Coleman’s Panqualityism

Philosopher Sam Coleman’s theory of consciousness is Panqualityism, a panprotopsychist form of Russellian monism in which the fundamental basis of the physical world is intrinsically qualitative but not intrinsically conscious, so that phenomenal consciousness arises only when organized qualities are made subjectively available by an awareness-conferring structure such as higher-order representation, thereby recognizing qualia without positing ubiquitous micro-subjects. In other words, what grounds the dispositional structure described by physics is, at least in part, these unexperienced qualities (qualia belonging to no subject), such that phenomenal consciousness comes about not by adding experience to fundamental reality but when an organism becomes suitably aware of organized qualities—awareness being a non-fundamental, broadly cognitive relation. This means, in Coleman's view, phenomenal qualities are irreducible while subjects are reducible (Coleman, 2014, 2015).

Qualities and Consciousness of Qualities

Panqualityism inherits the structuralist premise of Russellian monism (Russell, 1927): physics characterizes the world only relationally and dispositionally, leaving open the intrinsic categorical natures—the quiddities—that realize that structure. Russellian monists propose that these hidden natures are what consciousness consists in or is grounded in, promising to close the explanatory gap "from the inside." Coleman’s proposal, seemingly subtly different but actually radically so, is that those hidden natures are qualities: properties of the same broad kind as the redness, painfulness, warmth, or affective emotions of felt experience encountered in consciousness.

The central distinction is between quality and consciousness of quality. A quality is not yet a phenomenal event; it is only the possible content of such an event. Consciousness requires that such qualities be taken up into a perspectival form of awareness. Thus, panqualityism rejects both standard physicalism and standard panpsychism. Against standard physicalism, Coleman argues that a wholly non-qualitative ontology cannot intelligibly yield the qualitative character of experience. Against panpsychism, he argues that inserting consciousness or subjectivity at the microphysical level does not solve the hardest problem of composition: how many tiny subjects could constitute one macro-subject (Coleman, 2012, 2014, 2017).

Where constitutive panpsychists such as Goff (2017) take the intrinsic natures to be experiential, Coleman, following a line he traces to Russell (1927) and especially to Feigl (1958/1967), takes them to be (less substantively) qualitative: phenomenal-style qualities that are not, in themselves, felt or experienced by anyone or anything. He describes the basic building blocks of the physical world as “qualitative without being yet phenomenally qualitative,” and presents the view as an “enriched form of physicalism” in which physical laws remain intact while physical dispositions logically supervene on fundamental qualities (Coleman, 2015).

This part is standard-gauge panprotopsychism—the fundamental qualities are protophenomenal, categorical ingredients from which consciousness is built, rather than experiences in their own right. Phenomenal consciousness then arises when organized qualities—unexperienced qualia—are made subjectively available by an awareness-conferring structure such as higher-order representation (such as in biological brains), thereby engendering qualia without positing ubiquitous micro-subjects. As Coleman puts it. "That's fine on the standard use of 'qualia', which I argue against, but on my use, nothing engenders them since they are irreducible and non-conscious/non-mental; indeed, they comprise the deep and all-pervading intrinsic nature of physical reality!" (Coleman, personal communication, 2026).

The Combination Problem and the Subject-summing Negative Argument

Coleman's case for panqualityism is largely a negative argument, motivated by a distinctive diagnosis of the combination problem that vexes constitutive panpsychism (Coleman, 2012, 2014). Constitutive panpsychism typically posits micro-phenomenal properties plus micro-subjects to whom they belong—fundamental entities for whom there is something it is like—and must explain how macro-subjects like us are composed from them. Coleman argues that this is incoherent: subjects cannot sum. A subject's point of view is essentially exclusive, unified, and bounded, fixed by its experiences to the exclusion of all others, so combining subjects would require a macro-subject that both has and lacks its constituents' viewpoints, which no genuine composition can deliver. Fundamental qualities, he claims, face no parallel barrier—qualities, unlike subjects, can combine and co-locate—so the remedy is to retain fundamental qualities but discard fundamental subjectivity. Coleman concludes that micro-subjectivity is an “idle wheel”: it adds metaphysical cost without explaining macro-subjectivity. The better strategy is to retain qualities in the micro-ontology while denying that they require subjects. Thus, a robust panpsychist should become, as noted, a neutral monist in which qualities are irreducible and subjects reducible (Coleman, 2014).

Unexperienced Qualities and the Route to Phenomenal Consciousness

On panqualityism, the physical world’s ultimate reality is suffused with qualities that exist unexperienced. The phenomenal qualities of ordinary experience—the felt redness of red, the hurt of pain—are, on this view, the very same qualities; they are only contingently experienced, becoming phenomenally conscious when, and only when, a suitably organized system becomes aware of them. The hard problem's quality-half is thereby pre-empted: one need not conjure qualitative character from a purely structural-dispositional base, because qualitative character is present as the fundamental primitive.

On this view, what remains to be explained is awareness—how some qualities come to be apprehended by a subject—and Coleman treats this as a broadly functional, reductively tractable matter, rather than a further fundamental fact of the ground state. This distinction is what makes panqualityism, for its proponents, (seem) more naturalistically respectable than constitutive panpsychism: nothing experiential is fundamental, only the qualitative.

Coleman stresses that, with Rosenthal's higher-order thought (HOT), he analyzes experience/consciousness in terms of awareness; that is why, he says, accounting for awareness suffices for accounting for experience (Coleman, personal communication, 2026).

Awareness as Quotational Higher-order Thought

Coleman’s positive theory is a two-factor account. The world is constituted by qualities, but consciousness arises only where some structure makes qualities available “for” a subject. Generally following Rosenthal, Coleman favors a higher-order thought (HOT) account: a sensory or qualitative state becomes conscious when suitably represented by a higher-order state. A mind such as ours is not a mere pile of qualities, but a brain-organized qualitative system whose higher-order representational architecture selects, unifies, and bounds some qualities as the contents of one subject’s experience (Coleman, 2017; Rosenthal, 2005). Thus, Coleman's positive account of awareness is his quotational higher-order thought (QHOT) theory (Coleman, 2015).

Coleman stresses that panqualityism, crucially, is non-representational. That's how, he says, it gets to claim to capture acquaintance. Mental quotation, or as Rosenthal calls it, mental splicing, doesn't represent one's mental state to the subject; it merely presents it. There is no intermediary, as on Rosenthal's theory, where all one gets of the mental state is how the HOT represents it as being. On Coleman's view, the very mental state one is aware of is part of the state of awareness (Coleman, personal communication, 2026).
Coleman differs, however, with Rosenthal's HOT theory (Coleman, 2015). Standard higher-order representational theories, he argues, generate the qualities one is aware of within the higher-order state itself, thereby insulating the subject from her own first-order sensory qualities. Instead, a higher-order state should quote—display or frame—a first-order sensory quality, much as a gallery frame displays a painting, forming a composite in which the quality is presented rather than represented. A quoted quality is conscious; an unquoted quality remains non-conscious. The proposal is meant to vindicate the intuition of acquaintance—that we stand in an intimate, direct relation to our sensory qualities—without positing irreducible subjectivity, and to defuse the misrepresentation worries that afflict orthodox higher-order theories. Phenomenal consciousness, on this picture, is organized unexperienced quality plus quotational awareness; "something it is like" just is a quality being displayed to a subject.

This higher-order component is meant to answer several combination problems at once. The subject problem is avoided because panqualityism does not begin with microsubjects. The unity and boundary problems are addressed by the scope of higher-order representation: the qualities targeted together by the relevant higher-order state belong to one field of consciousness, while qualities not so targeted remain outside that subject’s experience. Coleman even suggests a “single very big HOT” at a time, a complex higher-order state encompassing the qualities synchronously experienced by a subject (Coleman, 2017).

While Coleman says he also remains open to a non-reductive account of awareness, like sheer acquaintance, his main headlines, he stresses, are: (i) Qualia are irreducible, and (ii) consciousness is a relation of awareness to one's qualia (Coleman, personal communication, 2026).

Placement, Objections, Status

Critics press several lines. A principal open difficulty is whether the higher-order apparatus can really explain awareness rather than merely correlate with it. Chalmers (2017) objects that reducing awareness omits the distinctive phenomenology of awareness itself; Coleman replies that any such awareness-phenomenology is dubious, rendering the objection inconclusive (Mihálik, 2020). Others grant this yet argue that panqualityism still faces an explanatory gap for the strong, intimate cognitive access we have to qualities (Mihálik, 2020), or that the quotational version implausibly relocates worldly qualities into the subject, motivating a first-order representationalist panqualityism instead (Rosenberg, 2025). The venerable grain problem—reconciling smooth, unified macro-qualities with heterogeneous micro-qualities (Lockwood, 1993)—remains a potential defeater that Coleman addresses through an account of qualitative "mental chemistry" (Coleman, 2012). Naturalistic and broadly physicalist in spirit, the view remains actively contested.

Moreover, back to basics: how do fundamental qualities generate the vast range of macro-qualities, and how do apparently discontinuous micro-qualities produce the smoothness of a visual field, pain, mood, or thought? Coleman proposes a qualitative continuum hypothesis: apparently incommensurable sensory modalities may occupy regions of a larger quality-space, with intermediary qualities unavailable to human experience. A sufficiently rich “intermodal” quality basis might, by recombination, generate the qualitative range familiar to us (Coleman, 2017). He also invokes the possibility of a holistic “quality fabric,” perhaps physically modeled through field or entanglement structures, while treating such links as necessary rather than sufficient for conscious unity (Coleman, 2017).

A recent extension of Coleman’s view is the role of unconscious mentality. He argues that panpsychism tends to conflate mentality with consciousness and therefore struggles to accommodate genuinely unconscious beliefs, desires, emotions, imagery, and content-rich processes. Panqualityism, by contrast, allows qualities themselves to exist unconsciously. Mentality is then an organized “Russellian harmony” of qualities by brains, some conscious and some not, enabling a unified account of conscious and unconscious mental content (Coleman, 2024). Moreover, he argues that denying unconscious mental qualities threatens the causal efficacy of conscious qualities, pushing one toward either epiphenomenalism or the acceptance of unconscious qualitative states (Coleman, 2025).

Coleman’s theory is thus neither illusionist nor panpsychist. It takes phenomenal qualities as real, causally and metaphysically fundamental, but denies that they are intrinsically conscious. Consciousness and subjectivity arise only when organized qualities are related by an awareness-conferring structure, plausibly a higher-order (re)representational relation. This allows panqualityism to claim the advantages of Russellian monism—no brute emergence of quality from the non-qualitative, and no dualist causal requirements—while avoiding the panpsychist inflation of subjects throughout nature (Coleman, 2015, 2017, 2024).

Coleman seeks to avoid misconstrual. He says, "Panqualityism, certainly, does not add experience to fundamental reality, but it does add experience to reality: e.g., by saying that experiencing a quale is a matter of awareness of it implemented, say, by higher-order thought. Experience comes in at the macro-level—humans and non-human animals. Experience is awareness, suitably implemented, of a quale. Some are apt to read me as saying there is experience in the micro, just not for any subject. I don't say that, since experience is always for a subject. What there is in the micro, on panqualityism, are more like potential qualitative contents of experience, which have their quality intrinsically and essentially (and unexperienced). Analogy: on naive realism, redness exists, albeit outside the head, independently of any perceiver or experiencer. I say the same about redness and micro-redness, in respect of its independence of awareness, though I differ in putting the qualia we experience in our heads (when we experience them - panqualityism says the whole world is qualia, evidently). In the micro, to stress, there is a lack of subjects, and, correlatedly, a lack of experience of the qualia. They are just qualitative properties intrinsically like those we experience, experience being an extrinsic affair. This part of my view, qualia/qualities literally without experience, is hard for people to get their heads around" (Coleman, personal communication, 2026).

In sum, panqualityism's distinctive contribution is clear: While it may seem that Coleman relocates the hard problem from the emergence of qualia to the disclosure of already-real qualities to a subject, he states, "The really hard problem is qualities, and those are irreducible" (Coleman, personal communication, 2026).

References

Chalmers, D. J. (2017). The combination problem for panpsychism. In G. Brüntrup & L. Jaskolla (Eds.), Panpsychism: Contemporary Perspectives (pp. 179–214). New York: Oxford University Press.

Coates, P., & Coleman, S. (Eds.). (2015). Phenomenal Qualities: Sense, Perception, and Consciousness. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Coleman, S. (2012). Mental chemistry: Combination for panpsychists. Dialectica, 66(1), 137–166.

Coleman, S. (2014). The real combination problem: Panpsychism, micro-subjects, and emergence. Erkenntnis, 79(1), 19–44.

Coleman, S. (2015). Quotational higher-order thought theory. Philosophical Studies, 172(10), 2705–2733.

Coleman, S. (2017). Panpsychism and neutral monism: How to make up one's mind. In G. Brüntrup & L. Jaskolla (Eds.), Panpsychism: Contemporary Perspectives. New York: Oxford University Press.

Coleman, S. (2019). Natural acquaintance. In J. Knowles & T. Raleigh (Eds.), Acquaintance: New Essays (pp. 49–74). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Coleman, Sam. 2024. “A Panqualityist Manifesto.” In Anthony Freeman and Graham Horswell, eds., Consciousness and Its Place in Nature: Does Physicalism Entail Panpsychism? 2nd ed. Exeter: Imprint Academic.

Coleman, Sam. 2025. “An Argument for Unconscious Mental Qualities.” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 103(1): 216–234.

Feigl, H. (1958/1967). The "Mental" and the "Physical": The Essay and a Postscript. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Goff, P. (2017). Consciousness and Fundamental Reality. New York: Oxford University Press.

Lockwood, M. (1993). The grain problem. In H. Robinson (Ed.), Objections to Physicalism (pp. 271–291). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Mihálik, J. (2020). Panqualityism, awareness and the explanatory gap. Erkenntnis. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-020-00256-x

Rosenberg, H. (2025). First-order representationalist panqualityism. Erkenntnis, 90(2), 695–710.

Russell, B. (1927). The Analysis of Matter. London: Kegan Paul.