Panpsychism, Aggregation and Combinatorial Infusion

Deferential Monadic Panpsychism (DMP) is a view that accepts that physical science is capable of discovering the basic structure of reality. However, it denies that reality is fully and exhaustively described purely in terms of physical science. Consciousness is missing from the physical description and cannot be reduced to it. DMP explores the idea that the physically fundamental features of the world possess some intrinsic mental aspect. It thereby faces a severe problem of understanding how more complex mental states emerge from the mental features of the fundamental features. Here I explore the idea that a new form of aggregative emergence, which I call ‘combinatorial infusion’ could shed light on this problem and bolster the prospects for this form of panpsychism. 1 Deferential Monadic Panpsychism (DMP) The core claims of any panpsychist doctrine is that mentality, primarily and most especially consciousness, is fundamental and ubiquitous. The fundamentality of the mental entails that it is not reducible to or explicable in terms of entirely non-mental features of the world. Ubiquity requires that the mental be in some sense involved with everything in the world. It is important to stress however that the ubiquity of the mental does not require that everything in the world be possessed of mind. If, for example, there is a finite set of types of fundamental entities from which all other entities, and all phenomena, in the world emerge then panpsychism only requires that these fundamental entities have a mental dimension to them. It does not demand that everything in the non-fundamental domain also exemplify mental properties. Beyond these basic principles, panpsychism can be articulated in several different ways. Idealism satisfies the core principles but denies that anything at all is non-mental. This is a rather uninteresting version of the theory, albeit one with immense historical significance, which can be regarded as a limiting case.