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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 fundamental point.”
He returns to the analogy of liquidity. Earlier he said liquidity is often used as an example of emergence because the molecules of H2O are not liquid. He says this is not emergence because H2O intrinsically has the capacity to become liquid in the right circumstances. Experience is like this, if and only if, non-experiential matter also has the capacity to be experience intrinsically:
“For what we do, when we give a satisfactory account of how liquidity emerges from non-liquidity, is show that there aren’t really any new properties involved at all. Carrying this over to the experiential case, we get the claim that what happens, when experientiality emerges from non-experientiality, is that there aren’t really any new properties involved at all. This, however, means that there were experiential properties all along; which is precisely the present claim.”
