Mental Chemistry: Combination for Panpsychists

Panpsychism, an increasingly popular competitor to physicalism as a theory of mind, faces a famous difficulty, the 'combination problem'.This is the difficulty of understanding the composition of a conscious mind by parts (the ultimates) which are themselves taken to be phenomenally qualitied.I examine the combination problem, and I attempt to solve it.There are a few distinct difficulties under the banner of 'the combination problem', and not all of them need worry panpsychists.After homing in on the genuine worries, I identify some disputable assumptions that underlie them.Doing away with these assumptions allows us to make a start on a working conception of phenomenal combination.panpsychists would insist that their explanatory gap-the question of how phenomenallyqualitied items combine, in effect-is conceptually less daunting than the physicalist one of conjuring phenomenality out of non-phenomenality: for the latter gap uniquely concerns the production of phenomenal quality as such. 5 But still, the dialectical damage is done: If the appeal of panpsychism is its promise to fill an explanatory lacuna, to make perspicuous the generation of mind, then the existence of a gap in our understanding concerning the manner in which micro-phenomenal components combine into phenomenal unities is fatal to panpsychism.It thereby loses its edge.So panpsychists must say something about the combination problem.In what follows, I examine the combination problem, and I attempt to solve it.There are a few distinct difficulties under the banner 'the combination problem', and not all of them need worry panpsychists.After homing in on the genuine worries, I identify some disputable assumptions that underlie them.Doing away with these assumptions allows us to make a start on a working conception of phenomenal combination.In the final section I tackle a powerful argument against panpsychism recently given by Goff (Goff, 2009b).This 'panpsychic zombie argument' is built upon Goff's understanding of the combination problem, so our treatment of the problem proves key to answering Goff's concerns. Combination ProblemsThis 'panpsychist explanatory gap' is not news to panpsychists-it was first noted by one of their own, William James.Another William, Seager, devised the moniker 'the combination problem' (Seager, 1995).In the hands of James and Seager the difficulty is even more serious than as described above.According to James, the problem is not just that we lack an understanding of how phenomenal parts can form a phenomenal whole-that we are missing the instruction manual, if you like-the real difficulty is that such combination is impossible in principle: for the very notion of phenomenal composition is metaphysically incoherent. 6 Perhaps the most well-known passage from James in this connection is the following 5 See e.g.Hartshorne 1977 for this panpsychist claim. 6I am using the verbs 'combine' and 'compose' more or less equivalently.This is because the combination problem is at root a question of how phenomenal composition, after material composition, can occur.I take it that if and only if phenomenal parts can combine, then they can compose a phenomenal whole.