FAQ

1. Doesn’t this imply absurd conclusions, like coffee tables being conscious?

Depending on the baggage the word "consciousness" carries, it may be absurd to think of a coffee table as conscious! But panpsychism doesn’t entail that all things are equally conscious, just that consciousness scales with complexity. On Mørch's reading of IIT and on Roelofs' universalist view, a coffee table’s experience (if any) would be unimaginably rudimentary, akin to a photodiode only being able to distinguish between light and dark. Rich consciousness requires high complexity. 

2. How can a stock market or ecosystem have "subjective experience"?

Phenomenology doesn't necessarily resemble human experience. Just as a bat’s echolocation is inconceivable to us, a market’s "experience" might involve abstract causal interactions, like price fluctuations as "sensations".

3. Doesn’t the China Brain thought experiment disprove group consciousness?

Although the China Brain thought experiment was originally used as an argument against functionalism, the reductio may fail if panpsychism or nesting isn't absurd. If a human group simulating a brain achieves Φ comparable to a biological brain, denying it consciousness is arbitrary, with the "flickering" result from exclusion undermining its plausibility.

4. Isn’t this just panpsychist animism?

Unlike animism, the argument doesn’t attribute agency or human-like intent to CAS. It’s an analytic claim: if consciousness is fundamental (panpsychism) and Φ quantifies its presence (IIT), then CAS qualify.

5. Why assume panpsychism is true? Physicalism hasn’t failed yet!

Currently, physicalism is a majority view among philosophers. One motivation for panpsychism is that physicalism struggles to explain how phenomenal consciousness fits into a universe governed by physical laws. Panpsychism, while controversial, retains the parsimony of a monist view and the empirical support for non-dualist views while offering a positive account of matter's intrinsic nature and consciousness's place in the universe.

So although arguments against physicalism from Mørch, Chalmers, Russell, etc. are not knockdown arguments that show physicalism is false and strictly necessitate dual-aspect monism, they do support the idea that panpsychism is at least as promising a theory. Given the choice, the combination problem seems easier to approach than the hard problem.