Consciousness, Revelation, and Confusion

Abstract

Critics have charged constitutive panpsychism with inconsistency.Panpsychists reject physicalism for its seeming inability to explainconsciousness. In making this argument, they commit themselves tothe idea of "revelation": that we know, in some especially direct way,the nature of consciousness. Yet they then attribute properties to ourconsciousness---like being constituted out of trillions of simplerexperiential parts---that conflict with how it seems introspectively.This seems to pose a dilemma: either revelation is false, andphysicalism remains intact, or revelation is true, and constitutivepanpsychists are hoist by their own petard. But this is too simplistic.Constitutive panpsychists can say that our minds contain innumerablephenomenal states that are "confused" with one another: immediatelypresent to introspection only en masse, not individually. Acceptingrevelation does not require ignoring the attentional, conceptual, andinterpretive limitations of introspection, and these familiarlimitations remove the tension between panpsychism and relevation.