Panpsychism without Subjectivity? A Brief Commentary on Sam Coleman’s ‘Mental Chemistry’ and ‘The Real Combination Problem’

Abstract

In a review, Sam Coleman 2012a praised Panpsychism as ‘hot stuff’ and I agree with him, because Panpsychism offers a theoretically elegant (even if somehow radical) way of handling the hard problem of consciousness within a moderate physicalist image of the world. If one considers experience as a fundamental property on a par with fundamental physical properties, then there are only two theoretical options: Either experience is a strongly emergent property of certain complex structures or it is ubiquitous.1 So if one wishes to avoid dealing with the problem of how the experiential magically emerges from the non-experiential, Panpsychism seems to be the only option. However, with Panpsychism, philosophers can easily get their fingers burnt by touching on the Combination Problem — as does Coleman himself in his attempt to solve it. Opponents of Panpsychism present the Combination Problem as quite comparable to the problem of strong emergence. While one