Galen Strawson

For the last five years philosopher Galen Strawson has provoked a mixture of shock and scepticism with his carefully argued case that physicalism (the view that every real, concrete phenomenon in the universe is physical) entails panpsychism (the view that the existence of every real concrete thing involves experiential being). In this book Strawson provides the fullest and most careful statement of his position to date, throwing down the gauntlet to his critics — including Peter Carruthers, Frank Jackson, David Rosenthal and J.J.C. Smart — by inviting them to respond in print. The book concludes with Strawson's response to his commentators. Galen Strawson’s books include Mental Reality, The Self? and Freedom and Belief.

'Consciousness', they say, 'is a mystery'. 'We have no idea what consciousness is.' 'The great intellectual task of our time is to explain the existence of consciousness.' This paper argues that these claims are false. Using 'ψ' to denote consciousness, it argues [1] that we know what ψ is (it's not a mystery); [2] that the idea that we need to explain the existence of ψ begs the question; [3] that ψ is the only thing in concrete reality that we know for certain to exist; [4] that ψ is the only thing in concrete reality whose qualitative nature we know; [5] that in experiencing ψ we know something of the nature of concrete reality as it is in itself; [6] that there is no other case in which we know something of the qualitative nature of concrete reality as it is in itself. It argues further [7] that [1] - [6] are fully compatible with physicalism in the original Vienna-Circle sense of the term; [8] that physicalism is compatible with panpsychism; and [9] that panpsychist physicalism is the most plausible (or if you prefer least implausible) view of the nature of concrete reality.

This chapter offers a twelve-word metaphysics. “Stoff ist Kraft, Wesen ist Werden, Sein ist Sosein, Ansichsein ist Fürsichsein”: concrete reality is force or energy and it is through-and-through processual; it admits no irreducible ontological distinction between substance and quality, and it consists of experience, experiencing, experientiality. The chapter proposes that the first three claims are profoundly plausible metaphysical principles, and that unprejudiced consideration of what we know about concrete reality obliges us to favor the fourth. The reason for this is not just that panpsychism is the most ontologically parsimonious view. We also have to factor in the silence of physics regarding the question of the intrinsic nonstructural nature of reality. How can experiential being arise or emerge from fundamentally nonexperiential being? The chapter concludes with the suggestion that nonexperiential concrete being may be metaphysically impossible.

This chapter was originally delivered as the opening address at Responsibility & Relationships, a conference held at the College of William & Mary in September 2012 in honor of the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of P. F. Strawson’s 1962 paper, “Freedom and Resentment.” The chapter begins with some reflections on this paper, disagrees with it about the source of the sense of freedom, and then considers various ways in which the sort of conceptual reversal that P. F. Strawson suggested for moral responsibility could be fruitfully applied to recent thinking about the persistence of the self.

This chapter makes a number of arguments. Direct realism is true, when properly understood. The issue of its truth or falsity must be kept separate from the issue of scepticism regarding an external world. No defensible version of direct realism denies the existence of things that can be rightly called ‘mental representations’. Direct realism neither requires nor entails ‘disjunctivism’, and ‘disjunctivism’ neither requires nor entails direct realism. Direct realism doesn’t require the truth of ‘transparentism’. There is some truth in transparentism, but we need to distinguish Moore’s version from the Reid-James version. A defensible version of transparentism must acknowledge, firstly, the sense in which we are fully aware of our sensations in conscious perceptual experience, and, secondly, the fact that we are in everyday life often aware of our experiences considered specifically as such.

This chapter argues that Descartes identifies the human mind with a stream of thinking or conscious experience. A Cartesian ego is not an immaterial soul-substance that has some kind of substantial being ontologically distinct from its conscious goings-on. It is wholly constituted of conscious goings-on. Consciousness is its very substance, its whole substantial nature—just as extension is (according to Descartes) the whole substantial nature of matter. If this is right, it immediately explains why Descartes claims that consciousness is an essential property of mind, a property it can never lack (this is not an unwarranted extra stipulation on his part—as Locke supposes). The conception of mind as conscious process does, however, face certain difficulties. It is, for example, not clear how conscious goings-on can constitute the categorical ground of the powers of the mind. The chapter considers these difficulties, and proposes that Leibniz might be able to help.

Many think that the subject of awareness can't be aware of itself as it presently is, any more than the fingertip can touch itself. Here it is argued that [1] the subject of awareness can be present-moment aware of itself non-thetically, and that in exceptional circumstances [2] the subject can be present-moment thetically aware of itself. Concerning [1], the sense is given in which [i] all awareness involves a subject of experience, and in which [ii] awareness is a property of the subject of experience. If one accepts that [iii] all awareness comports awareness of itself, and adds that [iv] awareness of a property of _x_ is _ipso facto_ awareness of _x_, one can derive [1]. Indeed one can derive [3] the subject of awareness is always non-thetically present-moment aware of itself. With regard to [2], it is argued that attentive present-moment self-awareness is achievable in certain meditative states.

I argue for the following claims: [1] all uses of I (the word ‘I’ or thought-element I) are absolutely immune to error through misidentification relative to I. [2] no genuine use of I can fail to refer. Nevertheless [3] I isn’t univocal: it doesn’t always refer to the same thing, or kind of thing, even in the thought or speech of a single person. This is so even though [4] I always refers to its user, the subject of experience who speaks or thinks, and although [5] if I’m thinking about something specifically as myself, I can’t fail to be thinking of myself, and although [6] a genuine understanding use of I always involves the subject thinking of itself as itself, whatever else it does or doesn’t involve, and although [7] if I take myself to be thinking about myself, then I am thinking about myself.

Many think John Locke’s account of personal identity is inconsistent and circular. It’s neither of these things. The root causes of the misreading are [i] the mistake of thinking that Locke uses ‘consciousness’ to mean memory, [ii] failure to appreciate the importance of the ‘concernment’ that always accompanies ‘consciousness’ on Locke’s view, [iii] the tendency to take the term person, in Locke’s text, as if it were (only) some kind of fundamental sortal term like ‘chair’ or ‘human being’, and to fail to take proper account of Locke’s use of it as a ‘forensic’ term (§26). Locke is not interested in the standard question concerning personal identity (i.e. ‘what has to be the case for it to be true that person P1 at (time) t1 is the same as person P2 at (time) t2, the same persisting subject of experience?’). He is interested in other questions all of which he answers: [A] what does a subject of experience that qualifies as a person actually consist of, ontologically speaking, considered at any given time? [B] what mental capacities must a subject of experience have in order to qualify as a person? [C] what sorts of changes of substantial composition can a subject of experience that qualifies as a person undergo while continuing to exist? [D] which actions is a subject of experience who qualifies as a person responsible for?

It is sometimes said that reasoning, thought and judgment essentially involve action. It is sometimes said that they involve spontaneity, where spontaneity is taken to be connected in some constitutive way with action—intentional, voluntary and indeed free action. There is, however, a fundamental respect in which reason, thought and judgment neither are nor can be a matter of action. Any spontaneity that reason, thought and judgment involve can be connected with freedom only when the word 'freedom' is used in the Spinozan-Kantian sense according to which freedom is a matter of 'rational necessitation', determination by reason.

Suppose that X and Y can’t possibly exist apart in reality; then—by definition—there’s no real distinction between them, only a conceptual distinction. There’s a conceptual distinction between a rectilinear figure’s triangularity and its trilaterality, for example, but no real distinction. In fundamental metaphysics there is no real distinction between an object’s categorical properties and its dispositional properties. So too there is no real distinction between an object and its properties. And in fundamental metaphysics, for X and Y to be such that there is no real distinction between them is for them to be identical.

In _Mental Reality_, Galen Strawson argues that much contemporary philosophy of mind gives undue primacy of place to publicly observable phenomena, nonmental phenomena, and behavioral phenomena (understood as publicly observable phenomena) in its account of the nature of mind. It does so at the expense of the phenomena of conscious experience. Strawson describes an alternative position, "naturalized Cartesianism," which couples the materialist view that mind is entirely natural and wholly physical with a fully realist account of the nature of conscious experience. Naturalized Cartesianism is an adductive (as opposed to reductive) form of materialism. Adductive materialists don't claim that conscious experience is anything less than we ordinarily conceive it to be, in being wholly physical. They claim instead that the physical is something more than we ordinarily conceive it to be, given that many of the wholly physical goings on in the brain constitute -- literally are -- conscious experiences as we ordinarily conceive them. Since naturalized Cartesianism downgrades the place of reference to nonmental and publicly observable phenomena in an adequate account of mental phenomena, Strawson considers in detail the question of what part such reference still has to play. He argues that it is a mistake to think that all behavioral phenomena are publicly observable phenomena.This revised and expanded edition of _Mental Reality_ includes a new appendix, which thoroughly revises the account of intentionality given in chapter 7.