In this paper panpsychism will be construed as a dual-aspect monism, claiming that all concrete entities have both (proto-)mental and physical aspects. It is thus to be distinguished from absolute idealism according to which the world consists solely of minds and their activities. It is also to be distinguished from materialism for which the world consists ultimately of mindless physical entites and their configurations. An finally, it is distinct from substance dualism wich assumes two categorically different realms of substances, mental and physical. Panpsychists thus claim that mental being is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of the universe, but is not the only fundamental and ubiquitous feature of the universe. The mental and the physical together make up the basic furniture of the universe in such a way that we can speak of a dipolar psycho-physical nature all concrete entities. There are many ways to spell this out in a metaphysical system. The most common one in recent debates is the idea that physical structure as described in mathematical physics cannot by itself provide the ultimate grounding of reality but it needs to be complemented by non-structural intrinsic facts which escape the vocabulary of physics. These so-called “quiddities” are omnipresent in the cosmos, and at least some of them are metaphysically necessary to ground the emergence of consciousness in the process of evolution. Within this general metaphysical framework a further subdivision has been widely accepted: constitutive panpsychism and emergent panpsychism. Constitutive panpsychists claim macroexperience is grounded in or constituted by microexperience. It is the thesis that the complete categorical nature (including the quiddities) of the physical states a priori entails the phenomenal states. Constitutive panpsychism is thus very much analogous to physicalism where all facts strongly supervene on the physical facts. The notion of the physical, however, is expanded to also include the non-structural categorical natures that give rise to conscious experience if functionally structured in an appropriate way. Emergent panpsychism, in contrast, claims that the unity of higher-level units of conscius experience is more than a simple combination of lower-level phenomenal events. Additional emergent laws of nature are required to account for higher-level phenomenal consciousness. David Chalmers has argued that constitutive panpsychism is the more interesting version of panpsychism because it alone opens genuine new middle ground between classical physicalism and dualism. It can solve the problem of mental causation without giving up the causal closure of the physical, thus avoiding the problems of dualism, and at the same time it avoids the conceptual problems of physicalism (no apparent a priori entailment of phenomenal facts by structural-physical facts). I will argue that constitutive panpsychism runs into the same intractable problems with mental causation as classical physicalism. Emergent panpsychism can provide a more robust account of mental causation that is nevertheless perfectly in accordance with contemporary science. Also, emergent panpsychism does not inherit the most damaging problems of (emergent) dualism. It still is a position that is conceptually distinct from both physicalism and dualism.

• published: 15 Dec 2014
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