Mohamed Taqi

A persistent intuition that motivates panpsychism — thereby generating the combination problem — holds that parts lacking experience cannot combine to produce a whole that has it. We argue that this intuition rests on an unexamined assumption: that phenomenological contents compose by a null-preserving operation. We show that any composition rule adequate to preserve the structural sensitivity of experience generates non-null composites from null parts. Qualitative character turns out to be nesting topology — forced by the formalism, not assumed. An argument from physical anchoring connects the set-theoretic result to the physical world, revealing that nesting topology is causal topology, and showing that wherever causal organisation closes into an irreducible whole, qualia become a logical necessity. In the discussion we draw out what follows once the null-preservation assumption is dropped, for panpsychism and the explanatory gap. Crucially, the argument begins from the methodological assumption that elementary parts carry no phenomenological content — which means panpsychism is not required.

Panpsychism holds that experience must already be present in elementary matter for consciousness to arise at the macroscopic level. We argue that this conclusion, however carefully motivated, follows only if one assumes a particular — and independently refutable — model of how phenomenological contents compose. Once that assumption is identified and rejected, the pressure towards panpsychism dissolves. In its place, a transcendental argument shows that consciousness is not distributed through matter but necessitated by the form of composition itself, even when every elementary part carries nothing at all. The position, under the assumption of monism, is called null monism.