Monadic panpsychism
Synthese January 22, 2024 Nino Kadić
Panpsychism holds that consciousness is fundamental and everywhere, but faces the subject combination problem: how simple conscious subjects could combine into complex ones. Assuming that problem cannot be solved, this paper proposes a version of panpsychism that avoids talk of combination entirely. Inspired by Leibniz's monads, it offers a relational explanation of how simple subjects could constitute complex experiences without merging their subjectivity. Called monadic panpsychism, the view does not rely on emergence and thus avoids problems faced by emergentist accounts. The author argues monadic panpsychism is preferable to combinatory and emergentist versions because it faces a less worrisome set of objections and has tools to address other combination problems.