Problem of consciousness in the contemporary philosophy of mind: A defense of panpsychism

Problem of consciousness as it is discussed in the contemporary philosophy of mind, also known as the hard problem, is the problem of why and how brain produces consciousness. Why there is consciousness at all and how it relates to brain? Various metaphysical approaches have advanced to answer these questions, most notably materialistic and dualistic ones. Among these approaches which are reductionists failed to reduce consciousness to brain (the problem of qualia) and others which are non-reductionists failed to establish a causal relation between consciousness and brain (the problem of mental causation). Panpsychism is both reductionist and non-reductionist. Because in panpsychism reducibility of human consciousness to brain is bound up with the condition of thinking consciousness as a fundamental element of reality; namely, to emerge human experience at the biological level, experientiality, hence consciousness in certain form and degree must be present at the chemical and physical levels. But explaining what role do micro experiences play to produce macro experiences can be a problem (the combination problem) for panpsychism. So, in this study we tried to show that when it is understood as a physicalistic and monistic approach (dual-aspect physicalist panexperientialism) panpsychism is more preferable position to face the problem of consciousness in comparison with others. We claimed that the existence of human consciousness can be made intelligible only if matter is accepted as experiential in and of itself and put forward the idea that mentality and physciality constitute a dualism only in an epistemological sense. In this view, for there is no causal relation between brain and consciousness the problem of mental causation goes away and with transforming the qualia problem to the combination problem, an insurmountable problem is restored to a theoretically tractable form. On this basis we argued that there are good reasons to embrace panpsychism and when we considered the pros and cons of all metaphysical approaches it is panpsychism which brings the best explanation. Finally we exemplified some of the scientifically and ethically favorable consequences of accepting panpsychism.