Consciousness and its Place in Nature

This volume, whose title echoes C.D. Broad's 'The Mind and its Place in Nature' of 80 years ago asks if physicalism entails panpsychism. It consists of a 30-page target paper followed by some 15 responses and a 100-page reply by Galen Strawson. He argues that real physicalism accepts that experiential phenomena are physical phenomena. This means that he is happy to assert that experience is 'just neurons firing' in the case of biological organisms like ourselves. The difficulty arises when materialists are committed to the proposition that 'physical staff is, in itself, in its fundamental nature, something wholly and utterly non-experiential.'

By contrast, Strawson defends the view that experience is a real concrete phenomenon and every real concrete phenomenon is physical. He argues against emergence claiming that 'if it is really true that y is emergent from x it must be the case that y is in some sense wholly dependent on x, so that all features of y trace intelligibly back to x.' Unusually, Strawson finishes in the same position as Sir Arthur Eddington who asserted that 'the stuff of the world is mind-stuff'. However, where he differs is that Eddington pursues his quest into the mystical. This raises a more general problem, that most philosophers are wholly unfamiliar with both mystical and psychical literature, and therefore address the mind-brain issue with a limited range of perception (C.D. Broad's book is a notable exception). The final essay is an impressive piece of work, setting out 36 metaphysical and four epistemological theses, and in reframing Descartes as a fellow panpsychist rather than a substance dualist.