The Intelligibility Of Consciousness And The Mentality Of Fundamental Entities

If we want to fully understand the reality of the world,then it is necessary to explain how consciousness exists.Given the success of science,it seems natural to expect that the explanation of consciousness,like the explanation of entities,e.g.,lightning,can be done by the scientific method which is largely based on physics.However,if the fundamental entities of the world are physical,they cannot possess mental properties since being physical simply means being non-mental.Therefore,in this framework,we can only explain consciousness in terms of the non-mental,so consciousness is a kind of emergent derivative.However,strong emergence is taken to be unintelligible.Unless we admit that consciousness is not intelligible,then we need to find other ways to account for consciousness.The quest for the intelligibility of consciousness has driven some philosophers to embrace anti-emergentism,which asserts that accepting current scientific conclusions does not entail denying the mentality of the fundamental entities.According to this view,what physics carves up is the structure of the world,and hence it’s plausible that the bearer of such structure can possess the categorical nature that makes what it is.Panpsychism holds that consciousness is the categorical nature of fundamental entities,that consciousness is instantiated by them,and that it is their consciousness that constitutes our consciousness.This constitutive account,though intelligible,encounters a variety of essential problems,such as the experience-summing problem,and the subject-summing problem.This puts panpsychism,or any theory that insist on fundamental mentality,in a predicament.But what has led panpsychism to this predicament?And is there any way out?This thesis first discusses the theoretical development from anti-emergentism to panpsychism.It is then argued that when panpsychists claim that fundamental entities also possess consciousness,they do not have a clear idea of what kind of consciousness they want to attribute to these entities,which leads them to treating many non-intrinsic properties of consciousness as intrinsic,and thus presupposing too much unreasonable baggage.For example,the subject-summing problem and the failure of present strategies are due to the panpsychists’ misconception that all consciousness must instantiate unity,and that for anything to be a unity is for it to be not combinable.However,in reality,our consciousness does not have to be unified by a single subject.A more general combination problem also arises for panpsychists who presuppose that lower-layer phenomenal characters are revealed in macro-consciousness.This thesis then offers a proposal about how to find a way out of the current predicament and thereby to open up new theoretical possibilities.Finally,in the search of the intelligibility of consciousness,we can see that what must be investigated sufficiently before attributing mentality to entities is the richness of quality in our own consciousness.