Conscious Subjects, Conscious Unity, and Five Arguments for Anti-Combination

This chapter looks at five arguments that have been advanced to show that minds cannot combine (under the heading of the “combination problem for panpsychism”) and considers the options for addressing them. They are the subject-summing argument, the unity argument, the privacy argument, the boundary argument, and the incompatible contexts argument. All of these arguments, under scrutiny, turn out to rest on assumptions either about the metaphysics of subjects of experience or about the unity of consciousness, so this chapter contains some in-depth examination of these two topics. For both topics, there is room for a range of plausible but conflicting views, and so the chapter outlines a plan to sketch three different theories of mental combination, starting from different assumptions about subjects and unity.