Brit Brogaard on consciousness
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Philip Thrift
Sep 18, 2019, 4:06:57 PM9/18/19
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(Brit Brogaard @BritHereNow)
Status of Consciousness in Nature
There is much more to be said about the combination problem and theories that posit micro-phenomenal qualities at the fundamental level of reality. However, the combination problem, as James envisaged it, is most obviously a problem for certain classical theories that take consciousness to be present in all aspects of reality. It doesn’t threaten theories that take micro-phenomenal qualities to be one among many fundamental properties.
In Search of Mentons: Panpsychism, Physicalism and the Missing Link
Panpsychism, Godehard Brüntrup and Ludwig Jaskolla (eds), Oxford University Press, 2018.
This chapter proposes a version of constitutive panpsychism. Under the condition that one accepts Chalmers’s arguments against type-B materialism, it argues that there are two contenders for explaining consciousness, the first being some version of strong emergence. She criticizes and finally rejects this kind of emergence. The second contender is panpsychism. Brogaard calls her proposal for a constitutive panpsychism ‘the theory of Mentons.’ Following Searle, it is argued that consciousness is best understood as a field-phenomenon according to which the unified field of consciousness changes as informational content is added or deleted from the field. Consequently, this version of panpsychism is not a form of state-panpsychism in which individual particulars bear mental properties. Mentons are construed as elementary particles that carry microexperiences. The chapter discusses different versions of the combination problem, which are answered by her account: the subject combination problem, the palette argument, and finally the revelation argument.
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