2023 Essay Competition

The winner of the essay prize on the topic "Is Consciousness Fundamental?" is by Dr. Yanssel Garcia (Assistant Professor of Philosophy, University of Nebraska-Omaha), for his paper, "Against the Irreducibility of Subjects." Dr. Garcia's paper will appear in an open-access special issue of the Journal of Consciousness Studies that will feature papers from the workshop at Marist College in September of 2023. We will link to this journal issue when it is available online. The abstract for Dr. Garcia's paper is below. Congrats to Dr. Garcia!

Against the Irreducibility of Subjects

Panpsychism has a problem. We are subjects of experience, and according to panpsychism, we are also somehow the combination of the smaller subjects of experience that comprise us. But we have a seemingly unshakeable intuition that we are irreducible. If this is so, then combination is impossible, and panpsychism fails. The question, then, is: why believe that subjects are irreducible? A number of arguments have been offered in defense of the irreducibility of subjects. I consider five. The primary purpose of this paper is to show that none of them clearly succeed. For each argument, at least one premise is either false, likely false, or in serious need of defense. I end the paper by attempting to nudge us away from the intuition that we are neither reducible nor combinable through the use of a fanciful thought experiment.