can a
fortiori be raised against the Pythagorean metaphysics, to which the
eliminative ontological structural realist is committed (Strawson 2006). It
is based on a venerable argument for panpsychism, the “genetic argument.”
It rests on a claim concerning the intelligibility of radical inter-attribute
emergence, as opposed to weaker intra-attribute emergence. In his paper,
“Panpsychism” Thomas Nagel had argued that uniform psycho-physical
correlations could not account for the emergence of mental properties from
the physical components of a system:
Instead, intrinsic properties of the components must be discovered from which

the mental properties of the system follow necessarily. This may be
unattainable, but if mental phenomena have a causal explanation such
properties must exist, and they will not be physical. (Nagel 1979, 187)
Emergence cannot be brute in the sense of there being nothing in the

emergence base in virtue of which the emergent phenomenon emerges: ex
nihilo nihil fit. Nothing can give what it does not possess. In order to make
sense of the emergence of consciousness, the evolution of the phenomenal
mind must be smooth. Consciousness in some form must be present “at the
very origin of things” (James 1890, 149). Inter-attribute emergence is to be

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avoided. Otherwise even a Cartesian soul could mysteriously emerge from

a Cartesian physical body (or, as in the case of eliminative ontological
structural realism, the emergence of a concrete physical object from a
configuration of abstract mathematical objects). If such inter-attribute
emergence is considered intelligible, then one will inevitably end up with a
radical Humean view of causal powers in which “any thing may produce
any thing” (Treatise III, xv), and any reasonable prospect for a substantive
metaphysical account of the mind-body relation will have vanished. If
emergence is construed as an intra-attribute relation, however, then one has
to give up the standard physicalist principle that there are no (proto-
)mental properties at the ontological base levels. Strawson calls this dogma
of contemporary physicalism the “NE principle”: “physical stuff is, in
itself, in its fundamental nature, something wholly and utterly non-
experiential” (Strawson 2006, 11). The intuition, that a system that is only
structurally defined cannot give rise to qualitative experience, is more than
just an epistemic problem of cognitive upward opacity that might be
overcome by more empirical research; it is a deep metaphysical puzzle.
This problem becomes even more serious if the relational structure that is
supposedly generating consciousness is conceived of in Pythagorean terms.
Conclusion
We have come full circle. We started with the hard problem of
consciousness and returned to it at the end. As it turns out, the hard
problem of consciousness is the major stumbling block for any ontological
structural realism. The panpsychist claims to have a better answer to the
hard problem of consciousness because no miraculously strong emergence
is required. Epistemological structural realism is another matter, however.
Since it is silent on the intrinsic properties of matter, it is compatible with a
panpsychist metaphysics. Indeed, someone who endorses structural realism
for epistemological reasons only, can have “secret” panpsychistic
inclinations at a metaphysical level. As was shown, Kant is certainly a case
in point.
We have argued that moderate ontological structural realism provides no
conceptual means to account for the individuation of objects without
intrinsic properties. Also, if relations and objects are interdependent and
circularly defined, a grounding problem for the circular structures arises.
For those reasons, moderate ontological structural realism seems to be a
conceptually unstable theory.
Eliminative ontological structural realism is conceptually more coherent.

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But it has problems of its own, the most important one being the collapse
of the distinction between the physical and the mathematical. The
Pythagorean metaphysics implied in this account is the source of a plethora
of metaphysical problems, not the least of them being the emergence of
consciousness.
Thus, the panpsychist can endorse epistemological structural realism as an
epistemological interpretation of the scientific endeavor. For the reasons
given above, the panpsychist will reject structuralist metaphysics in both
forms: moderate and eliminative.
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Consciousness and its Place in Nature. Does Physicalism entail
Panpsychism?, Exeter: Imprint Academic, 3-31.
Tegmark, M. (2007): 'The Mathematical Universe', in: Foundations of
Physics, 38 (2007), 101-150.
Unger, P. (2006): All the Power in the World. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
van Fraassen, B.C. (2006) 'Structure: Its shadow and substance' in: The
British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 57 (2006), 275-307.
Whitehead, A. N. (1929) Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology.
(1978, rev. ed., D. R. Griffin & D. W. Sherburne). New York 1929: Free
Press.
Worrall, J. (1989) 'Structural realism: The best of both worlds?' in:
Dialectica 43 (1989), 99–124.

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The Last Man Standing Argument for
panpsychism: A rejoinder
Pierfrancesco Basile (Bern)
1. Introduction
In Panpsychism in the West, David Skrbina mentions, approvingly, an
argument by process philosopher David Ray Griffin:
In light of “the ‘terminal’ failure of the approaches built on the Cartesian

intuition about matter,” panpsychism stands as the most viable alternative. This
is an important point, and one that has been neglected in the past. If intensive
critical inquiry of dualism and materialism over the past, say, few hundred years
has failed to produce a consensus theory of mind, then it stands to reason that a
third alternative like panpsychism, in some positive formulation, should gain its
viability. This “negative” argument for panpsychism may be called, for want of
a better name, the Last Man Standing Argument. (Skrbina 2005, 252; see also
Griffin 1997, 91)
This is an intriguing argument. But it is surprising that Skrbina should

endorse it. One of the main purposes of his book is precisely to show that
panpsychism has been an underlying theme in Western philosophy. Since
this is a task the book achieves remarkably well, one is left wondering why
panpsychism should be regarded as having been “neglected in the past.” It
is true that panpsychism has been ignored in the last fifty years or so within
analytic philosophy of mind. Nevertheless, half a century amounts to very
little if, as Skrbina contends, panpsychist motives are a constant theme
from the Presocratics onwards.
This preliminary observation suggests a question. William James speaks in
his A Pluralistic Universe of “the great empirical movement towards a
pluralistic panpsychic view of the universe, into which our generation has
been drawn.” (James 1909, 270) This is probably a correct estimate of the
intellectual situation of his time. Philosophers such as Hermann Lotze,
Gustav Fechner, James Ward, Charles Sanders Peirce, Charles A. Strong,
Josiah Royce, Gabriel Tarde and Henri Bergson, just to mention a few,
endorsed a version of the theory. But if about one century ago
panpsychism was such a widespread position, why was it forgotten in the
later decades of the twentieth century? This is a question for historians of
philosophy to answer. Apart from obvious reasons such as the rise of
analytic linguistic philosophy, it seems possible to speculate that

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panpsychism might have suffered exhaustion in the way most

philosophical theories do. Such theories are seldom conclusively refuted;
rather, they suffer deposition when they appear unable to answer
fundamental questions and spark fruitful lines of novel inquiry. After a first
period in which they ignite romantic enthusiasms, philosophical theories
either grow or cease to look interesting. Skrbina does not ask in his ample
survey of the history of panpsychism whether the theory might have come
to be perceived, at one point or another in the earlier part of the twentieth
century, as one more “terminal failure.” This raises the question for this
paper: could it be that, contrary to what is held by Griffin and Skrbina,
panpsychism is not “the most viable alternative” after all?
2. What’s so good about panpsychism?

In order to clarify this point, let’s briefly rehearse the case for
panpsychism. One main argument is the so-called “intrinsic nature”
argument. This can be reconstructed as consisting of two parts, the first one
of which is as follows: (1) natural science provides a description of the
relational structure of reality; (2) structure must be the structure of
something—i.e. relations require terms between which to hold; therefore,
(3) such terms, if real at all, must possess an intrinsic nature of their own.
This part of the argument is meant to secure the conclusion that there is a
meaningful question, namely, the one concerning the inner nature of the
fundamental constituents of reality that is left unanswered by natural
science. Once this is recognized, there is room for drawing the panpsychist
conclusion: (4) since the only reality whose intrinsic nature we are
acquainted with is our own subjectivity, the only way to account for the
inner being of reality’s basic constituents is in experiential terms—that is,
by conceiving of them by way of analogy with our own conscious,
phenomenal selves. Why should the self, as this is actually lived through,
be assigned such a fundamental metaphysical role? One main reason
adduced by panpsychists is that the concretely experienced self is precisely
what it seems to be; here, there is no distinction between the phenomenon
and the noumenon. As the late Timothy Sprigge put it: “Surely it is good
sense to take the one example of a thing we know concretely as thing in
itself as our paradigm for conceiving the nature of the other concrete things
in themselves which we know are there as the noumenal backing or basis
of our phenomenal physical world.” (Sprigge 1983, 105)
This line of reasoning is questionable on several accounts. First, it is not
obviously true that science provides only a formal description of reality.

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(Rosenthal 2006, 123; McHenry 2010, 17-18) Secondly, a doubt might be

raised as to whether reality, as disclosed by physics, really requires
positing substantive (i.e. non-relational) terms or whether reality could be
“relations” all the way down; pan-relationalism is a counterintuitive view,
but it has its advocates (cf. Seager 2006, esp. 140-144, for an extended
discussion of this issue). But even granting these two controversial points,
what precisely should we project onto the noumenal backing? Should it be
“will,” as Schopenhauer held, or something else, such as a sheer capacity
for feeling? (This is an important point which, in different argumentative
settings, will keep claiming our attention later on in this paper, especially
in sections 3 and 4). Lastly, the argument is conjectural at best: why should
we conclude that the unknown natures of the ultimate constituents of
reality must be experiential? There is nothing in the argument’s premises
that obliges us to take such a momentous step; we can concede the point
that in self-experience we have direct contact with things in themselves,
but what reason do we have for assuming that all things in themselves are
of the same kind? With respect to non-human (or non-animal) beings, Du
Bois-Reymond’s sceptical dictum, ignoramus et ignorabimus, would seem
to express an equally appropriate response. Consider the way David
Chalmers phrases the argument in The Conscious Mind: “After all, we
really have no idea about the intrinsic properties of the physical. Their
nature is up for grabs, and phenomenal properties seem as likely a
candidate as any other.” (Chalmers 1996, 155) This is a candid recognition
of the limitations of the intrinsic nature argument; the ascription of
phenomenal properties to the ultimate constituents of nature, while not
incoherent, is not a compulsory step to take.
The object of this paper is to assess what Skrbina terms the Last Man
Standing Argument for panpsychism. Since this is an argument by
exclusion, we need to consider a line of reasoning that capitalizes on the
weaknesses of panpsychism’s main alternative, materialist physicalism.
The non-emergence argument is one such argument. The core idea is
simple enough and was stated long ago by William James. On a Cartesian
understanding of matter as wholly insentient, so the argument goes, the
emergence of mentality would seem to amount to an unfathomable creatio
ex nihilo: “...with the dawn of consciousness [in the course of evolution] an
entirely new nature seems to slip in, something whereof the potency was
not given in the mere outward atoms of the original chaos.” (James 1890,
146) Here we have panpsychism at its strongest, but there are ways of
responding to this argument. (1) A first observation is that there is no proof

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that creation out of nothing is impossible; hence, brute emergence might

occur, while being an ultimate irrationality, that is, something that would
remain incomprehensible even to God, i.e. to a mind satisfying the
requirements of an ideal, perfected rationality; analogously, the idea of
creatio ex nihilo does not seem to be logically incoherent; stated in
Leibnizian terminology, it violates the principle of sufficient reason, rather
than the principle of non-contradiction. But it could also be argued,
following a suggestion by Colin McGinn (1989, 359), that (2) brute
emergence is intrinsically rational but cognitively closed to finite minds
such as ours. Alternatively, and in a more optimistic fashion, one could
hold with Thomas Nagel (1986, 52) that (3) we lack at present the
conceptual categories to understand mind’s place in nature; however, we
should not give up the hope to develop such categories in the future.
The fact that these options are available shows that the non-emergence
argument is less than conclusive. Admittedly, the first option is not
particularly attractive. But the case is different with the second and the
third. If panpsychism should turn out to be a “terminal failure” in the same
way in which materialism and Cartesian substance dualism are taken to be,
then radical conceptual revision is precisely what would be needed to show
that defeatist sceptics such as McGinn are wrong. For the time being, the
conclusion to be drawn is that the non-emergence argument is less than a
proof. Nevertheless, it is as strong as any of the best arguments in
philosophy. It therefore succeeds in vindicating panpsychism as a position
that deserves to be taken seriously in contemporary debates on
consciousness and its place in nature.
3. Mental unity
But does that mean that panpsychism is the most viable alternative?
Serious difficulties arise as soon as one asks how the mind/body relation
should be modelled. The panpsychist can opt either for an identity or for a
dualist theory of the mind-brain relationship. We will deal with the former
option in this section, while discussing the latter in the next. Before doing
this, however, another question needs to be addressed: how are the
substances (i.e. fundamental beings) that populate a panpsychist universe
to be conceived? Specifically, should they (1) be endowed with both
physical (i.e. non-experiential) and mental (i.e. experiential) features or
should they (2) be conceived as being purely mental (i.e. experiential)? (In
what follows, I will assume a pluralistic ontology, sidestepping the
question as to the viability of Spinozistic monism for the sake of

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argumentative convenience; but Spinoza might have been right after all
and we could all be aspects of a single, unified Reality; as a matter of fact,
it is not even clear that pluralism and monism exhaust all possible options;
as John Leslie (2001) has argued, there could be a plurality of universes,
each of which of a Spinozistic type.)
Note that the question is not what is more expedient to hold, but what is
consistent with the panpsychist’s appeal to the Last Man Standing
Argument. Skrbina recognizes that Cartesian dualism rather than
materialism or panpsychism expresses the “common intuitive feeling.”
(Skrbina 2005, 13) Nevertheless, he rejects dualism on the conventional
ground that two radically different substances could not interact; and since
no dualist has yet been capable of explaining how this is possible, Skrbina
concludes that “interactionist dualism is... currently held more as a matter
of faith than of philosophical reasoning.” (Skrbina 2005, 13) At the same
time, Skrbina is not willing to endorse the idealist view that all there is to
the basic constituents of reality is experience. Hence, he stresses the point
that metaphysical idealism (or, as it is perhaps better called, “mentalism,”
since it is the view that all ultimate realities have a mind-like nature rather
than the view that they are all ideas) is not to be straightforwardly
identified with panpsychism; the latter is the genus of which the former is
the species. (Skrbina 2005, 10) But is the panpsychist in a position to reject
idealism? The first of the two options identified above, the conception of
the ultimately real as a psycho-physical unity, faces the same difficulty of
Cartesian dualism. This now reappears in a mutated form: how could a
single thing possess both a physical and a mental side? What would hold
these two heterogeneous aspects or properties within the unity of the thing?
If the aim is to achieve a view that could enable us to think of experience
as a wholly natural phenomenon, then it seems contra-productive to posit
duality in the ultimate constituents of nature. Hence, a consistent form of
panpsychism will have to reject a dual-aspect theory and settle for the
second option identified above, which is a form of metaphysical idealism.
This view stands in need of further clarification. One possibility is to hold
that the ultimate mental items are independent existing, individual
experiences of the like of Hume’s substantial impressions or Clifford’s bits
of “mind-dust.” Nagel envisions a theory of this kind when he speculates
that “the components out of which a point of view is constructed would not
themselves have to have points of view.” (Nagel 1979, 194) As it has been
argued by William James and more recently by Galen Strawson, however,
it is unintelligible that an experience could exist independently of a self.

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According to William James, it is a phenomenological truth that our mind,

i.e. the total psychical whole that constitutes our conscious self at any one
moment, has no genuine parts; rather, “pulses of consciousness are unitary
and integral affairs from the outset,” and it would be absurd to “suppose
feelings which exist separately and ‘fuse together’ by themselves.” (1890,
181) If we think otherwise, this is because we do not pay sufficient
attention to the concrete nature of our mental life and are mislead by
spurious analogies. James makes the point quite vividly in a note to his
chapter on “The Mind-Stuff Theory”:
I find in my students an almost invincible tendency to think that we can

immediately perceive that feelings do combine. “What!” they say, “is not the
taste of lemonade composed of that of lemon plus that of sugar?” This is taking
the combining of objects for that of feelings. The physical lemonade contains
both the lemon and the sugar, but its taste does not contain their tastes, for if
there are any two things which are certainly not present in the taste of
lemonade, those are the lemon-sour on the one hand and the sugar-sweet on the
other. (James 1890, 158)
In other words, when we begin to scrutinize our experience and discern the
taste of lemon from the taste of sugar, we have not provided an analysis of
our mental state; rather, when we perceive the two flavours as distinct we
have moved into a novel mental state. A person’s total mental state at any
one moment (his momentary self) is the concrete reality; the isolated,
independent perception one encounters in philosophical books is a fiction.
Strawson’s route to the conclusion that experience is impossible without
subjectivity is more straightforward. In his lights, it is a conceptual truth
that an experience entails a corresponding experiencing subject and cannot
therefore exist without a feeler of some sort or another: “An experience is
impossible without an experiencer. Many... have made this point, and
many have taken it to be too obvious to mention... there can’t be
experience without a subject of experience, because (this is the whole
argument) experience is necessarily experience-for: it is necessarily
experience for someone or something.” (Strawson 2009, 271) Taking these
points by James and Strawson together, we obtain a “logico-
phenomenological” argument that is difficult to resist. If so, the conclusion
to be drawn is that all the basic constituents of reality must possess the
status of subjects. This means that the most viable form of panpsychism is
a form of Leibnizian monadism. (Another question I sidestep in what
follows concerns the ontology of the self; the contention that selves are

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real, however, does not need to be interpreted as a commitment to a pre-

Humean understanding of our selves as substrata ontologically distinct
from our experiences; on these issues see Strawson 2009, Sprigge 1993
and Basile 2003.)
With the basic metaphysical framework more or less in place, it is now
possible to address the problem of modelling the relation between the mind
and the brain. The identity theory gives rise to the well-known problem of
mental composition. How do the neuronal selves amalgamate so as to yield
a moment of human mentality? This is a real question, but it has little force
if it is taken to provide a conclusive refutation of panpsychism. As I have
argued more fully elsewhere (Basile 2009b and 2010), attempts to construe
the composition problem as a reductio ad absurdum implicitly ascribe to
the panpsychist the view that the human mind must be constituted by
smaller experiential unities in the same way in which a mosaic is
constituted by its stones. I see no reason why the panpsychist should be
committed to such a crude view of consciousness. Nagel gets the point
exactly right when he says that the real challenge is that of working out
adequate mereological categories for phenomenal parts and wholes. (Nagel
1986, 50) No argument against panpsychism can presuppose that we
already have such an understanding. Furthermore, it should be noted that
attempted refutations based on the composition problem prove too much.
The problem of explaining how one gets a single unified moment of human
mentality out of a plurality of neuronal minds is an instance of a larger
ontological problem. How does one get one substance out of many other
substances? The problem of combination arises with regard to non-mental
entities as well; even such a simple object as a chair is more than the mere
aggregate of its physical particles. If all combination had to be by way of
aggregation (i.e. in the same way in which a heap of sand is made of grains
or a wall is made of bricks), then not solely a unified self but none of the
objects in our every-day environment could ever be real.
Faced with this reply, the objector could try another strategy. Since no
panpsychist has yet produced an explanation of how the human mind could
emerge out of the lesser neuronal minds, no one is in a position to claim
that the theory has any explanatory advantages over competitor approaches
to the mind/body problem. (Goff 2009, 134) Is there really such a
dialectical stalemate? As it is usually put, this reply fails to fully grasp the
significance of the argument from non-emergence. To the best of my
knowledge, no panpsychist has yet been capable of providing an
explanation of how human mentality is generated from the several

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mentalities in the neurons. Nevertheless, this problem is of a different

order than the problem of explaining the emergence of the mental out of
the non-mental. Prima facie, the generation of a human mind out of myriad
lesser minds does not involve a violation of the principle ex nihilo, nihil fit.
It is true that to speculate that experience might be a fundamental feature of
the ultimate constituents of reality is not to have explained human
consciousness; however, a context or metaphysical framework has been
established in which such an explanation ceases to appear impossible. Still,
the objection that panpsychism has to face its own peculiar version of the
problem of emergence is probably correct. But it needs to be reformulated
in a more effective way. A. C. Ewing puts it as follows:
Can it be consistent dogmatically to deny the possibility of the conscious having

developed out of the unconscious (in the sense of the totally unfeeling), and yet
to assert the development of the humanly intelligent out of what is quite
incapable of reasoning? If we are to reject the former supposition on the ground
of unintelligibility, it seems that we ought to reject the latter too. (Ewing 1934,
412)
This passage captures what is sound in the objection under consideration.

Why should the transition from the non-cognitive (raw feels, sensations,
emotions) to the cognitive (grasping the meaning of a sentence, identifying
a perceived object as an object of a given kind, solving complex
mathematical problems) be less difficult to understand than the transition
from the non-experiential to the experiential? There is clearly something
that stands in need of explanation here. Is the gulf between sentience and
cognition a less dramatic one to bridge than the gulf between sentience and
non-sentience? On the face of it, it is not clear that this is so. In the case of
the non-emergence argument the burden of proofs lies on the materialist;
now the situation is reversed and the panpsychist has an obligation to
produce a convincing explanation.
The same point can be made by asking a question already touched upon
when discussing the internal nature argument, namely the question as to
how monadic experiences should be conceived. Should the panpsychist
endow his monads with a mere capacity for sentience and then try to work
out a theory capable of explaining how they could generate cognition?
Should we follow the opposite path? Or should we posit both sentience and
cognition as original features of a monad’s mentality? Apart from one
notable exception to be discussed below, Whitehead’s panexperientialism,
panpsychists are usually shy on this question. And when it is raised, they

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fail to achieve a consensus. Gabriel Tarde criticizes Hermann Lotze for

having endowed his monads with an emotional appreciation of the world,
whereas he conceives of them as endowed with cognitive abilities. (Tarde
1893/2009, 19n) The book by Ewing from which the above passage was
taken, Idealism: a Critical Survey, was published in 1934. I leave it as a
suggestion for further research: could this be one of the points at which
panpsychism appeared to early twentieth century philosophers to have
reached a dead end?
4. Leibnizian interactionism
If one rejects the identity theory, then the alternative model is a (non-
cartesian) dualist theory in which the mind and the brain are numerically
distinct, yet both intrinsically experiential. This is to revive Leibniz’s idea
of a dominant monad. In a forgotten but once very influential book entitled
Microcosmus, Hermann Lotze rejects the identity theory on the ground that
it leads to the composition problem. This he regards as posing a problem as
serious as that of explaining the emergence of mind out of insentient
matter:
No more than it formerly seemed to us possible to explain the peculiar elements

of mental life by the crossing of physical actions of the nerves, do we now find
the spiritualized nature of the parts adequate to render more comprehensible the
rise within us of the one consciousness. (Lotze 1885, 365)
Then, he offers his alternative:
The image which we have now to form of the living form and its mental life is
that of an association of many beings. The governing soul, placed at a favoured
point of the organism, collects the numberless impressions conveyed to it by a
host of comrades essentially similar but lower in rank from the inferior
significance of their nature. (Lotze 1885, 367)
This theory resurfaces in the philosophy of Whitehead, who probably

derives it from the Cambridge philosopher James Ward. (Like many of his
contemporaries, Ward had studied with Lotze in Germany; see Basile
2009a for a more detailed account of the relationship between the two
philosophers.) With some minor modifications, it was held by other
thinkers as well: hence, since the theory is based on an analogy between a
king and his subjects, Gabriel Tarde asked why we should say that the
dominant monad is intrinsically “higher” than the subservient monads. And

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indeed, how many of us truly think that our rulers are better than
ourselves? (Tarde 1893/2009, 61)
The naiveté of this doctrine is compensated by its advantages. First, on this
doctrine the composition problem does not arise; secondly, one great
obstacle to understanding mind-body interaction, the heterogeneity of the
interacting substances, is removed; lastly, because it assumes a numerical
distinction between the mind and the body, the theory does justice to our
intuitive feeling that we are not our body yet we are somehow blended
with it. This is the feeling so well expressed by Descartes in his Sixth
Meditation: “Nature also teaches me, by these sensations of pain, hunger,
thirst and so on, that I am not merely present in my body as a sailor is
present in a ship, but that I am very closely joined and, as it were,
intermingled with it, so that I and the body form a unit.” (Descartes
1641/1986, 56) The theory of the dominant monad as distinct from the
monads in the body yet collecting their experiences does full justice to this
feeling that “I and the body form a unit,” since the life of the mind is now
literally nourished by the neuronal experiences that flow into it. However,
the theory reopens the Leibnizian problem of monadic interaction. How
does the dominant monad “collect” the “numberless impressions conveyed
to it” by his comrades? It doesn’t seem obvious that panpsychist
mind/mind interaction is any bit more intelligible than Cartesian
mind/body interaction.
Do we have any understanding of how two selves could causally interact?
One philosopher who has tried to answer this question is Alfred North
Whitehead. There are good reasons for focusing on his philosophy, for his
is probably the most articulated version of panpsychism ever produced.
Whitehead’s metaphysics is a relational monadology, one in which the
basic constituents of reality are endowed with a capacity for causally
affecting one another. Whitehead breaks with the classical tradition in
philosophy and conceives of his physical ultimates as momentary
occasions of experience (actual occasions) instead of as permanent,
enduring substances. Such units are organized into series. Within each
series, each occasion inherits (prehends) some of the ingredients of
previous occasions. Through their prehensive activity, occasions come to
be linked in such a way as to form diachronically unified streams of
experience. Such streams interact in several ways and form complexes
(societies) of different kinds. The large variety of natural beings that exist
at different levels of reality—i.e. such things as electrons, molecules, cells,
crystals, plants, human beings—are all explained in terms of the way

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streams of actual occasions have come to interact in the course of cosmic

evolution. They are all in one way or another “societies” made up of the
more basic experiential occasions. (See Hosinsky 1993 and Kraus 1998 for
accurate yet accessible introductions to Whitehead’s philosophy; my own
interpretation is in Basile 2009.)
The question now is whether Whitehead’s panexperientialism, as Griffin
has named it, provides a satisfactory account of monadic interaction, which
in that system is explained in terms of the notion of prehension. As
Whitehead’s discussion in such works as Adventures of Ideas and
Symbolism makes clear, the concept of prehension (or, more precisely,
physical prehension) has its immediate phenomenological counterpart in
what Edmund Husserl referred to as “retention” and William James as the
“echoing” of the past in his analysis of the specious present. The hearing of
a melody exemplifies the phenomenon. The notes just heard resonate long
after they are gone and color our present appreciation of the musical piece.
Now, there is little doubt that such experiences of continuation of the past
into the present are real. But Whitehead goes well beyond both Husserl and
James in that he provides a metaphysical interpretation of what is
originally a phenomenological concept. One first source of concern here is
that retention is an intramonadic relation; if it can be interpreted as an
instance of causation at all, then it will be an instance of immanent
causation. What we are in search of, however, is a relation of causation
between different monads, that is, transeunt causation. That Whitehead
takes immanent causation to provide the key for an understanding of
transeunt causation suffices to cast his entire theory into doubt. For it now
appears that the theory is committed to the surprising claim that we inherit
from our previous moments of mentality in very same way in which we
inherit from the previous moments of mentality of other actualities, i.e. the
monads constituting our bodies.
There is also a worry as to whether Whitehead’s analysis of the causal
nexus is meaningful. In Whitehead’s account, the phenomenological
“echoing” of the past is turned into a real “influx” of past experiences into
the present moment of mentality: “The present moment is constituted by
the influx of the other into that self-identity which is the continued life of
the immediate past within the immediacy of the present.” (Whitehead
1933, 181) Whitehead understands causation as a kind of transference or
contagion: something must be passed over from the cause to its effect.
However, in the present moment of mentality past experiences are felt as
“just gone” rather than as “immediately enjoyed.” This means that, when a

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past experience is retained, what changes is not the experience itself but
that experience’s experiential mode. And this involves a distinction
between the experience per se (the item transferred from one occasion to
the next) and its ways of appearing (the experience immediately enjoyed as
against the experience as a vanishing echo from the past). Is this notion of
an experience remaining (numerically) self-identical while changing its
experiential mode an intelligible one? This is doubtful. As James points out
in a number of places, the being of an experience is wholly exhausted by
its appearance (see for example James 1909, 198-199). This seems entirely
correct: taken naively, in his primary, pre-philosophical meaning, a word
such as “pain” surely refers to our felt experience, and not to any
modification in our bodies, which we would rather view as the cause or
source of the pain. But if this notion of experience as being nothing over
and above its immediate felt quality is correct, then the experience
immediately enjoyed and the experience retained must be numerically
different; surely, the retained experiences come with a different qualitative
feel than those which are enjoyed for the very first time.
These strike me as powerful objections against Whitehead’s account of
monadic interaction. What about the ultimate experiential nature of his
monads, the actual occasion? What other features do they have, other than
an ability to relate to past moments of mentality? A Whiteheadian
philosopher such as Griffin acknowledges that it would be a mistake to
posit in all occasions the complexity we find in a human mind. As a matter
of fact, one reason why Griffin terms his position “panexperientialism”
instead of “panpsychism” (or “psychicalism,” as Hartshorne has it) is
precisely that the term “psyche” inevitably suggests “a higher form of
experience than would be appropriate for the most elementary units of
nature.” (Griffin 1997, 78) This is reasonable, but problematic. Like most
panpsychists, Griffin emphasizes that the only “aspect of the world we
know from within, by identity” is our own conscious experience (1997,
90). If this is so, then the question is, once again, how to decide which
features of our conscious experience can be generalized to all occasions in
nature. In Whitehead’s theory, each actual occasion is endowed with a
“physical pole,” i.e. a capacity for grasping aspects of other actualities, as
well as with a “mental pole,” i.e. with a capacity for grasping universal
forms or abstract concepts. But the ascription to all actual occasions of a
mental pole seems at odd with the requirement that experiences occurring
at the lower levels of reality—“micro-experiences” if one wants—be
significantly different from the experiences of human beings. Once they

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are endowed with a capacity for grasping abstract forms—hence, in one

way or another, with an intellect—such things as electronic occasions
become more human-like that one originally wanted them to be.
5. Conclusion
In section 3 I have reformulated the standard objection based upon the
composition problem, so as to strengthen the point that panpsychism has its
own version of the problem of emergence. In section 4, I have examined
what has a fair claim to be regarded as the more articulated version of
panpsychism ever produced, i.e. Whitehead’s panpexperientialism, and
explained my scepticism concerning the capacity of that philosophy to
account for mind-body interactions. Thus, it might seem at this point that
panpsychism is not in any better shape than materialist physicalism. The
following question could therefore be raised: on a monistic view of reality
as being made up of a single kind of ultimate stuff, the only alternatives are
materialist physicalism-cum-brute emergence and panpsychism; but since
both face serious difficulties, why not retreat to old fashioned Cartesian
dualism? After all, even a committed pansychist such as Skrbina admits
that this is the view that better captures our ordinary, pre-philosophical
grasp of the mind-body relation. One of the few contemporary dualists,
Geoffrey Madell, has recently argued that dualism rather than panpsychism
should be regarded as the Last Man Standing:
...I am often tempted to echo Churchill, when he claimed that democracy is the
worst imaginable form of government apart from all the others, and say the
same of substance dualism. Reflecting on it, I am sometimes inclined to think
that it, like democracy, is the worst possible solution to a problem, in this case
the mind-body problem, but reflection on other suggested solutions to this
problem, including that of panpsychism, leads me to think that the problems
with it may after all be less daunting than those which bedevil all other
positions. (Madell 2007, 51)
There is something importantly right in this response. One reason usually

advanced for rejecting dualism is the alleged impossibility of making sense
of causal interaction between a mental and a physical substance. In the
same way in which we lack a proof that the notion of brute emergence is
logically incoherent, however, we lack a proof that such interaction is
impossible in principle. (See Madell 2010 for a defence of this claim.) Not
surprisingly, however, dualism faces the greatest difficulty precisely there
where panpsychism is at its strongest, namely with respect to the notion of

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emergence. How could substance dualism be reconciled with the view that
human mentality is an evolutionary product? Apparently, the dualist must
here choose either the irrationality that comes with the notion of brute
emergence or postulate some kind of divine intervention. Here is Madell’s
solution:
The point I wish to emphasize... is that if we accept that the emergence of

consciousness... betokens some deep necessity or purpose, then the suggestion...
that such emergence must seem a sheer, brute inexplicable fact is one we no
longer have to accept. (Madell 2007, 50)
Madell does not elaborate on this issue, so it is unclear what his solution
eventually amounts to. But the general idea is clear enough: the emergence
of mind in the course of evolution would not appear irrational if we could
come to see it as part of a larger teleological, purposive scheme. This
response exploits the fact already noticed in section 2 that the irrationality
of the notion of brute emergence stems from a violation of the principle of
sufficient reason, and not of the principle of non-contradiction. From a
purely dialectical standpoint, Madell’s response is therefore wholly
adequate. Nonetheless, this solution is not very attractive: do we have any
independent reason for believing in such “deep necessity or purpose” apart
from our incapacity to understand how the sentient could be generated
from the non-sentient? If not, then such an attempt to rationalize
emergence might begin to look like trying to distil knowledge out of
ignorance.
Trying to develop Madell’s suggestion would lead us once again well
beyond the relatively safe precincts of professionalized philosophy of mind
into the more adventurous regions of general speculative metaphysics.
However, these reflections also lead us back to the question with which
this paper began. Is panpsychism the Last Man Standing? As it has been
argued, the doctrine needs to overcome some significant hurdles before
this claim can be vindicated, and we are yet far from seeing how that could
actually be done. Hence, and although I do think that panpsychism
deserves a fair hearing, I am led to conclude that its advocates cannot
afford to take slightly Nagel’s remark that “panpsychism should be added
to the current list of mutually incompatible and hopelessly unacceptable

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solutions to the mind-body problem.” (Nagel 1979, 193) Radical

revisionism, not panpsychism, might be what is needed.1
References
Basile, P. (2011): Materialism vs. Panexperientialist Physicalism: Where
Do We Stand?, in: Process Studies, forthcoming.
Basile, P. (2010): It Must Be True – But How Can It Be? Some Remarks
on Panpsychism and Mental Composition, in: Basile, P./ Kiverstein,
J./Phemister, P. (eds.), The Metaphysics of Consciousness, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 92-113.
Basile, P. (2009a): Leibniz, Whitehead and the Metaphysics of Causation,
Basingstoke-New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Basile, P. (2009b): Back to Whitehead? Galen Strawson and the
Rediscovery of Panpsychism, in: Skrbina, D. (ed.), Mind that Abides,
Amsterdam: Benjamins Publishing, 179-199.
Basile, P. (2003): Self and World. The Radical Empiricism of Hume,
Bradley and James, in: Bradley Studies 9.2, 93-100.
Chalmers, D. (1996): The Conscious Mind. Oxford and New York: Oxford
University Press.
Descartes, R. (1841/1986): Meditations on First Philosophy, translated by
J. Cottingham, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ewing, A. C. (1934): Idealism: A Critical Survey, London: Methuen & Co.
Goff, P. (2009b): Can the Panpsychist get Around the Combination
Problem?, in: Skrbina, D. (ed.), Mind that Abides, Amsterdam: Benjamins
Publishing, 129-36.
Griffin, D. R. (1997): Unsnarling the World Knot: Consciousness,
Freedom and the Mind-Body Problem, Berkeley: University of California
Press.
Hosinsky, T. E. (1993): Stubborn Fact and Creative Advance: an
Introduction to the Metaphysics of A. N. Whitehead, New York: Rowman
& Littlefield.
James, W. (1890/1950): The Principles of Psychology, Vol. I, New York:
Dover.
1
I wish to thank Michael Blamauer for the invitation to attend the Vienna workshop
on panpsychism. I am indebted to David Skrbina, Riccardo Manzotti and all other
participants for helpful comments and discussions. In this paper, I have made
occasional use of ideas already presented in Basile 2009a, 2009b, 2010 and 2011.

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James, W. (1909): A Pluralistic Universe: Hibbert Lectures at Manchester

College on the Present Situation in Philosophy, London-Bombay-Calcutta:
Longmans, Green and Co.
Kraus, E. (1998): The Metaphysics of Experience: a Companion to
Whitehead’s ‘Process and Reality’, New York: Fordham University Press.
Leslie, J. (2001): Infinite Minds. A Philosophical Cosmology, New York:
Oxford University Press.
Lotze, H. (1885): Microcosmus: An Essay Concerning Man and his
Relation to the World, Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark.
Madell, G. (2010): The Road to Substance Dualism, in: Basile, P./
Kiverstein, J./Phemister, P. (eds.), The Metaphysics of Consciousness,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 45-60.
Madell, G. (2007): Timothy Sprigge and Panpsychism, in: Basile, P./
McHenry, L. B. (eds.), Consciousness, Reality and Value: Essays in
Honour of T. L. S. Sprigge, Frankfurt: Ontos, 41-52.
McGinn, C. (1989): Can We Solve The Mind-Body Problem?, in: Mind
98, 349-66.
McHenry, L. B. (2010): Sprigge’s Ontology of Consciousness, in: Basile,
P./ Kiverstein, J./Phemister, P. (eds.), The Metaphysics of Consciousness,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 5-20.
Nagel, T. (1979): Panpsychism, in: Mortal Questions, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 181-195.
Nagel, T. (1986): The View from Nowhere, New York: Oxford University
Press.
Rosenthal, D. M. (2006): Experience and the Physical, in: Freeman, A.
(ed.), Consciousness and its Place in Nature: does Physicalism entail
Seager, W. (2006): The ‘Intrinsic Nature’ Argument for Panpsychim, in:
Freeman, A. (ed.), Consciousness and its Place in Nature: does Physicalism
entail Panpsychism?, Exeter: Imprint Academic, 129-145.
Simons, P. (2006): The Seeds of Experience, in: Freeman, A. (ed.),
Consciousness and its Place in Nature: does Physicalism entail
Simons, P. (1998): Metaphysical Systematics: A Lesson from Whitehead,
in: Erkenntnis 47, 377-93.
Skrbina, D. (2005): Panpsychism in the West, Cambridge, Mass: The MIT
Press.
Sprigge, T. L. S (1983): The Vindication of Absolute Idealism, Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press.

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Strawson, G. (2009): Selves, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Tarde, G. (1893/2009): Monadologie und Soziologie, Frankfurt:
Suhrkamp.
Whitehead, A. N. (1920): The Concept of Nature, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Whitehead, A. N. (1927): Symbolism, New York: Macmillan.
Whitehead, A. N. (1929/1978): Process and Reality. An Essay in
Cosmology, corrected edition by D. R. Griffin and D. W. Sherburne, New
York: Free Press.
Whitehead, A. N. (1933/1967): Adventures of Ideas, New York: The Free
Press.

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The Man Still Stands: Reply to Basile
David Skrbina (Dearborn/Michigan)
Pierfrancesco Basile makes several excellent points in his rejoinder on

the Last Man Standing argument for panpsychism. A few of them call
for further comment, and I offer my observations as follows.
To begin with, it should be made clear that the Last Man Standing
argument (LMS, for short) is but one of 12 arguments for panpsychism
that I cited in my book, Panpsychism in the West (2005). Some of these
(e.g. Non-Emergence) are actively discussed and debated; others (e.g.
Theological) less so. But notable figures throughout history have taken
strikingly different paths in arguing for the viability of panpsychism.
The LMS, in fact, was explicitly cited only recently, and only by David
Ray Griffin (1997: 91)—though it was anticipated by Friedrich Paulsen
in 1892. It bears mention due to its recent articulation, but in the larger
sweep of things, LMS is perhaps not a central issue.
I do endorse it, as Basile states, but I would not call this ‘surprising.’
But I was perhaps unclear in my explanation of panpsychism’s standing
vis a vis other contenders. Doubtless, virtually all current philosophers
accept some form of physicalism, as both a metaphysical stance and as a
theory of mind. Other forms of monism, collectively, take a distant
second, and (true, substance) dualism is so far back that to call it ‘third
place’ is a gross misnomer.
At the beginning of my book, I argue that panpsychism is best thought
of as a meta-theory, as a higher-order concept addressing which entities
in this universe are enminded. So conceived, it is clear that panpsychism
can subsume nearly every conventional theory of mind. One can be a
panpsychist materialist, a panpsychist dualist, a panpsychist idealist, a
panpsychist functionalist, and so on. Panpsychism does not, per se, offer
a theory of mind; it only claims that, however conceived, mind is a
characteristic of all extant, concrete individuals.
Thus, I was imprecise in my articulation of the LMS argument. I should
have stated that of the two historically-significant theories of mind—(1)
conventional physicalism, a materialist monism that ascribes mind only
to humans and (perhaps) the ‘higher animals’ (whatever they may be),
and (2) classical dualism, that posits two fundamental substances of
mind and matter, and that (as above) restricts the former only to limited
beings—both have major, unresolved problems. Consequently, some
form of panpsychism is more plausible than either of these two

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alternatives. Thus my three contenders are ‘non-panpsychist (we need a

new term for this!) physicalism’, ‘non-panpsychist substance dualism’,
and ‘panpsychism (of some indeterminate form)’; of these three, the
latter is, in my opinion, the LMS.
But I don’t think this would satisfy Basile! And rightly so: as he goes
on to offer a more detailed critique of panpsychism, and to suggest, in
closing, that dualism is not such a bad option after all; more on this in a
moment.
In his short critique of the ‘intrinsic nature’ argument (a variation on
what I have called the Continuity Argument), Basile raises four valid
criticisms. I would offer a simplified, three-part critique: (1) why must
we postulate an intrinsic nature at all?, (2) if we do, why must it be
experiential, or mind-like?, and (3) why must all things share a similar
intrinsic nature? In brief response: To deny (1) is arguably a form of
eliminativism, and I think we can, with Strawson, plausibly ‘eliminate’
this alternative. Point (2) is subject, itself, to a kind of ‘last man
standing’ argument: if the intrinsic nature of things is not mental, then
what is it? Mind, experientiality, will—these fall into a category of
which we have no better alternative. In the case of that object we know
best—ourselves—it is intuitively obvious. Denying point (3) demands
virtual solipsism: that we (humans) alone have a mental intrinsic nature,
and no, or only few, other things do. Such a standpoint, according to
Schopenhauer, is near insanity: “as a serious conviction, it could only be
found in a madhouse, and as such it would need not so much a refutation
as a cure” (World as Will and Idea, II, 19). In short, the
intrinsic/continuity argument has its problems, but they are not
insurmountable, nor are they fatal. Of course, it is not an analytic
argument—but that is another matter.
The Non-Emergence argument for panpsychism, which began all the
way back with Epicurus (see my 2005: 52, 53), is, perhaps, “less than
conclusive,” but only theoretically. In practice, at present, it is
conclusive—because, for whatever reason, we cannot conceive how
mind can plausibly emerge from no-mind. To say that ‘someday we
may (may!) be able to comprehend this fact’ is to make an arbitrary and
irrefutable claim. Strawson’s recent and influential essay “Realistic
monism”—reprinted in my 2009 anthology Mind That Abides—offers
powerful reasons why emergence is, and will remain, an
incomprehensible concept.

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In his third section Basile comes down hard on the dual-aspect variant of
monism, arguing that even here a kind interaction problem reigns, one
hardly better than the Cartesian case. But the problem is not so severe
with dual-aspectism precisely because it is a form of monism. The
interaction problem is at its ugliest with substances; aspects, or
dimensions, or perspectives on a unitary reality simply do not interact in
the way that substances must. And I would further argue that it is more
intuitive that we have dual aspects within ourselves than that we have
dual substances. The substances are one possible interpretation of our
firsthand experience of the aspects—but only one, and a very
problematic one at that. I continue to believe that dual-aspect monism is
a most promising way forward.
Two final points bear mention: Near the end of section three, Basile
states that “no panpsychist has yet been capable of providing an
explanation of how human mentality is generated from the several
mentalities in the neurons”—in other words, no one has yet solved the
combination problem. True enough. This is an important area of
research for all those who wish to defend panpsychism. I myself have
put forth some tentative ideas along this line, in my chapter “Minds,
objects, and relations”, in Mind That Abides. I think that a ‘dynamic
systems’ approach is very promising, and that we should view the lesser
minds in our bodies as operating in a sub-space of the larger mental
space that corresponds with our bodies. Theoretical physics works very
well with such a concept: parts of objects change dynamically in a ‘state
space’ that is a portion of, but of lesser dimension, than the state space of
the whole object. In a similar way, the ‘mind space’ of our atoms, cells,
or organs can coexist quite nicely within the larger mental space of our
brain or (better still) entire body. But this is just the beginnings of a
possible solution.
Finally, Basile concludes that panpsychism’s standing is scarcely better
than even Cartesian dualism. Citing both our pre-philosophical intuition
and a recent statement by Madell, he suggests that it is not unreasonable
to argue that dualism, not panpsychism, is the LMS. Of the notorious
interaction problem, Basile and Madell opine that substance interaction
is, like brute emergence, not theoretically impossible. But of course the
Cartesian form of dualism has both problems: interaction, and
emergence in humans alone. It has both the substance dualism and a
kind of phylogenic dualism between humans and all other beings. (It is
a kind of ‘double dualism,’ as I tell my students.) But there is an

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obvious, if partial, solution here: eliminate the emergence, and allow all
beings a dual substance of mind and matter—in other words, a
panpsychist dualism. Now there’s an interesting position! I think that
could make for some very interesting speculation.
So is panpsychism ‘terminally unacceptable,’ to take Basile’s
pessimistic inference? I think not, if only because of its meta-theoretic
status. Panpsychism is simply a universal application of a given theory
of mind. The argument for universalism is quite strong, given the grave
weaknesses in mental emergence. Apart from this, any ‘panpsychist’
theory of mind is only as strong or as weak as the underlying theory
itself, whether monist or dualist, idealist or materialist, and so on.
Critics of panpsychism: bear this in mind!

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“Mind Matters...” – Towards a concept of
proto-mental causation
Ludwig Jaskolla (Munich)
“How wonderful! That even

The passions, prejudices and interests,
That sway the meanest thing, the weak touch
That moves the finest nerve,
And in one human brain
Causes the faintest thought, becomes a link
In the great chain of nature.”
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Queen Mab, Canto II, 102-108
Chapter 1: Basic Distinctions

Causation is among the central, conceptual minefields of modern, analytic
philosophy of mind. The essential characteristics of this concept are
notoriously obscure in many debates. And this again is especially true for
the philosophical discussion of mental causation.
The long-term objective of my paper (cf. Chapter 4) is going to be a
systematic sketch of a positive theory of protomental causation within the
framework of an overall panexperientialistic ontology. Nevertheless, in a
first step (cf. Chapter 1), I am going to provide some basic conceptual
definitions that are important for the main goal of my paper. Due to the
complexity of the problem at hand (cf. Chapter 2), I will only line out two
basic, conceptual problems of classical approaches to mental causation –
and these only as far as they contribute my overall goal. These basic
distinctions and problems will be used (cf. Chapter 3) in order to define the
conceptual environment in which mental causation is possible.
But first things first: The concepts “Causation” and “Physical Worlds” are
often used uncritically within analytic philosophy of mind. This is why, I
am going to present my understanding of these concepts.
Causation: My understanding of causation is oriented towards our ordinary

use of this concept as well as towards some intuitions, I consider to be
basic concepts mapping the world reasonably adequate. Within ordinary
language, we form sentences of the following structure.

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A The baseball destroyed the window.

B If you step onto the frozen surface of the lake, it will crack.
C This key does not fit into the keyhole, because it is not sculpted in
the right way.
D This decision is going to hunt me for the rest of my life.
These sentences share a structural common element: They contextually

refer to the fact that a certain final state x2 is brought about by an initial
state x1. I consider the paradigm of 'bringing about' to be the smallest
common denominator of all the different ordinary language talk about
causation. It seems to me that our intuitive approach towards causation is
of just this kind: We want to understand under what circumstances a certain
final state is brought about by an initial state. I am going to argue for the
following first stipulative definition:
Definition 1.1 (Causal Relevance)

A state x1 is considered to be causally relevant to a state x2, iff. x2 is
brought about by x1.
Three short annotations:

(a) If one was to name the “mental father” of this approach, it would have
to be Aristotle: In De Generatione Animalium he puts forth a concept of
causation that is structurally oriented to the paradigm of artisanal
production (cf. Aristotle, 715a4-7): This is why, it is not surprising that the
aristotelian causes (i.e. efficient and final cause, as well as material and
formal cause) depict a rather liberal concept of causation. At this moment, I
want to emphasize that there are strong similarities between my definition
1.1 and the aristotelian concept of causation: Sentence A denotes an
example of an efficient cause – the kind of causation we are familiar with
from physics. B denotes a material cause, because the frozen surface resists
weight up to a certain critical amount. C denotes a formal cause, because
certain effects are only brought about under specific structural
circumstances. At last, D denotes a final cause. I would like to point out
that the preceding considerations exemplify the overall spectrum of a
liberal account of causation – I do not argue that they are exhaustive and/or
minimal.
(b) One central concern of this liberal account of causation is to map as
many of our ordinary intuitions about causation as possible. Both the

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concept of physical causation as well as a specific account of human

causation (cf. mental causation) can be mapped within the framework of
this liberal approach. Nevertheless, one needs to concede that this liberal
account is at this point not yet determinate enough to pose a full-blown
philosophical theory of causation. This is why, it will be necessary to
specify this account during the next considerations in order to give a
detailed account of how the different causal contributions within the causal
framework of the world can be mapped adequately.
(c) A last annotation: One critical concept of the modern philosophy of
mental causation is the claim that complete causal explanations are
exhaustive – e.g. that they tell the whole causal story of a respective causal
process. Following Jaegwon Kim (Kim 2002, 174), I call this the principle
of the exclusiveness of complete causal explanations (PEC). And I
emphasize that a causally relevant state (in terms of 1.1) does not entail
that the initial state is a complete causal explanation in the sense of PEC.
Physical World: Contrary to the notion of causation, the concept of the

physical world seems to be at least reasonably clear within the systemic
framework of modern philosophy. Following the extraordinary success of
the quantitative explanations of physics since mid-19th-century, most
philosophers consider the physical world to be the part of reality which is
described by physics: This means that an entity will be part of the physical
world, if and only if this entity is described by the differential equations of
modern theoretical physics (or is at least reducible to the entities described
by these equations).
Again, I am going to propose a liberal account of the physical world:
Definition 1.2 (Physical World)

The physical world consists of the set of non-supernatural
experiences arranged within the ordinary spectrum of human
experiences.
Further, two short annotations:

(d) Unfortunately, 1.2 is a rather bad example of a definition, because it
poses an iridescent concept of the natural world. At the end of the day, I am
arguing that most people have a rather clear concept of what it means to be
a natural phenomenon (as well as what not). Among the experiences of
natural phenomena count artifacts, animals, human persons or societies,
but also the causal relevance human consciousness. It is important to note

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that the set of entities described by physics (or the world of physics) is a
subset of the physical world as defined above. Wether the world of physics
is a proper subset of the physical world is left open at this point.
(e) I want to mention at least two philosophers that have influenced my
account of the physical world: David Hume argues in his Treatise on
Human Nature that our theories about the nature of the world are
essentially dependent upon the structure of experience. He mentions that to
first approximation different experiences are on par – this would imply that
there is no reason to consider the existence of bodies as better substantiated
than the existence of the mind (cf. Hume Treatise, 5). A similar account has
been put forth by Bertrand Russell in his Our Knowledge of the External
World. Russell considers experiences to be the ontologically most basic
entities, and argues that external to the framework of experiences no
substantiated knowledge about the world can be stated. Both approaches
are structurally extremely similar to the account given above in 1.2.
Chapter 2: A Classification of the Mind-Body-Problem in Terms of

Causation
Godehard Brüntrup within the scope of his dissertation Mental Causation
developed a trilemma in order to give a systematic mapping of the modern,
analytic philosophy of mind. His central conceptual concern comes down
to the following question: What modes are there to map the causal
relevance of the mental with respect to the physical?
A philosophical trilemma consists of three different theses. Within the
framework of a trilemma only two of the thesis can hold true
simultaneously. This entails that a trilemma can be resolved in three
distinct ways – by negating one of the respective thesis – rendering the
remaining two thesis a consistent system of philosophical ideas. Here are
our three “causal thesis” about the nature of the mental.
Thesis [1]: The physical world is causally closed.

Corollary Thesis [1*]: The world of physics is causally closed.
Thesis [2]: IF The physical world is causally closed. THEN
The mental is causally irrelevant.
Thesis [3]: The mental is causally relevant.
Negating thesis [3] does not seem to be a very promising road to go, if one
wants to ensure the causal relevance of the mental. This means that thesis
[2] and [1] or [1*] remain. In the following considerations, I am going to

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sketch these approaches and I am going to show that neither nonreductive

physicalism (non-[2]) nor dualism (non-[1]) are able to give intelligible
accounts of mental causation
Negating [2]: Nonreductive physicalists embrace to two substantial

proposition: 'The physical world is causally closed' and 'The mental is
causally relevant'. This entails that nonreductive physicalists need to negate
the conditional thesis [2] telling that by logical necessity [1*] implies non-
[3]. They make the interesting move of trying to persuade us that we are
mistaken assuming that the relation between the two substantial thesis [1*]
and [3] is a logical subjunction.
Brüntrup argued 1995 that the following characteristics hold true for every
version of nonreductive physicalism: (a) On the one hand, nonreductive
physicalists are (or rather want to be) metaphysical realists concerning
mental causation. This is due to the following argument: If you want to
secure the causal relevance of the mental and you interpret physical
causation realistically – you'd better interpret mental causation also
realistically (otherwise you will fall prey to epiphenomenalism). (b) On the
other hand, nonreductive physicalists need to construe some kind of
ontological dependence rendering the physical more fundamental than the
mental, because at the end of the day nonreductive physicalists are still
physicalists.
Nonreductive physicalism is served in three different flavors:
Emergence Theory: Like causation, emergence counts among the most

opaque concepts in modern philosophy. Basically, every theory of
emergence puts forth a two-layered theory of reality – I am going to argue
for the following simple definition:
Definition 2.1 (Emergence)

'A' emerges from 'B', iff. (i) A and B belong to distinct ontological
categories, (ii) no bridging laws hold between A and B and (iii)
the occurrence of A cannot be deduced from B in advance.
Timothy O'Connor argued 2002 that emergence should be understood as

causally relevant, non-supervenient relation between to levels of reality. At
first hand, the causal relevance seems to be unproblematic, because the
occurrence of level A is dependent upon the existence of B. This is why,
O'Connor argues: “the emergent state {is} a 'causal consequence' of the

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object's complex configuration” (O'Connor 2000, 8). His approach to

mental causation is dependent on his theory of the physical: Not all
microphysical states are completely determinate. This why emergent,
mental states – via downward causation – are able to act as determinants of
physical states. This is one emergentists way of 'securing' the causal
relevance of the mental.
Nevertheless, O'Connors theory bears the foul stench of the metaphysical
laboratory. Is it really possible to combine this kind of downward causation
with a causally closed world of physics? Causal closure of the world
physics means that there is no causal interaction between the domain
described by physics and the nonphysical (cf. Montero, 2, Definition
TCC). To me it seems obvious that there is a contradiction within the
framework of emergence, because the postulation of independent
downward causation conflicts with [1*]. If taken seriously, the notion of
downward causation drives the theory of emergence towards substance
dualism - rendering it inconsistent in respect of being some kind of
nonreductive physicalism.
Supervenience Theory: Supervenience is another way to describe the

dependence between the mental and the physical. Jaegwon Kim defined
supervenience as a specific version of mathematical covariance. This is
because (i) supervenience is a modal version of covariance and (ii) because
supervenience makes a statement about which level of reality is more
fundamental – to put this simple: 'supervenience is covariance + ontology'.
Here is my definition:
Definition 2.2 (Supervenience)

Properties of kind A supervene strongly on properties of the kind B,
iff.
∀w1, w2 ∀x∈w1, y∈w2 : (IF x is A-indiscernible from y THEN x is B-
indiscernible from y), where w1, w2 are possible worlds and x,y are
individuals.
This implies that a certain configuration of A-properties entails necessarily

a specific configuration of B-properties, because these configurations
occur together through all possible worlds. Nevertheless, supervenience is
asymmetric: Sure, certain A-configurations are entailed by certain B-
configuration, but in different possible worlds the same A-configuration
could be realized (multiply) by different B-configurations.

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Proponents of supervenience argue that the causal relevance of the mental

is guaranteed by the physical realization, but complete reduction is
circumvented by multiple realization. Is this approach convincing? I say:
not at all. Supervenience implies that complete translation of the causal
role of the mental in terms of the causal role of the physical basis is
possible, because the truth-values of every causal proposition is fixed by
the physical basis alone (cf. Brüntrup 1995, 211f). At the end of the day,
supervenience seems to lead to causal epiphenomenalism.
Tokenidentity Theory: The last approach, I want to discuss in this paper is

Donald Davidson's proposal to model the causal mind-body-nexus as a
threefold structure based on the distinction between token- and type-
identity. In a nut-shell his argument runs like this:
A mental event is type-identical with functional state – this means that
every property of the mental state has to be a property of the functional
state (and vice versa). The functional state poses a complete description of
the mental state in terms of the causal role the mental state fulfills within
our ordinary approach to reality. The functional state itself is token-
identical with a physical event: Implying that every occurrence of a
functional state is identical with exactly one physical event. Nevertheless,
this does not entail that a certain occurrence of a functional state has to be
identical with the same kind of physical event through all possible worlds.
Again, this can be interpreted in terms of multiple realization of the mental
state.
Proponents of token-identity argue that the causal relevance of the mental
is secured, because every mental event is identical with a physical event,
showing the intellectual proximity of token-identity to reductive
physicalism. Still, it puts forth that the distinction between types and
tokens entails nonreductionism and therefore secures causal significance of
the mental. To me this seems like a bad magic trick: I argue with
Honderich (1982) that within the framework of token-identity the causality
of a mental event can be adequately described as the disjunction of the
causal roles of all physical realization of this event. And this seems to
imply that the causal relevance of the mental is at best epiphenomenal –
this means also proponents of token-identiy have a hard time securing the
causal independence of the mental.
Negating [1]: The second, classical way of trying to secure the causal
relevance of the mental, is to insist that the physical world is not causally

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closed. Albeit, I will discuss dualistic ontologies in detail, it is interesting

to remark that dualists negate thesis [1] – not thesis [1*]. Interactionistic
dualists argue that there are equally real domains of reality which are
completely categorically separate. In particular this means: IF Q is an
essential property of the first domain, THEN Q is not a property of the
second domain – yet it is put forth, that these domains are able to interact
causally. The ontological independence of the two domains is guaranteed
via so called 'Detachability-Arguments' deducing the ontological
independence from the conceivability that the one domain could exists
without the other. For the actual world, these two domains are the mental
and the physical, which are intimately tied together via causal interaction.
Now, the interesting question seems to be: How do interactionistic dualists
make sense of this causal interaction? It is argued that mental causation is
structurally very similar to physical causation. One mental event can surely
bring about another mental event, but one mental event can also bring
about a physical event, says the dualist. Nevertheless, how this mechanism
exactly works is a contingent fact of the respective actual world – for
example, Descartes proposed that the epiphysis acts as the causal nexus
between the mental and the physical.
Though, one pressing question remains: how on earth should the causal
interaction bridge over the categorical chasm between the mental and the
physical? I argue that the dualist is not able to provide a systematic
criterion in order to transfer causal powers from one domain to the other
(lack of a tertium comparationis). At the end of the day, this results from
the fact that the dualist takes the 'the negation of [1]' in a literal sense: If
the physical is completely described by physics and the mental is real as
well as causally relevant, we need to assume that there are two
ontologically complete distinct domains of reality (cf. Zimmerman 2006,
113-122). In the course of this argument, I want to stop my analysis with
this intuitve problem of interactionistic dualism.
Synopsis: My goal during the last considerations was to 'show' – as far as

this is possible within the range of this paper – that most modern
approaches trying secure the causal relevance of the mental fail. If you take
a close look at the debate all theories sketched above have one common
structural element: Nonreductive physicalists as well as dualists try to
model mental causation within the paradigm of physical causation –
structurally physical causation can be described via the 'Billiard Ball
Universe': A physical event – the trajectory of one billiard ball – causes

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another physical event – the changed trajectory of another – via some kind
of efficient causation.
Now, I argued that this approach leads either to causal epiphenomenalism
or to causal elimination. And again this fact is intimately tied the the
principle PEC (sketched above): If one complete causal explanation of a
certain kind (like in physics) is at hand, then providing another causal
explanation of the same kind seems to
be senseless. To me two different approaches to this problem seem to be
promising: On the one hand, you could just accept that the causal
significance of the mental is to be reduced to the physical. On the other
hand, you could try to find a 'natural place' for the mental within the causal
framework of the world that is not conflicting with the causal talk of the
physical. I am going to opt for the second approach – putting forth the
following inquiry of philosophical theory formation:
Is the concept 'causal role' univocal in terms of the concepts mental

and physical?
In the course of the following considerations, I am going to sketch a theory

of protomental causation dealing explicitly with this inquiry.
Chapter 3: Preliminaries of a Panexperiential Theory of Mental

Causation
Causal Closure of Physics? A philosophical theory of mental causation
needs to find an independent, systematic place for the causal relevance of
the mental in the world. It seems too limited to just search for gaps within
the theoretical framework of physics.
Nevertheless, let's take another look at thesis [1*]:
The world of physics is causally closed; i.e. there is no causal

contribution of entities that are not described by physics.
But, is there reason to believe that this thesis is entailed by theoretical

physics? I do not think that there is. Physics as theoretical science is
occupied with mathematical models of reality. If we take for example a
close look at physics best theory of reality – quantum mechanics and
quantum field theory: The von Neumann formalism of quantum mechanics
describes states of reality as observables. Observables are self-adjunct
operators within a Hilbert space. The spatio-temporal development of

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systems of observables can be adequately described by differential

equations – for example the Schrödinger equation for non-relativistic
quantum systems. These describe the states of a system in terms of spatio-
temporal tensors. Now, the important lesson is that quantum mechanics
only correlates spatio-temporal tensors and states – i.e. these equations
assert nothing more than that some initial state x1 at t1 is followed by some
state x2 at t2 with a certain probability.
Similar considerations can be carried out for the Hamilton formalism
describing the temporal development of physical fields within the
framework of quantum field theory. At the end of the day, I argue that the
mathematical formalism behind quantum mechanics and quantum field
theory is complete indeterminate considering the question wether these
correlations are interpreted to be strict causal relations or mere regularities
(in the sense of Hume). Yet, what is the sequitur for our inquiry? I argue as
cautious as possible for the following assertion:
Theoretical physics does not necessarily entail strict causal laws.
During the last years, philosophers as well as physicists have opted for
similar interpretations. Mentioning only two eminent examples: Henry
Stapp in his 2009 'Quantum Interactive Dualism' as well as Gregg
Rosenberg in his 2004 'A Place for Consciousness' chapter 9.3. I want to
carry on this train of thought:
1. Theoretical Physics does not necessarily entail strict causal laws.

2. IF the world of physics is causally closed, THEN it is necessarily
causally closed.
3. IF the world of physics is necessarily causally closed, THEN there
are necessarily strict causal laws.
4. **The world of physics is causally closed**
5. There are necessarily strict causal laws.
One can easily see that there is a conceptual conflict between proposition 1
and 5. I argue that the claim for causal closure of the physical is indeed
stronger than what can be deduced from theoretical physics, because I
showed earlier that our most basic physical theories do not necessarily
entail strict causal laws. I want to defend the thesis that there is good
reason to believe one is not only able to negate [1*], but that [1*] does not
even follow from physics.

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Let's take a look at this analysis from a different angle: Are these results
surprising for physicist? I don't think so. Most physicists are well aware
that the set of differential equations they employ to describe the world is
nothing more than a functional representation – yet a very precise one –
describing the physical world incompletely. And this is also precisely the
way, I understand the second intuitive definition from chapter 1: The
domain of the non-supernatural experiences is greater than the domain that
is completely described by physics.
Mental Causation (Step 1): At this point, I want wrap up my preceding

analysis in order to provide a first, positive concept of mental causation. I
am going to argue for the following thesis:
Besides the well-known causally relevant events of physics, there is

the possibility of other forms of natural, nevertheless causally
relevant events.
I need to mention one important aspect of this thesis: Contrary to other for
example interactionistic dualism, my approach does not imply that the
'other forms' of causality are not physical in the sense that they are not part
of the natural world. My thesis postulates merely (i) that the complete
causal framework of the world is not entirely described by physics and (ii)
that other causal contributions do not conflict with the causal story told by
physics. Within this context, I consider my approach to be naturalism at its
best. In the course of the following considerations, I am going to present a
first positive characterization:
Definition 3.1 (Mental Causation [intuitive])

Physical causation can be understood (structurally) adequately by the
paradigm of 'pushing'– whereas mental causation can be understood
by the paradigm of 'deciding'.
Physical causation is best described as the direct 'bringing-about' of one

event by another event. Again, we can make use of the billiard-ball-model
that has been developed above – the cause brings about the effect, like the
first ball hits and pushes the second. Essential aspects of this kind of
causation are: (1) Physical causation is always localized exactly in spatio-
temporal terms. This means that cause and effect can be modeled
(structurally) by some tensor consisting of three spatial coordinates and

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one temporal coordinate. (2) Within the framework physical causation,

cause and effect are always arranged temporally linear. Implying that
physical causation is temporally asymmetric – the cause occurs always at
least one instant before the effect.
But how about mental causation? I will be relying mainly on two
philosophical intuitions: At the beginning of the 20th century, Alfred North
Whitehead realized that mental causation has to be of very different kind
compared to physical causation. He argued that our ordinary conception of
mental causation holds that the mental is causally relevant by restricting
the possible development of events via formal limitations in a way that
certain effects are favored while other are cut off. Whitehead summarized
the setting of these limitations via the paradigm of 'evaluating' – which I
will call 'deciding'. My intention will be to extend one of Dean
Zimmerman's intuitions in his Immanent Causation: Physical causation is
always dependent on certain formal limitations clarifying under which
conditions which effects are brought about. At this point, I am going adopt
Zimmerman's view – arguing that mental causation is merely a specific
form of setting these limitations.
Of course, the idea sketched above already a very technical concept mental
causation – and this is why, I want to explore this notion within the context
of a rather simple example:
“I'd rather have coffee than tea with my pie”
If you were to analyze this decision, probably the first thing you would
remark is that this decision is already a decision within a very specific
context: Now, this very decision provides a formal limitation of its
environment – ideally causing that the person will get coffee with her pie.
Besides this rather vague substantial criterion, some essential
characteristics of mental causation are: (1) Mental causation is always
localized exactly in spatio-temporal terms. This means that cause and
effect can be modeled (structurally) by some tensor consisting of three
spatial coordinates and one temporal coordinate. (2) Mental causation sets
formal limitations – cause and effect are (strictly speaking) synchronous.
This kind of synchronous 'top-down-causation' is the most important line
of demarcation between physical and mental causation.
Within the following considerations, I am going to provide a systematic
sketch of one positive of proto-mental causation.

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Chapter 4: A Positive Theory of Proto-Mental Causation

Panexperientialism, Naturalism and the Causal Relevance of the Mental:
During the preceding considerations, I argued that the negation of thesis
[1*] poses the possibility of being able to provide a natural place for the
mental within the causal framework of the world. One central claim was:
You need to drop the causal closure of physics as well as the thesis that the
physical describes the natural world completely in order to secure the
causal relevance of the mental. Bottomline: I am aiming at a theory of the
natural world synthesizing physicalistic as well as dualistic intuitions.
Panexperientialism (one particular fashion of panpsychism) meets these
criteria: It secures the causal relevance of the mental without tearing it out
of the natural world completely, by arguing that some kind of mentality is
an essential aspect of every state of reality – complex or simple – organic
or inorganic. It has been argued that panexperientialism is in fact the only
true naturalism, because it renders the mental to be just one phenomenon
among the other basic characteristics of the natural world – nothing
special, like in non-reductive physicalism or interactionistic dualism.
A few paragraphs ago, I argued that panexperientialism matches
beautifully the demands of a realistic account of mental causation: Within a
concept of the world that renders the mental as fundamental, it seems to be
implausible to assert that the one science not describing the mental as well
as the causal relevance of the mental (i.e. physics) has among its essential
characteristics the necessary causal closure of physics as well as the
necessary completeness of physics. The foregoing argument traces its roots
back to the definitions 1.1 and 1.2 giving a very liberal account of the
natural world that adjusts to our ordinary, everyday concept of the world.
I want to refer back to Gregg Rosenberg who argued in his 2004 A Place
for Consciousness that panexperientialism should be called 'Liberal
Naturalism' (cf. Rosenberg 2004: 76f). This seems to be the very essence
of panexperientialism in conceptual terms.
A Systematic Sketch of ONE Panexeperientialistc Ontology: Since the

different, competing of accounts of panexperientialism are legion, I want to
give a short introduction on what I consider to be the fundamental aspects
of viable notion of panexperientialism. My version of panexperientialism
traces back to Alfred North Whitehead's Process and Reality as well as
Galen Strawson's Consciousness and its Place in Nature (and to some
extent to Selves). I define panexperientialism to be the following thesis:

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Definition 4.1 (Panexperientialism)

Panexperientialism is the thesis that the mental-experiential and the
physical are ontologically on equal footing within the basic aspects
of every fundamental state of reality. The mental-experiential aspects
are the intrinsic carriers of the states, whereas the physical aspects
pose the objectified outsides of the states.
In a nut-shell, I assume that every micro-event described by physics has

some features that can be in loose way of speaking be described as
'experiential'. Within the context of this analysis, I will not be able to give
positive arguments (for a profound introduction to these arguments, please
refer to chapter 8 of Godehard Brüntrup's Das Leib-Seele-Problem) why it
seems reasonable to make this 'panexperiential move' – I am just going to
assume it as viable theory within the context of the modern, analytic
philosophy of mind.
Nevertheless, I need to give one additional remark: I will be making use of
the prefix 'proto-X' a lot in the following considerations and mostly within
the context of anthropomorphic concepts like 'experience'. The interesting
thing about these concepts is that they are almost exclusively used to
describe features of humans. Nevertheless, there is no intrinsic reason to
believe that these concepts are solely applicable to humans. I am going to
use the prefix 'proto-X' in order to describe some concept that (i) bears
substantial similarities to the human concept 'X' but that nevertheless (ii) is
not identical to 'X' in structural terms. To give one simple example: One
could argue that a slide rule is a 'proto-computer', because the slide rule is
very similar to the computer – both are used to solve problems relying on
binary arithmetic operations - but the slide rule is because of its very
limited possibilities no modern computer. So every time I am going to use
some anthropomorphic concept in the following considerations, it is going
to be an acronym for the respective proto-concept – for important
exceptions; I am going to use the prefix.
Here are some basic definitions:

Proto-Perspectives: Definition 4.1 raises a first question – we need to
inquire what the mental-experiential aspect is that poses the intrinsic
carrier of every micro-event? I am going to argue that this mental-
experiential of a micro-event is the phenomenal perspective of the event
upon itself as well as its environment: Every event bears some proto-
experience of what it means and how it feels to be this particular event.

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Rephrasing Thomas Nagel, one could argue that intrinsic natures of events
are essentially 'views from somewhere'. Described in structural terms, this
intrinsic nature is best understood as a quale. These qualia are individual –
entailing that they are not multiple realizable. Nevertheless, I take qualia to
be able to stand in various similarity-relations to other qualia: For example,
the qualia of two different electrons Qe,1 and Qe,2 are much more similar to
each other than to the quale of a proton Qp – this observation about greater
or smaller similarity rests upon the fact that electrons (compared to
protons) behave very similar in physical terms. To give a full review of
definition 4.1, we need to clarify two subsequent concepts.
Proto-Representation: The theory of perspectives as qualia told us
something about the exterior characteristics of the mental-experiential –
nevertheless, I need to give an account of the interior substantial structure
of the mental-experiential in order to make my account of
panexperientialism intelligible. (1) One of the central (inner)
characteristics of a protoperspective is that it represents its environment.
Implying that it is essential for a perspective to have some (maybe crude)
idea of the circumstances it is situated in. These circumstances can be
specified via two features: (1-a) The past of the state (complete or partial)
is present within the state in terms of fixed, causal relations the state bears
to its predecessors as well as the past environment of the predecessor-
states. (1-b) Giving an account of the representation of the state's future is
more complicate: We need to discern certain equivalence-relation. For the
present, I am referring to the theory of abstraction by Bob Hale and Crispin
Wright (an extensive summary can be found in Hale/Wright 2009). They
argue that we are able to pick out and define abstract entities by providing
equivalence-relations – for example Hume's famous definition:
The quantum of elements A = The quantum of elements in B, iff.

There is a f:A→B such that for all a A there exists some b B mit
f(a)=b, and vice versa.
In this special case, the equivalence relation in question is defined by the

bijective function f which assigns to every element of the first set exactly
on element of the second set – and again vice versa. Now, let's go back to
our proto-perspective. Have a look at the set of propositions describing all
the logically possible states of the perspective E at one point of space-time:
We can give a structure of this set which discerns the different logically
possible developments of E in its future. For example:

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X is part of one possible future W1 of E, iff.

X, all proposition of W1 and all propositions of E's past form a
maximally-consistent system.
Basically, this is nothing more than the abstract description of a possible

world W1, which can be adequately characterized as one possible
development of the state E originating from E's (fixed) past. Within this
context, we are able to talk about a perspective representing its future: The
set of the possible developments W1...n that are consistent with E's past, is
used in order to define E's future (for some point of space-time). I want to
propose a certain limitation of this principle: The complexity of the
associated abstractions is directly, positively correlated with the mental
complexity of E – implying that the representation of past and future for
micro-events is supposed to be very simple.
In his 2008 Structure and Being, Lorenz B. Puntel argued that the structure
described above can be adequately stated as the ability of a perspective to
integrate its environment as well as past and future within one intensional-
coextensional act of unity (cf. Puntel 2008, 375).
Proto-Intentionality: (2) The second central (inner) characteristic of a
perspective is that perspectives are of that kind that they evaluate their
environment – i.e. representation of past and future, as well as the actual
environment – from their particular point of view. Implying the following:
A perspective is able to attribute qualitative characters QW,1...n to its possible
developments W1...n – that means that the perspective is representing its
environment as well as evaluating it via attributing some specific quale.
Within the context of 'proto-intentional evaluations' the process can be
pictured in a rather simplistic fashion: 'W1 is better than W2'. These
comparisons provide an external description of what it means to assign one
particular quale to a possible world W.
A Panexperiential Theory of Mental Causation: Within the context of the
proposed panexperiential ontology, we need re-evaluate our understanding
of mental causation layed out in chapter 3. I argued that every kind of
physical causation needs some kind of formal or structural element in order
to bundle and route the causal power of efficient causation. Furthermore, I
argued in chapter 3 that mental causation is some special occurrence of
these formal constraints. Now, panexperientialism puts forth the thesis that
strictly speaking every physical event bears mental characteristics. And this
is why, I need to re-adjust my foregoing considerations:

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Definition: 4.2 (Protomental Causation [Step 1])

The formal constraint within the causal net of micro-physical events
is provided by the protomental aspect of the respective event.
On the one hand, these results are not exceedingly surprising, because if
you consider the mental as a fundamental aspect of every state of reality, it
makes sense to consider these aspects to be causally relevant. But on the
other hand, there are some rather severe misconceptions luring in the
background of 4.2:
Query (1) – Isn't it weird that protomental causation does not make
any difference in the causal framework of physics? No, on the
contrary within he context of a panexperiential ontology this is
among the results you would expect. Among my central points was
that the protomental is similar to the human mental, nevertheless I
argued that it is much simpler in structural terms. One would expect
that a protomental event has only a very limited scope of action in
terms of its rather simple proto-representation and proto-
intentionality – furthermore, this scope of action is so exceedingly
small that it diminishes in the differential equations of physics.
Query (2) – Why is there no 'mentality operator' within the
differential equations to render the laws of physics a complete
description of the world? Well, this is a hard question that is
intimately tied to the concept of a law of nature. In my opinion, laws
of nature are theoretical generalizations mapping our best
systematizations of the empirical facts (basically, this is very similar
to David Lewis' proposal from 1994). Nevertheless, I am going to
extend Lewis' thesis by advancing Nancy Cartwright's claim that
even at the very basis of physics there are no laws of nature in terms
of universally valid links (cf. Cartwright 1983). At the end of day, I
am going to opt for the following, substantial thesis: Structural
features that are interpreted as laws of nature within the context of
physics, are nothing more than the abstracted protomental-behaviour
patterns of micro-events behaving extremely predicable due to lack
of complexity.
In order to describe a protomental causation adequately, I am going to

define three processes partitioning the causal significance of the
protomental apsect of a micro-experiential act of causation. Nevertheless,

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one short preliminary remark: I am going to limit my approach to

protomental causation because one would need to solve the combination
problem in order to give a detailed account of mental causation (of human
level). Since I do not have such a solution at hand, I need to make this
restriction.
Definition 4.3 (Protomental Causation [Process 1])

A micro-event Et (at point of time t) is located (i) within an
environment of events P1 … Pm and (ii) within the context of its past
Et-1 … Et-n. The event Et represents environmental influences as well
the constraints of the past via phenomenal content, AND abstracts a
future consisting of its possible strains of development {W1 … Wx}.
This definition contains two assumptions: Firstly, it is implied that E's past
(i.e. Et-1 … Et-n) remains existent in some substantial way, because they
need to contribute to specific way the event E experiences its environment.
Loosely, I am going to address this assumption as some kind of past-
eternalism. Nevertheless, I want to point out that past-eternalism does not
imply that the past events are equally existent compared to the actual now.
Furthermore, I think that there is no reason to believe past-eternalism
entails either an a-theory or a b-theory of time. Via the means that have
been sketched above, the micro-event generates qualitative representations
as well as the representation of a future. This representation of the future
seems to imply that the future is itself is taken to be non-existent, otherwise
E would be able to just perceive its future directly. This is why, I am
calling this position future-presentism.
To illustrate my approach, I am going to make use of rather
anthropomorphic examples in the following considerations. Nevertheless, I
take it as a matter of fact that some non-anthropomorphic reformulation
within the framework of proto-concepts is possible. This is why, I am
arguing that these examples should be understood in purely illustrative
terms:
… In order to reach a decision, I am representing the way back from

university and marking this way as 'unpleasant', because a deep
depression is just passing over Bavaria. I am than abstracting
different possible ways of getting back home – for example walking
or taking the tube …

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This example leads over to the definition of the second process:
Definition 4.4 Protomental Causation [Process 2])

The possible developments W1 … Wx of the event Et are, after
process 1, evaluated by Et one by one and marked with specific
phenomenal content. These contents form a hierarchy mapping the
weighted structure of possible developments of the event.
Evaluation as well as phenomenal marking are achieved via the proto-

intentional aspect of the micro-event. The 'weighted hierarchy' itself is
accounted for by means of the comparison of the qualitative markings of
the different possible developments. This is done via propositions of the
following kind: 'Wq poses a better possible future for Et than Wp.' Let's
have look at a system of three different possible developments {W1 W2
W3} as well as following 'weighing' of this future – 'W2 is better that W1',
'W2 is better than W3'. This system is still incomplete, nevertheless one is
able make the assertion that W2 is the possible development of the event
that is mostly likely the one that is going to be realized.
… I need to decide between going home by foot or taking the tube.

According to the circumstances sketched above, I am going to
evaluate the way home by tube as better than walking …
One classical account of such hierarchies can be found withing the

framework pf physics: Under ideal circumstances physical states strive for
certain conditions that are maximally fitting in energetic terms. Implying
that the realization of different (not as fitting) states, is going to require a
very high amount of energy in order to achieve and maintain the (non-
fitting) state. And this, among other reasons, shows how nicely the
proposed account fits with the causal framework of physics: The theory of
protomental causation does not alter the description of physics, but
provides another ontological carrier.

Linear-structured physical causation is bundled by Et's development-
hierarchy in exactly such a way that a certain successor-event Et+1 is
generated, where (i) Et+1's immediate past consists of Et. (ii) Et+1
realizes the hierarchical highest possible development of Et either (ii-

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a) partial or (ii-b) complete. (iii) Et transmits its characteristic quale

unto Et+1.
The central feature of this process consists in the insight that we need to
discard the concept of a purely formal description of the protomental
aspect of causation: A purely formal constraint is not able to bring about
anything – the constraints need activity. With this in mind, I am going to
discard the concept of a complete internal description of protomental
causation. The initial- and the successor-event are bound together in such a
way that the initial-event is the first event of the past of the successor-
event. The hierarchy establishes the overall structure of the successor-
event, nevertheless the development of the events in Et's environment
could alter the realization of the hierarchy. And this is why, I am going
leave open wether a complete realization is achieved or only a partial one.
… Well, I am going to decide to take the tube to get back home. To

realize this goal, I am going to initiate different processes in order to
bring about my desired sequitur. I am walking to the station, get on
the train, and so on. Constraints from my environment could, for
example, consist in a rail-malfunction that forces me to take a
different route than fastest one …
One concluding annotation concerning this process: Strictly speaking, the

transmission of the characteristic quale from the initial-event unto the
successor-event is not among the essential characteristics of protomental
causation. Nevertheless, this transmission of this quale can be mapped
ontologically very easy within the framework of a panexperiential
ontology, and it makes sense, because it comes in very handy when trying
to give an account of the persistence-conditions of micro-events.

Process 4 is identical in structural terms to Process 1;
Within the framework of these three (or rather four) processes, one is able
to describe protomental causation in following way:
Definition 4.7 (Protomental Causation [Step 2])

A microphysical process of causation can be adequately described
as:

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… Process 3' → [ Process 1'' → Process 2'' → Process 3'' ] →

Process 1''' → …
where the bold words denote what we would typically call one,
distinct act of causation – different times are denoted by simple
quotation marks.
During the course of the present analysis, I tried to provide a positive

concept of protomental causation: The initial question was posed by the
severe structural problems of classical 'solution' trying to solve the problem
of mental causation. This critique lead over to a very general and intuitive
notion of mental causation. Within the framework of a panexperiential
ontology, I argued that the mental is causally relevant in the world because
it provides the formal constraints necessary for every act of causation. I
argued that definition 4.7 puts forth a concept of causation that (i) secures
the causal relevance of the mental and (ii) fits nicely with the already
developed framework of physical causes.
I am pretty aware that there are a lot of loose ends in my approach – among
the most pressing questions are: (i) What is human mental causation within
a panexperiential ontology that is able to solve the combination problem?
As well as: (ii) Does the assumption that 4.7 fits seamlessly with the causal
framework of physics really hold true?
Just one little meta-philosophical remark in order to sketch the significance
of the proposed approach. A discussion with John Donaldson at the
University of Edinburgh culminated into the following demand: Just give
me one genuine causal rôle of the mental that is not already provided by
the physical. An answer from my point of view could like this: What if the
physical would loose its causal powers, if it were loose the protomental
aspect first? Maybe all the time the question was ill-formulated … maybe
there is no reason to tinker the mental into the causal framework of the
physical … maybe …
References
Aristoteles: De Generatione Animalium, translated into English by Arthur
Platt unter the editorship of J.A. Smith and W.D. Ross, Oxford: 1949.
Brüntrup, G. (1994): Mentale Verursachung – eine Theorie aus der
Perspektive des semantischen Anti-Realismus, Stuttgart.
Brüntrup, G. (1995): Mentale Verursachung und metaphysischer Realismus.
in: Theologie und Philosophie (70), p.203-223.
Brüntrup, G. (2008): Das Leib-Seele-Problem – eine Einführung, Stuttgart.

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Cartwright, N. (1983): How the Laws of Physics lie, Oxford.

Honderich, Ted (1982): The Argument for Anomalous Monism, in: Analysis
(42), p.59-64.
Hume, D. (Treatise): A Treatise on Human Nature, edited by David F.
Norton and Mary J. Norton, Oxford: 2008.
Kim, J. (2002): The Many Problems of Mental Causation, in: Chalmers, D.
(ed.): Philosophy of Mind - Classical and Temporal Readings, Oxford,
p.170-179.
Lewis, D. (1994): Humean Supervenience Debugged, in: Philosophical
Topics (24), S.101-127.
Montero, B.: Varieties of Causal Closure. Retrieved as well as cited January
25th 2010 at 3 p.m.:
http://barbara.antinomies.org/papers/VarietiesofCausalClosure
O'Connor, T. (2000): Causality, Mind and Free Will, in: Noûs –
Philosophical Perspectives 14: Action and Freedom, p.105-117.
Puntel, L. B. (2006): Struktur und Sein – Ein Theorierahmen für eine
systematische Philosophie, Tübingen.
Rosenberg, G. (2004): A Place for Consciousness – Probing the Deep
Structure of the Natural World, Oxford.
Rugel, M.: Panexperientialismus – Das Erleben kleinster Einheiten als
Bauplan von Geist, Materie und Welt (Arbeitstitel), forthcoming.
Russell, B. (KEW): Our Knowledge of the External World – as a Field for
Scientific Method in Philosophy, Reprinted from the Original (1914) with a
new Introduction by John G. Slater, New York, 1996.
Stapp, H. (2000): Quantum Interactive Dualism, II – The Libet and Einstein-
Podolsky-Rosen Causal Anomalies in: Erkenntnis (65), p.117-142.
Strawson, G. (2006): Consciousness and its Place in Nature - Does
Physicalism entail Panpsychism? Exeter.
Strawson, G. (2009): Selves – An Essay in Revisionary Metaphysics, Oxford.
Whitehead, A. N. (PR): Process and Reality, New York, 1985.
Wright, C. / Hale, B. (2009): The Meta-Ontology of Abstraction, in:
Chalmers, D. / Manley, D. / Wasserman, R. (eds.): Metametaphysics,
Oxford.
Zimmerman, D. (1997): Immanent Causation, in: Noûs - Philosophical
Perspectives 11: Mind, Causation and World, p.433-471.
Zimmerman, D. (2006) Dualism in the Philosophy of Mind, in:
Encyclopedia of Philosophy 2nd Edition, London, p.113-122.

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The Spread Mind:
Phenomenal Process-Oriented Vehicle
Externalism
Riccardo Manzotti (Milan)
1. Does phenomenal experience really occur inside the nervous

system?
In neuroscience, most of the available literature assumes that the mind is
the result of some yet-to-be-defined activity taking place inside the nervous
system, possibly inside the brain. Many different subsystems have been
proposed (ranging from microtubules up to the complete talamo-cortical
system, Crick and Koch 1998; Hameroff 1998; Tononi and Edelman 1998;
Edelman, Baars et al. 2005; Tononi and Koch 2008), but no conclusive
evidence has been presented up to now.
Neuroscientists are looking for the neural underpinnings of phenomenal
experience (Dehaene, Changeux et al. 2006; Tononi and Koch 2008; Koch
2010; Revonsuo 2010). Consider Christof Koch’s certainty that “Scientists
are now revealing the material basis of the conscious mind. In coming
years they will gradually fill in the details, making much of the armchair
philosophizing moot. […] Such theories will provide quantitative answers
to questions that have long stumped us.” (Koch 2010, p. 76)
Is such confidence justified? For one, there are not yet any available
theories explaining how and why quantitative phenomenal should lead to
the emergence of qualitative phenomenal qualities. Nor has it been
explained in the least how to connect the normative aspect many mental
phenomena to the physical domain. On this regard, Shaun Gallagher warns
that “Neither the cognitive neurosciences nor phenomenological
approaches to consciousness, however, should be satisfied with simple
correlations that might be established between brain processes described
from a third-person perspective and phenomenal experience described
from a first-person perspective. Such correlations do not constitute
explanations, and indeed, such correlations are in part what need to be
explained.” (Gallagher 2005, p. 6)
Notwithstanding the great success in many respects of neuroscience, many
scholars do not share such faith in neuroscience as the forthcoming
‘mindscience’ (for a review see Manzotti and Moderato forthcoming). As a
result of these and similar issues, a few authors raised some skepticism as

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to the soundness of such neural sciovinism (Faux 2002; Bennett and

Hacker 2003; Noë and Thompson 2004; Manzotti and Moderato
forthcoming).
In this paper I will consider a different approach that, albeit still in its
infancy, has not yet been exploited adequately: could the neural activity be
only a subset of a more extended bundle of physical processes either
responsible or identical with consciousness?
2. The location question

As to consciousness, it is often assumed that the most basic question is
about the nature of consciousness. What is the phenomenal experience?
What is the stuff phenomenal experience is made of? If you are a
physicalist, as I assume you probably are, you should conceive
consciousness as something physical (in this I agree with most available
scientific and philosophical literature; see Dennett 1995; Kim 1998;
Strawson 2005). This is a very broad statement that is not particularly
commitment and yet it is sufficient to draw some preliminary basic
suggestions. If phenomenal experience is a physical phenomenon, it has to
be located somewhere in space and in time. This means that it should be
possible to pinpoint a spatiotemporal region that corresponds to a certain
mental occurrence. Let us dub the question as to where the mind is the
location question.
Looking for a spatiotemporal region is perhaps a convoluted way to look
for what is commonly referred to as a process. This is not a trivial
conceptual step, shifting from other widespread and less physically-sound
yet philosophically popular notions such as state of affairs, states, events.
For in physics what happens is usually closer to the occurrence of a
process rather than to the instantiation of a state of affairs. Just to make a
few examples, in physics it makes more sense to speak of the process of
oxidation rather than of a state of affairs corresponding to oxidation. In
physics things happens and that is another way to say that processes are the
basic building blocks of a physical understanding of the world (Whitehead
1925; Eddington 1929; Heisenberg 1958; Pylkannen 2007). But even
without committing too strictly to a process-ontology, it is rather
uncontroversial that any physical phenomenon is located in time and space.
If phenomenal experience is a physical phenomenon – and I do not see any
viable alternative – it ought not be an exception.
The location question lies at the very foundation of current scientific
research on the nature of subject and so far there is neither consensus nor

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hope of getting close to a solution anytime soon. Yet it is possible to

envisage two rivaling alternative views whose respective value is still
largely unresolved.
On the one hand, many authors tried to locate the relevant physical
phenomena inside the physical boundary of the subject’s body – often
inside the physical limits of the nervous systems or some subset of it. This
trend can be labeled internalism – namely, the idea that the mind depends
on or is identical with properties or events taking place inside the boundary
of the subject’s body or some subset of it. Internalism is the view that all
the conditions that constitute a person’s thoughts and sensations are
internal to the nervous system (Koch 2004; Adams and Aizawa 2008;
Mendola 2008). Consider Koch’s claim that “If there is one thing that
scientists are reasonably sure of, it is that brain activity is both necessary
and sufficient for biological sentience.” (Koch 2004, p. 9) The crucial
claim in this sentence is whether brain activity is sufficient or not.
Internalism advocates that it is, while other views either weaken to a
certain extent or straightforwardly reject the sufficiency of brain activity.
As to the necessity, more or less all agree, although what kind of necessity
is still an open issue. Coherently, internalism can be seen as the view that
answers to the location question by pinpointing to some neural process.
According to internalism, the spatiotemporal boundaries of mental
phenomena are limited to a short span of a few hundreds of milliseconds
and to the bursts of neural firings spreading through axons, dendrites and
cellular bodies. An aesthetic experience would allegedly correspond to
some neural process initiating and ending inside the nervous system
although undoubtedly historically originated by external stimulation,
learning, and development.
On the other hand, many scholars are skeptical as to resources of the body
alone. In particular, it doesn’t seem plausible that the internal properties of
a body can cope with certain aspects of the mind whose properties seem
unmatched by the properties shown by neural activity. Among such
resistant features of the mind two broad categories can be outlined:
semantic/intentional/relational properties and phenomenal/1st person
properties. The first group expresses the fact that the mind seems to be
projected outward the body towards events scattered in time and space
accordingly to the ends and stimuli of the subject. The mind seems to have
a not reducible relational and externally oriented attitude expressed by hard
core philosophical issues such as intentionality and semantics. As a result,
it has been considered whether the environment and the spatio-temporal

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physical surrounding of the subject’s body could be literally constitutive of

the mind. This other approach has been labeled externalism – the view that
the mind depends on or is identical with properties or events taking place
outside the boundary of the subject’s body. In its more radical form, as we
will see, an externalist answers to the location question by suggesting that
the spatiotemporal boundaries of the physical processes identical with the
mind are, at least in principle, larger than those of the body and temporally
as extended as they need to be to encompass what they refer to (in practice
a lot more than a few hundreds of milliseconds).
From the onset it is worth to stress that externalism is no less physicalist
than internalism. This should not come as a surprise although it often is.
There is a widespread and rather surprising misconception according to
which only internalism is a genuine physicalist position. As a matter of
fact, physicalism requires only that the mind is explained in physical terms.
Physics is not made by the nervous system alone – being “neural” is a
subset of being “physical”. Thus, in principle, there are many physicalist
explanations which are not confined to the neural domain. Equating the
mind with the brain is not the only possible option for physicalism.
However, it is the only possible option for a physicalist who embraces
internalism in some form. Yet, for the physicalist internalism is only one
possibility among many and there is no conclusive evidence for it.
In the following, after having outlined the present state of the internalism
vs. externalism debate, the various forms of externalism will be listed. The
variety of the available models of externalism highlights the value of
externalism as a broad approach. In the near future, it is probable that some
of these versions will be discarded – some because too daring and others
because too conservative. It is something to be expected.
3. Journey to the center of the nervous system

At the onset, I will start from a relatively simple case of direct veridical
perception. There is an object in front of a human subject – for instance, a
red apple in full sunlight. As every schoolboy knows, the sunlight hits the
apple surface and other photons are reflected anywhere. Some of these
photons go straight against the subject’s eyes. They pass through his
cornea, are deflected by the lens, and eventually end their journey
smashing against its photoreceptors (rods and cones). The energy of the
photons is transferred to very fast chemical reactions whose result is to
increase the density of rodopsin in localized portion of the retina. Such
increase triggers the emission of action potentials in the surrounding

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neurons. In turn the action potential travels down an axon headed toward
the junction between this neuron and another called a synapse. The
presynaptic ending contains synaptic vesicles that contain transmitter
chemicals. When an action potential reaches the presynaptic ending it
causes some of these vesicles to bond to the presynaptic membrane and to
spew its transmitter chemical into the synaptic cleft. It migrates across the
cleft and is received by the postsynaptic receptors. In this way, synapsis
after synapsis, cell after cell, axon after axon, the sunlight triggered a chain
of neural activities whose result is, among other things, the subject having
an experience of a red apple. This is very well known. What it is usually
forgotten is that we have a physical chain of events and that we keep
considering only the last part. The situation can be represented as follow
E1 → E2 → E3 → …→ EN-1 → EN
When the process is complete, the subject reports a phenomenal experience
of red. Now, what is the relevant part of the chain of events as to the
occurrence of phenomenal experience? We can be a little more precise and
assign to each step a more or less defined role - something like the
following
Esurface → Ephotons → Elens → Ereceptors → Erodopsin → EopticalNerve → Egeniculate →
→ EV1 → EV2-N → Einferotemporal
Of course this is still a simplification of the actual complexity involved in
such a process (many steps were omitted). And yet, for the sake of the
argument, we can further simplify it as follows (Pextended)
Eexternal word → Ereceptors → Enerves → Eearly cortical areas → Efinal cortical areas
Of course leaving to the reader to define precisely what are the final and
early cortical areas. An interesting fact is that, although it is possible that
such chain, especially in the final steps, is made of feed-forward as well as
feedback connections between neurons, from a temporal point of view is
nevertheless a feed-forward chain. Regard the complete perceptual chain of
events, neuroscientists usually focus their attention on the final part of it
(Pinner).
Enerves → Eearly cortical areas → Efinal cortical areas
They tried to find some good reasons to justify the appearance of
phenomenal experience of this physical chain of events. Famously and
mistakenly, during XIX century, Johannes Muller tried to assign
phenomenal quality to undetermined specific energies located in the
afferent peripheral nerves (Muller 1840). The failure to find anything in

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peripheral nerves led scientists to consider only the inner portion of the
chain:
Eearly cortical areas → Efinal cortical areas
Afterwards, other authors tried to locate consciousness in the early cortical
areas. Recently many authors discredited this idea. For instance, V1 is now
believed to not contribute directly to conscious experience (Crick and
Koch 1995). The ablation of many early areas does not always lead to the
disappearance of the corresponding mental content. As a result, many
authors are now trying to identify an even smaller and inner portion of the
original chain (Zeki and Bartels 1999; Kreiman, Koch et al. 2000; Zeki
2001; Rees, Kreiman et al. 2002; Koch 2004). They focus on Pcortical
Efinal cortical areas
However this choice, which I have to stress once again it is based the
undemonstrated assumption that consciousness has to be produced inside
the nervous system – is plagued by the above mentioned faults. Apart from
the fact that the properties of anything located in Efinal cortical areas are
completely different from our conscious experience – a fact that I will
consider at greater length below – there is one more dilemma to be solved.
If our experience of the red comes out of a certain neural activity by itself,
we are faced with two options: either certain neural patterns are by their
very nature phenomenal (and there is no evidence for this so far) or certain
neural patterns becomes phenomenal due to their relation with something
else. The second option blatantly contradicts the assumed sufficiency of
neural activity. Let me spend some more words on this last issue. Let us
suppose that I want to defend a position like the following. A neural
pattern N, by itself, is not phenomenal. Yet when it has some relation R
with something else, it is phenomenal. Now, the relation could be anything
you like. For instance, it could be the fact that N takes place inside a
human skull, or it could be the fact that N was caused by an external red
apple, or it could be the fact that N is the result of
filogenesis/ontogenesis/epigenesis. These are very interesting facts about
N, but facts that do not change what N is, when N takes place. So if N is
the same in all these situations, it cannot have different properties (at least
physical properties). Thus, either N is different or N is the same and then it
cannot be the fact that N has some relation that assign to N different
physical properties. To claim that N becomes different leads to absurdity
since by definition it hasn’t changed by being in some kind of external
relation.

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In sum, neither we can say that neural activity is identical with phenomenal
experience since nor we can say that a certain neural activity is
phenomenal depending on its past history. It would violate a simple
physical principle according to which two physically identical systems
must have the same physical properties.
4. The Spread Mind

After having outlined some of the problems that plague the search for
consciousness inside the brain, we can reconsider the problem as a whole.
What are the physical limits of the conscious mind? And what are the
physical phenomena that can be suggested as being identical with the
mind? Let’s go back to the whole perceptual process sketched above
(Pextended):
Eexternal word → Ereceptors → Enerves → Eearly cortical areas → Efinal cortical areas
Is there any really strong reason why the physical process either
responsible or identical with consciousness couldn’t be the whole process
from Eexternal word up to Efinal cortical areas? I suggest that the physical foundation
of phenomenal experience is larger than the neural portion of it. This is the
core idea of this paper. I suggest that whenever a phenomenal experience
occurs the relevant physical process is not confined to the boundaries of
the nervous system but is physically extended to comprehend the external
world as well. It may sound like a strange idea. But it is hardly stranger, I
think, than the commonplace conception that our phenomenal experience
of the world stems out of neural activity alone.
To begin with, I will address the apparently simpler case of veridical direct
perception (which is still unpredictable and unexplained for most
perceptual theories, by the way). I suggest that the physical set of events
either responsible or identical to conscious experience is the whole causal
chain going from the external perceived thing up to the final relevant
neural activity.
I admit that the proposal could appear as rather counterintuitive and thus, if
it ever has surfaced, it has been, as fast as possible, dismissed. Yet, I will
argue, there are no substantial reasons to reject it. Although many authors
suggested that the content of consciousness (as well as intentional beliefs
and mental representation) could be external to the body (Putnam 1975;
Burge 1979; Gibson 1979; Varela, Thompson et al. 1991/1993; Honderich
1998; O' Regan 2001; O' Regan and Nöe 2001; Nagasawa 2002; Noë 2004;
Tonneau 2004; Rockwell 2005; Byrne and Tye 2006; Honderich 2006),

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almost no one ventured to consider the possibility that the mind could be
physically larger than the body, especially as to phenomenal experience.
It seems that it is very hard to question the widespread consensus as to
whether the core physical substratum of the conscious mind is internal to
the body. For instance, Jaegwon Kim proclaims that “if you are a
physicalist of any stripe, as most of us are, you would likely believe in the
local supervenience of qualia” (Kim 1995, p. 159), that is the mind must
somehow depend on what take place inside the body. He must believe that
the notion is so self evident that does not need any explicit explanation.
Yet, a physicalist could appeal to physical phenomena external to the body
and thus be a physicalist and not accept the local supervenience of qualia.
Yet, there have been many counterexamples to this kind of premise in
other areas.
For instance, take flight. Is flight only a biological phenomenon since birds
and insects perform it? Yes and no. Of course, the biological machinery –
made of wings, feathers and membrane – is necessary in order to take
advantage of the atmosphere. Yet animals would not fly if there the
atmosphere were not dense enough. It would not make sense to deny that
flight is not physical because it extends in time and space beyond the
confines of the muscles and the wings of the flying animal. Yet, no one
would deny that muscles and feathers are very useful, either. Yet, muscles
and feathers are neither necessary nor sufficient. For one, a helicopter flies
without any feather or muscles. Flight is a physical phenomenon that
extends beyond the boundaries of pure biological machinery Isn’t
consciousness akin to flight in this respect?
Here I would like to contradict explicitly the apparently widespread
conviction that if consciousness is a real physical phenomenon, it has to
reside inside the nervous system. This is a non sequitur both from a logical
and an empirical perspective. First, because it could be a physical system
not constrained into such confines. Secondly, because all the empirical
evidence does not show that the brain is sufficient, but rather that the brain
is necessary. Therefore, I suggest considering seriously whether there are
any scientific and empirical reasons to reject phenomenal externalism.
This hypothesis has several consequences in the way in which we conceive
and single out the physical boundary of the subject. Usually we take the
subject to be made of a body and, possibly, by a mind. The mind has been
forcefully located either in the brain or inside the body by many recent
authors. In the lack of any empirical confirmation, we consider here the
possibility that the mind is actually physically larger than the body.

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Thus, at every instant, for a given subject, we should consider two physical
bundles. The first bundle is roughly defined by the skin (although such
boundaries are much fuzzier than it could seem at first sight). To avoid any
ambiguity, we could call this bundle the traditional body.
At each instant there is another set of physical processes. This set is
identical with the subject consciousness. These processes, not differently
from any other physical process and not differently from the more
orthodox neural processes, are extended in time and space. Therefore, they
began earlier than the instant in which we consider the subject traditional
body. How much time before? There is no common span. They have
different temporal duration depending on their causal structure. All
together they form a bundle of processes, larger than the traditional body,
that we could call the extended body. According to the position presented
in this paper, the extended body is identical with the subject consciousness.
It comprehends all those events – either near or far, either in time or in
space – constituting the phenomenal experience of the subject.
In short, although with respect to the traditional view (according to which
the mind, whatever it is, has to be carried along comfortably inside the
head), the position presented here is classifiable as a kind of externalism,
from a more liberal perspective, it is a better form of internalism. In fact,
both the structure and the content of the experience remain inside the
extended body. However, here, the boundaries of the subject are extended
beyond those of the body, thereby permitting to the perceived world to be
internal to the mind, without requiring an incorporeal mind.
5. Intuitive arguments and empirical proofs against the spread mind

I will mention here a few of the main commonsensical reasons to dismiss
such an intuition.
Identification between the body of the subject and the subject. It is
commonly held that the subject must somehow be identified with her/his
body. Since Galileo, the body is considered to host the machinery relevant
for the occurrence of the mind. The alternative has always been that of
considering an immaterial soul. Yet, there is nothing immaterial in
considering the larger set of physical processes whose fulcrum is the body
of a subject.
Perceptual center of gravity. Our eyes, our ears, our mouth and nose are all
centered in the skull. This fact gives a powerful feeling of being where our
senses are centered – that is inside the skull. However, such feeling is no
more authoritative than the feeling that our planet cannot rotate since we

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always feel to be standing up. In fact, our brain could be located

somewhere else without any sensible difference in our conscious
experience (Dennett 1978).
Social skills. When we look at someone, it is convenient to identify that
someone with her/his body. Analogously, we feel that others identify us
with our body. Children learn to recognize themselves in mirror (Staller
and Sekuler 1976; Robinson, Connell et al. 1990). Yet what they recognize
is their body, and not themselves.
Confusion between necessity and sufficiency. Since the body is a necessary
part of the subject, it could never be absent. Whenever there is a subject,
there is the body of the subject. This is not a proof that the subject is
identical either to her/his body or to a part of it. Rather it is a proof (by
induction) that the body is necessary for the subject. We should not derive
unwarranted conclusion out of this simple fact. For instance, there are no
examples of environment-less bodies (brain in a vat). So we do not really
know whether a body is sufficient to host a conscious subject. “Brain-in-
vat cases have always been seriously undefined. Until the scenario is much
better fleshed out, we can’t say what the brain’s intentional contents would
be. Simply to assert that they are the same as yours begs the question”
(Lycan 2001, p. 34).
Common usage of words vs. exact meaning. In everyday life, it is useful to
identify a subject with her/his body. However such identification is more a
practical than a theoretical one. It could be something more akin something
like the “rising sun”. We all know that the sun does not literally rise
anywhere. Yet the common usage of words could endorse some wrong
intuition where the exact meaning of terms is unclear, as it happens with
consciousness.
Although such vague commonsensical views can lurk in the background of
the evaluation of a proposal, they are not serious theoretical challenge. I
listed them to bring them in the open of a discussion. I will now consider
more serious empirical and theoretical drawbacks.
5.1 Spatial limits of a process

It has been objected that the whole process cannot be taken to be a good
candidate for phenomenal experience since it extends on an excessive
spatial dimension. The red apple could be many meters from me. A
mountain could even be at several kilometers. The moon is a 1 light second
from the standard human observer. Yet this is a very unsound argument,

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since there is no known law of nature by which processes must have a

upper bound limit for their spatial length.
On the other hand, neural processes are spatially extended too. Their
spatial extension goes from a few microns (the smaller neurons) up to the
scale of the whole brain. As far as we know, there is no upper limit. Of
course, neurons are constrained to a limited space due both to the practical
constraints of a mobile organisms and to the speed limitation of signal
axonal transmission. However, in principle, if we accept spatially extended
physical processes in the case of neural activity, why should we reject
other physical processes only because of their different spatial size?
In short, since neuroscientists accept to consider Pcortical although is
spatially extended, there is no reason they should reject Pextended for the
same fact.
5.2 Temporal limits of a process

Here the same argument applied above goes. Neural processes are
extended in time. A neural process of object recognition, from the sensory
input to the final triggering of some object correlated neural firings, takes
approximately 300-400 msec. In physical terms, it is a lot. Plenty of
separate events can take place in that amount of time. If we consider the
larger physical process, we are outlining here, it is only slightly longer than
the neural part. The increase in the total duration is the amount of time
necessary for the nervous signal to be transmitted from the retina to the
early visual cortex: a few msec. For the sake of completeness, it should be
considered also the time needed for light to travel from the object to the
retina, but such time is really infinitesimal. Furthermore, as in the case of
space, there is no upper limit to the duration of a process. In our brain
processes are constrained by the fact that the organism has to react with
reasonable speed to incoming stimuli. But there is no reason to suppose
that if it were possible to slow down a brain, consciousness should
disappear. There is no known law of nature that constrains phenomenal
experience to a certain temporal dimension.
In short and as above, since neuroscientists accept to consider Pcortical
although is temporally extended, there is no reason they should reject
Pextended for the same fact.
5.3 Material discontinuity

Many neuroscientists could find more congenial to accept only processes
mediated by the same kind of chemical reactions and kind of cell. The

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argument, if there is any, is more or less the following. While Pcortical takes
place among cortical neurons, there is a discontinuity once you step out of
the brain. Alternatively, a neuroscientist could accept all kind of neurons
and the discontinuity is at the receptor. Besides, at the receptor there is
another kind of discontinuity, psychologically very demanding: the
discontinuity between organic material belonging to one organism and
other material (either inorganic or organic of some other organism). After
all the psychological need for a material uniformity is the what pushed
Camillo Golgi in believing that neurons were interconnected by means of
sharing the same intracellular fluid (eventually Ramón y Cajal showed that
neurons are, in fact, separate cells).
Yet this is a very weak argumentation. A physical process does not depend
on the tassonomic uniformity of its constituents but rather on the causal
transmission of a certain amount of energy (Reichenbach 1956; Salmon
1980/1993; Dowe 1999; Dowe 2000). As a trivial example, consider a
mechanical wave passing through various medium before dissolving into
thermal noise. It could pass through concrete, steel, air and remain the
same physical process. After all, isn’t the same thing that occurs in neural
processes? As every schoolboy knows, neurons are separate and
autonomous cells. They communicate by spreading chemicals between
synapses. What takes place inside the axon is very different from what
happens between neurons. What matters is the propagations of a signal and
not the material used for its propagation.
Once more, since neuroscientists accept to consider Pcortical although is
mediated by discontinuous materials, there is no reason they should reject
Pextended for the same fact.
5.4 Counterexample from indirect perception

In this category I consider a huge range of various phenomena such as
hallucinations, dreams, after images, hallucinations, phosphenes, mental
images. There is no space left to consider all these phenomena since each
will deserve at least a whole paper. Here I will focus only on dreams
mainly because they are the most often quoted case of phenomenal
experience occurring without direct contact with the external world.
During a dream, the brain seems indeed sufficient to sustain phenomenal
experience identical or very similar to actual perception. This fact has been
so convincing that many scientists consider direct perception as a special
case of dreaming, namely a case where the external stimuli control that

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special dream that we take as the real world (Edelman 1989; Revonsuo
1995; Lehar 2003; Metzinger 2003).
However fascinating this idea could be, there are no final evidence as to its
soundness. First, we are not sure what a dream is. And, above all, there is
no proof that a neural tissue could be sufficient to host the occurrence of a
dream without being part of an extended network of physical processes.
The confusion is here due to the fact that it is taken for granted that a
dreaming brain is physically separate from the environment. Is it
completely correct? Is the brain ever disconnected from the external
world? I have argued elsewhere that it is not the case, due to very basic
physical considerations (Author in press). Consider a simpler physical
system: a bottle of water. You rotate the bottle of water. As a result, the
liquid inside will keep moving for a while. Suppose that, after a powerful
rotation, you close the bottle inside a box. Is the bottle disconnected from
the environment? Yes and no. Of course, the bottle is disconnected from
what is taking place in her surrounding after the inboxing. However, are
the events inside the bottle (the rotation of the liquid) autonomously
produced by the bottle? Of course not. From the point of view of the
physical processes involved, what is going on inside the bottle is causally
continuous with external events occurred a few moments ago.
Similarly, the brains of real subjects reporting having dreams are never
disconnected by their past environment. Even if they are sleeping in a
hermetically closed room, their brain is still the result of many past events
that are causally continuous with the dream-correlated neural activity.
Instead of considering normal perception as a special case of dream,
dreams could be seen as a delayed and disordered case of perception.
Another fact that could support this view is provided by the sever
limitation of dreamed mental content during dream. As far as we know,
dreams are made of phenomenal building blocks that are always the result
of direct contact with the corresponding physical phenomenon in the
external world. In dreams as well as in other cases of mental imagery, the
brain seems incapable of autonomously producing new phenomenal
content but only to recombine them. Systematic studies of dream content
showed a remarkable lack of novelty in dream with respect to real life
(Domhoff and Schneider 2008). The overall finding of several studies is
that "dreaming consciousness" is "a remarkably faithful replica of waking
life" (Snyder 1970, p. 133). Not only in dreams it seems that there are no
complete novel mental content, but even their combination is seldom really
unusual, a condition referred to as bizarreness of dream, i.e. any events

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outside the conceivable expectations of waking life. In most surveys the

majority of dreams were rated as having little or no bizarreness (Snyder
1970; Domhoff and Schneider 2008). Specific studies emphasized “the
rarity of the bizarre in dreams” (Dorus, Dorus et al. 1971).
A convincing example is offered by born blind patients that seem unable to
have any phenomenal experience of colour. It is surprising that there is a
widespread and unsupported belief that there are subjects that, although
systematically deprived of some sensory modalities, are able to mentally
conceive them somehow. A simple case is represented by the alleged
ability of born blind subjects capable of dreaming colours1. This is, at best
of my knowledge, largely dismissed by actual data (Pons 1996; Ittyerah
and Goyal 1997; Kerr and Domhoff 2004). Real born blind subjects do not
dream any colour. Real born blind subjects do not have mental imagery
with colours. They do not experience the phenomenal experience we have
when we open our eyes and see a coloured world.
There is some confusion in the literature since many alleged born blind
subject are neither blind nor born with that condition. Truth is that many
classified born blind became blind at a very early stage in their
development (a few months, a few years), but had some kind of contact
with light-related phenomena. However, if we set aside all the dubious and
vague cases, it seems that without some residual sight, no congenitally
blind subject ever reported a mental colour of any kind – whether dreamed
or imagined. As reported by a detailed study on 372 dreams from 15 blind
adults “those blind since birth or very early childhood had (1) no visual
imagery and (2) a very high percentage of gustatory, olfactory, and tactual
sensory references” (Hurovitz, Dunn et al. 1999, p. 183). Of course
completely born blind subject can have mental imagery of various kinds.
They can experience shapes and forms. This is coherent with the kind of
phenomenal externalism I advocate here. In fact, a born blind subject has
plenty of physical contacts with shapes and forms by means of her other
senses. For instance, she can touch a ring and feel the circular shape.
It has been suggested that since patients who lose their primary visual
cortex to strokes continue to experience visual dreams, the activity in V1 is
unnecessary for dreaming (Koch 2004, p. 109). As a result, consciousness
should be located innermost. Apart from the fact that the neurobiology of
dreaming is still the theatre of heated discussions (Domhoff 2005),
1
For instance, it has been reported that a Turkish painter, allegedly born blind, is
capable of mentally feeling colors (Kennedy and Juricevic 2003). Yet there is no
evidence that he can have any phenomenal feelings associated with colors.

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If this were confirmed for every sensor modality, it would support the fact
that mental content is not generated inside the brain, but rather is the result
of physical continuity with external phenomena. A possibility offered by
phenomenal externalism is that the difference between unconscious
processes and conscious processes (either direct perception or dreaming or
whatever) lies in the existence of a physically causally continuity with real
events in the environment, no matter how long and complex.
In short, instead of being a counterexample of phenomenal externalism,
dreams could offer a convincing test bed for phenomenal externalism. On
the other hand, also in normal perception we are not in contact with the
instantaneous environment, which is the environment taking place at the
exact time of our neural activity, but rather with a temporally proximal
environment. In dreams, due to the relative physical and functional
isolation from such temporally proximal isolation, there could space left
for a temporally more extended spatial continuity with the environment.
6. Advantages of phenomenal externalism

I hope I have made it clear that, at least, there are no compelling reasons to
reject phenomenal externalism from the start. We need to collect more
empirical data and to carry on more dedicate experimentations such as to
explore a neglected option. Yet, on a more positive note, why should we
take the trouble to consider phenomenal externalism? What are the
advantages that could we derive from it? In fact there are many possible
advantages. I will mention a few.
A different candidate for phenomenal experience (hard problem). So far,
consciousness research mostly focused on neural activity. Adopting a
process and externalist view, different and more promising physical
processes could be identified.
A solution to the representation problem. A crucial aspect of the mind-
body problem understands how the brain represents the external world.
Adopting an internalism approach entails to postulate the existence of
intermediate representations physically distinct from what they represent.
Phenomenal externalism could allow to get rid of the problem of
representation all together, since there would be no need to have
representations in the classical sense. What we would perceive would be
identical with what is perceived – the vehicle of representation and what is
represented being one and the same.
An easier approach to mental causation. If mental processes were identical
with physical processes, they would have causal antecedents and

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postponents. They would belong to the physical causal flow. These

processes would not face the epiphenomenalist risk since they would not
be a property emerged out of an otherwise already coherent causal
network. They would be already a part of the causal network.
7. Conclusion
The spread mind theory tries to outline a radical ontological twist. The
spread mind suggests that most of current problems in dealing with
phenomenal experience are due to a series of unwarranted ontological
premises. The most obnoxious of them is probably the assumption that
phenomenal experience stems out of neural processes alone.
As it has been argued by other authors, there is not a magic threshold
dividing what takes place inside our nervous system and what takes place
outside. Indeed there is a continuous flow of causal processes seamlessly
going from the environment to the brain and backward.
After all, neural activities are instantiated by series of action potentials
distribute in time and in space. They are processes spanning a spatio-
temporal region. Once we accept a neural process as something that is not
located at a precise point in time and space, there ought not be any
difficulty in accepting other kinds of physical processes.
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Authenticated
Taking the Hard Problem of Consciousness
Seriously: Dualism, Panpsychism and the
Origin of the Combination Problem
Michael Blamauer (Vienna)
About the nature of the external world we have at

the onset nothing but hypotheses. Before we test
them in any very exact way, we may with safety
try to understand them. Perhaps what seemed
the wildest of them all may turn out to be the
very best.1
Josiah Royce, “Mind and Reality”
1. From dualism to panpsychism

The “hard problem of consciousness”, made prominent by David Chalmers
over the last fifteen years (cf. Chalmers 1995, 1996, 2002) essentially
concerns the idea of fundamental mental properties and the concept of
naturalistic dualism. The present paper aims to discuss two important
implications of this notion of the hard problem. The first regards the
principle difficulty of limiting the scope of fundamental properties. The
second regards the combination problem. I will argue firstly that
naturalistic dualism entails panpsychism, by demonstrating that the
fundamentality of mental properties entails their ubiquity. Secondly, I will
show that the core dualistic assumptions presupposed in the formulation of
the hard problem within the standard materialist framework might be the
origin of the combination problem.2 In the last section I will discuss two
alternative positions – substance dualism and metaphysical idealism – with
the primary aim of showing that a reformulation of panpsychism in one of
these frameworks may have the advantage of sidestepping the combination
problem.
1
Royce (1882), 35.
2
I wish to thank Galen Strawson for the remark that the formulation of the “hard
problem of consciousness” is essentially entailed in the assumption of the “standard
materialist framework”. This remark substantially influenced my thoughts on the
combination problem.
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The “hard problem of consciousness” is chiefly concerned with the

challenge of finding a place for subjective experience within the materialist
metaphysics of our world. The major difficulty here lies in the fact that
reductive explanation of subjective phenomena is impossible.3 Reductive
explanation means here that a phenomenon (Q) can be fully captured in
terms of or reduced to some more fundamental phenomena (P), so that P =
Q. (Cf. Lewis 1994 and Chalmers 1996, 70) David Chalmers developed a
powerful argument against reductive positions on consciousness such as
physicalism or a posteriori materialism (Cf. Chalmers 1996, 52ff. and
131ff.). The basic idea is that the meaning of consciousness is determined
in a different manner than the meaning of other scientific concepts, like
water = H2O. To take an example, if identity in the aforementioned sense
would hold for consciousness (and its underlying physical processes), an
atom-for-atom physical or functional duplicate of mine (a thing
indiscernible from me by methods of physical science) would have
identical phenomenal experiences. But even if I cannot make sense of a
duplicate of certain physical systems, like a lake lacking the property of
being wet or being frozen under certain circumstances, I can of course
make sense of a physical or functional duplicate of mine lacking conscious
experience. But if there is no necessity in the relationship between the
occurrences of subjective experiences and physical (or functional) brain
states they cannot be identical, because identity is a relation that requires
necessity (cf. Kripke 1980). Hence reduction in the mentioned sense is
impossible.
The same argument holds for the idea of consciousness as an emergent
property of the brain. The concept of emergence here is taken similarly to
the way we take liquidity to be an emergent property of a group of H2O
molecules. Liquidity is a property of water, but liquidity is not a property
of H2O molecules. If we try to understand the relation between the property
of liquidity and the non-liquid components of the system, we find that
liquidity arises due to some law-like behavior of the components under
certain conditions (temperature, pressure, etc.). Liquidity therefore depends
(in a strong sense) on the law-like behavior of the H2O molecules – it
reduces to it. Insofar as a reductive approach to consciousness is rejected, a
more radical kind of emergence has to be assumed, because it does not
3
Chalmers (1996) and Searle (1992) give a fairly broad overview on the major
arguments against materialism. Further reading on classical arguments is to be found
in Chalmers (2002).

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intelligibly reduce to something more fundamental. Yet such a kind of

radical (unintelligible) emergence seems to imply a kind of magic or
miracle, and it would not provide any explanatory advantage over weak
emergentism or physicalism (cf. Strawson 2006, 18). This is the reason
why Strawson rejects the concept of brute emergence in the mentioned
sense.4
What follows from the impossibility of reduction within this argumentative
framework? An apparent consequence is that consciousness must be
viewed as something fundamental. Now, due to the claim of irreducibility
concerning consciousness within the scope of materialism and the “hard
problem”, the following points establish the framework of arguments:
1. What physics say about nature is true. (Physical properties are taken
as fundamental properties of reality.)
2. Consciousness is a fundamental and irreducible fact of reality.
(Phenomenal properties are taken as fundamental properties of
reality.)
3. Our universe consists only of one kind of stuff. This stuff has two
fundamental kinds of properties: physical properties and mental
properties.
4. These properties correspond to a set of fundamental laws that
correlate the two kinds of basic properties with each other.
These four assumptions form the pillars of a position that David Chalmers
calls “naturalistic dualism” (which is in fact a variety of non-reductive
materialism) (Cf. Chalmers 1996, 123ff.). Naturalistic dualism takes
consciousness seriously yet at the same time accepts the physical facts of
physical science as fundamental facts of reality. However, these
assumptions seem to imply a further assumption due to the relationship
between (1), (2) and (3), namely:
5. The fundamental features of reality must be ubiquitous.
The reason for assuming (5) is that if we take physical properties to be

ubiquitous, we must assume this of mental properties as well and in the
same way. There seem to be no grounds to presuppose that something
4
A similar rejection of the concept of consciousness as a brute emergent phenomenon
was already prominently featured in William James’ Principles of Psychology (1890).
(Cf. James 1890/1998, 145ff.)

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fundamental would initially appear at a certain functional or organizational

level. William Seager famously pointed out that
[i]t is disturbing that consciousness can be an absolutely fundamental feature of

nature while being dependent upon particular systems satisfying purely
functional descriptions […].No other fundamental feature of the world has this
character, or a character even remotely like it. It is rather as if one declared that
‘being a telephone’ was a fundamental feature of the world, generated by a
variety of physical systems agreeing only in fulfilling the relevant, highly
abstract, behaviourally defined functional descriptions. […] Of course, seeing
that consciousness is a truly fundamental feature we cannot ask how it is that all
and only systems meeting certain functional descriptions are conscious, yet this
idea does seem to deepen rather than mitigate the mystery of the generation
problem. (Cf. Seager 1995, 275)
It should be noted that this statement was addressed against Chalmers’

“principle of organizational invariance”, which is constitutive for the
restriction of the fundamentality claim of consciousness in order to define
the framework of naturalistic dualism and to establish a border to
panpsychism. Chalmers introduced this principle because he clearly saw
that if we take mental properties to be fundamental and ubiquitous in the
same way we do for physical properties, then the fifth assumption pushes
the case for panpsychism (cf. his own remarks on panpsychism in
Chalmers 1996, 293ff.).
This structure of reasoning provides a rather good argument for
panpsychism and is indeed originally found in some notable papers on this
topic (Cf. e.g. Nagel 1979, Seager 1995 and Strawson 2006): If we accept
the irreducibility of consciousness to pure physical or functional states, and
if we are doubtful on the topic of brute emergence, we have a strong
argument for panpsychism.
Panpsychism is – in short – typically understood to be the view that

conscious experience is a fundamental as well as ubiquitous characteristic
of our universe, equal to physical properties like mass, charge and spin. In
the current discussion some hold it as a possible coherent thesis about the
mind-body relationship. According to this definition, every concrete thing
has both physical and mental aspects. Galen Strawson takes panpsychism
to be the position that holds “that the existence of every real concrete thing
involves experiential being even if it also involves non-experiential being”
(Strawson 2006, 8). Thus the scope of experience to be found in the

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universe may range from the micro-experiential level of ultimate particles

to the macro-experiential level of human beings.
Yet the assumption of consciousness as something widespread, as well as
the talk of micro- and macro- experience seems to obscure the meaning of
the concept. If we speak of the consciousness of a dog, a cat or a mouse –
even if it is quite obvious we are not equating the term with “human
consciousness” – we end up with a rather confused idea of what exactly we
mean by it. As a matter of fact, the matter becomes even more confused the
deeper we descend the “ladder of evolution”. Due to this difficulty, I think
it is important to keep at least the most fundamental characteristics of
consciousness in mind when we try to consider it on the lowest
organizational levels of the universe. This is even more important if we are
attempting to arrive at panpsychism as a sound theory of the human mind-
body relationship. This means that the kind of consciousness we ascribe to
ultimates must at least provide the possibility of generating a full-blown
version of these features at the level of more highly organized animals.
In the current debate, the fundamental characteristic of consciousness,
which is likewise associated with the hard problem, is its experiential
phenomenal character. But despite the comprehensive discussions of the
nature of phenomenal consciousness, one might still feel uncomfortable
with this as an exclusive characterization. This is because narrowing the
concept of consciousness as a dimension of subjectivity solely to its
experiential phenomenal character seems to leave out some of its
fundamental aspects.
Therefore, I intend in the following to take a deeper look at the problem by
arguing that consciousness is not just an empirical fact, but also a
transcendental feature of our world.5 The term “transcendental” is used
here in the classical sense as the view that the subject’s conditions of
possibility of experiencing objects are simultaneously the conditions of the
possibility of the appearing objects themselves. Furthermore, I assert that
consciousness as a dimension of subjectivity is primarily intentional, and
characterized by some basic form of selfhood and experiential feeling.
In the context of the following outlines, intentionality is taken in the sense
of always being involved with something other than itself. Whereas
consciousness represents things in a certain way, things like tables, chairs
and knifes do not represent things in a certain way. They are not about
anything. On the contrary, tables, chairs and knifes are rather things being
5
In recent years, Rowlands (2003) has referred to this interpretation of phenomenal
experience as transcendental rather than as an empirical feature of our world.

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represented in conscious experience of them. Yet conscious acts do not

only involve the consciousness of something, but also an immanent
awareness of the experiencing subjects themselves. This accompanying
consciousness of the subject itself is no additional act directed towards an
empirical person, but rather the core self-givenness of every intentional act.
Consciousness does not appear to itself in the same way objects do. Rather,
it is in itself immediately self-conscious by representing the world in a
certain way. There is no additional experience. This brings us to the topic
of selfhood. The term selfhood is taken in the sense that everything that is
perceived or experienced, is perceived or experienced by a subject of
experience. The concept does not thereby refer to higher cognitive or
reflexive features such as a self-model, a self-concept, a higher-order
reflexive awareness of one’s own mental states or internal system status,
and the like. Rather, the argument is for an experience-immanent structural
feature of first-personal presence or mineness of experience. The
unfortunately untranslatable, though correct, German formulation of this
idea would be that experiences are “jemeinig”. However, I don’t think it
makes sense to speak of experience that is not present to anybody.6 And of
course, coming to the third and last of the basic features of consciousness,
every perception or experience of something is steeped in some exclusive
feeling which is the essence of what it is like for me to see, hear, smell, do,
etc.
In the following, it is assumed that every one of the aforementioned

features entails problems for panpsychism, especially concerning the
challenge of making sense of tiny subjects summing.
2. The combination problem

In light of the characteristics of the outlined subjective dimension of
consciousness, panpsychism raises several problems.7 One of them is the
so-called combination problem, first noted by William James in his
Principles of Psychology (1890). It concerns the fact that we currently have
no idea as to how a combination of micro-experiences could produce full-
blown conscious experience like ours. Although James does not refer to
panpsychism per se, since his critique was directed only at so-called
6
Galen Strawson has also recently put this idea forward. Cf. Strawson (2009, 63ff.).
7
A comprehensive overview of the problems of panpsychism can be found in Seager
(1999, 216-252) and Seager / Allen-Hermanson (2005).

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“mind-dust” theories, he points out the logical incomprehensibility of the

idea of subjects summing (Cf. James 1890/1998, 158 and 160; also Seager
1999, 242). Hence, even if one could make sense of the idea of atoms
having conscious experience, there seems to be no easy answer to the
question of how lower single states of subjective experience could be
combined to result in higher (and even more complex) states of
consciousness, especially with respect to the subjective dimension of
consciousness.
The problem starts when we attempt to explain how multiple streams of
consciousness – e.g. the streams of every single unit that constitutes my
brain – can combine to constitute one single perspective (namely mine) on
the object. The perspectival relationship of the ultimate to its environment
must in some sense be constitutive in its having an intentional object
present and hence in the object’s condition as three-dimensional thing.
How then, can zillions of these perspectives combine to form my single
perspective on an object? The same applies to the concept of selfhood: You
cannot arrive at a single first-person-perspective from the fusion of many
first-person-perspectives. For the sake of argument, let us imagine that
every single particle has a basic kind of “self” or “I”. Even if it does not
see or hear because it has no ears or eyes, it has a specific feeling for its
environment. It stands in an intentional – though very primitive –
relationship to it. Now, combine a multiplicity of these different
experiencing “selves” or “I’s”. You won’t ever arrive at yourself as an
experiencing single “I” or “self” via a combination of different other “I’s”
or “selves” (Cf. James 1890/1998, 158ff.). And again, the same holds true
for a single subjective experience. My feeling (severe) pain is not
constituted by the fusion of a multitude of (slightly) pained tiny subjects
(cf. Goff 2006). Treating the combination problem by evaluating the
concept of panpsychism, it seems Thomas Nagel was right in his
programmatic paper of 1979. There, he stated that the acceptance of the
premises that lead to panpsychism is more coherent than their negation, but
in the end, panpsychism as a whole turns out to be rather problematic. Yet
how could it be that all the presented arguments coherently lead to
panpsychism, but culminate in such a seemingly serious problem?
3. On the origin of the combination problem

If all of the reasoning concerning panpsychism ultimately leads to the
combination problem, it seems plausible that the error might be found
along the way. Hence, a recapitulation of the outlined assumptions,

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arguments and consequences is in order. I will go about it by critically

discussing the basic assumptions and major steps of the foregoing
argumentation, which has led us to panpsychism and the combination
problem.
Let us begin by examining the background of the non-reductive approaches
to consciousness under discussion today, which were the source of our
reasoning. This is the background of the so-called “hard problem”, which
can be interpreted as the name for the main point of dispute between
reductionists (physicalists or functionalists) and non-reductionists (dualists
or panpsychists) in regards to the nature of consciousness. Whereas
reductionists (physicalists or functionalists) claim – in short – that mental
phenomena are identical with physical or functional processes and hence
reducible to it, non-reductionists (dualists or panpsychists) hold that
consciousness is something fundamental besides the fundamental physical
aspects of reality. Generally speaking, the standard materialist framework
entails the formulation of the “hard problem”, and this problem indicates
the difficulty of finding a space for consciousness within the physical
domain of our world. And given the fundamentality claim concerning
consciousness within this framework, one is naturally driven to a dual-
aspect position better known as property dualism.8 It is essential to bear
this in mind when we return to the combination problem later.
Now, as I have argued above, it is apparently only a small step from
property dualism to panpsychsim. The reason for this is the principle
difficulty of limiting the scope of fundamental mental properties to within
the overall framework. And the reason for this in the first place is that
consciousness is not a vague concept.9 Moreover, following William
Seager, it turns out to be rather incoherent to artificially limit mental
properties to appearing only in systems with a certain complex and fine-
grained functional architecture while generally taking physical properties
to be ubiquitous. It is more coherent to view mental properties as
ubiquitous as well, above all when facing the problems of emergentism (cf.
Strawson 2006, 12ff.).
8
David Chalmers labels his position “naturalistic dualism”, even though it is a kind of
property dualism. By “naturalistic” he wishes to emphasize the fundamentality of both
the physical and the mental, and likewise indicate the – albeit yet unknown – lawful
and natural relationship between these two distinct domains.
9
Philip Goff developed the argument that the non-vagueness of the concept of
consciousness leads to a kind of panpsychistic ontology. He presented this idea at the
workshop, “The Mental as Fundamental” at the University of Vienna in May 2010.

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These outlines urge us to address the question of the status of physical

properties in relation to mental properties and, moreover, the distinct mode
of being of both. For these reasons, Strawson infers a position he calls
“microphsychism” (Cf. Strawson 2006, 24ff.). Micropsychism, like
property dualism, presupposes the existence and fundamentality of a mind-
independent, physical world. According to Strawson, micropsychism is a
position similar to property dualism insofar as it takes mentality to be a
fundamental property of physical systems. But it avoids the problem of
emergence by not only ascribing mentality to certain complex systems, but
by taking it to be the property of (at least some) fundamental particles as
well:
Real physicalists must accept that at least some ultimates are intrinsically
experience-involving. They must at least embrace micropsychism. Given that
everything concrete is physical, and that everything physical is constituted out
of physical ultimates, and that experience is part of concrete reality, it seems the
only reasonable position, more than just an ‘inference to the best explanation’.
(Strawson 2006, 25)
Now, it follows that the concept of property dualism and its subsequent
development as micropsychism are obviously the origin of the combination
problem. This diagnosis is based on two strong reasons:
1. The ontological separation of the mental and the physical, by taking

both as fundamental properties of reality (which are neither
reducible, nor emergent).
2. The transfer of this fundamental separation from the ontological
macro- to the ontological micro-level (to save the intelligibility of
emergence).
To arrive at this diagnosis, we must merely draw the logical conclusions

from the foregoing passage: If the subjective dimension of consciousness is
nothing we can think of in terms of generation, then micropsychism, as the
idea of (some) fundamental particles having physical properties as well as
mental properties in the aforementioned sense, is a dead position. Within
such a framework, panpsychism (as well as micropsychism) lacks an
explanatory advantage over any dualistic position – on the contrary, it must
deal with counterintuitive consequences and additional ontological dead
weight. To put it differently: In the case portrayed above, the mind-body
problem has only been transferred from the macro-level of human

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consciousness to the micro-level of particle-consciousness merely to avoid

the problems of emergentism.10
After evaluating the recapitulation of arguments, the standard materialist
framework as the primary source of property dualism turns out to be the
origin of the combination problem. It has been argued that this kind of
dualism is also manifested in the sort of panpsychism that later faces the
unsolvable combination problem. Hence, if we want to overcome the
combination problem we have two alternatives: Either we abandon
panpsychism and turn to a completely different position, with other
premises etc. Or, if we wish to uphold panpsychism as a sound theory, we
must challenge the background assumptions of the standard materialist
framework by finding an alternative position that meets the different
requirements. In other words: If we take the mental to be fundamental, it is
not necessarily self-evident that we should take physical properties to be
fundamental in the same sense. However, precisely this is presupposed in
the formulation of the “hard problem” and, moreover, the mind-
independence of the physical domain is in fact an unquestioned premise of
the most prominent arguments voiced in this discussion (e.g. the zombie-
argument or the knowledge-argument).
Actually, I believe a fully elaborated position that meets all the outlined
requirements is currently lacking. Nevertheless, I view a few positions as
possible candidates for further consideration with regard to the
combination problem. In the following, I will outline two of them.
4. Two alternative strategies for avoiding the combination problem

If the combination problem is in principle unsolvable within the scope of
the materialist framework, it seems the only viable strategy is to sidestep it
– either by switching the framework or by abandoning panpsychism per se.
There are at least two alternative approaches to property dualism, with
quite different background assumptions. Both take consciousness
seriously, yet without running into the combination problem. On the one
hand, there is substance dualism, which avoids the combination problem
by avoiding panpsychism as such. On the other hand, there is – at first
glance, the more radical approach of – idealism, which avoids the
combination problem by constructing a different framework for
panpsychistic ideas.
10
Dean Zimmermann (2006, 115) referred precisely to such a kind of
“micropsychism” as a rather “bizarre theory”, which nevertheless “qualifies as
compositional dualism” even if it seems “to be a kind of materialism”.

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Let me begin with the first candidate: substance dualism.11 In the following
discussion of this doctrine my major focus is on its relevance to the
combination problem. I will not discuss the typical problems related to this
view.12 In his book on Cartesian dualism, John Foster presents the five
basic claims of substance dualism. It is astonishing that they are in most
respects similar to the basic claims of panpsychism. He lists them as
follows (Foster 1991, 1):
1. There is a mental realm.

2. The mental realm is fundamental.
3. There is a physical realm.
4. The physical realm is fundamental.
5. The two realms are ontologically separate.
Of course, one can easily see that it is claim (5) that is essential to the idea
of substance dualism. Contrary to panpsychism and even to property
dualism, substance dualism views the mental and the physical as possibly
existing independently of one another. Every single mind is something that
exists merely through and by itself, without further dependence on a
physical body consisting of physical ultimates. Foster points out that
substance dualism views the mind as being (i) conceptually fundamental,
as well as (ii) metaphysically fundamental. According to (i), “No mental
statement is amenable to a non-mentalistic analysis”; and according to (ii),
“No mental fact is non-mentally constituted” (Foster 1991, 8). And the
same holds true for the physical realm. So again, contrary to property
dualism, which faces the problem of emergence when attempting to make
intelligible the occurrence of mental properties at a certain level of
functional or physical complexity, substance dualism avoids it by simply
holding that the mind is neither an emergent phenomenon, nor identical
with physical processes (neither token- nor type-identical), since “facts or
states of affairs, cannot be identical if their ontological ingredients are
different” (Foster 1991, 9).
In Descartes’ view, the mind is simple and essentially indivisible. He takes
it to be a substance in the classical Aristotelian sense of having
11
In my discussion of substance dualism I primarily follow Forster (1991), Crane
(2003), Zimmermann (2006) and Robinson (2007).
12
Which are in fact the interaction problem and the pairing problem. For a
comprehensive and detailed discussion of the different problems of substance dualism
cf. Zimmermann (2006), Robinson (2007) and Lycan (2009).

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independent existence (in addition to being persistent and property-

instantiating).13 Minds are unities in a core sense, and each individual mind
is considered to be an individual mental substance. This was one of
Descartes’ basic characteristics of the mind, posited to differentiate it from
material (extended) objects: whereas objects can be divided into smaller
parts and, vice versa, constructed of such parts, the mind is an indivisible
unity, though a unity of different and complex experiences. Substance
dualism is a “radically non-physicalistic account of what exists or occurs
within the mind” (Foster 1991, 202) and it furthermore views all
appearances as belonging to a basic mental subject in the sense that
“mental events are always and necessarily events concerning the mentality
of these subjects” (Foster 1991, 205). However, this talk of the mind as a
substance does not imply that the mind is to be regarded as a “thing” in the
same way we regard tables, knifes and chairs as things. Substance in this
context simply means that the mind is something fundamental in the sense
of not ontologically relating to anything other than itself. Moreover, the
mind is not to be considered a thing since things are contents of
representational states and the mind is first and foremost no such content.
On the contrary, the mind represents things in a certain way due to its
intentional character. Obviously, because of this radical separation of the
mind-sphere from the physical world of material objects, substance
dualism faces nothing like a combination problem, since the mind is not
understood as something generated or composed.
A position different to, and even more radical than, substance dualism
would be one that denies the aforementioned metaphysical separation by
(either entirely or merely partially) absorbing the physical realm into the
fundamental dynamics of the mind. As a consequence, the physical realm
would no longer be fundamental in the same sense as the realm of the
mind, but rather be taken as derivative of fundamental mental processes or
objects. Nowadays, such a position would be labeled classically idealistic.
Most of these positions could also be interpreted as panpsychistic insofar
as they consider the mental to be something fundamental and ubiquitous in
their overall philosophical systems (e.g. those of Leibniz, Berkeley or the
13
Crane (2003), referencing Peter Simons (1998), indicates that the concept of
substance has little relevance in current ontological discussions since it is challenged
by other ontological categories like events, particulars, etc.

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German Idealists).14 It must firstly be stated that even though idealism is

treated today as a rather dead position, it is obviously at no explanatory
disadvantage to realistic, materialistic or dualistic positions. Indeed, quite
the contrary is the case, although I will not attempt a vindication of
idealism in the following. As in the preceding section, this position will
only be discussed with regard to the combination problem.
A major aim of idealistic approaches was to overcome substance dualism
as a doctrine claiming the existence of two different realms of being, which
in their view was in some way an unintelligible distinction. One of the
major critics of dualism was Leibniz.15 In his Discours de métaphysique
(1686/2002, 20ff.) he offers a challenging critique of Descartes’ concept of
extended substances and the notion of their divisibility. Even if the mind is
taken to be an indivisible substance, the extended world (i.e. the material
world made of matter) is in principle divisible ad infinitum. Leibniz’s point
of criticism was that if we consider matter to have this character, it would
be unintelligible how an infinite number of infinitely small units could
merge to result in a being of a certain shape and certain size, such as a
table, knife or even a human body. So Leibniz assumed that objects, which
are mere aggregates, must be made up of simples, which are by definition
indivisible. There follows the distinction between mere aggregates and real
unities (Cf. Rescher 1979, 77ff.). In Leibniz’s philosophy, these indivisible
simples or individual substances are called monads (Cf. Leibniz,
1714a/2002, 152ff.; 1714b/2002, 110ff.). One might now ask: What is the
quality of a monad that makes it the indivisible constituent of everything
that exists? Remembering Descartes’ definition of the mental, one can
easily infer that a monad must be something mental in order to meet the
specified requirements. And this is what Leibniz’s idealism is about.
However, idealism is only the umbrella term for a number of positions that
range from a Leibnizian kind of pluralistic idealism, to Berkeleian
phenomenalistic idealism, to the transcendental idealism of Kant and, later,
the German Idealists. In general, the basic assumption of the idealistic
position is that reality is epistemologically and (depending on the kind of
14
Cf. Seager/Allen-Hermanson (2005), who label at least Leibniz and Berkeley as
panpsychistic idealists. But certainly, e.g. Schelling’s System (as representative of
German Idealism) should be interpreted as panpsychistic idealism as well (cf.
Blamauer 2006).
15
In my discussion of Leibniz’s idealism and his critique of Descartes’ notion of
substance I mainly follow Leibniz (1686/2002), Leibniz (1714a/2002), Leibniz
(1714b/2002) and Rescher (1979).

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idealism) metaphysically mind-correlative or mind-dependent. Of course,

this assumption carries with it a real challenge, as it runs contrary to our
everyday assumption about reality, which, in a nutshell, is that there exists
a physical, mind-independent as well as metaphysically fundamental
material world. But this should not concern us here, since we are only
addressing the question of alternative strategies that avoid the combination
problem.
In this context, a hypothesis worth exploring could be as follows:
• (H) All facts about states and objects of reality are facts about
experiential or mental states or about relations between or within
experiential or mental states.
(H) is conceptually connected with the following two claims:
1. Consciousness is epistemologically and metaphysically fundamental.

2. Mind and world are not distinct metaphysical realms.
According to the basic notion of idealism, consciousness must be

considered the constitutional basis of the objective world. Hence, mind and
the objective world must be dynamically interrelated to each other due to
their identical constitutional basis. Now, what consequences result for our
main questions concerning the mind-body problem and the combination
problem? Obviously, there is no longer a mind-body problem in the sense
of the aforementioned “hard problem”, since within the scope of idealism,
there is no more question of how the mind could fit into a supposedly
fundamental physical framework. There is only one fundamental basis – be
it interpreted dynamically as a process or more statically as a substance; no
more question remains of how two epistemologically and ontologically
different kinds of properties, substances, states, particulars or events could
relate to each other. There is only mind, and that is the only immediately
given, real fact. If we now examine the combination problem in light of
this view, it seems to vanish into thin air.
Within the Leibnizian framework, there are only monads or aggregates of
monads and a hierarchical organizing principle (Cf. Leibniz 1714a/2002,
156 and Rescher 1979, 110ff.). Every real unit is a monad, even if it
assembles a set of monads beneath itself as the hierarchically superior
monad and hence organizational principle. In the case of the mind-body
problem, this means that even if the body is an aggregate of monads, it has

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a hierarchical organization where the highest principle is the apperceiving

subject. This subject, of course, is an indivisible unit by itself, and hence
there is no combination problem.
Within a phenomenalistic (Berkeley), or transcendental (Kant, German
Idealists), framework, there is only the transcendental subject, or
transcendental subjectivity, as the constitutional principle of an objectively
given world. According to Descartes’ skeptical hypothesis outlined in the
2nd Meditation, we cannot be sure whether we perceptually grasp things as
they really are or rather merely as they are present to an experiencing
subject. Kant’s transcendental project stands firmly in this tradition when it
assumes that gaining objective knowledge about the external world is
necessarily mediated by the subjective conditions under which we are
aware of them. Due to the fact that knowledge of external things
necessarily requires experience, and experience always means that things
appear for a subject and only under the subject’s conditions of experience,
we have no access to things as they are in themselves, but rather only to
how they are present for us in experience. If we examine the question of
objectivity from this transcendental point of view, the mode of being of the
objective turns out to always be related to subjective conditions of
conscious experience. Being, in the sense of being-an-object-for, turns out
to be relative to a subject;16 it depends on the subject’s point of view. In
contrast, consciousness does not appear for itself in the same way objects
do. It rather is in itself immediately self-conscious in representing the
world in a certain way. This is the reason why all attempts of the subject to
comprehend herself in terms of objectivity must fail – at least within the
transcendental framework. And obviously, no combination problem occurs
either.
5. Conclusion
Wild and airy indeed! But why so? Mind-Stuff was a worse hypothesis,
because, when you tried to express all its consequences, it became
unintelligible. The ordinary uncritical Atomism is a worse hypothesis, because
we never get from it the least notion of how this eternally existent matter may
16
It must be mentioned that the former, epistemologically-driven, critical
transcendentalism of Kant was transformed into a rather strong ontological idealism by
the German Idealists, especially by Fichte and Schelling, as a result of the alleged
unintelligibility of things-in-themselves.

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look and feel when nobody sees or feels it. The mystical “one substance with
two faces” is worse, because that is no hypothesis, only a heap of words.
(Royce 1882, 40)
Keeping within the scope of Royce’s thoughts, I think there is no better

reflection of what I have tried to outline than these words. I began with a
rejection of materialism and embarked on a quest for a suitable explanation
of consciousness. I wished to take the fundamentality claim of conscious
experience seriously and was naturally driven towards panpsychism. I
attempted to show that panpsychism faces the combination problem only
due to certain core dualistic background assumptions resulting from a
rather questionable scientific worldview, which I classified as the standard
materialist framework. This position also forms the background to the idea
of “one substance with two faces”, nowadays better known as property
dualism or as the derivative form of micropsychism. So in aiming for a
solution to the combination problem entailed by the standard materialist
framework, I have presented two alternative positions that both sidestep the
combination problem by taking the mental as truly fundamental: one that
avoids the problem by abandoning panpsychism as such – substance
dualism; the other sidestepping it by constructing a different ontological
framework: idealism. However, these positions may also have problematic
consequences. One might now ask: Shouldn’t we better give up on these
questions given all these troubles? I do not think so. To be continued…17
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17
I thank Pierfrancesco Basile, Wolfgang Fasching, and Georg Schiemer for helpful
comments on former drafts of this paper. The Austrian Science Fund (FWF) financed
this study in the context of the research project “Taking the Hard Problem of
Consciousness Seriously – Naturalistic Dualism and the Consequence of
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Authenticated
Mind Space: Toward a solution to the
combination problem
David Skrbina (Dearborn/Michigan)
I begin with two fundamental, and perhaps obvious, observations. First,

there is no more basic fact of existence than that of subjective
experience—which is the central feature of that which we loosely call ‘the
mind.’ Mentality, experientiality, qualia, qualitative experience—I take
these as synonymous, and as representative of this one most-basic truth of
reality. Each person knows this truth more deeply and more intimately
than anything else. It is an ancient truth, one which crosses many
divisions within philosophy. It is the common thread that links disparate
thinkers and times, from Anaxagoras and Parmenides to Berkeley and
Descartes and many others. Normally one would expect that no
reasonable person could question this fact, although certain eliminativists,
analytic philosophers, and hard-core materialists come perilously close to
doing so.
Secondly, I take it that some form of metaphysical monism must be true.
This view has widespread support today, if only because few are willing
to defend the alternatives—particularly full-blown (classical) substance
dualism. The problems of dualism are well-known: interactionism, the
causal closure of the physical world, and various untenable theological
implications, all conspire to make it virtually unacceptable. In
abandoning (true) substance dualism, we are of practical necessity left
with various forms of monism.1 The leading candidates would include:
conventional physicalism (taken as synonymous with materialism),
neutral monism, and so-called ‘property dualism,’ which I prefer to call
dual-aspect monism. Neutral monism is an intriguing option, but we
lack a well-articulated version at present. Hence I take it that dual-
aspectism is the leading challenger to the dominance of physicalism.
If we accept, then, that mind or experientiality is the most basic fact of
existence, and that some form of monism must obtain, then our path
forward narrows. First of all, if the mental is primary, then the
physical—the material—is secondary; it is something of which we are
less certain, and less able on which to make definitive pronouncements.
1
No one in the past century, at least, has been willing to defend any form of
pluralism, and thus I leave that option aside.

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Physicality is the inferred reality, whereas mind is the experienced

reality.2
The question then follows: Is the physical derived from the mental? If
so, we arrive at a form of idealism. If not, then the physical must have
something like equal standing with the experiential. Along with most
others, I have a hard time accepting the former, for much the same
reason that pure (mechanistic) materialism is unacceptable: in the words
of Nagel (1974: 446), “we do not at present have any conception of how
it might be true.” Thus we are driven to accept the equiprimordial
standing of the mental and the physical, yielding a monism that has
irreducible experiential and physical qualities—which is none other than
dual-aspect monism.3 We can accept this despite the fact that the mental
appears to us as the more fundamental reality; that is, the mental is
epistemologically primary, though without being ontologically primary.
The vast majority of philosophers, in accepting conventional (non-
experiential, mechanistic) physicalism, must thereby adopt two unsavory
positions: (a) they must reject the powerful intuition that it is the mental
that is the more fundamental reality, rather than the physical; and (b)
they must embrace some form of mental emergentism—thereby
incurring the burden of explaining how the experiential can arise from,
or emerge from, a wholly non-experiential physical reality. Intuitions
can be rationally overridden, but the thesis of emergentism is a different
matter altogether. Galen Strawson, in his contemporary classic
“Realistic monism: Why physicalism entails panpsychism” (2006,
2009), gives an incisive formulation to the notion that brute emergence
of mind is, quite literally, incomprehensible. His conclusion: “I think it
is very, very hard to understand what it is supposed to involve. I think it
is incoherent, in fact…” (2009: 41)—that is, how can it be that
something like experience can possibly emerge from that which is
utterly devoid of experience?
I won’t recount the whole case against emergence here, but I do want to
emphasize three salient (and interrelated) aspects of this problem. In
order to be comprehensible, any theory of emergence must offer
2
This obviously flies in the face of conventional materialism, in which the physical
is the ultimate reality and the mental is derivative, or emergent—as I will explain
below.
3
Of course, there could be (many) other, equally-fundamental aspects of the one
monistic reality, or even infinitely many—as Spinoza presumed. I hold this as an
open conjecture, but one which does not substantially affect the argument to follow.

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explanations for what I have called the historical, phylogenic, and

ontogenic questions. First: If, at some time in the distant past, mind
(experientiality) did not exist at all, and now it does, then we would like
to know roughly when in the course of evolution it appeared, and why.
Presumably there was a reason for mentality, some evolutionary
advantage, that facilitated its sudden—and I emphasize ‘sudden’—
appearance in the natural world. The emergentist should be able to offer
at least a tentative proposal regarding when and why mind first appeared
on this planet.
Second, of the wide variety of organisms that exist on Earth today, we
would like to know which ones possess this experiential quality, and
which do not (the phylogenic question). Few today would defend the
view that humans alone are enminded; Griffin (2009) gives compelling
empirical data for nonhuman minds. But once we extend mind to
nonhumans, the question is begged: How far do we go? Either we go
‘all the way,’ and include all nonhumans, or we draw a line
somewhere—with appropriate justification, of course. But there’s the
rub; Velmans (2009), for example, demonstrates the intractable
difficulty of drawing such lines in the phylogenic order. And in truth, no
one thus far has been able to establish a defensible breakpoint. Without
such demarcation, the way is open for some form of panpsychism.
The third question, regarding ontogenics, is best illustrated by a
developing fetus. If a fertilized, one-celled human egg has no mind, but
a nine-month-old newborn does, when in the process of development
does mind appear? How many cells does the fetus need, how many
functioning neurons, in order for it to begin experiencing—not ‘like a
human,’ but simply at all? Again, one can imagine that there is no clear
line to be drawn in the process of ontogenesis that would mark off the
sudden emergence of mind. And without such a line, experientiality
goes back to the egg—and likely beyond.
All three questions are at present unanswered, on the emergentist thesis.
All are related to the basic issue of the requisite structural framework—
physiological, biological, or physical—that can support mind,
consciousness, and experientiality. What this is, we do not know. It
could simply be a matter of ignorance; and indeed this is the standard
claim: ‘There must be a line somewhere, but we do not know where it
is, nor even how to determine this.’ But the faith remains that the line is
there, after all. The panpsychist counterclaim is that this question is
epistemologically indeterminate because it is ontologically

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indeterminate; in other words, the line can’t be drawn because it’s not
there. Once we break out of the human sphere, the ball is rolling and it
is very hard to stop. (Perhaps we can sympathize with the nice, clean
distinctions of Descartes’ day…)
Given these problems with emergentism, a panpsychist dual-aspectism is
certainly a viable option. And if emergence is found to be
fundamentally incoherent, then dual-aspectism becomes a clear favorite.
Under this presumption, the one monistic reality is intrinsically
experiential, and thus panpsychism obtains. I will take this to be the
case.
***
At this point, an important issue arises regarding the compositional

nature of the mind. In our own first-hand experience, mind is a singular
sense of conscious awareness, characterized by a rich and diverse
sensory imagery. But on the dual-aspect thesis, experiential mind also
resides at the level of physical ultimates. This implies two immediate
questions: (1) How many levels of mind exist between the ultimates and
ourselves? (Or for that matter, ‘above’ ourselves?); and (2) What is the
relationship between these ultimate / intermediate minds, and our
singular, higher-order self? These points need to be addressed by any
adequate theory of panpsychism.
The usual assumption is that, on the panpsychist view, higher-order
minds are composed of lower-order ones, in much the same way, or in
an analogous way, that macro objects are composed of physical (atomic)
ultimates. Composition of physical ultimates is relatively
straightforward; the mass of the whole is the sum of the masses of its
ultimate parts. And the physical characteristics of the whole are entailed
by the properties of its ultimates, and the corresponding physical laws.
However, the notion that a higher-order mind could be the result of a
composition of mental ultimates—or we might say, of the mental
characteristics of physical ultimates—is mysterious, and threatens to
undermine panpsychism at its foundation. We lack a conception of how
this could be true.
Thus, the combination problem—which some (e.g. Strawson) call the
composition problem—is perhaps the most significant issue facing
panpsychist theories today. We need to be clear as to what precisely the
problem is. At a minimum, we have the problem that the human body,

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with its singular sense of mind and consciousness, is composed of

myriad atomic particles, each with their own corresponding experiential
lives. What is the relationship between these lesser selves and my
unitary sense of consciousness? Am ‘I’ composed of these atomic
selves? Do I supervene on them? Is there a causal relationship between
myself and them? How can billions of minds unify into one? And
perhaps most importantly, how can billions of incredibly simple minds
combine to form one rich, diverse, multi-modal consciousness?
To further complicate the picture, I must allow for the possibility that the
various organs, subsystems, and other composite structures in my body
may also possess singular subjective selves—or at least participate in
mental processes. Could this really be possible? William James
certainly thought so: “To sum up, mental facts can compound
themselves… My arm-feelings can be, though unnoticed… They can
also be noticed and cooperate with my eye-feelings in a total
consciousness of ‘my arm’” (in Perry 1935: 765). Some two centuries
earlier, Leibniz and Diderot observed similar points. Leibniz wrote, “I
even maintain that something happens in the soul corresponding to the
circulation of the blood and to every internal movement of the viscera,
although one is unaware of such happenings…” (1704/1996: 116).
Diderot said, “In all seriousness, [I] believe that the foot, the hand, the
thighs, the belly, the stomach, the chest, the lungs, the heart, have their
own particular sensations…” (1769/1937: 85). As well Schopenhauer
believed that the parts of the body were individual and discrete
‘objectified wills’.4 In support, he cites a passage from Parmenides: “for
in each and all men ‘tis one thing thinks—the substance of their limbs”
(in Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1009b20). And in a similar vein, Nietzsche
wrote: “our body is only a social structure composed of many souls”
(1886; sec. 19).
On the most liberal reading of the panpsychist thesis—which I adopt—
the body indeed has innumerable lesser selves: organs, cells,
5
macromolecules, proteins, atoms, and so on. All of these (except the
atomic ultimates) are themselves composed of lesser selves, and all
4
See World as Will and Idea, section 20, for an especially vivid description.
5
Process philosophers take issue with this, holding to a much more restrictive form
of panpsychism (‘panexperientialism’) that excludes aggregates and artificial
composite structures. For a further discussion of the problems with this view, see
my (2008).

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participate in higher-order minds—with ‘my self’ serving as the peak of

this mental hierarchy.
The two problems cited above become clear; to reiterate: (1) How do
selves ‘combine’ at all?, and (2) How can my higher-order self consist
of, ultimately, a combination of billions of incredibly simple atomic
selves?
Let me interject here that I do not see the combination problem as a
formal objection to panpsychism—even though it is often stated as
such.6 In fact it is no objection at all to panpsychism per se. More
properly understood, it is a call for details. At best, it may stand as an
objection to certain specific forms of panpsychism that may fail to
adequately account for this relationship. But in general we should treat
it as a (reasonable) demand for explication.
***
In order to get a better handle on this issue, it’s probably best to take a
quick look at how it was addressed by our predecessors. The earliest
discussion of the topic occurs in Leibniz, in his first elaboration of the
idea of the ‘dominant monad’ (1686).7 Certain objects, he said, have “a
thoroughly indivisible and naturally indestructible being”; it is these
things that possess a single, higher-order, dominant monad, which
functions as the ‘soul’ (or in certain cases, mind) of the thing. (We
recall that every individual monad was, for Leibniz, formed on the
model of the soul.) But exactly how this process of domination or
unification occurs, he does not say. Nor does he offer any criterion by
which to evaluate degree of divisibility or destructibility.
In the mid-18th century, Kant briefly addressed Leibniz and the
combination problem in a footnote of his early work Traume der
Geisterseher (Dreams of a Spirit-Seer; 1766). He is discussing the
concept of an ‘inner reason’ for the efficient causality found in matter,
when he adds this comment:
Leibniz says that this inner reason...is the power of conception [i.e.
intelligence], and later philosophers received this undeveloped thought with
6
Including by myself: see my book Panpsychism in the West (2005: 264).
7
Though the term ‘monad’ would not appear until 1698, in the work On Nature
Itself. But the basic concept was already present in Leibniz’s letter of 1686.

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laughter. But they would have done better if they had first considered
whether a substance of the nature of a simple particle of matter is possible
without any inner state. [If so, they would have to] think out another
possible inner state than that of conceptions... Everybody recognizes [that]
even if a power of obscure conceptions is conceded to...matter, it does not
follow thence that matter itself possesses power of conception, because many
substances of that kind, united into a whole, can yet never form a thinking
unit. (p. 54)
Evidently, then, Kant believed mental combination to be impossible.

Unfortunately he does not elaborate.
Just three years later, Diderot published his Le Reve de d’Alembert
(1769), observing that a swarm of bees functions like a single organism
even though it is nothing more than a myriad of individual creatures in
close contact: “This cluster is a being, an individual, an animal of sorts”
(1769/1937: 67). Likewise, the human body is a kind of swarm of
organs, “[which] are just separate animals held together by the law of
continuity in a general sympathy, unity, and identity.” These
individually-sentient organs then somehow combine to create the whole
human. This happens, Diderot said, through “continual action and
reaction;” that is, through constant exchange of matter and energy. This
is sufficient for unification to occur; “it seems to me that contact, in
itself, is enough” (ibid: 76).
In 1890, James’ Principle of Psychology tackles the issue, coming down
against the possibility of combination. It is “logically unintelligible” he
says, because combination cannot create an utterly new feature of
reality—namely, a single unified mind. We recall this well-known
passage:
Where the elemental units are supposed to be feelings, the case is in no wise
altered. Take a hundred of them, shuffle them and pack them as close
together as you can (whatever that might mean); still each remains the same
feeling it always was, shut in its own skin, windowless, ignorant of what the
other feelings are and mean. There would be a hundred-and-first feeling
there, if, when a group or series of such feeling were set up, a consciousness
belonging to the group as such should emerge. And this 101st feeling would
be a totally new fact… (1890/1918: 160)
But James ultimately changed his mind. In his A Pluralistic Universe

(1909), he offers a lengthy chapter on the “compounding of
consciousness.” Empirically, combination must happen; otherwise “it

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makes the universe discontinuous” (p. 206)—that is, there would be no

higher-order minds at all, when in fact there obviously are. We
ourselves are proof that combination must occur.
After James, it would be nearly 100 years before this problem was again
taken seriously. Especially since the mid-1990s, we see growing
attention paid to it, in conjunction with a generally increasing awareness
and acceptance of panpsychism.8
***
So, how can we move ahead on this ‘problem’ that is, after all, a call for
details? Consider again the physical realm. All the complexity of the
physical world, and the macro-scale objects that populate it, derive (as
far as we know) from a small number of very simple particles: quarks,
leptons (i.e. electrons), and a handful of force particles (photons, gluons,
and other bosons), together with the laws of physics. That the
complexity of the human brain, for example, can arise from the motions
and interactions of a vast number of a few types of simple subatomic
particles, is astounding.
In effect, size matters. Size brings hierarchical complexity, which
induces greater variation. Size allows simple ultimates to jointly create
intricate patterns of behavior in space and in time. With a large number
of constituent parts, an object can assume a large number of different
states and conditions, which vastly outnumber the limited states of its
elements. In essence, each ultimate, and each level of structural
hierarchy, expands the realm of possible states of the whole.
Two factors, then, are critical: large numbers of particles, and a
sophisticated hierarchy of structural complexity. Fewer particles, or
lesser complexity, would yield a vastly simpler object—that is, an object
with a much smaller universe of possible states. Conversely, the more
particles and the richer the hierarchical complexity, the larger the space
of possible states. This ‘space of possible states,’ sometimes called a
configuration space, embodies the physical complexity of the object.
Among macro-scale objects, living organisms exhibit a particularly wide
range of possible states and behaviors. Compared to nonliving objects
of similar mass (i.e. of similar number of elementary particles), they
8
For other contemporary discussions of the combination problem, see for example:
Seager (1995), Skrbina (2005), Coleman (2006), Goff (2006, 2009), Basile (2008,
2009), and Harman (2009).

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have a more complex and more dynamic internal structure, and thus a
much larger configuration space. Compare a human being and a large
rock. Each may possess, say, 80 kg worth of particles, but the state
space of the human far exceeds that of the rock. In each case, though,
such a space exists, and it arises from a few types of very simple
particles.
I would further suggest that each of these two driving factors—number
of ultimates, and degree of structural complexity—opens up two primary
‘axes’ in configuration space. An object’s space has a width given by
the number of ultimates in it, and a depth given by the degree of
structural complexity. The volume of the total space is, then, ‘width x
depth.’ An 80 kg person and an 80 kg rock both have equal state space
width, but the human has a vastly greater depth (due the complexity of a
living being), and thus a much greater overall space of possible states.
The mental life of a rock is wide but not deep. An amoeba, by contrast,
is deep but (relatively) narrow.
Notions like configuration space, or state space, are accepted and widely
used today, at least within the physical sciences. They have proven
extremely useful in depicting the behavior of complex objects in a
conceptually simple manner. I believe that we need something similar in
the psychological sciences, i.e. in the philosophical study of mind and
consciousness.
Consider the following: If experience is a core property of matter, along
with such things as mass, charge, spin, and so forth, and if the physical
characteristics yield a large and complex spatio-temporal configuration
space, then an analogous effect should occur with experience. That is,
an object should exist both in a physical configuration space, and
simultaneously in an ‘experiential space’—a mind space, if you will.
Just as simple physical ultimates can yield an extraordinarily complex
configuration space, so too may we conjecture that a large number of
experiential ultimates, combined in a complex mental hierarchy of
experiential structures-within-structures, can yield a complex mental
space. The experiential ultimates, each very simple but large in number,
open up a large and complex mind space for the collective whole.
An image that comes to mind is a camping tent. The tent is held up by
many individual ropes, each of which, by itself, can do little to open up a
space within. But each rope, staked in a different direction, opens up
another ‘dimension’ of space inside the tent. Many simple ropes, united
together but pulling in different directions, collectively open up a large

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internal space. In an analogous fashion, each (experiential) atomic

particle and each (experiential) level of structure of a given object opens
up a new dimension in its overall mental space. In this way, simple
ultimates can, in truth, ‘combine’ to form a complex, higher-order mind.
Furthermore, there must be a one-to-one correspondence between
physical configuration space and mind space—because both refer to the
same object. As an object’s physical state changes—that is, as it moves
within its configuration space—so too must it move within its mind
space, because mind is linked to the very same ultimates. There can be
no physical change without mental change; every physical change
occurs simultaneously with experiential change. Thus, we have no
dualist interaction problem. Mind and body change together, in parallel,
simultaneously. Leibniz’s “preestablished harmony” was perhaps not
far from the mark after all.
But what about the connection, if any, between configuration space and
mind space? They have one common dimension: time. Physical objects
exist in space-time, and mental objects exist in, let us say, qualia-time.
But it is the same temporal axis in each case. Time is the common
parameter between the physical world and the mental world. In effect, it
is a bridge between the two, and unifies the two realms into a single,
comprehensive space. Thus, the complete object, as a mind-body whole,
exists in a unified sphere that we might call the space-time-qualia (STQ)
complex. And since there is a one-to-one correspondence between
changes in space-time and changes in qualia-time, the temporal
dimension serves as a line of symmetry, reflecting the changes in one to
the changes in the other—in a non-causal manner. Time is the axis
around which the physical and mental worlds revolve.
The STQ complex, then, considered as a whole, is required to
encompass the full range of existential reality. Only this complex maps
out the complete range of conditions of a given object.
Finally, we still have the question of unity. How can billions of
individual experiences yield one complex mind? Why is it one mind?
Let us ask the same question in physical space: How can billions of
physical elementals combine to yield one complex physical object?
Actually, this question is deceptively simple, but the short answer is that
the particles adhere sufficiently tightly, and persist together long enough,
for us to declare a given configuration as an object. Because the
particles are closely linked—because they co-participate strongly—
something called ‘the whole’ exists, and interacts with the world.

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In an analogous way, these same particles, and their same hierarchical

complexity, map out a mind space—a space of possible mental states—of
which something called ‘the whole’ moves within. Just as long as, and to
the same extent that, a given configuration of particles exists as one
object, so too, and in the same degree, does there exist a singular mental
object, or mind. This is hard for us to grasp because the physical whole is
objective—accessible to third party observation—whereas the mental
whole, or the mind of the object, is subjective and thus necessarily hidden
from view. And in truth we might be fully justified in denying its
existence at all, except for one bothersome fact—our own mind. It is our
own singular mental existence which assures us, in the most positive
manner possible, that individual physical objects possess individual
internal experiential states.
The existence and unity of mind is neither more nor less certain than the
existence and unity of objecthood. I have portrayed objects as clear-cut
entities, but this is far from the case. Physical things are ‘fuzzy,’ in the
sense that, at the atomic scale, quantum fields tail off to infinity.
Additionally, other particles and forces in the universe exert a small but
determinate presence within any given object. And, particles are
constantly joining and leaving objects, particularly living ones (particles
of food, water, air, etc). Objects are thus best understood as fuzzy,
quasi-persistent temporal patterns of mass/energy.
On the above theory, minds must be understood in the same way. Mind
has an indeterminate reach in the universe, potentially able to encompass
everything. It has ‘fuzzy edges’ that tail off into the unconscious, the
subconscious, and other esoteric states. And it is perhaps best
understood as a quasi-persistent pattern in time, assuming only rough
self-similarity combined with long-term stability.9
The combination problem is, in many ways, the toughest challenge for
panpsychism. But it is also the key to its success. Any viable and well-
articulated panpsychist theory of mind will, of necessity, resolve the
combination problem. It is a kind of acid test, and one that should spur
us on to think more deeply about a concept of mind that finds
experientiality residing at the very heart of the physical world.
9
Elsewhere (2009) I have employed the terminology of dynamical systems theory,
and argued that the mind is best viewed as a strange attractor pattern in state space.

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References
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Chromatikon IV.
Basile, P. (2009): “Back to Whitehead?” In: Mind That Abides (D.
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Coleman, S. (2006): “Being realistic.” In: Journal of Consciousness
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Diderot, D. (1769/1937): “D’Alembert’s Dream.” In: Diderot:
Interpreter of Nature. Lawrence and Wishart.
Goff, P. (2006): “Experiences don’t sum.” In: Journal of Consciousness
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Goff, P. (2009): “Can the panpsychist get around the combination
problem?” In: Mind That Abides (D. Skrbina, ed.). Benjamins.
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Approaches to Consciousness in Psychology, Neuroscience, and
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Harman, G. (2009): “Zero-person and the psyche.“ In: Mind That
Abides (D. Skrbina, ed.). Benjamins.
James, W. (1890): Principles of Psychology. Dover.
James, W. (1909/1996): A Pluralistic Universe. University of Nebraska
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Kant, I. (1766/1900): Dreams of a Spirit-Seer. Macmillan.
Leibniz, G. (1686/1989): Letter to Arnaud. In: Philosophical Essays
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Perry, R. (1935): Thought and Character of William James. Little,
Brown.
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Strawson, G. (2006): “Realistic monism: Why physicalism entails

panpsychism.” In: Journal of Consciousness Studies, 13(10-11).
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There is No Combination Problem
Philip Goff (Hertfordshire)
Emergentist and reductive forms of panpsychism

We can divide things that exist into two categories: metaphysically
heavyweight entities and metaphysically lightweight entities. The
heavyweight entities are those into which nature is carved in and of itself;
the lightweight entities are mere shadows cast by our discourse. To put it
less metaphorically: the heavyweight entities are the entities upon which
truths depend, the lightweight entities are those entities which depend on
truth.
For those enemies of realism who hold that truth is grounded in coherence
or usefulness, all entities are lightweight: the sentence 'The moon exists' is
grounded not in the existence of some object, the moon, but in the
coherence the proposition expressed by the sentence has with other
propositions, or in the usefulness of believing that proposition. But those
who believe that truth is ultimately grounded in the world need not take all
entities to be heavyweight. It is highly plausible to think that the truth of
the sentence 'There is a party at Bill's' does not require of the world that
there be some thing, Bill's party; it requires merely that there be people
having a good time at Bill's. If this is the case, then Bill's party is
metaphysically lightweight: its existence is grounded in, rather than itself
being something that grounds, truth. For reasonable realists the same is
surely true of wars, street fights, the European Union and Beethoven's 5th.
I take physicalism to be a form of realism according to which the only
metaphysically heavyweight objects are the non-conscious objects of
fundamental physics; all other objects, such as tables, planets, rocks and
conscious subjects, are mere shadows cast by our language. I take the
defining commitment of panpsychism to be to the heavyweight existence
of mereological ultimates with conscious experience. We can, at least in
the first instance, distinguish between two distinct ways to go on from that
initial commitment. Let us call 'panpsychists reductionists' those who take
these conscious ultimates to be the only metaphysically heavyweight
things: sentences about the existence and conscious experience of macro-
level subjects, e.g., 'Bill is feeling anxious', are made true not by macro-
level subjects instantiating phenomenal qualities but by facts about
conscious ultimates, just as 'There is a party at Bill's house' is made true
not by a party but by facts about partiers. For panpsychist reductionists
macro-level conscious subjects are metaphysically lightweight, in
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something like the way the physicalist takes all conscious subjects to be
metaphysically lightweight.
In contrast, we can define 'emergentist panpsychists' as panpychists who
believe that both conscious ultimates and macro-level conscious subjects
are metaphysically heavyweight: 'Bill is feeling anxious' is made true by
some single subject of experience instantiating the phenomenal quality of
feeling anxious (and not by any more fundamental state of affairs). Taking
macro-level conscious subjects to be heavyweight does imply substance
dualism; it is coherent to suppose that certain physical objects, wholly
composed of physical parts, such as brains or central nervous systems, are
metaphysically heavyweight. If a brain is metaphysically heavyweight,
then, although it is wholly composed of physical parts, it is utterly
irreducible to those parts; we can call such a composite physical object an
'emergent whole'. Emergenist panpsychists identify the subject of Bill's
experience with some emergent whole in the physical world.1
An emergent whole is irreducible to its parts in the sense that truths about
its existence and nature are not made true by facts about its parts. Contrast
again with Bill's party. Truths about the existence and nature of Bill's
party, truths such as 'There is a party at Bill's tonight' or 'Bill's party was
wild!', are made true by entities at a more fundamental level, i.e. people
(having a good time). Emergent wholes are not like that: truths about their
nature and existence, such as 'Bill thinks therefore he is', or 'Bill is feeling
anxious', are made true by facts about the emergent whole itself and its
qualities, and not by facts about its parts.
The physicalist and the reductive panpsychist think that all macro-level
entities are reducible to micro-level facts, in the same way that Bill's party
is reducible to facts about partiers. In contrast, the emergentist panpsychist
holds that macro-level conscious subjects are emergent wholes.
Against reductive panpsychism

I think reductive panpsychism is a position that is difficult to maintain.
One becomes a panpsychist because one is metaphysically serious about
1
I remain neutral on the question of whether 'the subject of Bill's experience' is
identical to Bill. It would be plausible to think so if we took the subject of Bill's
experience to be identical to a whole organism. It is less obvious what we should say if
we think that the subject of Bill's experience is identical to a part of an organism, for
example a brain. In this case, I suspect it is indeterminate whether Bill's uses of the
first person pronoun refer to the organism or the brain, but obviously these are deep
matters which deserve more attention (see Strawson 2009 for a little more detail on
these issues, and a defence of the view I incline towards).

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consciousness. It seems to me that this metaphysical seriousness ought to

be credited either to both macro-level and micro-level subjects alike, or to
neither.
Just as we have divided objects, so we can divide properties, into
heavyweight and lightweight. Heavyweight properties constitute the joints
of nature; to the extent that objects share heavyweight properties they
genuinely resemble, that is, they resemble in and of themselves.
Lightweight properties are merely shadows cast by predicates. An electron
and a horse do not genuinely resemble, do not resemble in and of
themselves, in virtue of both possessing the property of being either an
electron or a horse. But it is plausible to think that two electrons genuinely
resemble, resemble in and of themselves, in virtue of both being negatively
charged. If these intuitions are correct, being negatively charged is a
heavyweight property, whilst being either negatively charged or a horse is
a lightweight property.
Lightweight properties are those which are dependent on the satisfaction of
predicates, whilst heavyweight properties are those upon which the
satisfaction of predicates depends. An electron has the property of being
negatively charged or being a horse in virtue of satisfying the predicate
'being either negatively charged or a horse', which it in turn satisfies in
virtue of being negatively charged. When it comes to the property of being
negatively charged, however, it is plausible to think that things go the other
way round: the electron satisfies the predicate 'being negatively charged' in
virtue of being negatively charged.
Physicalists take phenomenal properties to be lightweight: objects have
phenomenal properties in virtue of satisfying phenomenal predicates,
which they satisfy in virtue of more fundamental physical facts.2 The
minimal commitment of panpsychism is that the consciousness of
fundamental particles is a heavyweight property: fundamental particles
satisfy phenomenal predicates in virtue of having phenomenal properties
rather than the other way round (from now on I will think of mereological
ultimates as fundamental particles for ease of exposition).
It follows from this commitment that two fundamental particles, in so far
as they share phenomenal qualities, genuinely resemble each other. But
2
Can't physicalists identify phenomenal properties with physical properties, e.g. pain
with c-fibres firing? Of course they can, but on my understanding of physicalism, the
physicalist is obliged to take such higher-level physical properties to be lightweight;
only the properties of fundamental physics, e.g. mass and charge, are metaphysically
heavyweight.

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macro-level conscious subjects like Bill and Ben also share phenomenal
qualities.3 It seems to me unintelligible that the sharing of determinates of
some determinable X can, in one instance, constitute genuine resemblance,
whilst in another instance fail to constitute genuine resemblance, for
example, it is not intelligible to suppose that two spherical things
genuinely resemble in so far as they are spherical, whereas two cuboid
things do not genuinely resemble in so far as they are cuboid.
We have then an argument from the basic commitment of panpsychism to
panpsychist emergentism:
Premise 1: The consciousness of fundamental particles is a heavyweight

property, and so any two fundamental particles, in so far as they share
phenomenal qualities, genuinely resemble.
Premise 2: Bill and Ben share some phenomenal qualities, e.g. what it's
like to see red.
Premise 3: For any four objects O1, O2, O3, and O4, and any
determinable X, if O1 and and O2 genuinely resemble in so far as they
share a single determinate of X, and O3 and O4 share a single determinate
of X, then O3 and O4 genuinely resemble in so far as they share a single
determinate of X, and hence in sharing a single determinate of X they share
a heavyweight property.
Conclusion: Bill and Ben, in so far as they share phenomenal qualities,
genuinely resemble, and hence in their sharing of phenomenal qualities,
Bill and Ben share heavyweight properties.
I conclude, therefore, that the panpsychist is obliged to take phenomenal

qualities to be metaphysically heavyweight.
Even if the argument above is sound, couldn't the panpsychist be an
emergentist about phenomenal qualities, but not about conscious subjects,
i.e. the objects that instantiate phenomenal qualities? I find this kind of
hybrid position unintelligible. It entails that a lightweight object
instantiates a heavyweight property, which would be analogous to Bill's
party instantiating negative charge. How can a linguistic shadow instantiate
a joint of nature? To drop the metaphor: I don't think we can make sense of
the idea that an object dependent on the truth of our discourse can
instantiate a quality upon which the truth of our discourse depends.
3
Bill and Ben might be organisms or might be brains of organisms depending on what
we identify macro-level subjects of experience with.

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I conclude, therefore, that panpsychists are obliged to be emergentists

about conscious subjects.
Why there is no combination problem

Let us return to the canonical expression of the combination problem in
William James:
Take a hundred of them [feelings], shuffle them and pack them as close
together as you can (whatever that may mean); still each remains the same
feelings it always was, shut in its own skin, windowless, ignorant of what the
other feelings are and mean. There would be a hundred-and-first-feeling there,
if, when a group or series of such feelings where set up, a consciousness
belonging to the group as such should emerge. And this 101st feeling would be
a totally new fact; the 100 feelings might, by a curious physical law, be a signal
for its creation, when they came together; but they would have no substantial
identity with it, not it with them, and one could never deduce the one from the
others, nor (in any intelligible sense) say that they evolved it. (James 1983, 162)
What does James mean when he says that the 101st feeling would not have
a 'substantial identity' with the 100 feelings, that it would not have
'evolved' from them? I suggest that we can capture the spirit of what James
meant in terms of the framework developed above. I interpret James as
claiming that the relationship between the 101st feeling and the 100
feelings is not like the relationship between Bill's party and his guests.
Once you shuffle round Bill's guests in a certain way – give them drinks,
pump up the music, encourage them to engage in inane party banter –
you've thereby got a party. The fact the guests are arranged in this way,
and the fact that there is a party, are not metaphysically distinct states of
affairs. The fact that the guests are so arranged makes it true that there is a
party.
On my interpretation of James, he is struggling to make sense of an
analogous relationship between the hundred feelings and the hundred-and-
first-feeling. James can't see how the fact that there are a hundred feelings
arranged in a certain way could make it true that there is a hundred-and-
first-feeling. These seem to be metaphysically distinct states of affairs,
even if, as a matter of brute fact, one emerges from the other, perhaps on
account of some 'curious physical law'.
In other words, what James is struggling to find intelligible is panpsychist
reductionism, the view that truths about the existence and nature of high-
level conscious subjects are made true by truths about lower-level subjects.
He has no concerns about the intelligibility of panpsychist emergentism,

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the view that facts about the existence and nature of high-level conscious
subjects, as a matter of brute fact or natural law, arise from facts about the
existence and nature of micro-level conscious subjects. The combination
problem, at least as understood by James so interpreted, is a problem only
for panpsychists reductionists, not for panpsychists emergentists. If I am
right that all panpsychists ought to be emergentists in any case, it follows
that panpsychists have nothing to worry about as regards the combination
problem.
The special phenomenal composition question

So we panpsychists have to be emergentists. As such we don't have a
combination problem. But we do have a pressing question to answer. I call
this question, in homage to van Inwagan,4 'the special phenomenal
composition question', and it goes like this:
The special phenomenal composition question: Under what

conditions do fundamental particles combine to form a higher-level
subject of experience?
I take there to be five places metaphysicans should look for answers to

metaphysical questions:
1. Truths we know with Cartesian certainty via our immediate

acquaintance with conscious experience
2. Conceptual truths
3. Common sense
4. Empirical data
5. Cost-benefit analysis of theoretical virtues
I don't believe, contra Descartes, that Cartesian certainty, in and or itself,

can rule out any answer to the special phenomenal composition question.
Cartesian certainty tells me that there exists at least one conscious thing,
but it cannot tell me whether or not that conscious thing is metaphysically
simple or composed of physical parts.5 However, on the plausible
4
See van Inwagan 1990.
5
So I disagree with Descartes that we can know that the mind is indivisible. When I
introspect, the subject of my experience does not present itself as a thing with parts.
However, I see no way of ruling out the possibility that, when introspecting, I am
conceiving of the subject of my experience in terms of only part of its nature. Perhaps

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assumption that cost-benefit-analysis will yield the result that the

identification of conscious subjects with composite physical objects is
preferable to the identification of conscious subjects with either Cartesian
egos or fundamental particles, then Cartesian certainty and cost-benefit
analysis working together can rule out one answer to the special
phenomenal composition question:
Nihilism about phenomenal composition: Fundamental particles

never come together to form a macro-level conscious subject.
If there is at least one conscious subject, i.e. the subject of my experience,

and that conscious subject is identical to a composite physical object, then
there is at least one occasion on which fundamental particles come together
to form a conscious subject, i.e. when they come together to form the
subject of my experience.
What about conceptual truths? I can't see how conceptual truths can rule
out any of the answers to the special phenomenal composition question
(except ones which are obviously contradictory, e.g. fundamental particles
form conscious subjects under condition X, and don't form conscious
subjects under condition X).6 The following answer seems perfectly
coherent, although exceedingly unlikely (for cost-benefit reasons to do
with inelegance and arbitrariness):
Small blue tablism about phenomenal composition: Fundamental

particles form conscious subjects when they form small blue tables.
What about common sense? I think it's pretty clear what answer common
the subject of my experience has non-phenomenal as well as phenomenal aspects, such

that if I were to conceive of it in terms of its whole phenomenal and non-phenomenal
nature, it would be evident that it has parts. I find the idea of an object that instantiates
both phenomenal and non-phenomenal aspects forming a unified nature quite
beautiful, even though we can form no positive conception of such a thing. If the brain
is the bearer of consciousness, and I believe it is, it must be a very beautiful thing.
6
Slight qualification: if metaphysical vagueness is incoherent, then conceptual truths
can rule out the common sense answer (and probably small blue tablism as well, given
the vagueness of the concept of the concepts involved in this answer). Also, perhaps
some non-obvious incoherences may constrain answers to the special phenomenal
composition question, e.g. if actual infinites are impossible, then the thesis that macro-
level consciousness requires an infinite number of ultimates will be inconsistent with
realism about macro-level consciousness.

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sense would give to the special phenomenal composition question:
Commonsense answer: Particles form a conscious subject when and

only when they form organisms (or a subset of organisms, or the
brains/central nervous systems of organisms; I will ignore these
alternatives for the sake of simplicity).
Unfortunately, I think we have very strong reason to reject this answer, as I

will now try to explain. The boundary between the organic and the non-
organic is vague. There are what we can call 'organic borderline cases' –
cases where there is no fact of the matter as to whether or not we have a
human organism – at the beginning and end of an organism's existence. In
any particular case, there is no utterly precise point in time, after which we
have a zygote, and before which we had only sperm and egg. Similarly, in
each particular case, there is no utterly precise point in time after which we
have a corpse and before which we have a living body. Given our
macroscopic concerns, this vague boundary is barely discernible. But if we
were looking at a complete description of the fundamental particles
composing a human organism during, and slightly before and after, its
existence, there would be no precise arrangement of particles which
constituted the beginning and end of the human's existence; there would be
borderline cases.
If the commonsense answer to the special phenomenal composition
question is correct, it follows that there are 'phenomenal borderline cases',
cases where there is no fact of the matter whether or not we have a
conscious subject. If the existence of an organism is necessary and
sufficient for the existence of a conscious subject, and if it's sometimes
vague whether or not we have an organism, it follows that it's sometimes
vague whether or not we have a conscious subject.
But for emergentist panpsychists, both micro and macro-level conscious
subjects are metaphysically heavyweight entities: nature is carved up in
and and of itself into both micro and macro-level conscious subjects. If we
couple this commitment with a commitment to phenomenal borderline
cases, we reach the view that the world in and of itself is vague.
Emergentist panpsychism, in conjunction with the commonsense answer to
the special phenomenal composition question, entails metaphysical
vagueness.
However, it is extremely plausible that vagueness is a semantic, rather than
a metaphysical, phenomenon. To explain the fact that Bill is tall, we don't

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need to suppose that there is some fuzzy, indeterminate state of affairs of

Bill's neither having nor lacking some quality; we need only suppose that
the meaning of the predicate 'is tall' is indeterminate such that there is no
fact of the matter as to whether or not it applies to someone with Bill's
exact height. On such an explanation, it is language, rather than the world,
which is indeterminate. Such semantic explanations of vagueness are
extremely plausible.7 Indeed, Horgan and Potrč have powerfully argued
that metaphysical vagueness is incoherent.8 Vagueness is a massive area,
and I don't have space here to adequately defend the semantic theory of
vagueness. My own judgement it that the attractiveness of semantic
theories of vagueness, and the dubious intelligibility of metaphysical
vagueness, give us very strong reason to want to avoid any metaphysical
theory which is committed to metaphysical vagueness.9
If we are to avoid metaphysical vagueness, and if we are to take macro-
level subjects to be heavyweight (as I have argued we must as
panpsychists), then we cannot accept common sense's answer to the special
phenomenal composition question.
What about empirical data? Perhaps a non-panpsychist might try to argue
that the behaviour of a system can constitute evidence as to whether or not
that system is conscious, but it is difficult to see how the panpsychist could
claim this, given that she thinks that fundamental particles are conscious.
And so, having exhausted all other possible sources of metaphysical truth,
we find ourselves having to turn to cost-benefit analysis of theoretical
virtues to find the answer to the special phenomenal
composition question. The two most theoretically elegant answers to the
special phenomenal
composition question are
1. Nihilism about phenomenal composition: Fundamental particles

never come together to form a macro-level conscious subject.
2. Universalism about phenomenal composition: All arrangements of
fundamental particles result in their composing a macro-level
conscious subject.
7
See for example, Dummett 1978: 260, Fine 1975, Russell 1923.
8
Horgan and Potrč 2008, Ch. 2.
9
It is worth noting that the phenomenon that philosophers call 'vagueness' is very
different from the kind of indeterminacy postulated by standard interpretations of
quantum physics.

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We have already ruled out nihilism. Thus, by a process of elimination, we

end up with universalism.
Universalism entails that there is a conscious object formed of the particles
composing my teeth, the particles composing your toe nails, and the
particles composing Venus. Isn't this view wildly counter to common
sense? Of course it is, but the commonsense view cannot be true, assuming
reality in and of itself is not vague, and so we must look elsewhere for the
truth. Having exhausted all other sources of metaphysical knowledge, we
find we must turn to cost-benefit analysis, and this criterion of theory
choice clearly favours universalism and nihilism. Assuming the falsity of
nihilism, our only rational choice is universalism.10
Conclusion
Panpsychists should be emergentists, from which it follows that (i) they
should stop worrying about the combination problem, (ii) they should be
universalists about phenomenal composition.11
References
Fine, K. (1975): 'Vagueness, truth and logic', Synthese, 30: 265-300.
Horgan, T. and Potrč, M. 2008. Austere Realism, Cambridge, MA.,
London: MIT.
Lewis, D. (1986): On the Plurality of Worlds, Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
James, W. (1983): The Principles of Psychology, Cambridge, MA.,
London: Harvard University Press.
Russell, B. (1923): 'Vagueness', Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 84-
92, reprinted in Keefe, R. and Smith, P. 1996. (Eds.) Vagueness: A Reader,
Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 61-8.
Strawson, G. (2009): Selves: An Essay in Revisionary Metaphysics,
Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press.
Van Inwagan, P. (1990): Material Beings. Ithaca and London: Cornell
University Press.
10
My argument for universalism about phenomenal composition is very similar to
David Lewis's argument for universalism about composition (Lewis 1986: 212-13).
11
I am very grateful to all the participants at the 'The Mental as Fundamental'
conference in Vienna for helpful comments.

Authenticated
Panpsychism as Paradigm
Freya Mathews (Victoria)
I come to panpsychism not from an attempt to explain consciousness but

from an attempt to explain the world – to explain what kind of world this
world of ours is, and consequently how we ought to fit into it. My entry
point has been, in other words, not through the philosophy of
consciousness but through the philosophy of nature, philosophy of nature
construed as the attempt to understand the metaphysical make-up of the
world at large. The philosophy of nature has become urgently relevant in
our time because the environmental crisis is pointing to a misalliance
between humanity and its world. Panpsychism has thus for me been a
project of metaphysical rehabilitation conceived within the discourse of
environmental philosophy.
The argument that I shall put forward in this chapter however focuses
strictly on the metaphysical rather than the environmental. The gist of the
argument is that a holistic or cosmological version of panpsychism,
according to which the universe as a whole is the ultimate locus of mind,
or of mind-like properties, can function as a rival to materialism,
materialism being understood as the view which denies that mind, or any
mind-like property, inheres in an essential way in matter or in other
fundamental elements of physical reality. Moreover, I shall suggest that, in
relation to materialism, cosmological panpsychism functions not merely as
a rival theory but as a rival paradigm. I make this suggestion because
materialism generates a number of intractable anomalies, anomalies that
have become so entrenched in the philosophical tradition of the West as to
seem inevitable. We perhaps forget that they are anomalies, and treat them
instead as the very substance of metaphysics. It might be in consequence of
this conflation that we have concluded that metaphysical questions are in
principle undecidable, and consequently not worth pursuing. Tackling
these intractable questions from the viewpoint of an alternative paradigm
might then have implications for metaphysics itself as a discipline.
I would like to emphasize that it is panpsychism in a holistic or
cosmological guise, as exemplified in, for instance, Spinoza or Schelling,
rather than in the more “distributed” guise favoured by process theorists,
that can serve as an anomaly-dissolving alternative to materialism. Perhaps
there are parallel arguments for the distributed panpsychism of process
theory, but this is not a question I shall be taking up here.

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I shall address four specific metaphysical anomalies. In each case I shall

argue that these are anomalies for materialism but are far less problematic
for cosmological panpsychism. The arguments as I present them here will
be very abbreviated but can be found in more developed form elsewhere in
my work.1
1. Problem of realism, or of the appearance/reality distinction

2. Problem of why the universe hangs together, or, more narrowly, the
problem of causation
3. Problem of why there is something rather than nothing
4. Problem of the origin of the universe, or of a beginning to time
Of course, the hard problem of consciousness, which I have not listed, is

also a pre-eminent anomaly for the materialist paradigm, an anomaly
which panpsychism can make some claim to solve. But if it can be shown
that materialism harbours other anomalies, and that cosmological
panpsychism solves, or at least softens, these, this independent evidence
for panpsychism strengthens it as a contender in the case of the hard
problem. Moreover, a sense of the cosmological reach and origins of
consciousness will provide a new and illuminating context for the
investigation of our own human consciousness. In both these respects then
exploring cosmological panpsychism as paradigm is relevant to the hard
problem of consciousness.
1. Problem of Realism
I would like to start with the problem of realism, though I don’t need to
spend too much time on this as it was anticipated by both Schopenhauer
and Bertrand Russell, and has been reviewed in contemporary discussions.
(Skrbina 2009)
The problem may be set out as follows: the language of physics affords us
no way of intrinsically characterizing the difference between a real
physical entity and a merely apparent (perhaps illusory) one. Take the
property of solidity, for instance. It is common sense to suppose that a
body is real if it is solid, but solidity cannot be characterized in intrinsic
terms: there is nothing we can identify in a solid body itself that renders it
solid. Solidity is rather defined extrinsically in terms of impenetrability: a
body is solid if it can keep other bodies out. But as an account of the real-
ness of a body, of its actually occupying space as opposed to merely
1
See Mathews 1991 and 2003 in particular.

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appearing to occupy it, this is clearly question-begging: a body is solid, in

the sense of real, only if the bodies it keeps out are themselves already
solid. There is no reason why an order of illusory bodies should not be
such that they appear to keep one another out. Their doing so however will
not render them solid, in the sense of real. All the properties assigned to
matter in physics – mass, momentum, charge, and so on –turn out, like the
common sense property of solidity, to be defined in this extrinsic way, and
as such may be question-begging as accounts of what it is for a body to be
really there – for it to be really real as opposed to merely apparent or
illusory.
The only way we could ever distinguish the real from the illusory,
conceptually speaking, is to ascribe to the real some form of reflexive
interiority or presence-to-itself, such as we ourselves enjoy. We have no
problem conceptually distinguishing a real person from an illusory one,
because we know that though the illusory person may look the same as the
real person, there is nothing going on in her. In the real person, by contrast,
there is definitely something going on. It may not necessarily be thought –
the real person may, for example, be asleep; but there is in her an
unceasing psychophysical movement towards an end, the end of self-
existence, which, though it may not be conscious at all times, is definitely
intentional, self-directional, conative. The real person is psychophysically
self-activated and present to herself, through introspection, in a way that
the illusory person, qua mere appearance, is not. There is, in other words, a
way we can describe the real person that clearly and definitively marks her
off from any illusory counterpart. To ascribe a comparable self-presence,
or reflexive interiority, to matter generally seems to be the only means
available to us by which we might escape from the conceptual impasse of
the appearance/reality distinction. This is a means unavailable to
materialists, with their denial of mindlike properties to matter. It follows
that only panpsychists – who are indeed prepared to ascribe mindlike
properties to matter – can solve this conceptual anomaly of the
appearance/reality distinction at the heart of materialism.
There is a second, epistemological form of the problem of realism, but it
would take me too far afield to detail it here.2 I shall instead explain why I
think the conceptual version of the argument from realism suggests not
only panpsychism per se, but a global or cosmological form of
panpsychism.
2
See Mathews 2003, chapter 2.

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Argument to global panpsychism

Let us allow that the argument from realism has shown that matter is
endowed with interiority – we might call this its subjectival dimension.
However, within our accepted Western framework for thinking about
matter, viz physics, the domain of physical reality is no longer conceived
as merely coextensive with that of matter but includes forces and fields and
even space itself. In relation to these nonmaterial aspects of physical
reality, the problem of realism still arises: how are we to distinguish
between real and merely illusory light, for instance? Can we say of light
that it too has a subjectival dimension?
If the argument from realism is to succeed, an extension of subjectivity to
physical reality generally, rather than its restriction merely to matter, does
seem to be required. But to take this step forces us to face the question of
the relation of subjectivity to the subject. Subjective experience is, after all,
the province of a subject. However, a subject, understood as a centre of
subjectivity, is necessarily an indivisible unity: there are no scattered
subjects, and the boundaries between subjects are not nominal. The
individuation of subjects, or centres of subjectivity, is objectively
determined: a thought objectively belongs to you or me; it is not up to a
third person, qua knower, to decide where the boundaries of our respective
subjectivities will be drawn. However the individuation of objects, at the
macro-level, at any rate, is not consistently objectively determined in this
way. Matter is not really, in any ontological sense, parcelled up into
convenient units or packages, despite the plethora of discrete artefacts in
our own daily life that suggest that it is. Indeed, many of our individuations
– of rocks and mountains, for instance - have basically nominal status. We
accordingly have to ask whether the physical realm could be externally
divided up so as to correspond with an internal differentiation into a
manifold of individual subjects. Where does the subjectivity of a mountain
range, for instance, lie? In the individual mountains or in the range as a
whole? In the rocks that make up the mountain, or in the underlying crust
from which the rocks have become detached? Where do individual
mountains end and the range begin, and how many of the individual rocks
are still attached to the crust, and to what extent is the range an extension
of the crust? Are there many subjects here or one, and if one, is that one the
earth’s crust as a whole, or perhaps the entire body of the planet? Matter at
the macro-level is not given in indivisible unities the way subjectivity is.
And the question of how to divide reality up into subjects, or centres of
subjectivity, to which materiality is subjectively present, becomes acute

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when the attribution of subjectivity is extended to the physical realm

generally. For there is not even any intuitive presumption that the non-
material dimensions of the physical realm – field or wavelike processes,
for instance – can be carved up into units. There may be a wave-particle
duality at the micro-level of physics, but the wave-like aspect is as much a
part of the fabric of reality as the particle-like aspect is. And the wave-like
aspect does not lend itself to differentiation into units. How then, again,
can physical reality as a whole, inclusive of its wave and field-like aspects,
be externally differentiated consistently with an interior differentiation into
a manifold of subjects?
The most effective way for a panpsychist to reconcile the internal
ontological unity and indivisibility that properly belongs to subjects with
the generally merely nominal unity of physical entities may simply be to
adopt a holistic approach to physical reality. If physical reality as a whole,
under both its material and non-material or field-like aspects, is seen as
constituting a genuine, indivisible unity, then it could itself perhaps be
regarded as a subject, or field of subjectivity, to which the entire
differentiated physical manifold is subjectively present. In this case, while
matter generally could be said to be present to itself, objects individually
could not be said to be so. That is to say, when we regard the universe as a
whole as the prime locus of subject-hood, we face a combination problem
in reverse: how are the entities, objects or beings we normally regard as
distinct subjects to be individuated within such an all-encompassing
holism? The problem is not, as it is for process philosophers, how are
compound consciousnesses to be built up out of simple ones, but rather
how can local, individual subjects come to differentiate themselves within
the matrix of a global mind. (For extensive discussion of the combination
problem, see Skrbina 2009.)
In order to address this “combination problem in reverse”, we need to
sketch in the outlines of cosmological panpsychism, or at least some
version of it. Since I do happen to have a version to hand, let me provide
such a sketch, and in the process explain how this theory deals with the
combination problem in reverse, or, to give it a name of its own, the
individuation problem.
Cosmological panpsychism: a version

I shall start with cosmological panpsychism under its physical aspect.
From this point of view, physical reality as a whole, including both its
material and its non-material aspects, such as space and electromagnetic or

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gravitational energy, forms an unbounded, indivisible, substantival (though

not in the first instance material) plenum. This plenum is construed
geometrodynamically, as a dynamic extended substance – space – in a
continuous process of expansion and internal self-differentiation. The
model is the age-old one of water (shades of Thales here)(how nice it
would be if the very first philosopher got it basically right!): the universe
may be compared with a vast ocean coursed continually by currents and
waves, some of which interfere to become vortices which hold their
structure for long enough to give the appearance of independent or
enduring existents. (W. K. Clifford articulated this “space theory of
matter”, as a metaphysical template, long before Einstein and later John
Archibald Wheeler gave it mathematical form as geometrodynamics.
(Clifford 1876, 125-6) And although geometrodynamics has not yet been
accepted into physics, due to lack of experimental confirmation, it still
makes eminent sense as a metaphysical template.) This geometrodynamic
plenum is holistically rather than aggregatively structured, and those
internal differentia which are not only stable in their configuration, but
actively self-realizing, qualify as what I call selves. Selves are defined, in
systems-theoretic terms, as systems with a very special kind of goal,
namely their own self-maintenance and self-perpetuation. On the strength
of their dedication to this goal, such self-realizing systems may be
attributed with a drive or impulse describable as their conatus, where
conatus is understood in Spinoza’s sense as that “endeavour, wherewith
everything endeavours to persist in its own being”. (Spinoza 1951, Part III,
Prop VI, Proof)
Selves then enjoy a real though relative individuality even though they
exist in the context of an undivided whole. Since they proactively seek
from their environment the resources they need to actualize and maintain
their structure while at the same time resisting causal inroads into their
integrity, they count, ontologically, as individuals, even though they are
not separate substances, but disturbances within a global substance.
Moreover, the interference patterns which create these relatively stable
configurations in the plenum are relational: it requires a very special
“geometry” in the surrounding field to create the conditions for such self-
perpetuating “vortices”. The paradigmatic instances of selfhood, in the
present sense, are of course organisms, constituted in the relational
matrices of ecosystems. The systems-theoretic criteria of selfhood – self-
regulation, homeostasis, goal-directedness and equifinality – may also turn
out to apply to higher order biological systems, such as ecosystems and the

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biosphere. Indeed, it may be argued that the cosmos itself satisfies these
criteria, since it is necessarily self-actualizing and self-regulating, and its
self-structuring follows the relational dynamics of systems. (The details of
this argument can be found in Mathews 1991.)
Overlaying systems theory on geometrodynamics then, we arrive at a
universe which is One, substantivally speaking, but which also self-
differentiates, selectively, into a relative Many, the Many being those
“interference patterns” which correspond to self-realizing systems, or
selves. The systems criterion, set in a geometrodynamic framework, thus
renders inanimate matter mere backdrop to the true individuals, the selves,
in this scheme of things. Rocks and clods of clay and grains of sand are,
from this point of view, not really things in their own right, but rather
knotty bits of the matrix or plenum. Matter is thus properly described in
mass terms: earth, rock, sand, water, sky, air, etc. The only genuine
individuals that populate this world are selves.
Having briefly reviewed this cosmology under its physical aspect, let us
now consider it under its subjectival – which is to say its explicitly
panpsychist – aspect. We can see that, even described in physical terms,
this cosmology, consisting of a One which self-differentiates into a Many,
points towards panpsychism, inasmuch as the One is already described as a
self-realizing system, and hence as imbued with the mind-like property of
conativity. But it is under the duress afforded by the Argument from
Realism that we are really driven to interpret this view in panpsychist
terms.
Considering the present cosmology under its subjectival aspect then, what
presents is an extension, a field, which, while it appears to observers
(observers embedded within the field itself) as a geometrically dynamic
space, is experienced from within as a field of subjectivity, a great,
internally differentiated field of impulse, of intrinsic activity, of felt
expansions, swellings, dwindlings, contractions, surges, urges and so forth.
Impulses within this field follow certain patterns: they gather and unfold,
constellate and dissipate, in objectively patterned ways, just as our own
subjective impulses do. This “lawlikeness” of motion – of impulse – in the
primal field may be read as correlative with physics. To read subjectival
process this way, as that which is manifested externally in the lawlikeness
of physics, is not to deny the characteristic freedom or spontaneity of
subjectivity: the characteristic patterns of subjectival movement may be
acknowledged without this implying that subjectival processes are strictly
predetermined. An analogy might be helpful here. Consider the movement

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of a snake. Snakes move in a determinate way: they slither or slide, in

wave-like fashion; they do not hop, gallop or fly. Yet this does not entail
that the direction a particular snake chooses to take on a given occasion is
predetermined. Order in the sense of the large-scale patterning of motion
does not preclude small-scale variations of “direction” within such
patterns. This degree of freedom within the framework of a larger order is
presumably correlative with quantum mechanical “give” in physical
systems. Quantum mechanics has revealed aspects of physical reality,
such as wave-particle duality, complementarity and nonlocality, which,
while compatible with the large-scale patterning of classical physics,
allow, at the micro-level, for the indefiniteness, diffuseness,
indeterminism, and sudden resolutions and dissolutions that are typically
associated with mental or subjectival processes. In other words, the large-
scale patterning of impulse in a subjectival field may manifest externally as
the lawlikeness of classical physics while an element of choice or
spontaneity within that patterning may be read as correlative with quantum
physics. The primal field then, from the present point of view, exhibits
aspects of both the traditional physical and the traditional mental or
subjectival, without being reducible to either.
If this is how the global field of subjectivity may be imagined from within,
from the viewpoint of the One as Subject, the question of how finite selves
embedded in this larger Subject may be imagined from within remains to
be considered. How can relatively distinct subjectivities, the subjectivities
belonging to the differentia we have identified externally as self-realizing
systems in the geometrodynamic matrix, form within the field of a larger
consciousness? How do such subjects manage not to be absorbed,
experientially, into the larger field, and how does the larger Subject, of
which they are a part yet from which they also differentiate themselves,
experience them?
A psychoanalytic analogue might provide a model in this connection.
Psychoanalytic theory is, of course, premised on the idea of the
unconscious – that certain aspects of mental life in human beings,
particularly those aspects associated with ego, are conscious, while other
aspects are unconscious. Amongst the unconscious components of psyche
are enduring constellations of psychophysical energy which never surface
into ego consciousness yet which nevertheless may be active in the psychic
life of a person. In certain circumstances these constellations may eclipse
the ego as engine of agency and overtake the person in question, driving
their behaviour. Carl Jung called such constellations of psychophysical

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energy autonomous complexes, to indicate that though they are in reality

part of the psyche, such complexes are unaware of this fact and to a certain
extent are self-organized to lead a “split off” life of their own. Though the
analogy is not perfect, it does, I think, suggest a way in which a self-
realizing system might become a relatively distinct and self-directing
centre of subjectivity within the larger field of the One as Subject. And just
as a person whose psyche harbours an autonomous complex is not
consciously aware of the way the complex feels to itself, but is
nevertheless psychically organized so as to make room for the complex,
and perhaps made uncomfortable by the “gaps” that the complex leaves in
her consciousness, so the One as Subject may feel the effects of finite
centres of subjectivity in the field of its own larger subjectivity, even
though it may not be able actually to experience the way such finite selves
feel to themselves.3
These are very brief remarks, and much remains to be explained, but I
hope I have said enough to show in a preliminary way how the
individuation problem – which is to say, the combination problem in
reverse – may be resolved in the context of the present cosmological
version of panpsychism.
Having completed my sketch of this version of panpsychism, let me now

return to the anomalies, those problems which remain intractable for
materialism but which dissolve, or at least soften, in the context of
panpsychism. I have already reviewed the Argument from Realism, and
explained how panpsychism can give conceptual content to the distinction
between appearance and reality in a way that materialism, anomalously,
cannot. Let us now turn to the question of why the universe hangs together,
where this can also be read, more narrowly, as the problem of causation, as
originally formulated by David Hume.
2. Why does the universe hang together?

Materialism, insofar as it remains particulate, analyzes physical reality in
terms of patterns of motion exhibited by elementary physical units, where
these patterns are given by laws that are logically extrinsic to the units in
question. In other words, the laws could be different; they could in
principle cease to hold. To the extent that physics continues to source
3
Many thanks to Craig San Roque for helping me to understand, in psychoanalytic
terms, the role of autonomous complexes in psychic life.

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fields and forces to particles of various kinds, it affords no logical

assurance that the universe will continue to be governed by these laws, nor
hence that it will continue to hang together. The laws holding the
elementary units together might simply collapse, and physical chaos ensue.
In other words, such a physics cannot explain the coherence of the world;
this coherence remains a fortuity. In this sense, physics remains subject to
Hume’s anomaly. There can, Hume pointed out, be no logically necessary
connections between distinct existences. To the extent that physics posits a
universe of logically distinct existences, it cannot explain why these
existences are held together by the observed laws of nature.
A ready solution to this problem of causation, and to the larger conundrum
of why the universe hangs together, is simply to relinquish the hypothesis
of distinct existences. If the universe is not fundamentally particulate, if it
is instead fundamentally an indivisible unity, or plenum, then the problem
of coherence disappears. A plenum, such as space considered
geometrodynamically, is intrinsically internally structured in accordance
with a principle of perfect point to point connectivity and hence perfect
continuity. In other words, motion in a plenum will necessarily propagate
smoothly and isotropically, and hence in a fundamentally lawlike way, at
least until interference patterns set in. A geometrodynamic universe is
necessarily a lawlike one. (Mathews 1991, chapter 2)
The problems of coherence and causation then point us metaphysically in
the direction of unity and holism, but this does not yet in itself necessarily
entail a commitment to panpsychism. The step to panpsychism occurs
when we wonder why the universe is an indivisible unity. Granted, if it is
an indivisible unity, then it will be lawlike, and will hence hang together.
But if it does not have to be an indivisible unity, if the fact of its indivisible
unity is itself contingent, then we have still not explained, in any ultimate
way, why it hangs together. This hanging together will remain a
metaphysical fortuity. And, from a materialist perspective, there seems to
be no more reason, ultimately, for unity than for fragmentation: atomistic
chaos is as logically possible as lawlike unity. From a panpsychist
perspective however, there is every reason to expect unity rather than
fragmentation. Having inferred the unity of the universe from the evidence
of its lawlikeness, the panpsychist explains this unity by reference to a
subjectival aspect of reality. A subject, in the sense of a centre of
subjectivity, is itself intrinsically, as we have already noted, an indivisible
unity. Subjectivity is an extension, a field for experience – for meaning,
purpose and agency - but there are no hard edges or boundaries in this

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field; the different instances of its experience are cross-referential and

inter-permeating. Meanings, for example, are differentiated only within a
larger field of meanings which overlay and inform one another; purpose
gives coherence and direction to all it touches, bringing different cognitive
functions together into indissoluble synergies; agency, being referenced to
purpose, has a similar effect. The “hanging together” that presents itself to
us as the physical face of reality thus points forcefully to the conclusion
that subjectivity, so clearly indivisible in its essential nature, must, at a
deeper level, be integral to the nature of things. Reality hangs together
under its outer aspect because that outer aspect is indicative of an inner,
subjectival and accordingly indivisible, nature.
It is thus the panpsychist who offers at least the outlines of an answer to
the question why the universe holds together rather than falling apart. In
other words, it is the panpsychist who can shed a little light on a
conundrum that is sheer anomaly for the materialist.
3. Why is there something rather than nothing?

Either there is or there isn’t a reason for the existence of a world, for the
existence of the “something” that can be seen as a matter of fact to exist. If
there is no reason, then what exists – the world as we know it – just is as it
is, absolutely arbitrarily; it could have been entirely otherwise or it could
have been not at all. If on the other hand there is a reason for the existence
of something, then presumably that reason involves self-causation or self-
creation, since there is ultimately nothing other than what-exists that could
bring what-exists into existence. But self-causation, upon analysis, turns
out to have consequences: it turns out to entrain a certain nature for the
thing that is self-creating. This nature is, as we shall see, consistent with
panpsychism but not materialism.
Allow me, very briefly, to explain. A universe, which is self-creating,
must also exhibit certain other attributes. Firstly, it must be imbued with
causal power. The reason for this is that a Humean account of causation
cannot work in the case of self-causation: self-causation cannot be
analyzed, Hume-wise, as a contingent relation of succession and contiguity
such that every time event of type A occurs it is, contingently but
invariably, followed by an event of type B. Since in self-causation cause
and effect are the same “event”, no such relation of succession can be
posited. Causality must in this instance either be reduced to nothing at all
or it must be analyzed in terms of the action of a non-empirical “power”
within the cause. Powers are (notoriously to logicians) “occult” things, or

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aspects of things, empirically opaque, intensional, lurking within things

rather than fully extensional, as materialist attributes are. (Routley 1980;
Plumwood 1993) Let us add to intensionality the fact that the power of
self-causation is reflexive, hinging on the ability of the thing in question to
direct its powers onto itself. And to intensionality and reflexiveness let us
furthermore add an element of telos – the fact that the power of self-
creation has a specific end in view, viz the self-existence of the self-
creating thing. The upshot of this thumbnail analysis of self-causation is
that self-creativity looks decidedly conative, and conativity bears all the
hallmarks of the intentional, where intentionality is understood, in
phenomenological terms, as the province of the mental, or at any rate of
the mind-like.
In other words, a self-creating universe will be a conative universe. It will
not be a purely materialist or mechanical universe. If conativity is
understood as a category of panpsychism, then we can say that a
panpsychist universe offers an answer to Leibniz’s question, why is there
something rather than nothing, while a materialist universe does not.
4. Was there a beginning to time?

If it is inherent in the nature of the universe – or, as we have seen, of a
particular kind of universe, namely a conative one – to bring itself into
existence, then this universe will presumably not come into existence at
one moment rather than another. There must be a sense in which such a
universe has always existed. Why so? The nature of things generally, in
abstracto, can be specified outside of time, but in the case of a self-causing
thing, its nature in abstracto is necessarily self-instantiating, so that the
instantiation will exist as timelessly as the thing in abstract. (Heavy shades
of the Ontological Argument here.) To say of the universe that it is of a
finite age, as physicists currently do, does not then make sense for a self-
creating universe. There is no more reason for a self-creating universe to
have come into existence X million than Y million years ago. This is not to
say that it must have endured for an infinite number of years, or instants. It
is rather to say that it must be, so to speak, temporally indeterminate at the
edges.
To explain what I mean by this, let us contrast such temporal
indeterminacy with the current orthodoxy amongst physicists that
postulates a “first three minutes” scenario.4 According to this scenario, the
4
This was the title of a particularly famous book by Stephen Weinberg outlining the
early history of the universe. See Weinberg 1977.

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universe began with an explosion of energy from an initial singularity and

evolved rapidly thereafter, over tiny fractions of micro-seconds, till the
highest of the initial high energy was dissipated, and things started to calm
down, after an interval of three minutes or so. In other words, a fully
temporally determinate universe burst into being at an originary moment
and thereafter time immediately began ticking over, minute by minute. In
supposing this, physicists are not of course supposing that the universe
began at a point in pre-existent time, but that time itself originated at a
certain point, a point that is now measured by how long ago it was in the
past. Such a view however invites the question, why then? Why did the
universe originate X billion years rather than Y billion years ago? No
answer seems to be available for this question. Moreover this first-moment
scenario seems implicitly inconsistent with physicists’ own account of the
history of the universe. For the passage of time is discoverable through
change, but metric time is a function of periodic processes: if there are no
periodic processes that can function as measuring sticks for time, then time
remains metrically indeterminate. In the early stages of the universe,
according to the physicists’ story, there was an extremity of physical flux,
a soup of protean form, as yet unfixed. In the midst of this explosive
instability, no periodic processes were yet occurring. It is accordingly
impossible to impose a measure of time, even retrospectively, on that
period. Time was undoubtedly passing, since change was occurring, but
whether the time that passed was of long or short duration would have
been, and remains, impossible to say. There would have been no more
reason to say of that earliest period that it lasted for three minutes than to
say that it lasted for three billion years, since there was no way, even in
principle, of measuring time. So although there may have been physical
sequence in the unfolding of the universe, it seems wrong to say that this
sequence began at a particular moment. There is no moment of origin
because, during those earliest phases, there were simply no moments. The
time between events was indeterminate. The most we can say is that the
universe was around, in a temporally indeterminate way, and then as
physical order constellated, the possibility of a temporal metric began to
emerge.5 Moreover, if either a universal heat death or a “big crunch” ever
5
In order to ascertain that a given process is periodic, a significant degree of order
must already obtain in the universe. Different kinds of ostensibly periodic processes
need to be measured against one another, and a certain amount of physical theory
capable of predicting periodicity in the processes in question must be at least
tentatively formulable.

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eventuate, then the universe might pass into a further phase of temporal
indeterminacy.6
The “first three minutes” hypothesis then – which is to say, the hypothesis
that posits an originary moment for the universe – seems inconsistent with
physicists’ own account of evolutionary cosmology. The hypothesis of
self-creation however - which, as we have seen, entails a panpsychist view
of the universe – enables us to make sense of evolutionary cosmology
without falling into the originary anomaly. The self-created universe
emerges into metrical time from a pre-metric and hence temporally
indeterminate past. In this sense such a universe is “outside” time, yet
temporality can emerge within it. Perhaps this is not so different from the
temporal experience of an ordinary self. There is a temporal indeterminacy
about our own experience of origin. In our early life we lack any sense of
the metric of time – our infancy is our “dreaming”, an ocean of temporal
non-differentiation, from the depths of which a definite temporal axis
eventually defines itself. There is no originary moment, only this ocean of
flux out of which temporal order emerges. This is admittedly only an
analogy, but perhaps it provides some intuitive support for the panpsychist
hypothesis of a universe which is both timeless, because self-created, but
also generative of time.
In conclusion, the “hard problem” of consciousness is not the only problem

that panpsychism helps to dissolve. Several of the primordial questions of
metaphysics return satisfactory answers from a panpsychist perspective,
not only vindicating panpsychism as an explanatory paradigm, but
reinstating those metaphysical questions themselves, so long discarded as
unanswerable.
References
Clifford, W.K. (1973): “On the Space Theory of Matter.” In: Proceedings
of Cambridge Philosophical Society 2, 157. Reprinted in Kilmister, C.W.
(ed), General Theory of Relativity, Pergamon Press: Oxford.
Mathews, F. (1991): The Ecological Self. Routledge: London.
Mathews, F. (2003): For Love of Matter: a Contemporary Panpsychism.
SUNY Press: Albany.
Plumwood, V. (1993): Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, Routledge:
London and New York.
6
This paragraph parallels very closely a passage in Mathews 2003, p. 53.

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Skrbina, D. (Ed) (2009): Mind That Abides: Panpsychism in the New

Millennium. John Benjamins: Amsterdam and Philadelphia.
Spinoza, B. (1951): Ethics. trans R.H.M. Elwes, Dover: New York.
Routley, R. (1980): Exploring Meinong’s Jungle and Beyond. In:
Departmental Monograph 3, Philosophy Department, Research School of
Social Sciences, Australian National University, Canberra.
Weinberg, S. (1977): The First Three Minutes. Andre Deutsch: London.

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Not bound to feel everything?
A dialog on the scope of experience.
Matthias Rugel and Benjamin Andrae (Munich)
In this article, we will discuss the question how many connections a thing
in existence has to other things. Here, the term 'thing' is understood in a
very wide sense to cover all kinds of concrete entities, be it material atoms
or human souls. The discussion takes the form of a dialog between the two
authors of this article, hopefully capturing the essence of the problem in a
lively and entertaining way, but still providing solid theoretical arguments
that are central for metaphysical investigations. As the argument
progresses, 'experience' of another thing will take the center stage as a
model for connection, and thus a strong panpsychist tendency is
introduced.
In the dialog, 'B' will argue that every individual is connected to all other
individuals. He finds support for this in Aristotle, Leibniz and Whitehead.
'M' will try to argue that every individual is only connected to some and
definitely not all other individuals. He backs up his thesis with Gregg
Rosenberg's theory of natural individuals.
M: Aristotle says in De anima (III.8.431b.22): “The soul is in a way all

existing things”. What a fascinating statement. Nonetheless I cannot really
believe it. Do you have an idea what it could mean?
B: Hmm, Aristotle is notoriously brief in his statements, but I guess he

means just that a mental entity is connected to every other entity.
Otherwise it doesn't seem to make much sense (...unless he has a very
strange concept of identity, but let us not go there).
M: Alright. There are also nutritive and perceptual souls for Aristotle, but
in this case he really thinks of a mental or intellectual soul. A mental entity
may be related to every other entity. Yes, maybe that is what he means
here.
B: I think that from what we just said it follows that I am right now
connected to the Big Bang (which happened some more than 13 billion
years ago) and to the Alpha Centauri System (which is a little more than
four light-years away), although I was not five minutes ago, simply

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because I am now thinking about them. This basically means that I am

connected to everything! (Or at least to everything I can think about. This
statement opens the Pandora's box of some hardcore realist/anti-realist
debates, but let’s not go there either.) I think that this conclusion might
possibly upset quite a few of our fellow philosophers...
M: Why? There is no problem. I do accept that a human can think about

every entity. But that does not mean that I am connected to everything,
because the relation to most entities is only a potentiality and a faculty.
Actually one only ever thinks about some entities.
B: But a potentiality in more than a mere possibility. It constitutes a

connection on its own. For example, even if I do not actually speak
German right now, the potentiality for me to do so remains an important
part of reality. So via the potential to think about everything, a mental
entity is indeed connected to everything!
M: That's interesting. Perhaps a mental entity has a connection to all

concrete things via its faculty to think. Maybe only the potentiality of
thinking is necessarily a connection to all existing things. I'm not really
sure about it: It might be that in quantum mechanics entities exist that are
both particle and wave but we cannot conceive of them. But still, this may
be as Aristotle says.
However, I'm not really interested in the connection of thinking-about. It's
a too thin connection; there is no guarantee that the thinking really grasps a
real thing (and not some unicorn or some non-existent future). I agree with
another opinion of Aristotle, that all thinking is derived from perceiving or
simple experiencing. It seems to me that there are many existing things to
which you are connected in experiencing. But Aristotle would be wrong
when he would say that souls are experientially connected with all existing
entities.
B: By experience, do you mean sensory experience?
M: As far as I can see Aristotle thinks of sensation. I take that to mean

sensory experience. And that's a good starting point and the prototype of
experience. (I would prefer this prototype to the prototype of the
potentiality of thought. A thought seems to me constructed out of sense
experience.)

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B: Well, I doubt that sensory experience is a connection at all. For in

sensory experience, I am just perceiving something, like light waves or
sound waves, arriving at my sensory organs. It does not make any
difference to me whether they are produced by some object I seem to
perceive or as part of some illusion – so sensory experience can hardly
constitute a connection to some object.
This is also what Leibniz would have said, I think. He thought that we are
indeed connected to everything, but only in an ideal way and not via
sensory perception.
“This interconnection, or this adapting of all created things to each one, and of
each one to all the others.” (Monadology, §56)
“But in simple substances this influence of one monad over another is only
ideal, and it can have its effect only through the intervention of God; in the
sense that in God's ideas one monad requires of God, and with reason, that he
takes account for it when he organizes the others at the beginning of things.”
(Mondaology, §51)
M: I like Leibniz and especially his Monadology, thanks for focusing on it.
Leibniz really thinks that not only humans as mental entities, but also all
monads are connected to all other monads in an ideal way. That includes
animal souls and simple monads. At least some of them do not have sense
organs. I agree with Leibniz that experience is not always sense
experience.
But it is also implied that the ideal connection of monads is not only
thinking; Leibniz calls it perceiving. It will be non-sensory perceiving in
some cases, but why is it forbidden to think that it is also sensory
experience in some cases?
B: It is true that Leibniz talks about perceptions. But I am fairly sure that
he does not take that to mean something perceived with the sensory organs,
because that would imply a direct physical interaction between monads and
he explicitly denies that. Therefore I consider it certain that also for
Leibniz, a connection via a sensory organ is not a real connection at all.
"No external causes could ever have an influence on its [the monads]
interior" ” (Mondaology, §11).
M: Assuming that you are right with your rather wild statement about the
status of sensory experience, the only real connection left is non-sensory

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experience. Whitehead knows this and speaks of 'perception in the mode of

causal efficacy'. An analogy for non-sensory feelings is the experience of
one's own eyes while seeing and one's own skin while touching. But
Leibniz denies that non-sensory perception is something causal. How can
you understand it, if it is neither causal nor sensory?
B: Well, I think that for Leibniz the perceptions still represent the whole
monadic world correctly, because god made sure of that at the beginning of
things, thus providing some kind of ideal, god-given connection. However,
I agree that Leibniz' conception leaves very little space for an autonomous
connections between a subject and the world, and that having a theory that
includes such autonomous connections would be desirable.
You are right that the best candidate for such a direct, non-sensory
connection is causation. However, I think that talking about causation will
immediately allow me to drive my point home that everything is connected
to everything, because this is just how the interaction laws of physics
behave.
M: I know that the field of the some fundamental forces of physics, e.g.
gravitation, is considered to be holistic. I also interpret physics as causal
and not just as regular. Perhaps it is also the right position that everything
is physically responsible for everything. But there is more to causation than
the fundamental forces of physics.
To get a grip on causality it is not useful to focus on the holistic causal
responsibility but on the significance that one particle or field has to
another.
This happens all the time in everyday physics, where you disregard the
wider environment. I would propose to give an ontological foundation to
that with a theory of causal significance. Gregg Rosenberg did this in his
'A Place for Consciousness' (2004). A further advantage of this theory is
that it is possible to interpret quantum entanglement as a causal
phenomenon.
B: Hm, in physics this disregarding of the wider environment you are

talking about is just an approximation made for practical purposes, and
there is no theoretical ground for it. But still, I find it very interesting that
you attempt to provide such a ground. However, I do not understand what
causation means beyond interaction by physical laws.

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M: Well, I do not propose a physical theory but a metaphysical one. But it

should be compatible with physics and in the best case it should shed light
on the physical concepts. My theory of causation tries to clarify the
concept of a thing as something that is causally relevant. It also clarifies
the concept of entanglement, which I consider to be a connection with a
restricted scope.
B: Well, compatibility is not a problem, because no physicist will ever

include the distribution of dust in some remote corner of the planet mars
into his calculations. However, I strongly doubt that there can be positive
influence of our metaphysics on physics, unless the theories are
experimentally testable. Still, I also doubt that terms from physics are
relevant for metaphysics, so I am very interested to hear your theory of
causation that features a restricted scope of causal influence.
M: My idea is somewhat Whiteheadian. For him there is a strong

association between causation and experience. And at least in most cases
he thinks of non-sensory experience. He says “A simple physical feeling is
an act of causation” (Whitehead 1929, 361). This is my new meaning of
causality.
Causation and experience run in opposite directions. A Whiteheadian
entity, a so called 'actual entity', is caused by past events. And its past is
just what it experiences.
B: This definition of causation is very interesting. It is also panpsychist,

because every interaction will be accompanied by some experience. I am
very sympathetic to that. However, if I remember Whitehead correctly,
each actual entity is connected to all past events, and since the future does
not yet exist, that means that for Whitehead everything is connected to
everything, and my thesis still stands.
M: That's right. An actual entity experiences everything that places a

causal constraint on it and for Whitehead this is its whole past. There are
only secondary aspects that filter the experienced entities. The scope can
be restricted by the subjective aim or by conceptual prehensions. But these
are operations the actual entities undertake additionally to the prehending
of all past facts. So you are still right.

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But now, I would like to modify the Whiteheadian theory to include a more
fundamental restriction of connection. In this modified theory, the
connection is still based on causality.
B: Ok, since all cases we looked at up to now either resulted in everything

being connected with everything – as in the case of thinking about or
causal interaction in physics and in Whitehead's understanding – or in
everything being connected with nothing – as for sensory experience –
now you propose a new theory. I am very keen to hear it and will lean back
and enjoy the show for a while...
M: Let's again begin with Aristotle and his statement: “The soul is in a way
all existing things”. I’d like to translate this statement in a more modern
language. I'm not really interested in souls, especially not in souls
separable from the body, but in natural individuals which I conceive in a
panexperiential way as entities with both a physical and an experiential
aspect. I'd like to reject “all existing things” in Aristotle's thesis and restrict
my claim to “some existing things”. But I'd like to insist that there is a
strong connection between the basic entity or the natural individual and the
other existing things, in the best way there may be a kind of identity as
Aristotle says. The connection should not only mean that two things are in
the same world or that a mental thing can think about all other entities. The
intensive connection I am thinking of has to be a kind of basic causal,
bodily, experiencing or inner connection, perhaps akin to identity. So my
thesis is “Each natural individual is connected in an intensive way with
some but not all existing things.”
My question is now: What makes the scope of an entity (especially a
panpsychistic entity) restricted? There are two types of restriction.
Half-hearted restriction means that primarily an entity is connected to
everything but in a second step this holistic connection is restricted. A
fundamental restriction does not share the holistic claim. We talked about
three variants of the half-hearted restriction. Leibniz' holistic approach has
the problem to individuate the different monads. Therefore, he ascribes to
monads an individual point of view and a more or less distinct perception
of other monads. A less distinct perception may be less relevant for the
activity of a monad. Physics works in a pragmatic similar way. The
fundamental forces may interrelate all entities, but only some entities are
relevant to others, e.g. because the rest are so far away that their impact can
be neglected. The third variant discussed is Whitehead's. He restricts, as we

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have seen, via conceptual work of the experiencing subject which

primarily prehends all the past.
In the following I want to discuss some variants of fundamental restriction.
My intuition (why I want to restrict this scope) is that each kind of sense
experience is restricted to an environment and to a special domain of
qualities. Such a restriction should also apply to wider concepts of
experience. In particular it should apply to experience as an aspect of non-
Humean causation. One way to conceive such a restriction of my
connections would be to allow only connections to my parts and my inner
structure. In another variant the restriction is performed by Aristotelian
forms that may help in our problem in at least two ways: the restriction
may result from the associated contents or from the powers which a
substance is attributed by its essence. My favorite will be the restriction by
a fundamental hierarchical causal mesh as it is provided in Gregg
Rosenberg's theory of Causal Significance and his Carrier Theory of
Causation. This will be read as a variant of a restriction via powers.
First, let us try to restrict the scope of a subject to its inside or its bodily
parts. With this supposition some work may be done on individuation: an
individual may be correlated with something that makes a causal difference
as a kind of downward causation. But this is no contribution to the question
whether the scope of an individual is restricted or not, because nobody will
deny that there are also causal connections of an individual both with its
bodily parts and its environment. It may be proposed that one cannot
experience every causal impact but only the impact of one's own inside.
Only the inner (downward) causality may correspond to the scope of
experience.
This approach has at least two difficulties: First, what should be the
difference between real inner experience and outer experience about which
one is deceived? There is causal involvement with the inside and the
outside; one seems to experience the inner and the outer world.
Even if the distinction can be made a second difficulty with the theory of
inner- or bodily-scope appears. If one can only experience one's inside,
how is it possible to have experiential contact with the world outside at all?
If an individual is in a deep sense only connected to its inside, we have a
kind of solipsism. If one favors a causal theory of experience, our problem
shows up similarly to a difficulty of Leibniz. Why should it be impossible
that a monad in its experience causally interacts with other monads?
These two difficulties are why I reject the thesis that the scope of a subject
(individual) is restricted to ones inside or one's body.

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All other proposals for restrictions, as far as I see, are variants of

Aristotelian forms. In perception and thought the form plays the role of a
transmitter. When I see a tree, there is the same form in me as it is really
implemented in the tree. Perhaps because of this Aristotle not only says
that the soul is connected with other things, but that it: “is (in a way) all
existing things”. The soul being all things may be only a thin possibility,
the restriction may be that only the environment and some types of the
form may be associated with this special soul. Even if a thinking mental
entity may be related to everything, the experiences transmitted to an
animal may be very restricted.
But the concept of forms as content has lethal defects, as we can see by
looking at Leibniz. He cannot accept forms as a content of thinking and
experiencing. He attacks the idea of causal influx, the idea that the same
form that is a principle of a concrete thing can also be accidentally in the
mind of an experiencing or thinking subject (Mondaology, §7). It's really
not a good idea, that there is something that could be taken from a thing in
the world and put into the soul for experiencing or thinking it. Leibniz
denies that there has to be something in between the perceiving subject and
the perceived thing. Instead there has to be direct representation (even if
ultimately guaranteed by God). If Leibniz' argumentation is sound, the
above proposal to restrict the scope via the forms as contents has to be
rejected.
There is a second understanding of Aristotelian forms that does not imply
considering forms as transmitters of content. This substantial form is
thought of as the essence of an individual. Some causal powers of the
individual belong to this essence. Causal powers may correspond to
restricted relations and only be directed to a restricted environment. For
example, consider that the essence of a bird is to be a flying vertebrate
animal, and that flying is a causal power 'flying to (somewhere)'. Let us
concentrate on this specific power. If we connect this with the
Whiteheadian idea that causation is something experiential this may be an
attractive panpsychistic restriction. Besides some other experiential powers
shared with other vertebrate animals, birds are special in that they can feel
on their way on flying to some place, by their own power. Some other
powers are missing, like the powers of rational thinking and acting that we
ascribe to humans. It may be that this restriction of the mode of experience
implies a restriction of its scope, but that is not necessary (as in the case of
of thinking). We have said that Whitehead himself does not share the idea
of a primarily restricted connection. He favors secondary restrictions

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performed by conceptual prehensions. One can understand them as

connected to a form – a Whiteheadian “eternal object”. (Leibniz also
would see these “eternal objects” as a kind of “form as content” that has to
be rejected. But for now we ignore this objection.)
This eternal object, say the 'flying to (somewhere)', that is felt by a bird,
may be classified as something that is potentially directed to everything.
But the specific environment prevents this feeling in special cases, e.g. no
underwater object and no treasure buried in the earth can be the aim of a
birds feeling of flying to somewhere. But why not claim that flying is
primarily restricted to open oxygenic space or something like this.
You may claim that humans with their power to think and act rationally are
not primarily restricted in scope. But it seems to me that it is not necessary
for a strong connection of an individual to have a conceptual or cognitive-
mental aspect like rationality.
There is a further reading of forms as causal powers besides instances
where one feels one’s own powers. The idea is that it is not the individual
exercising the causal power any more that has the experience of it, but that
a different individual has that experience. The form does not have to be
identified with the causal power; it may provide only the connection.
Although Gregg Rosenberg does not understand himself in these
Aristotelian terms, I'll try to interpret his position in such a way here. For
Rosenberg the form is the causal connection between some natural
individuals. Instead of a “form” he speaks of a receptive binding. This
receptive binding is not itself experienced. But it implies that the bound or
“formed” individuals experience each other. A causal connection between
individual C and B is only possible if there is a receptive binding (or form)
that binds C, B and possibly many other individuals in a causal nexus.
Corresponding to each Aristotelian form there has to be some “matter” that
it forms. Corresponding to each binding there has to be something intrinsic
that is bound, intrinsic properties of the bound parts. In Rosenberg's theory
this insight is implemented in the following way:

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Shared form (causal

receptive binding) of
A, B and C
Individual C Individual B
Individual A
With effective With phenomenal
properties e, f, ... properties p, q, ...
e contributes causally to B
Three individuals A, B, C bound in a shared receptive binding. This

implies causal constraints between A, B and C, resp. the emphasized
asymmetric relation that C causes B. The shared form implies this causal
relation and implies as its 'matter' (intrinsic nature) that B experiences C.
There have to be other relations of causal contribution and experiencing
inside this receptive form that are not pictured here to integrate individual
A in the shared form.
Let there be a receptive binding implying that individual C constrains

individual B. This may happen because of the constraining effective
property e of C. Now, this connection cannot exist if it does not have an
intrinsic carrier, i.e. a property that not only mirrors the relations in which
B and C stand, but also gives them an ontological foundation (without
which it cannot exist as a concrete entity). According to Rosenberg's
proposal, this carrier is the phenomenal property p of B. (The main
alternative would be that it is a phenomenal property of the whole causal
nexus with A, B, C, …, which is bound by the form connecting them.)
It is a plausible interpretation of Rosenberg that this phenomenal carrier p
of B is identical to the effective property e of C. (It may be really attributed
to B, but derivatively, seen purely structurally without regard to its
phenomenal aspects, as a property of C.) In this case we are back to the
starting thesis of Aristotle: The soul is not only connected to some things,
but it is some other things because it carries one of its essential properties.
Property e could not exist without being carried by p of B.
There is a form as the connection itself, the receptive binding. But this
form is not the form criticized by Leibniz. Rosenberg's form does not have
to be the transmitter of the content. Receptive binding only provides the
context for causal interaction and direct experiencing of the bound
individuals.
What are the implications of these considerations to the project of
panpsychism? The point I'd like to make is in the title of this dialog. A

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subject in a panexperientialist world is not bound to feel everything. There

may be not only half-hearted restrictions of the scope of experience but
also fundamental ones.
B: Alright, that was very impressive. You convinced me that it is possible

to devise a metaphysics that features a restricted scope of connectivity.
There is one huge problem, though: You never gave a sufficient reason as
to where exactly to draw the boundaries. Why include a connection to this
entity and not to the one next to it? As long as this problem is not solved, I
think I will rather stick to my idea of universal connectivity.
M: You are right, that's a real problem. To get a hint of a solution look at a
further feature of Rosenberg's theory, the hierarchy of natural individuals.
A receptive binding does not only provide a form for the causal and
experiential connections of the individuals that are its members. It is also
the specific characteristic of a natural individual of a higher level. This
higher level individual will also interact with other individuals of the same
higher level and experience the impacts it gets from them. This is provided
by a further form or receptive binding that does not work on the
individuals of the lower level but on the individuals of the higher level.
Corresponding to this receptive binding there is a further individual on the
next higher level, etc.
Shared form of
a higher level
A C E
B
D
The picture shows receptivity of different levels. The receptivity between A,

B and C is the same as in the last picture. Each closed line corresponds to
a receptivity, connecting its member individuals and similarly as an
individual itself, bound by a higher level form. The lowest level receptivity
corresponds to the continuous line, the level above binding A, B and C on
the left side and D and E on the right side corresponds to the dashed line
and the highest receptivity to the outer dashed and dotted line.

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This hierarchy is possible because the lower level individuals are not
determined independently of their context. The end of this hierarchy is
reached if the highest level individual is totally determined. This causal
and experiential mesh corresponds to the hierarchy of the sciences. It is a
scientific fact that on all levels other causal powers and other environments
are relevant. I presuppose the hierarchical causal mesh is the fundamental
order of the world but cannot really specify it more as through the hint to
the hierarchy of sciences at the moment.
The opposite thesis to this experiential mesh, a panpsychism with holistic
experience, always seemed, at least to me, to be a strange position. The
probability of panpsychism is much better if there is at least a model for
restricting the scope of experience. This corresponds to the intuition of a
restricted scope of sense experience in everyday life.
L (from the audience): Matthias, your restriction seems to be an
extrapolation from phenomenology to ontology. Is this restriction only
according to phenomenology? It seems to me somewhat anthropocentric.
M: My idea to restrict the scope of experience comes from

phenomenology, that's right. As far as I see, you have to choose what type
of connection you prefer while building an ontology. I prefer a connection
modeled after sense experience to one modeled after thinking. No species
of subjects seems to have all kinds of sense experience. Every sensory
feeling seems to be restricted. This proves to be much less anthropocentric
than when you model your theory after human thinking. With thinking it is
much simpler to imagine an analogy to a thought-relation with all other
objects. The holistic picture of science seems to me only a further example
of a theory modeled on thinking rather than on experiencing. But with the
much more intensive relation of experiencing something I'm able to adopt
some fundamental restrictions of the scope of connectivity.
Epiloge: More on Rosenberg's terms

The dialogue forum is closed, some people who are acquainted with
Rosenberg's book, are still talking.
G: Why don't you understand Rosenberg's theory holistically? Is causality

no transitive connection? Does not the causal mesh guarantee that every
natural individual is causally connected to all other individuals? Does not
the carrier theory imply that this connection has also its phenomenal
inside?

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M: I can admit that there are some holistic relations of all natural
individuals, e.g. in the potentiality of thought. But this normally does not
concern causality and experience.
There is a special Rosenbergian case that is a nearly holistic story. There
may be only one level of individuals that are connected together with only
one form or receptive binding determining them all. But even this nearly
holistic scenario implies no holistic experience of any of its individuals.
The high-level-individual that connects all the others and corresponds to
the world as a whole is not experienced. This happens simply because
individuals in the Rosenbergian theory can only experience individuals of
the same level connected by a higher-level-individual. (An indicator for
this is that in the human case it is a phenomenological impossibility to
experience a whole of which oneself is part in a way that is both an inner
and an outer experience. To experience the whole means either an outer
experience of all the other entities or an inner experience of unity. It is
doubtful whether the whole nature is an entity at all.)
I would also think that the world is not simple like this. If there is a more
complex structure of the Rosenbergian causal mesh, not every individual
has causal contact to all individuals of the same level in the sense of
suffering effective causal constraint. Additionally, no natural individual
has experiential access to individuals of other levels. Hence, effective
causal constraint is not considered to be a transitive relation.
The receptive binding itself could also be described as exhibiting some
causal constraint on its members. But in Rosenberg's theory this
constraining effect has not to be carried by a phenomenal property of the
receptive binding relation. Its effective aspects are totally carried by
effective properties of the individuals of the same level. In Rosenberg's
model no individual can effectively constrain an individual of another
level. If one were to assume such a constraint, one would end up with an
interactionalism of levels. One had to accept some similar problems as the
substance dualist has when he accepts an interaction of body and mind.
Therefore, according to Rosenberg, no individual can experience
something on a level different from itself.
G: You've argued that the restriction to one's own body would end in
solipsism. But with Rosenberg's theory, don't you also have a kind of
solipsistic concept of phenomenal properties? Don't you make it
impossible in principle that an individual has a grasp on the whole

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universe? But at least in cognition it seems that humans do have access to

some holistic aspects of the universe, the whole physical space, a whole
qualitative space, etc.
M: It may be that in cognition there is a connection to everything, but I

doubted the stability of cognitive connections before. For Whitehead, e.g.,
our cognitive access to the world as a whole is mediated by abstraction and
eternal objects. Rosenberg allows a direct experience of some things
outside oneself. But he denies the possibility of an experience of all other
things, especially the world as a whole. He could construct the connection
to the world as a whole with similar methods as Whitehead.
As long as there are many layers of nature, I cannot allow that an
individual may grasp all individuals of the universe. At most it experiences
all other individuals of its own level. But maybe the experiencing
individuals of the highest level minus 1 could be in some receptive
bindings that at least include every concrete being of the highest level
minus 1 so that it could make sense to say that it experiences a totality of
the world. But even if an experience of the whole would be possible for the
nearly highest level individuals, it would not be possible for simpler
individuals of lower levels.
Rosenberg himself seems to speculate that there aren't any receptive
bindings that bind a human individual to all other individuals of the same
level. He could imagine that the highest level receptive connection only
binds some parts of the brain, one of which is me (at the relevant moment).
But he is far from being a solipsist who restricts experience to the space
filled by a physical brain. There may be overlapping receptive fields which
bring the relevant information from the outside to the experiencing
individual. Some primitive isomorphisms that mirror the outer world to the
phenomenal world and vice versa (Rosenberg 2004, 292) could transport
the information.
G: It's an interesting question how some information comes into an

experience from outside a receptive binding. But it’s of no interest for our
search for the objects of direct experience, since this information is no
direct experience. It is also a correct reading of Rosenberg that he restricts
effective causation on intra-level causation. But that's not the whole truth.
Both lower and higher level individuals contribute to the causal profile of a
natural individual. The lower level effective interaction does not stop in
case of intra-level causation. Especially, through the causal constraints of

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the four fundamental forces, that may be represented by the effective

properties of the lowest level (or at least a low level), every higher level
individual is effectively causally connected to all other individuals.
M: I've admitted something like a holism of physical causality before. I

have to go more into the details now. Rosenberg distinguishes between the
Humean mosaic, the nomic mosaic and the causal mesh (Rosenberg 2004,
219-220). The Humean mosaic consisting of the regularities of nature is
the most wide-meshed, it is contained in the nomic mosaic (containing also
some uninstantiated laws), which is again integrated in the causal mesh
containing receptive bindings. Therefore the connections of the wider
meshed structures are also causal, but perhaps less fundamental in the
causal mesh. Physics is wholly described by the Humean mosaic or in
some readings of natural laws by the nomic mosaic. But a causal structure
has to be constrained by a receptive binding that is not necessary
implemented by the physical regularities or laws alone. Causal laws and
regularities are ontologically abstractions and simplifications of receptive
bindings, even if epistemologically the regularities and laws are easier to
detect. Forms or receptive bindings are ontologically the much more
fundamental causal structure. And it is enough for the carrier theory that
the receptive bindings and the effective properties of the individuals that
are directly bound by it are carried. The effective properties are carried by
phenomenal properties. The receptive binding, although it was not
necessary to mention up to now, is carried by the experience itself. This
can be identified with the subject that experiences phenomenal properties.
G: This may be as you said – although it seems to me quite misleading to

call the physical interactions causal connections even if they are no
receptive bindings.
But here comes my second doubt on Rosenberg's theory coming from the
level above. The receptive binding relations seem to be crucial to the
nature of the effective properties of the bound individuals. Rosenberg calls
the binding relations final causes of the bound individuals, we called them
forms or (with Aristotle) “formal causes”. You have just said that receptive
bindings are also carried by experiencings (of unitary fields) or subjects. It
seems to me that Rosenberg's and your position is like Leibniz' position,
there's a primitive coordination of individuals. But while in Leibniz' theory
this coordination is a-causal, you call it causal. And, most important, while
in Leibniz' theory this coordination is guaranteed by one divine subject,

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your theory guarantees it through many subjects: all higher level

individuals. One could say that Rosenberg's theory is the polytheistic
version of Leibniz' monotheistic theory. Is the higher level really a subject
like this, which cannot be accessed by the lower level but gives the
restriction of the connections for the lower level by its subjectivity?
M: That's an interesting idea. There may be some respects in which your

suspicion is true. God may constrain every individual but may not be
experienced herself.
But remember the differences. The God of Leibniz thinks of all monads
and the whole world, a carried individual subject in Rosenberg's theory
may not think anything but only experience. Additionally, in the spirit of
Leibniz it is plausible that God is experiencing, at least in so far as she is
thinking. But a determinate individual – resp. one of the highest level – is
not constrained by any other individual and therefore does not experience
anything. As far as I see there is no necessity that the receptive binding
itself has to be carried, resp. if its bound individuals are carried already. Its
“matter” is not a corresponding subject, but the carrier of the individuals
and properties that it binds.
Most importantly, as long as you accept that there has to be a receptive
binding (or a subject) in order to understand an interaction of the parts, the
parts in Rosenberg's theory really affect and modify each other, while a
monad only modifies itself.1
References
Aristotle (350 B.C.): De Anima, in The works of Aristotle, translated by
J.A. Smith. Oxford: Claredon Press 1931.
Leibniz, G. W. (1714): Monadology, in G. W. Leibniz, Philosophical Texts,
translated and edited by R.S. Woolhouse and R. Francks. New York:
Oxford University Press 1998.
Rosenberg, G. (2004): A Place for Consciousness: Probing the Deep
Structure of the Natural World, Oxford University Press.
Whitehead, A.N. (1929): Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, ed.
of D. R. Griffin & D. W. Sherburne, 1978, New York: Free Press.
1
Thanks to Christina Schneider and the audience of the Vienna Conference “The
Mental as Fundamental” for valuable comments on a draft of this paper, especially
Ludwig Jaskolla and Godehard Brüntrup.

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10. Matthias Rugel / Benjamin Andrae

In recent years one could notice a revival of panpsychistic

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be considered fundamental in the same sense as the physical, then it

In the opening article, “Panpsychism and Structural Realism,”

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formulation of the hard problem of consciousness, Brüntrup argues

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instantiated by causal relations in the environment.” The process-

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subjects from their microscopic parts is not – as he states – the

All of the contributions to this book – even those discussing

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McGinn, C. 2006. Hard Questions – Comments on Galen Strawson.

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What is Structural Realism?

1 This paper was initially presented at the “Toward A Science Of Consciousness”

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ideal rational acceptability or as maximal coherence; thereby any claim

The Incompleteness of Structure: A “Chalmersian” Presentation of the

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acceptance of the thesis that the qualitative mental properties of

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Let P be the conjunction of all micro-physical truths about the universe,

(1) P&~Q is conceivable.

But, says the standard scientific essentialist (type-B materialist), P&~Q is

(1) P&~Q is conceivable.

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(1) P&~Q is conceivable.

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Epistemic Structural Realism

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realism and anti-realism. It is rather a form of anti-realism. As such it

It is quite otherwise with a substantia phenomenon in space; its inner

Kantian empirical agnosticism in regards to the intrinsic nature of

Ontological Structural Realism

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interpreted ontologically. The bound variables in the Ramsey sentence

The Carrier Problem

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intuitive force. How could it possibly be that all relational properties of

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Eliminative ontological structural realism adopts a parsimonious, one-

Moderate Ontological Relationalism

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ontological structural realist denies - there must be something else, out of

To be an individual object implies having intrinsic properties. Esfeld's

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Eliminative Ontological Structural Realism

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