Source
Chalmers (2016), “The Combination Problem for Panpsychism”, in Brüntrup & Jaskolla (eds), Panpsychism: Contemporary Perspectives, OUP, pp. 179–214, LIT-395, read in full in NOTE-358 from the author’s April 2015 draft. Section numbers are the draft’s; the printed chapter was not seen.
What was actually shown
Why the constitutive form matters. Panpsychism’s attraction is a place for consciousness in physics without dualism’s problem of mental causation. That holds only if micro-experiences are the quiddities of physical properties and constitute macro-experience (constitutive Russellian panpsychism, §2). The view must then build all of our experience from a handful of micro-properties by necessary relations and no new laws, “a little like trying to juggle seven balls in the air with both hands tied behind one’s back” (§9).
Three problems, plus four (§3). The subject problem, sharpest as subject-summing: given 101 subjects, the first 100 do not seem to necessitate the 101st. The quality problem, sharpest as the palette problem: few micro-qualities, a vast array of macro-qualities. The structure problem, sharpest as structural mismatch: the structure of experience is not the structure of the brain. Then unity, boundary, awareness and grain. A proposed solution “should indicate which problems it is addressing, and which problems it is not”.
The arguments (§4). Seven are set out with numbered premises. Anti-aggregation, from James’s nihilism about composites, is weak. Subject-summing is “a significant challenge”. Structural mismatch is “one of the more powerful arguments” (§8: five premises, one of them the structure-preservation principle).
Non-combinatorial escapes cost the motivation (§5). Emergent panpsychism, which includes IIT read as a fundamental law, avoids combination and inherits dualism’s mental-causation problem. Autonomous panpsychism, cosmopsychism among it, faces a decomposition problem “just as hard”. Identity panpsychism makes the macro-subject a fundamental entity; its best form, quantum holism, faces doubt about stable brain-scale entanglement and a structural mismatch.
Combinatorial responses stay open (§§6–8). Deflating the subject leaves a “bundle combination problem”. Seager’s combinatorial infusion reduces to identity or emergent panpsychism. Goff’s phenomenal bonding must steer between “a single giant subject”, if bonding is transitive across ubiquitous causal relations, and “far too many subjects” if it is not. Functional accounts of awareness meet the conceivability objection. Panqualityism avoids micro-subjects and leaves all three problems. For structure, “perhaps the only viable line” is that experience mirrors broadly physical, informational structure, and it is unclear how that could be constitutive rather than “brute nomic principles”.
What could have come out otherwise. A response could have avoided combination at no cost, or a combinatorial one could have been carried through. The case analysis finds neither, but it is an analysis of the responses on offer, not a proof that none can work.
What this does not say
- That panpsychism is false. The conclusion is that the problem may be unanswerable, or that answering it may point to the right theory (§9). The shortlist (phenomenal bonding or quantum holism, small palettes, informational composition, a somewhat deflationary account of awareness) is “not at all clear” to cohere.
- That the arguments are independent of conceivability. Subject-summing and the panpsychist-zombie argument stand or fall with the step from conceivability to possibility, which the paper defends only ad hominem: panpsychists who used it against physicalism are “not in a good position” to deny it.
- That the subject-summing argument refuses group minds. Its premise is James’s twelve men, and it bites where a whole’s experience is grounded in its parts’ experiences. A materialist who grounds a nation’s experience in its organisation, as Schwitzgebel does, is not its target (NOTE-358, Bearing).
- That IIT’s exclusion postulate is refuted. Footnote 7 objects in one line that exclusion, like a view Nagel suggested, makes consciousness extrinsic. No case is worked through, and the objection is aimed at the 2008-era postulate.
Connections
- THEORY-043. The paper reaches that account’s two routes from panpsychism. Its candidate for what bounds a subject is “informational integration along the lines of Tononi’s hypothesis”, which it finds derivative and unprincipled, and its footnote 7 is an objection to exclusion that owes nothing to the verdict on groups. A bonding relation “just nontransitive enough” would also be a criterion for which wholes are subjects (QUESTION-046), but the paper offers none.
- IIT. Barrett et al. (THEORY-523) derive a gapless tiling of space-time by non-overlapping substrates from the exclusion axiom and defend it comparatively. On this paper’s classification that is emergent panpsychism, which pays in mental causation.
- Levin (LIT-439, NOTE-341, C8) says his model “takes a stand on the combination problem”. His citation is Chalmers’s companion paper, “Panpsychism and Panprotopsychism”, not this one; and by this paper’s standard a stand names the sub-problems it addresses and a constitution relation, which Levin does not (THEORY-583).
- The hard-problem account this panpsychism answers is THEORY-694. The meta-problem challenge (THEORY-577) adds a reporting aspect to the combination problem: how combined states produce reports of consciousness.