Source: Essentia Foundation, Analytic Idealism Course, Dr. Bernardo Kastrup, 2022.
A podcast critically examining constitutive panpsychism, a contemporary philosophical idea asserting that consciousness is a fundamental property of matter at its most basic level. The speakers outline panpsychism as a response to the perceived failures of mainstream physicalism to explain consciousness. However, the lecture proceeds to detail three major flaws in this panpsychist view: its failure to coherently explain how individual micro-consciousnesses combine into our unified experience (the combination problem), its reliance on a flawed analogy between the divisibility of perceived objects and the nature of the perceiving subject, and its physical incoherence based on the nature of quantum fields in modern physics. The speakers ultimately argues that panpsychism offers no genuine explanation and faces insurmountable logical and physical challenges.
•The lecture begins by revisiting the criticism of mainstream physicalism, highlighting its alleged lack of coherence, empirical adequacy, explanatory power, and conceptual parsimony. It suggests that physicalism fails to explain how consciousness arises from inert matter.
•The discussion then shifts to constitutive panpsychism, a contemporary metaphysical hypothesis that posits consciousness as a fundamental property of all matter, even at the level of elementary particles. This view is presented as an attempt to overcome the hard problem of consciousness by considering experience as inherent rather than emergent.
•A significant portion of the lecture focuses on the combination problem in panpsychism. This problem questions how the micro-consciousnesses of individual particles could combine to form the seemingly unified macro-consciousness experienced by individuals. The lack of a clear mechanism for this combination and the absence of unambiguous empirical evidence are emphasized, drawing an analogy to the non-contact nature of neurons.
•Another key topic is a critique of the logical reasoning often used to support panpsychism. The lecture argues that panpsychists mistakenly attribute the divisible structure of perceived objects (down to fundamental particles) to the subject of perception itself. This is likened to assuming a person is made of pixels simply because their image on a screen is pixelated.
•Finally, the lecture addresses the physical incoherence of constitutive panpsychism based on modern physics, particularly quantum field theory. It explains that elementary particles are understood as excitations of underlying quantum fields that span the entire universe without spatial boundaries. This challenges the panpsychist notion of spatially separate micro-consciousnesses and raises issues for explaining individual, bounded consciousnesses.
1. What is constitutive panpsychism and what problem is it trying to solve?
Constitutive panpsychism is the metaphysical hypothesis that consciousness is a fundamental property of matter, present even at the level of elementary subatomic particles like electrons and quarks. Proponents of this view argue that it avoids the "hard problem of consciousness" faced by physicalism, which struggles to explain how consciousness arises from seemingly non-conscious matter. Panpsychism posits that consciousness doesn't emerge but is inherent in the basic building blocks of reality.
2. According to the source, why is constitutive panpsychism considered not to be an improvement over physicalism?