Galen Strawson on Panpsychism

Frank Jackson Galen Strawson on Panpsychism

We make powerful motor cars by suitably assembling items that are not themselves powerful, but we do not do this by ‘adding in the power’ at the very end of the assembly line; nor, if it comes to that, do we add portions of power along the way. Powerful motor cars are nothing over and above complex arrangements or aggregations of items that are not themselves powerful. The example illustrates the way aggregations can have interesting properties that the items aggregated lack. What can we say of a general kind about what can be made from what by nothing over and above aggregation? I think that this is the key issue that Galen Strawson (2006) puts so forcefully on the table. One thing we can say more or less straight off is that a certain supervenience thesis will hold. Suppose that we have a stock of ingre- dients that are all of kind K,whereK might cover a highly diverse set — all items with the properties mentioned in one or another physi- cal science, as it might be, and where K will in general include modes of arrangement as well as properties of the arranged — being an elec- tron moving in a certain force field, for example. Suppose that we have two aggregations, A and B, which are, K thing for K thing, and K mode of arrangement for K mode of arrangement, identical, and are nothing but such aggregations. There are no gratuitous additions. If A has some non-K property, then so does B, and conversely. The non-K properties of mere aggregations supervene on the K properties of those aggregations. Why so? To deny the supervenience thesis would seem tantamount to denying that we are dealing with ‘mere’ aggregations, to denying the ‘nothing but’ part of the specification of the aggregations. If we think of the emergence of properties that Strawson discusses as properties that come from mere aggregation, then we can put it this

Journal of Consciousness Studies, 13, No. 10–11, 2006, pp. 62–64

Copyright (c) Imprint Academic 2010 For personal use only -- not for reproduction GALEN STRAWSON ON PANPSYCHISM 63 way: emergent properties supervene on that which they emerge from. Moreover, one way to view his insistence that emergence be ‘intelligible’ and not ‘brute’, is as insisting, to put the matter in terms that figure in the current debate over physicalism (in the usual sense of that term, not his) (see, e.g., Jackson, 2003), that any properties that emerge do so a priori and not a posteriori. Strawson gives a number of examples of emergence and they are all, in my view, cases where the properties that emerge are a priori determined by the nature of the aggregations — the nature, that is, of that which is aggregated and how it is aggregated — on which they emerge. Take being liquid. He is right that ‘we have … no difficulty with the idea that liquid phenomena … are emergent properties of wholly non-liquid phenomenon’ (Strawson, 2006, p. 15). The reason is, I would say, that when we have enough detail about the non-liquid phenomenon, we have something that leads a priori to liquidity. The non-liquid phenomenon will include the way molecules move past each other, the way certain bodies of molecules tend to group together but in ways that allow easy changes in overall shape, the way force fields including especially gravity move the molecules around while allowing a certain degree of cohesion (without the cohesion, we’d have a gas), and so on. After a certain amount of information of this kind, what else is there to say but something like ‘That counts as being liquid’, and when that happens we have something a priori. Similar points apply to his example of life*. The smooth reduction he talks about seems to me to be another way of saying that life* follows a priori from enough information of the right kind about constituents that are not themselves alive*. I think Strawson is right to reject brute emergence; that is to say, on my way of construing matters, I think he is right to insist that cases of emergence are always cases of a priori supervenience. But how much does this help the cause of panpsychism? One way to resist panpsychism while agreeing with his rejection of brute emergence is to hold that consciousness a priori supervenes on items that are wholly non-conscious. This is in fact the view I hold. Strawson clearly thinks it is very implausible (as I once did; it was my reason for not being a physicalist). But there is another way of resisting panpsychism. It is to insist that consciousness does not emerge in the relevant sense. Items which are conscious are more than mere aggregations of the non-conscious. Strawson does not reject this position outright but finds it implausible. I think this is because he does not consider the most attractive version of the position. The most attractive version holds that there are

Copyright (c) Imprint Academic 2010 For personal use only -- not for reproduction 64 F. JACKSON fundamental laws of nature that go from certain complex arrangements of the non-conscious to consciousness. These arrangements are more than mere arrangements of the non-conscious because they have the extra property of causing consciousness. We know that different arrangements of the non-conscious may possess very different kinds of conscious experience. There are very many different kinds of conscious experience and they go along with differences in regard to, for example, how things are around some human body, the neurological differences between dogs and humans, the nature of an injury, blood sugar levels and so on. The panpsychist needs certain kinds of compo- sition laws — laws that take the bits of consciousness in everything and tell us about the rules of additivity, as we might put it. Surely it is at least as plausible that the laws be ones that don’t talk of additivity but instead talk of the generation of the various kinds of conscious experience. Panpsychists like to argue that something as special as consciousness could not plausibly come from aggregating items that separately lack consciousness. But once we acknowledge that consciousness comes in very many forms, we have to allow a role for the generation of these various types of consciousness by items that lack the types in question. But if we can get quite new types of consciousness, why not consciousness per se?

References

Jackson, F. (2003), ‘From H2O to water: the relevance to a priori passage’, in Real Metaphysics, papers for D.H. Mellor, ed. Hallvard Lillehammer and Gonzalo Roderiguez-Pereyra (London: Routledge), pp. 84–97. Strawson, G. (2006), ‘Realistic monism: Why physicalism entails panpsychism’, Journal of Consciousness Studies, 13 (10–11), pp. 3–31.