Panpsychism without Subjectivity? A Brief Commentary on Sam Coleman’s ‘Mental Chemistry ’ and ‘The Real Combination Problem’

and I agree with him, because Panpsychism offers a theoretically elegant (even if somehow radical) way of handling the hard problem of consciousness within a moderate physicalist image of the world. If one considers experience as a fundamental property on a par with fundamental physical properties, then there are only two theoretical options: Either experience is a strongly emergent property of certain complex structures or it is ubiquitous. 1 So if one wishes to avoid dealing with the problem of how the experiential magically emerges from the non-experiential, Panpsychism seems to be the only option. However, with Panpsychism, philosophers can easily get their fingers burnt by touching on the Combination Problem — as does Coleman himself in his attempt to solve it. Opponents of Panpsychism present the Combination Problem as quite comparable to the problem of strong emergence. While one 1 I consider Panpsychism or Panexperientialism to be a theory that claims the ubiquity of mental or experiential properties, respectively. Thus, I consider Panpsychism or Panexperientialism not to be about proto-mental or proto-experiential properties. This is mostly because I don’t see much explanatory power in these notions: If proto-mental properties are not mental, then they are physical and the hard problem returns with full force. And if proto-mental properties are in some sense mental, then the concept is delusive because it merely conceals problems with fundamental subjectivity such as those faced in the Combination Problem. In what follows, I will show that Coleman’s position faces similar problems