Panpsychism and Compositionality: A solution to the hard problem

Anand Rangarajan

We begin with the assumption that all emergentist approaches are inadequate to solve the hard problem of experience. Consequently, it's hard to escape the conclusion that consciousness is fundamental and that some form of panpsychism is true. Unfortunately, panpsychism faces the combination problem – why should proto-experiences combine to form full fledged experiences? Since the combination problem has resisted many attempts, we argue for compositionality as the missing ingredient needed to explain mid level experiences such as ours. Since this is controversial, we carefully present the full argument below. To begin, we assume, following Frege, that experience cannot exist with being accompanied by a subject of experience (SoE). An SoE provides the structural and spatio-temporally bounded “container” for experience and following Strawson is conceived as a thin subject. Thin subjects exhibit a phenomenal unity with different types of phenomenal content (sensations, thoughts etc.) occurring during their temporal existence. Next, following Stoljar, we invoke our ignorance of the true physical as the reason for the explanatory gap between present day physical processes (events, properties) and experience. We are therefore permitted to conceive of thin subjects as physical compositions. Compositionality has been an intensely studied area in the past twenty years. While there is no clear consensus here, we argue, following Koslicki, that a case can be made for a restricted compositionality principle and that thin subjects are physical compositions of a certain natural kind. In this view, SoEs are natural kind objects with a yet to be specified compositionality relation connecting them to the physical world. The specifics of this relation will be detailed by a new physics and at this juncture, all we can provide are guiding metaphors. We suggest that the relation binding an SoE to the physical is akin to the relation between a particle and field. In present day physics, a particle is conceived as a coherent excitation of a field and is spatially and temporally bounded (with the photon being the sole exception). Under the right set of circumstances, a particle coalesces out of a field and dissipates. We suggest that an SoE can be conceived as akin to a particle coalescing out of physical fields, persisting for a brief period of time and then dissipating – in a manner similar to the phenomenology of a thin subject. Experiences are physical properties of SoEs with the constraint (specified by a similarity metric) that SoEs belonging to the same natural kind will have similar experiences. The counter-intuitive aspect of this proposal is the unexpected “complexity” exhibited by SoE particles but we have been prepared for this by the complex behavior of elementary particles in over ninety years of experimental physics. Consequently, while it is odd at first glance to conceive of subjects of experience as particles, the spatial and temporal unity exhibited by particles as opposed to fields and the expectation that SoEs are new kinds of particles, paves the way for cementing this notion. Panpsychism and compositionality are therefore new bedfellows aiding us in resolving the hard problem.