Galen Strawson: Panpsychism & Consciousness

Biography

Galen John Strawson was born in 1952, the son of the philosopher P. F. Strawson, one of the most influential figures in twentieth-century analytic philosophy. Galen studied at the University of Oxford, where he earned his undergraduate degree, and at the University of Oxford and University College London, where he completed his doctorate. He has taught at the University of Oxford, where he was a fellow of St John's and Jesus Colleges, and he is currently professor of philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin. He is known for the uncompromising clarity and the willingness to defend unfashionable positions — panpsychism, the denial of free will, a "thin" view of the self — that have made him one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary philosophy of mind.

Historical Background

Strawson's philosophy of mind is a rebellion against the evasions of the physicalist mainstream. Since the 1960s, the dominant strategy in the philosophy of mind has been to defend physicalism while denying that consciousness poses a special problem: consciousness is nothing over and above brain activity; the felt character of experience is either identical to, or eliminable in favor of, physical facts. Strawson argues that this strategy is intellectually dishonest. The reality of experience — the fact that there is something it is like to feel pain or see red — is the most certain thing we know, more certain than any theory of physics. A physicalism that cannot accommodate experience is no physicalism at all.

His positive proposal, developed in the 2006 paper "Realistic Monism: Why Physicalism Entails Panpsychism," is that the physical must be reconceived to include the experiential: matter, at its fundamental level, has experiential properties in addition to its structural and relational properties. This is panpsychism — the view that experience is a fundamental feature of reality — and Strawson is its most prominent contemporary philosophical defender. He has also been one of the most forceful contemporary critics of free will, arguing in Freedom and Belief (1986) and many later papers that free will in the strong sense is impossible whether or not determinism is true.

Core Ideas

The Certainty of Experience

Strawson's starting point is epistemological: conscious experience is the most secure datum we have. The existence of experience is not something to be inferred or explained away; it is given. Any theory of reality that fails to accommodate the reality of experience — however elegant its physics — is for that reason false. This is the "realism" of realistic monism: a full-blooded commitment to the reality of the experiential, in contrast to the deflationary or eliminativist moves of many physicalists.

Realistic Monism and Panpsychism

Realistic monism is the view that (1) there is only one kind of stuff in reality (monism), and (2) this stuff is experiential at its base (realism). Since the physical world is the only world there is, and since consciousness exists and cannot arise from nothing, the fundamental constituents of the physical world must themselves have experiential properties: this is "panpsychism," or more precisely "panexperientialism" — the view that experience is everywhere in nature, in some form, at the fundamental level. Strawson argues that panpsychism is not a luxury or a mystical speculation but the only option for a monist who takes experience seriously. He does not claim that fundamental particles are conscious in the way we are; he claims that their intrinsic nature includes experiential character, and that the complex experience of organisms arises from the combination of simpler experiential states.

The Combination Problem

Strawson is candid about the difficulties of panpsychism, especially the combination problem: how do the experiential states of fundamental particles combine into the unified experience of a human being? Unlike many panpsychists, Strawson thinks the combination problem may be insoluble — experience, he suggests, may be atomistic, with each basic experiential event a distinct "experiential episode," and the apparent unity of consciousness a construction. This willingness to press his own position to its most radical conclusions is characteristic of his philosophy.

The Impossibility of Free Will

Strawson's argument against free will is famous for its simplicity and force. In "The Impossibility of Moral Responsibility," he argues that we cannot be ultimately morally responsible for our actions because we are not ultimately responsible for what we are. To be ultimately responsible for an action, one would have to be responsible for one's character — for the way one is — but one's character is the product of heredity, environment, and prior actions, none of which one ultimately chose. Any attempt to ground ultimate responsibility leads to an infinite regress. Strawson concludes that free will in the strong ("ultimate") sense is impossible — not just under determinism but under any metaphysics. His conclusion, developed in Freedom and Belief, is that we can neither believe in free will with intellectual honesty nor stop living as if we had it — a deep tension in the human condition.

The Thin Self and the Experience of Time

In his work on the self, Strawson defends a "thin" conception: the self is not a unified persisting entity but may be understood as the "subject of experience" at a time, an entity that exists from moment to moment without necessarily persisting through time. He argues, controversially, that the "pearl view" of the self — the view that the self is not continuous but a sequence of discrete experiential episodes — is both philosophically defensible and phenomenologically accurate for many people. His essay "The Self" and his book Selves: An Essay in Revisionary Metaphysics (2009) develop this view. He has also written on the experience of time, arguing in The Secret Connexion and related papers for a "motion" view of the experience of passage.

Major Works

Freedom and Belief (1986) presents the argument against free will. Mental Reality (1994) argues for the primacy of experience in the philosophy of mind. The Secret Connexion: Causation, Realism, and David Hume (1989) is a study of causation and Hume. Real Materialism and Other Essays (2008) collects his most important papers, including "Realistic Monism." Selves: An Essay in Revisionary Metaphysics (2009) develops the thin view of the self. The Subject of Experience (2017) gathers his essays on consciousness, the self, and experience.

Philosophical Influence

Strawson has been a decisive figure in the revival of panpsychism in mainstream analytic philosophy. His 2006 paper, together with the work of David Chalmers and Thomas Nagel, made panpsychism respectable again — a live option in the debate about consciousness rather than a curiosity. His insistence that physicalists either accommodate experience or abandon the claim to be physicalists has forced a generation of philosophers to take the explanatory gap seriously.

His argument against free will is one of the most discussed arguments in contemporary moral philosophy, a standard reference in the debate over responsibility, and a permanent challenge to compatibilism. His work on the self has influenced the growing literature on the metaphysics of the self, and his insistence on taking the first-person data of experience seriously has resonated with the phenomenologically and contemplatively informed approaches to consciousness. He is that rare philosopher: rigorous enough to satisfy his peers, and radical enough to change the terms of the debate.

Related Concepts

Strawson's realistic monism is the most prominent contemporary defense of panpsychism in the philosophy of mind. His argument against free will bears on what is free will and on the illusion of free will. His thin conception of the self connects to what is the self and to the bundle theory of self, and his account of experience engages qualia and the hard problem of consciousness. Strawson's central demand — that any philosophy of mind must start from the reality of experience and never look away — remains the standard against which deflationary theories of consciousness must measure themselves.