Consciousness, Revelation, and Confusion
Dialectica April 5, 2023 Luke Roelofs
Constitutive panpsychism, the view that consciousness is a fundamental feature of matter and that human consciousness is composed of countless simpler conscious parts, has been criticized as internally inconsistent. Critics argue that panpsychists rely on the idea that we know the nature of consciousness directly through introspection (revelation), yet they attribute to consciousness properties—like being made of trillions of experiential parts—that conflict with how it appears introspectively. This creates a dilemma: either revelation is false (supporting physicalism) or it is true and panpsychism is self-defeating. The paper argues this dilemma is too simplistic.