A Critique of the Argument for Panpsychism through Refutation of the Emergence of Consciousness
Pizhūhish/hā-yi Falsafī- Kalāmī June 3, 2023 Mohammadjavad Elahieasl, Mahdi Zakeri
Panpsychism holds that fundamental physical entities have conscious states, and one key argument for it is that consciousness cannot emerge from non-conscious matter. Galen Strawson argued that emergence is either true (wholly dependent on and deducible from the fundamental level) or brute (wholly dependent but not deducible), and both are impossible. This paper argues that Strawson’s dilemma overlooks a third type of emergence, found in C. D. Broad’s historical emergentism, where the emergent property depends only partially on the fundamental level via fundamental laws of nature (nomism). Under this view, emergent properties require both the base level and trans-ordinal laws, making emergence coherent and possible. The paper concludes that Strawson’s argument does not refute emergentism.