Nagel Pansychism Summary Assessment

January 2011 - Second Year - Philosophy of Mind Summary - Pansychism (Nagel) 

Explain why (according to Nagel) one might believe in panpsychism.

Panpsychism is the view that mental substance is fundamental and ubiquitous. Like dualism, panpsychism holds that there are both mental and physical substances that are non reducible (so they are fundamental). Panpsychism differs from dualism is in claiming mental substances are everywhere or omnipresent (ubiquity: the 'pan' in 'panpsychism' means all). It is the ubiquitous part of the claim that seems so bizarre - it would mean all physical components of the universe have mental properties - including things that aren't living organisms, like a rock, and things that are very small, like a cell.

Nagel offers a four premise argument in support of a panpsychic conclusion. The first premise is material composition : living things are complex systems composed of physical matter. This seems reasonable - we have no evidence of any non material constituents. Nagel's second premise is anti-reductivism - a denial that mental states are implied by physical states. This is a denial of accounts such as the identity theory which seek to identify all mental states with physical states. The third premise - anti-eliminativism - is that mental states are real; we cannot analyse mental states (and therefore the mind body problem) away.

The fourth premise is anti-emergence. Anti-emergence is the view that all properties of systems are derived from its constituents and how they are combined (excluding the properties of it in relation to something else). New properties (like consciousness) do not somehow emerge. The anti emergence view holds that properties appearing to emerge reveal an epistemological problem - there must either be constituents we are not aware of, or some undiscovered properties of the constituents we are aware of. If anti-emergence is correct, an appearance of consciousness emerging is due to unknown properties or constituents - such as mental states being fundamental and ubiquitous.

So physical beings are experiencing mental states, and these mental states are neither directly implied from their physical states nor emerging as a result of the complexity of the arrangement of their physical matter. This means that the mental states must have been present in the constituents of the physical matter, and as they have not emerged along some causal chain, they must have been present at the absolute lowest level. Nowhere on the continuum from the smallest possible physical matter (like superstrings, or something even smaller we have not discovered) and the most complex system like human beings can a source of mental matter be located, so it must be present at the lowest possible level.

Nagel does not find panpsychism to be a wholly plausible account for the mind body problem, concluding that it should be added to the list of unacceptable solutions. It is difficult to imagine how it would work, to have the complex mental states of humans comprised of mental properties at the lowest possible level. If the ability to feel sad does not emerge somewhere on the line of complexity, then would a rock or a speck of dust have the ability to feel sad? It seems unintelligible. So the panpsychic account is not now obviously more credulous than at least some of theories denied in the four premises. We could dispute each of the above premises and end up embracing other theories - substance dualism, the identity theory, some kind of theory that denies the reality of mental states, or emergence.