Emergent Panpsychism

Panpsychism is the view that all physical things have, besides their physical properties, also psychological or phenomenal properties. The psychological properties are commonly assumed to be intrinsic. The idea is that physics only tells us about the structural and relational properties of things, but remains silent on what it is -- intrinsically -- that has all these dispositions and stands in all these relations to other things. So if we want to attach fundamental psychological properties to electrons (for example), we may well say that they are those physically unknown intrinsic properties: electrons ultimately are pain (say). But that's not essential to what I mean by "panpsychism". If you say that all physical entities have fundamental and irreducible, but extrinsic psychological properties, that's also panpsychism.

Emergent panpsychism is the view that only certain aggregates of physical particles have basic psychological properties. For instance, one might hold that while electrons, protons and neutrons do not have psychological properties, atoms inevitably do. The psychological properties of atoms are as basic and primitive and inexplicable as are the basic psychological properties of electrons on the more traditional (and more "pan") version of panpsychism.

Other versions of emergent panpsychism are more restrictive (and even less "pan"). Thus one might say that only carbon atoms have basic psychological properties, or only carbon atoms in benzene rings, or only the benzene rings themselves. Or one might say that it's only certain microphysical or chemical processes that have basic psychological properties, say, condensation reactions between molecules. Or C-fiber firing. Still, the psychological properties are assumed to be basic and inexplicable: the condensation reaction isn't, say, pain in the way in which it is a condensation reaction, namely by having certain physical and structural properties (like being a process in which two organic molecules combine and some water is eliminated), which are the defining criteria for condensation reactions. No, the condensation reaction is pain simply because the biological process that has all these physical properties is, somehow, really pain. (Or perhaps it is pain because it has certain other psychological properties, like feeling like pain. But then it has these other psychological properties not because it has physical and structural properties in terms of which they can be defined.)

I certainly don't want to count classical panpsychism as a physicalist position. But where shall I draw the line? At the other end of my spectrum lies type-B physicalism. Should I conclude that type-B physicalism is also not a kind of physicalism? I could accept that. But I guess type-B physicalists wouldn't like it. So where would they draw the line, and why?

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