Constitutive panpsychism, often presented as a solution to the hard problem of consciousness, is fundamentally incapable of solving it because it faces the same structural and substantive difficulties as physicalism. The hard problem and the combination problem for panpsychism are shown to be structurally and substantively similar, based on comparable arguments from conceivability. This suggests that mereological atomism—the view that wholes are composed of independent parts—may underlie the problems of both panpsychism and physicalism. Priority monism, a naturalistic alternative to atomism, is proposed as a strategy that could resolve the general problems for both approaches.
Perception is a fundamental ontological category in G.W. Leibniz's philosophy, and it connects to modern panpsychism. Modern panpsychism struggles to define protopsychic properties—the basic mental features that combine into higher-level consciousness. Drawing on Leibniz's monadology, the author proposes that protopsychic properties represent all reality vaguely, preventing high-level psychic properties from emerging, and that mental properties are states of partially blocked protopsychic properties rather than combinations of them. Three strategies are offered to adapt these ideas to naturalistic panpsychism: treating physics as structural phenomena derived from monads, positing a non-causal relationship between monads, or adopting naturalistic pantheism with God as a mediator.