Panpsychism trapped by physicalism

A deep greenside bunker is a big challenge for almost any golfer. Philosopher Galen Strawson believes he has proven that if you are a physicalist, you must accept the reality that every bit of matter and energy contains experience. But he also explains there are some major problems with accepting panpsychism. There is a way out for Strawson: get out of the physicalist trap.

This is the final post in the series on panpsychism as argued by philosopher Galen Strawson. The previous posts explored his argument that realist physicalists, those who accept experience as a real thing, must accept panpsychism as a fact of nature. We noted his inconsistency in abusing and then using emergence as an explanation. We conclude by showing how he varies greatly from William James and Arthur Eddington, the great thinkers he quotes to support his position. The difference comes down to this: can real physicalism support an understanding of mind?

The title of Strawson’s essay is “Realistic Monism” because he offers this as a physicalist defense of monism: the idea there is but one fundamental underlying reality. As a “realist physicalist monist” he shows that accepting the undeniable reality of experience means that the one thing that is real is matter/energy and that means that it must include in its intrinsic nature experience in some form.

Throughout the essay he makes several references to Sir Arthur Eddington, the famous astronomer who did much to bring understanding to Einstein’s theory of relativity. Strawson quoted Eddington who called it “silly” to think that non-experiential matter could produce experience or consciousness.

He concludes by referring back to Eddington who employs James’ term “mind-stuff’:

“I finish up, indeed, in the same position as Eddington. ‘To put the conclusion crudely’, he says, ‘the stuff of the world is mind-stuff’ — something whose nature is ‘not altogether foreign to the feelings in our consciousness’. ‘Having granted this’, he continues, the mental activity of the part of the world constituting ourselves occasions no surprise; it is known to us by direct self-knowledge, and we do not explain it away as something other than we know it to be — or, rather, it knows itself to be. It is the physical aspects [i.e. non-mental aspects] of the world that we have to explain.”

To understand more clearly what Eddington meant by this, the first post in this series recalls his analogy of the two views of his writing table.

His reference to Eddington, beyond his obvious enjoyment of Eddington’s use of “silly,” appears based on Strawson’s definition of realistic physicalism. Eddington and Strawson agree…