Panpsychists claim that all of reality is
infused with experience.
And what they mean by that is very intriguing.
They mean that the lowest level, the fundamental
particles or the strings, whatever it is that's
the fundamental ingredient of reality actually
has the felt quality of experience in it.
And the reason that we humans and other sophisticated
biological systems are conscious is that we're
configured in very sophisticated ways based
on relations between these fundamental experiential
ingredients.
Now I'm critical of this.
I'll tell you why.
Some people would say that it's a funny view.
But I don't think it is a funny view that
there's something intrinsically wrong with
the position.
After all, there have been religious traditions,
like Buddhism, that have held this position
for years.
But my problem is how it meshes with today's
work in fundamental physics.
So right now, there is a terrible contradiction
between relativity theory on the one hand
and quantum mechanics on the other.
There is an issue about, essentially, how
to relate the big elements of reality to the
fundamental small ingredients at the quantum
level.
And these solutions seem to preclude the idea
that there would be anything like subjects
of experience at the ground level.
These ideas often claim that space and time
are themselves emergent.
They come from relations between fundamentally
non-spatial and non-temporal ingredients.
But if reality's fundamental ingredients aren't
spatial, I don't understand what the panpsychists
mean when they claim that these little elements
of reality are subjects of experience.
And if time isn't fundamental, which some
of these theories claim, then I certainly
don't understand how there could be subjects
at the fundamental level, because consciousness
seems to be inherently a temporal phenomena.
It causes events in the mind to happen for
one thing.
And when we introspect our own conscious activity,
we're not static beings.
We exist in time.
So I think there's a fundamental mystery here.
And I think that there is a view that's like
panpsychism, which would be much more friendly
to that work on how to reconcile quantum mechanics
and relativity theory.
That work, by the way, is within an area known
as quantum gravity.
So I think the possible route to reconciliation
here that is still friendly to what the panpsychists
say is to think that there may be prototime
at the fundamental level.
So even if there's nothing like time, and
even if there's nothing like space, it would
seem friendly to the idea that there's protospace
and prototime.
And if that's the case, that is quite friendly
to a view that's known as panprotopsychism,
which is, by definition, a view that says
that the fundamental ingredients as they combine
give rise to conscious experience, and that
those fundamental ingredients are quasimental.
So that might be one way that the panpsychist
could modify her view that is more loyal to
the actual work in physics right now on quantum
gravity.
That being said, there are a lot of different
theories of quantum gravity.
There's a lot of controversy in that domain.
String theory, for example, is highly controversial.
And string theory, of course, is not the only
theory of quantum gravity.
Some people claim that time is fundamental.
But what I think is important is that philosophers
who are making claims about panpsychism actually
engage without work and think, "OK, if I'm
making claims about what the fundamental ingredients
of reality are, could those fundamental ingredients
be anything like mental subjects?
And could they be anything like experiences?"
Because that's what they're claiming.
And if what they're claiming doesn't mesh
with physics, that's a problem.
