Nicholas Osborn

A version of panpsychism emerges from a critical overview of the metaphysics of properties. The “powerful qualities theory,” according to which all concrete properties are equiprimordially powerful and qualitative, enjoys a general advantage over other major theories of properties. But it faces some issues. Chief is the Collapse Argument: the powerful qualities theory struggles to define powerful qualities in a way that distinguishes them conceptually from pure powers. But this issue is avoided by a variant of the powerful qualities theory which makes powerful qualities “powerful qualia”: essentially dispositional instances of phenomenal consciousness. I reject a few attempts to sever the link between this powerful qualia theory of properties and panpsychism. The result, and the view I endorse, is a version of panpsychism: a panpsychism of powerful qualia.

The view that constitutive panpsychism faces a subject combination problem is rooted in the ‘Jamesian’ intuition: the intuition that multiple subjects do not simply sum into a greater, composite subject. Most commentators on the subject combination problem seem to take the Jamesian intuition as an unbudgeable psychological given. This has led to the popularity of emergentist and ‘bonding’ solutions. But emergentist solutions face the same sorts of issue as physicalist emergentism, while bonding solutions are ad hoc and mysterian. Therefore I propose we backtrack, and reexamine how unbudgeable the Jamesian intuition really is. A thin conception of subjects, adumbrated here, permits us to build a positive conception of subjects summing into subjects. There is a number of arguments purporting to show why this sort of pursuit is futile, effectively defending the Jamesian intuition, but I argue that they fail. I also include a critique of the transparency of subjectivity, a principle which has been used to legitimise anti-subject-summing intuitions. By renouncing the Jamesian intuition we clear the way to accepting a metaphysical position according to which subjects really do sum into subjects. This dissolves the subject combination problem, effectively sparing constitutive panpsychism from what is generally regarded to be its most troublesome issue.