Panpsychism’s Combination Problem Is a Problem for Everyone

Mendelovici, Angela

doi:10.4324/9781315717708-25

Cited by 17 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 34 publications

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“…Later authors have correctly flagged that these combination issues often apply to other ToCs as well, at least insofar as they wish to explain in a physically grounded fashion the complex, unified, bound macrophenomenology that humans typically experience (Mendelovici, 2019). Indeed Johnson (2016) adopts the same terminology in Principia Qualia, in which the boundary problem is one of eight subproblems of consciousness that all ToCs need to address: "how to determine the correct boundaries of a conscious system in a principled way."…”

Section: Rosenberg's Formulation Of the Boundary Problemmentioning

confidence: 99%

Don’t forget the boundary problem! How EM field topology can address the overlooked cousin to the binding problem for consciousness

Gómez-Emilsson

Percy

2023

Front. Hum. Neurosci.

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The boundary problem is related to the binding problem, part of a family of puzzles and phenomenal experiences that theories of consciousness (ToC) must either explain or eliminate. By comparison with the phenomenal binding problem, the boundary problem has received very little scholarly attention since first framed in detail by Rosengard in 1998, despite discussion by Chalmers in his widely cited 2016 work on the combination problem. However, any ToC that addresses the binding problem must also address the boundary problem. The binding problem asks how a unified first person perspective (1PP) can bind experiences across multiple physically distinct activities, whether billions of individual neurons firing or some other underlying phenomenon. To a first approximation, the boundary problem asks why we experience hard boundaries around those unified 1PPs and why the boundaries operate at their apparent spatiotemporal scale. We review recent discussion of the boundary problem, identifying several promising avenues but none that yet address all aspects of the problem. We set out five specific boundary problems to aid precision in future efforts. We also examine electromagnetic (EM) field theories in detail, given their previous success with the binding problem, and introduce a feature with the necessary characteristics to address the boundary problem at a conceptual level. Topological segmentation can, in principle, create exactly the hard boundaries desired, enclosing holistic, frame-invariant units capable of effecting downward causality. The conclusion outlines a programme for testing this concept, describing how it might also differentiate between competing EM ToCs.

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Section: Rosenberg's Formulation Of the Boundary Problemmentioning

confidence: 99%

Don’t forget the boundary problem! How EM field topology can address the overlooked cousin to the binding problem for consciousness

Gómez-Emilsson

Percy

2023

Front. Hum. Neurosci.

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“…214-220) In more recent work, she has suggested that we may be cognitively closed to understanding how the different aspects of experiences combine. (Mendelovici, 2019a) 5 It does not matter, as far as the argument of this article is concerned, whether the relevant properties are attributed to experiences themselves, acts of experiencing or (as on Nida-Rümelin's, 2011 view) subjects of experience. 6 Many theorists who hold non-relational accounts of perceptual experience are non-relationalists about intentionality in general (Kriegel, 2007(Kriegel, , 2008(Kriegel, , 2011Mendelovici, 2018;Nida-Rümelin, 2011).…”

Section: Adverbialism and The Many-property Objectionmentioning

confidence: 94%

Beyond adverbialism: A new non‐relational theory of perceptual experience

Gow

2021

Mind & Language

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All non‐relational views of perceptual experience face Jackson's famous many‐property problem. I argue that the original problem, and the existing responses to it, have focused too closely on the controversial terminology for which adverbialism is best known. We can also direct Jackson's many‐property problem explicitly onto the adverbialist's metaphysics, generating a new challenge. The responses contemporary adverbialists and non‐relationalists have made to the original objection are not successful against this challenge. We need a new non‐relational account. I sketch an outline of a new theory, and motivate the view by explaining how it can respond successfully to this additional challenge.

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“…Similarly, we can imagine an 'RQM zombie world' in which the relative facts associated with the micro-observers are the same as in an ordinary RQM world, but there are no macro-observers and no macroscopic relative facts. This seems at least conceivable, for as Mendelovici puts it, 'it is not clearly intelligible why a mere collection of subjects, however organized, should yield a new subject ' [29]. And if it is the case that no arrangement of micro-observers necessitates the existence of a corresponding macro-observer, then macro-observers cannot be literally identical to collections of micro-observers -something further must be added to explain the presence of a macro-observer.…”

Section: Subject Combinationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…such that 'when microexperiences combine to yield macroexperiences, they fuse together and cease to exist independently' [29]. This could proceed by invoking quantum holism [38,39] in order to say that any systems sharing entanglement should in fact be regarded as a single entity: 'A panpsychist might speculate that such an entangled system, perhaps at the level of the brain or one of its subsystems, has microphenomenal properties.…”

Section: Identitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Information is Physical: Cross-Perspective Links in Relational Quantum Mechanics

Adlam¹,

Rovelli²

2023

Philosophy of Physics

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Panpsychism is a theory of phenomenal consciousness which suggests that every physical system possesses some form of consiousness. One particularly important issue for panpsychism is the 'combination problem,' referring to the fact that panpsychism must offer some account of how the consciousnesses associated with individual fundamental particles combine to give rise to higher-level consciousnesses associated with beings like us.Relational quantum mechanics (RQM) is a proposed solution to the quantum measurement problem, originated by Carlo Rovelli. A central feature of RQM is that it attributes 'relative facts' to every physical system, and therefore RQM faces a problem somewhat similar to the panpsychist combination problem: it must offer some account of how the relative facts associated with individual fundamental particles are related to higher-level relative facts associated with beings like us. In this article, I use the existing literature on the panpsychist combination problem as a starting point to think about how to address this structurally similar combination problem in RQM.I begin in section 1 with an introduction to relational quantum mechanics. Then in section 2 I discuss some similarities and differences between RQM's combination problem and panpsychism's combination problem.Finally section 3 reviews a number of proposed solutions to panpsychism's combination problem, and assesses the prospects for a similar solution in the context of RQM. I will argue that overall the prospects for solving RQM's combination problem look better for RQM+CPL, the alternative version of RQM proposed in ref [1], than for orthodox versions of RQM.

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Panpsychism’s Combination Problem Is a Problem for Everyone

Cited by 17 publications

References 34 publications

Don’t forget the boundary problem! How EM field topology can address the overlooked cousin to the binding problem for consciousness

Don’t forget the boundary problem! How EM field topology can address the overlooked cousin to the binding problem for consciousness

Beyond adverbialism: A new non‐relational theory of perceptual experience

Information is Physical: Cross-Perspective Links in Relational Quantum Mechanics

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