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Panpsychism and Causation

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Panpsychism and Causation PANPSYCHISM AND CAUSATION: A NEW ARGUMENT AND A SOLUTION TO THE COMBINATION PROBLEM Hedda Hassel Mørch Ph.D. thesis Department of Philosophy, Classics, History of Art and Ideas Faculty of Humanities University of Oslo January 2014 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS First of all, I would like to thank my supervisor, Camilla Serck-Hanssen, for all her advice, support, trust and encouragement during my time at the University of Oslo, first as a B.A. student, then as her M.A. student and finally as her Ph.D. student. She has been an insightful critic, an open-minded discussion partner, an inspiring teacher and, not least, a good friend. I could not have wished for more in a supervisor. I am also very grateful to David Chalmers, who kindly accepted to be my secondary, external supervisor and has given very helpful comments on this thesis as well as on many talks on the same material. I would like to warmly thank him also for welcoming me to a long visit to ANU and a shorter visit to NYU, for inviting me to a workshop on panpsychism at the Great Barrier Reef (2012), for organizing and including me in the panpsychism reading group at ANU, and for his participation at the workshop “Panpsychism, Russellian Monism and the Nature of the Physical” in Oslo (2013). These have all been invaluable experiences. Thanks to the Faculty of Humanities for their generous funding, and the Department of Philosophy, Classics and History of Arts and Ideas for having been a wonderful place to work. Very special thanks to Philip Goff for extensive and thoughtful comments on this thesis as well as many talks and drafts on the same material, for many discussions from which I have learned and benefitted immensely, and for inviting me to visit ANU. Special thanks also to Sam Coleman, for valuable comments and discussions, and for giving me the opportunity to present a paper at the conference “The Metaphysics and Ontology of Phenomenal Qualities”, which was very helpful for developing the ideas of this thesis. Many thanks and my greatest appreciation go to my fellow Ph.D. students (one a post-doc by now), the three Kantians, Toni Kannisto, Jonas Jervell Indregard and Jacob Lautrup Kristensen, for extensive and patient comments on the first draft of this thesis, for countless fun and interesting discussions and many good times over the course of the last three years – and for teaching me so much about the great Kant. Many of my other fellow Ph.D. students also deserve thanks. In particular, I would like to mention Ole Martin Moen, Lars Christie, Veli-Pekka Parkkinen, Monica Roland, Jorid Moen and Jola Feix, who have contributed with valuable comments on my work as well as much appreciated chats and coffee breaks. Among other colleagues, I would i especially like to thank Anders Strand, for many thoughtful pieces of advice, and Carsten Hansen, for his discerning comments on my work on many occasions. I would also like to thank all of the other students or researchers with an interest in panpsychism whom I’ve had the privilege to meet and discuss with, in particular, Brentyn Ramm, Benjamin Andrae, Jonathan Simon and Luke Roelofs, for sharing their insights with me. I’m very grateful to all the speakers and participants at the workshop “Panpsychism, Russellian Monism and the Nature of the Physical”, of which I was the organizer, for creating an incredibly interesting and inspiring event, and for providing helpful and encouraging feedback on some of the material from this thesis, which I presented there. Let me also thank all the participants at the workshop at the Great Barrier Reef, on panpsychism and the combination problem, for their comments and suggestions on what have become chapters 5 and 6 of this thesis. Unfortunately, I can’t mention all the kind and brilliant people whom I’ve met and learned from along the way. I’m grateful to every one of you, and happy to have found that the world of academic philosophy is such a friendly place. Finally, I gratefully acknowledge the invaluable support of my friends and family, a few of whom I would like to mention especially: my friend Victoria Kielland, for always understanding and being on my side; my aunt Grete Hassel, for providing a fantastic writing retreat at her farm in Sigdal, where large parts of this thesis were written; and my parents, Åse Hassel and Morten Mørch, for always supporting me in every way. Hedda Hassel Mørch, December 2013 ii TABLE OF CONTENTS 1 INTRODUCTION .......................................................................................................... 1 1 THE DEFINITION OF PANPSYCHISM ........................................................................... 2 1.1 Everything ........................................................................................................ 2 1.2 Mental .............................................................................................................. 3 1.3 Is ....................................................................................................................... 7 2 THE ARGUMENTS FOR PANPSYCHISM ..................................................................... 10 2.1 The Argument from Philosophy of Mind ........................................................ 12 2.2 The Argument from Metaphysics and Philosophy of Science ........................ 27 3 PROBLEMS FOR THE ARGUMENTS ........................................................................... 39 3.1 The Combination Problem ............................................................................. 39 3.1.1 Combination Problems for Constitutive Panpsychism .............................. 42 3.1.2 Combination Problems for Emergent Panpsychism .................................. 48 3.2 Irreducible Dispositionality ........................................................................... 51 4 OUTLINE OF THE THESIS: CAUSAL SOLUTIONS TO THE PROBLEMS .......................... 55 2 THE HISTORY OF THE ARGUMENT FROM CAUSATION ............................. 58 1 LEIBNIZ ................................................................................................................... 60 2 SCHOPENHAUER ...................................................................................................... 63 3 JAMES ..................................................................................................................... 68 4 WARD ..................................................................................................................... 71 5 STOUT ..................................................................................................................... 72 6 SCHILLER ................................................................................................................ 74 7 HARTSHORNE .......................................................................................................... 76 8 HUME ...................................................................................................................... 77 9 REID ........................................................................................................................ 79 10 ELIMINATIVISTS ABOUT CAUSATION AND NEWTONIAN FORCES ............................ 80 11 RECENT REDUCTIOS ................................................................................................ 84 12 THE PRESENT RELEVANCE OF THE ARGUMENT ....................................................... 86 3 A NEW DEFENSE OF THE ARGUMENT FROM CAUSATION ........................ 90 1 FIRST FORMULATION .............................................................................................. 90 1.1 Arguments for Premise I* – Non-Reductionism ............................................ 93 2 SECOND FORMULATION .......................................................................................... 96 3 THE MENTAL DISPOSITIONALITY PREMISE .............................................................. 101 3.1 Marks of Dispositional Causation ............................................................... 102 3.2 Efforts and Results – and Hume’s Objections ............................................. 104 3.3 Necessary Connections Between Motives and Efforts ................................. 105 3.4 Veridical Experience of Necessary Connections ......................................... 108 3.5 Experience of Mental Causation .................................................................. 111 iii 3.6 Other Experiences or Conceptions of Causation ......................................... 114 3.7 Abstracting Away the Mental ....................................................................... 116 4 THE ARGUMENT FROM CAUSATION: SUMMARY ................................................... 118 4 OBJECTIONS TO THE ARGUMENT FROM CAUSATION ............................. 120 1 OBJECTIONS FROM PSYCHOLOGY AND PATHOLOGICAL CASES ............................. 120 1.1 Pain Asymbolia ............................................................................................ 120 1.2 Illusions of Agency I – Libet ........................................................................ 123 1.3 Illusions of Agency II – Wegner ................................................................... 124 1.4 The Transparency of Motivation .................................................................. 127 2 PHILOSOPHICAL PRESUPPOSITIONS AND IMPLICATIONS ........................................ 128 2.1 Are All Experiences Motivational? .............................................................. 128 2.2 Implications
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