Does emergentism explain consciousness?
The second in a four part series on philosopher Galen Strawson’s argument that accepting physicalism requires an acceptance of panpsychism. Here we look at Strawson’s skewering of emergentists who claim that consciousness or experience is an emergent property of physical matter.
Strawson is a realist physicalist, that is one who accepts the absolute reality of experience. What got us to this point is Strawson’s view that anything concrete is physical, that experience is as concrete or real as anything can be, and that means experience is physical. If experience is not something separate from or of different substance or nature from what we measure as the physical material (that would be dualism), then it must be included in the physical material. Hence: micro or panpsychism.
He starts with questioning the almost unquestioned assumption of traditional physicalists that what they call physical reality is definitely not mental or experiential:
“I think they take it, for a start, that ultimates are in themselves wholly and essentially non-experiential [NE] phenomena. And they are hardly going out on a limb in endorsing NE, for it seems to be accepted by the vast majority of human beings. I do not, however, see how physicalists can leave this commitment unquestioned, if they are remotely realistic in their physicalism…”
