The Combination Problem for Panpsychism∗

Panpsychism, the view that fundamental physical entities have conscious experiences, is an exciting and promising view for addressing the mind–body problem. I have argued in “Panpsychism and Panprotopsychism” that it promises to share the advantages of both materialism and dualism and the disadvantages of neither. In particular, it can respect both the epistemological intuitions that motivate dualism and the causal intuitions that motivate physicalism. Nevertheless, panpsychism is subject to a major challenge: the combination problem. This is roughly the question: how do the experiences of fundamental physical entities such as quarks and photons combine to yield the familiar sort of human conscious experience that we know and love. The most influential formulation of the combination problem was given by William James in The Principles of Psychology (1895). In criticizing “mind-dust theory”, on which mental states are held to be compounds of elemental mental states, James made the following observations: