Panpsychism and its problems

This is the third in a four part series explores philosopher Galen Strawson’s argument that physicalism requires the acceptance of panpsychism. He explains how the reality of experience requires the existence of experience in all matter/energy. He identifies some key objections to this idea, but does he answer them adequately?

Emergence of experience from non-experience requires “proto-experience”

Strawson explains the only alternative left in explaining our experience coming from non-experiential stuff, is that that stuff has to have something of experience within it:

“Experiential phenomena can indeed emerge from wholly and utterly non-experiential phenomena. This is possible because these non-experiential phenomena are intrinsically suited to constituting experiential phenomena in certain circumstances, and are ‘protoexperiential’ in that sense, although ultimately non-experiential in themselves…”

He defines “proto-experiential”:

“‘Proto-experiential’ now means ‘intrinsically suited to constituting certain sorts of experiential phenomena in certain circumstances’… If you take the word ‘proto-experiential’ to mean ‘not actually experiential, but just what is needed for experience’, then the gap is unbridged. If you take it to mean ‘already intrinsically (occurrently) experiential, although very different, qualitatively, from the experience whose realizing ground we are supposing it be’, you have conceded the…