Galen Strawson on Panpsychism, Physicalism, and Why Consciousness Is Foundational

Galen Strawson argues that taking physicalism seriously — that physics describes everything real — forces the conclusion that experience is a fundamental feature of matter, because real consciousness cannot have emerged from stuff that was wholly non-conscious.

Key ideas

1. Genuine physicalism entails panpsychism. The argument runs as a short chain: physics describes everything; consciousness is undeniably real; so consciousness is wholly physical; there is no radical (magic) emergence; the arising of consciousness from the wholly non-conscious would be radical emergence; therefore consciousness must already be present, in some form, at the bottom of things. Panpsychism is not an exotic add-on to physicalism but its honest terminus.

2. The silence of physics. Physics describes only the structure of things — relations, captured in equations — and says nothing about their intrinsic nature, what Russell called their ‘quiddity’. So the everyday assumption that the physical is by definition non-conscious is smuggled in, not read off the science. The field is open: consciousness could be the intrinsic nature whose structure physics measures.

3. Illusionism is incoherent, not merely wrong. To deny that experience exists — the position of Dennett and Frankish — collapses on itself, because an illusion of experience is already an experience. Strawson calls it the silliest claim ever made; the only rival for that title is the claim that nothing exists at all.

4. Radical emergence is the real extravagance. Heat reducing to molecular motion, wetness to intermolecular forces — these are smooth reductions, and the ‘extra’ thing people feel (warmth, wetness) is itself a conscious experience. To get consciousness from the utterly non-conscious would be unintelligible even to a God: parsimony favours putting experience at the base, not positing a magic step.

5. Consciousness is not intelligence. Experience — the bare what-it’s-likeness — needs no memory, no self, no problem-solving. Because it is simple, not complex, it is easier, not harder, to locate at the foundation. A large language model can grow indefinitely more intelligent without any reason to think it feels anything: intelligence and consciousness dissociate in both directions.

Summary

Real physicalism: what ‘physical’ actually means

Strawson calls himself a physicalist in a deflationary sense — physics has a description to give of everything in the universe, and there is no extra stuff it cannot reach. The trouble, he says, is a ‘blocker’ built into the ordinary word physical: people hear it as meaning non-conscious by nature. His counter is the ‘silence of physics’. Physics describes the structure of the world in equations but makes no claim about the intrinsic nature of the stuff whose structure it describes — a point he traces to Russell (the ‘quiddity’ of the real) and Eddington. When he says physics can describe a pain, he means only that a pain is a neural going-on that neurophysiology can describe; physics cannot describe the feeling, nor the intrinsic non-structural nature of anything at all. The felt character is not thereby outside the physical — it is the intrinsic nature the equations leave untouched.

Why physicalism entails panpsychism

The core is an inference to the best explanation, laid out as numbered steps. Physicalism is true; consciousness is real (‘non-negotiable’); so consciousness is wholly physical; there is no radical emergence; the emergence of consciousness from the wholly non-conscious would be radical emergence; therefore consciousness must in some manner already be present at the base of reality. Pressed on which monism this is, Strawson takes the ‘least worst view’: spin, mass and charge are appearances of an intrinsic nature that is experiential — echoing Heisenberg’s suggestion that energy be treated as the one general substance of the universe. He has ‘dropped the pan’, preferring plain psychism, and rejects the atomistic caricature of tiny conscious marbles: he does not really believe in electrons as discrete objects but in fields — ultimately, he ventures, a single field.

The case against radical emergence

Radical emergence is the arising of something from a base that contains nothing in virtue of which the new thing could be explained — magic, in effect. Strawson denies it occurs anywhere in science. The stock counter-examples fail: heat reduces smoothly to particle motion, liquidity to intermolecular laws. And the ‘extra’ quality people point to — the felt warmth, the felt wetness — turns out on inspection to be a conscious experience, so the examples quietly smuggle in the very thing at issue. To posit radical emergence of consciousness is the theoretically extravagant move; it ‘would be unintelligible even to God’. Putting experience at the bottom is the simpler, more parsimonious option. Resistance to it, he says, is habit and prejudice, not argument — the same audiences accept many-worlds and probability-cloud electrons without blinking, then balk at proto-experience.

The case against illusionism

The deniers of consciousness — now styling themselves illusionists — Strawson regards as making the silliest claim ever advanced (rivalled only by the claim that nothing exists). The refutation is one move: if your current experience were merely an appearance, the having of that appearance is already an experience. Consciousness is the one case where the having of it is the knowing of it, and where we know a piece of reality as it is in itself. He grants that our knowledge is only partial — the neural machinery is not given in the taste of garlic or the feeling of pain — but the felt character itself is not something introspection could be wrong about in the way illusionists need.

The combination problem and the self

If experience is everywhere, why is a brain conscious and a table not? Strawson accepts the question but not the panic. That the fundamental stuff is experiential does not mean every clumping of it is a subject — a football team in a huddle is eleven subjects, not one. It takes very particular, complicated electrochemical organisation to yield large-scale consciousness, just as it takes remarkable biological engineering to yield an opposable thumb or an eye. The sense of being a single self is what evolution would produce in a mobile organism that must unify incoming data at one locus — here he sides partly with Dennett, treating the self as a useful construct grounded in the fact of being one moving body, while denying illusionism about experience itself. On machine minds he agrees with Anil Seth: nothing in principle bars silicon consciousness, but structure goes all the way down, so a true duplicate of a brain would have to reproduce the wet biology too — at which point you have not built a computer but grown a being.

Speakers

• Galen Strawson — guest; philosopher, University of Texas at Austin; real physicalist and panpsychist
• Alex O'Connor — host; Within Reason / CosmicSkeptic

See also

• Panpsychism — the position Strawson supplies with its physicalist argument: experience as the intrinsic nature physics leaves silent
• Consciousness — the wiki map of positions; Strawson occupies the panpsychist corner from a physicalist starting point
• Illusionism — the deflationary rival he rejects as incoherent: an illusion of experience is already experience
• Anil Seth on Consciousness, Machine Sentience, and Why Intelligence Isn't Awareness — the companion Within Reason conversation; Seth and Strawson converge on rejecting conscious AI from different metaphysics
• Keith Frankish on Illusionism, Consciousness, and the Hard Problem — the illusionist Strawson is arguing against
• Alex O'Connor — host page