On Galen Strawson's defense of panpsychism

I'm coming to the party a bit late here (the podcast was posted back in May), but I thought I'd comment on Galen Strawson's defense of panpsychism on Philosophy Bites.

Strawson admits that he has no argument for panpsychism, "just a great big intuition", but it's an intuition I share. He asks, "How could experience arise just from putting wholly non-experiential things together in a certain way or in a certain pattern?" Strawson is a physicalist. Physicalists think conscious beings such as us consist solely of matter. But this raises a question: How can you get conscious experience just by combining mindless bits of matter in a certain way?

Strawson's solution? Deny that bits of matter are mindless: "I think there must be something it's like to be, say, an electron." In a sense, of course, this solution does get rid of the problem we just mentioned. If bits of matter aren't in fact mindless, then the question "How can you get conscious experience just by combining mindless bits of matter?" doesn't arise.

Unfortunately, I don't think Strawson's panpsychist solution makes the existence of human and animal consciousness any less mysterious. Suppose every atom in my body has its own experiences. Now we face a question: How can you get my experiences just by combining my atoms' experiences in a certain way? After all, my experiences are not the sum of the experiences of all the atoms in my brain. What it's like to be me is not what it's like to be this atom plus what it's like to be that atom plus what it's like to be this other atom, etc.

Perhaps my point will be clearer if I make it in the following way. I have no idea what it's like to be an atom. The experiences of an atom (if atoms do indeed have experiences) form no part of my experience. It would be totally false to say that the thoughts going through my mind are the thoughts of one atom in my brain plus the thoughts of another atom in my brain plus the thoughts of yet another atom in my brain, etc. Thus, even if we attribute experiences to the atoms in my brain, we bring ourselves no closer to understanding where my experiences come from.

In my opinion, the real mystery about human and animal consciousness is this: How can you get consciousness just by combining things in a certain way? Giving those things their own consciousness doesn't solve the mystery.

Update 10/28/12: As usual, I come up with a great (well, in my opinion, at least) philosophical argument, only to learn that someone smarter than me has thought of it already. See Philip Goff's article "Experiences Don't Sum" in Galen Strawson, et al, Consciousness and Its Place in Nature, ed. Anthony Freeman.