Conatus: REVISED EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

described as consciousness, but there seems no evidence that inanimate matter has it. What evidence could there be? Panpsychism also suffers from its own ‘constitution problem’. (See Chapter 7.) Since most things in the world are built from smaller things, how do all the little consciousnesses add together to form one bigger consciousness? Why, for instance, do I not experience all the feelings of the individual cells of my body? Or, for that matter, all the feelings of my individual atoms?

Panpsychism may be a fringe belief for the time being, but that might be more of an accident of history than anything else. Or it may be that it is easier to think about objects out there in the material world than it is to think about what’s going on inside our heads. There is more than a trace of panpsychism in Greek philosophy, especially Plato, where the ‘anima mundi’ (soul of the world) is the spirit that permeates all matter. Meanwhile the pre-Socratic philosophers in particular used the word ‘archē’ (beginning) for the fundamental underlying source of the being of all things. What might that ‘primary substance’ be, it could be asked?

Panpsychism is really suggesting that the ‘ultimate substrate’ — which we’ve been seeking for several chapters now — could be consciousness. So, on this view, there is only one substance — consciousness — and everything else, including matter, is derived from this. Meanwhile, physicalism offering us the opposing view — consciousness requires a ‘substrate’ and the obvious substrate is matter.

Lawrence Cahoone (The Dilemma of Modernity)

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