Panpsychism without Subjectivity? A Brief Commentary on Sam Coleman’s ‘Mental Chemistry’ and ‘The Real Combination Problem’
Michael Blamauer
November 1, 2013 DOI: 10.2478/disp-2013-0022 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Theoretical or philosophical paper |
|---|---|
| Key points | Argues that panpsychism offers a theoretically elegant way to handle the hard problem of consciousness within a moderate physicalist image of the world, but that it faces the Combination Problem, which opponents present as comparable to the problem of strong emergence. The author suggests Coleman's attempt to solve the Combination Problem is vulnerable to this objection. |
Abstract
In a review, Sam Coleman 2012a praised Panpsychism as ‘hot stuff’ and I agree with him, because Panpsychism offers a theoretically elegant (even if somehow radical) way of handling the hard problem of consciousness within a moderate physicalist image of the world. If one considers experience as a fundamental property on a par with fundamental physical properties, then there are only two theoretical options: Either experience is a strongly emergent property of certain complex structures or it is ubiquitous.1 So if one wishes to avoid dealing with the problem of how the experiential magically emerges from the non-experiential, Panpsychism seems to be the only option. However, with Panpsychism, philosophers can easily get their fingers burnt by touching on the Combination Problem — as does Coleman himself in his attempt to solve it. Opponents of Panpsychism present the Combination Problem as quite comparable to the problem of strong emergence. While one