Strawson's Realistic Monism and Real Materialism (Panpsychism)

Philosopher Galen Strawson espouses an all-pervading materialism that encompasses all mental and physical properties and objects. It is his kind of materialism, “Real Materialism,” and his kind of monism, "Realistic Monism," as he calls them (Strawson, 2006). "I'm attracted to the thing-monist view," he says, "according to which the universe is a single thing in some non-trivial sense" (Strawson, 2020). His principal thesis is "the primacy of panpsychism" and he claims "compelling reasons for favoring panpsychism above all other positive substantive proposals about the fundamental nature of concrete reality" (Strawson, 2017). He calls panpsychism “the most parsimonious, plausible and indeed ‘hard-nosed’ position that any physicalist who is remotely realistic about the nature of reality can take up in the present state of our knowledge” (Strawson, 2008, 2011). Conversely, he calls the denial of “conscious experience, the subjective character of experience, the ‘what-it-is-like’ of experience,” in his words, “the silliest claim ever made” (Strawson, 2018).

In his most recent statement, Strawson recasts the position as "psychist physicalism"—physicalism in the original, non-metaphysical Vienna Circle sense, joined to the metaphysical proposal that the intrinsic nature of all concrete reality is experiential—and adds a second, explicitly more speculative proposal, inspired by the Rig Veda, that desire or affect is primordial in all experience and perhaps in all concrete being (Strawson, 2027).

Reclaiming "Materialism"

Strawson deconstructs the concept and use of the term "materialism," showing that, historically, it had nothing to do with denial of the existence of consciousness, but rather that consciousness is wholly material. He laments that the words "materialism" and "physicalism" have come to be treated as synonymous and to involve denial of the existence of consciousness. It is, he says, ironic that these two words have "been used to name a position in the philosophy of mind that directly rejects the heart of materialism and is certainly false" (Strawson, 2011).

His newest work adds to the historical record. Panpsychism, he notes, is "classically, a materialist view, and has nothing to do with beliefs about souls." As early as 1905, Gerard Heymans was weary of hearing that his "psychic monism" was only "a disguised materialism" (Heymans, 1905). C. A. Strong called his own panpsychism "only a revised materialism" (Strong, 1930), Durant Drake found "no legitimate antithesis between the two terms" (Drake, 1911), and Bertrand Russell held that "from the standpoint of philosophy the distinction between physical and mental is superficial and unreal" (Russell, 1927). Because "panpsychism" now names too many incompatible positions—Thomas Nagel treats it as "dualism all the way down" (Nagel, 2024), and on a broad reading Berkeley, Hegel, and all idealists qualify as panpsychists—Strawson prefers "psychism." Berkeley is no psychist, since he holds that immaterial souls are not made of experience. Psychism is a species of stuff monism with a strong form, on which the stuff of concrete reality is wholly experiential, and a weak form, on which it is at least partly so (Strawson, 2027).

Real Physicalism, Not "Physics-alism"

Strawson defines physicalism to be the view that "every real, concrete phenomenon in the universe is … physical" (Strawson, 2006). It is a view about the actual universe, and he assumes it is true. But then comes the "Strawsonian Twist."

What does it take to be a "realistic physicalist" or a "real physicalist?" He makes one thing absolutely clear: "You're certainly not a realistic physicalist, you're not a real physicalist, if you deny the existence of the phenomenon whose existence is more certain than the existence of anything else: experience, 'consciousness', conscious experience, 'phenomenology', experiential 'what-it's-likeness', feeling, sensation, explicit conscious thought as we have it and know it at almost every waking moment" (Strawson, 2006).

All materialists hold that every concrete phenomenon in the universe is physical, and they are neither sensible nor realistic, Strawson says, if they have any inclination to deny the concrete reality of mental phenomena like experiential phenomena. He concludes by taking no prisoners: "Full recognition of the reality of experience, then, is the obligatory starting point for any remotely realistic version of physicalism … It is the obligatory starting point for any theory that can legitimately claim to be 'naturalistic' because experience is itself the fundamental given natural fact" (Strawson, 2008).

Strawson's latest formulation ties real physicalism to the Vienna Circle. To be a physicalist in this original sense is simply to hold that everything that concretely exists "has a physics description," a close paraphrase of Moritz Schlick (Schlick, 1935). This makes no claim about the intrinsic, non-structural nature of anything; "it's simply a remark about the scope—the reach—of a certain powerful system of theoretical description." The members of the Vienna Circle were outright realists about experience. Against their view, Strawson sets "physicalism," the "obviously false" view that physics descriptions can capture everything about reality, which, by denying experience, becomes a metaphysical doctrine. As Russell put it, physics "does not tell us anything as to the intrinsic character of this material" (Russell, 1927).

To say that every pain has a full physics description is not to say that physics conveys anything of what pain feels like; the same holds for "pain or gold, amusement or hydrochloric acid." Strawson counts Quine among the real physicalists: "I have been accused of denying consciousness, but I am not conscious of having done so. … Whatever it precisely may be, consciousness is a state of the body, a state of nerves" (Quine, 1987). By contrast, he judges most self-styled identity theorists of the later twentieth century "fake identity theorists": instead of identifying experiential goings-on with physical goings-on, they denied that experience really existed, because they had assumed, question-beggingly, that to be physical is to be non-experiential. And he asks the illusionist: "Is the cognitive illusion of pain (say) painful? Does it hurt?" If it does, it is not an illusion; if it does not, "no one has ever really suffered in any way" (Strawson, 2027).

To block the everyday connotations of "physical," Strawson now writes ψ for experiential being of any kind, however primitive, ψ* for "interesting," biologically evolved experience like our own, and χ for concrete reality, welcoming χ's resemblance to X, "a traditional marker of the unknown." He marks with an asterisk each point at which he knowingly departs from analytic-philosophy orthodoxy (Strawson, 2027).

As a "real physicalist," in his definition, Strawson holds that the mental/experiential is physical, and he is happy to say, along with many other physicalists, that experience is "really just neurons firing," at least in the case of biological organisms like ourselves. But when he says these words, he means something radically different from what almost all physicalists mean. He does not mean that all characteristics of what is going on, in the case of experience, can be described by physics and neurophysiology (or any non-revolutionary extensions of them). His claim is stunningly different. It's that experiential phenomena "just are" physical, so that there is a lot more to neurons than physics and neurophysiology account for (or can account for). No one who disagrees with this, he says, is a "real physicalist." This is Strawson's challenge.

Stuff, Quality, and Power

Strawson's monism rests on three assumptions he flags as "chokepoints" for orthodox analytic philosophy (Strawson, 2027). Power being is nothing over and above categorical being. The stuff of the world is of a single fundamental kind; indeed there is "no possible good argument for stuff dualism, given the respects in which we are (irremediably) ignorant of the nature of χ." And since the ability to interact causally suffices for sameness of substance, this stuff monism "immediately rules out any kind of traditional interactionist dualism," and property dualism with it, the view on which "there can be one kind of fundamental substance and two fundamentally different kinds of intrinsic properties." And there is nothing more to an object than its qualities, no "bare substratum": "Sein ist Sosein" (“Being is Such-ness” or “Existence is Essence”). Together, these make "kind monism" or "quality monism" as good a name as "stuff monism." Stuff monism—one fundamental kind of stuff—is distinct from the thesis that there is only one thing; Strawson's attraction to thing-monism—"I'm attracted to the thing-monist view," he says, "according to which the universe is a single thing in some non-trivial sense"—is thus a further, separable commitment (Strawson, 2020, 2027).

Radical Emergence and Three Options

Strawson’s asserts that physicalism (or materialism^[1]), that is, "real physicalism" (or "real materialism"), entails panexperientialism or panpsychism, on one assumption: it entails panpsychism given the impossibility of "radical" emergence. Moreover, given that all physical stuff is energy, in one form or another, we may suppose that "all energy is an experience-involving phenomenon" (Strawson, 2003, 2006, 2011, 2020, 2021).

Strawson happily admits, "This sounded crazy to me for a long time, but I am quite used to it, now that I know that there is no alternative …" It may also sound odd to use "physical" to characterize mental phenomena like experiential phenomena, but real physicalism, realistic physicalism, entails panpsychism, and whatever problems are raised by this fact, he exhorts, are problems a real physicalist must face.

Strawson now sets out three options for real physicalists (Strawson, 2027). Radical Emergentism holds that physical stuff is fundamentally non-experiential and that experience emerges from it by "radical emergence": the emergence of one kind of thing Y from another kind of thing X "which is of such a kind that nothing about X can be appealed to in order to explain the emergence of Y; or is at the very least of such a kind that nothing about X is sufficient to explain the emergence of Y." Such emergence is appealed to nowhere else in science, creates the classical hard problem, and, insofar as it tends toward epiphenomenalism, ceases to be physicalist. It cannot be refuted by argument, but the objection is ancient: "it is impossible to conceive that ever bare incogitative matter should produce a thinking intelligent being" (Locke, 1689).

Weak Psychism, or "archepsychism," holds that experiential qualities are among the fundamental qualities of all physical stuff; it removes the classical hard problem but risks becoming a form of dualism. Strong Psychism, which Strawson favors "as the view that we have most reason to accept in the present state of our knowledge," holds that "all physical stuff—everything whose structural-relational nature physics detects and describes—is ψ," the stuff of stars and interstellar dust clouds as well as brains. T. L. S. Sprigge put it well: the "in itself" of the physical consists in "innumerable mutually interacting centres of experience," our own consciousness being "a 'high-grade' instance" (Sprigge, 1983). Why, Strawson asks, persist in assuming that the fundamental nature of concrete reality is non-experiential, when there is no evidence that anything non-experiential exists, and when the only thing we know for certain about concrete reality is that some of it is experiential? Strong Psychism is "the simplest view given the known facts … the most uncompromisingly tough-minded view."

Energy and Reality as It Is in Itself

Following Werner Heisenberg, Strawson takes energy to be not a property but "the substance from which … all things are made" (Heisenberg, 1958), and Strong Psychism proposes that Energy is experience. Our own experiences are already concrete instances of it; the proposal is only that the rest is of the same fundamental nature. To the objection that something experiential cannot have spin or charge, Strawson replies that the objection "lacks any possible evidential support": it is no harder for experiential stuff to have the observable characteristics that lead us to speak of spin, charge, and nucleosynthesis than for non-experiential stuff to have them. Experience, on this view, is "live, occurrent, dynamical, concrete stuff." Nor does experience reveal all its power being: the neural stuff that constitutes the experience of London's inhabitants at any moment would, fed into an optimal fusion machine, power London for a considerable time.

The decisive point is that in having experience we are directly acquainted with physical reality as it is in itself—with the brain as it is in itself, not as it appears to physics or the neurosurgeon. In Roy Wood Sellars's words, "Here, and here alone, are we … on the inside of reality" (Sellars, 1932). To deny this, Strawson writes, "is to show that one is not a serious participant in the so-called mind–body debate." When nature has shown herself to us "in her nakedness and without disguise in the form of our thoughts," Morton Prince wrote, we have "mistaken her for a supernatural goblin" (Prince, 1885).

Strawson endorses Strong's advice, "Do not try too hard to imagine sentience" (Strong, 1934). He regards the so-called combination problem as having "very little force," and holds that a field-theoretic conception of the physical points toward "some suitably secular version of 'cosmopsychism'," on which the universe is in some unimaginable sense a single field of experience—a view he concedes is likely to alienate even those otherwise willing to entertain psychism (Strawson, 2027).

Primordial Desire

Strawson's second proposal takes its cue from the creation hymn of the Rig Veda: "Desire arose in the beginning, which was the first seed of mind" (Rig Veda 10.129.4)—a proposal "inspired (but no more than inspired)" by the hymn. "Mind," in his narrow usage, requires not just experience but interesting experience, with cognitive capacity and memory. Experience can exist without Mind, as a primitive stream without retention, and no level of cognitive functionality suffices for Mind: frontier AI models that lack experience behave with cognitive sophistication, "but their existence doesn't involve the existence of Mind." "Desire" is affect in the broadest sense, occurrent pro-or-con valence, which Strawson holds can exist without any capacity for agency—one can conceive of a creature wholly incapable of action yet possessed of powerful likes and dislikes (Strawson, 1994); "Desire*" is desire fused with agency and conatus, "any sort of mental push or oomph."

On the weaker reading of the hymn, all experience, however primitive, involves Desire. This is not a conceptual truth, and Jaak Panksepp and Mark Solms might accept it "even if they rejected any form of psychism." On a second reading, Desire drives the evolution of intelligence, since intelligence is a means of getting what is desired. On the grandest reading, an old idea running from the Greeks through Spinoza, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche, Desire is a feature of all concrete being; given Strong Psychism, this follows from the weaker reading. Strawson initially withholds the stronger claim that all concrete being involves Desire*, since Desire may have preceded Desire*. He finds support in the work of Antonio Damasio, Panksepp, and Solms, noting that Nagel credits Solms with "a persuasive case that the core of conscious experience is not perception or cognition but affect" (Nagel, 2024), and suggests that because Energy has intrinsic push, "when we look for intrinsic push in ψ we find—it may be said—D*."

He adds an argument from asymmetry. If primordial experience were affectless, affect would have to emerge from it radically; "we have, therefore, strong reason to suppose that primordial ψ is already D, already affect-involving." Likewise, purely cognitive experience seems possible, but Desire* could not develop from it without radical emergence, so the very existence of Desire* argues that it is primordial, at least in this universe: "Not even God could create an Energy-less and hence D*-less universe. I wouldn't be at all surprised" (Strawson, 2027). Strawson marks the status of these claims plainly. The paper is "a free fantasia"; he will "argue for—or perhaps simply talk up" primordial Desire; and of the thesis that primordial experience is already Desire* he says, "I'm not particularly concerned to argue for it. It's offered as … an interesting proposal." He allows that the universality of Desire may lapse in certain meditative states or in nibbāna, noting further reasons for doubt (Millière and Metzinger, 2020; Metzinger, 2024).

The Having Is the Knowing

To the objection that Desire, being directed, is intentional and so belongs only to interesting experience, Strawson replies that all experience involves cognition and intentionality. An experience of a particular shade of blue, to take G. E. Moore's example, is a token of a type (Moore, 1903), and "in the experiential case, being a token of a type just is being intentionally directed at it"; it is also knowledge of that type by direct experiential acquaintance, "which is the necessary foundation of all knowledge." "There's no experience without knowledge, because there's a fundamental sense in which, in the case of experience, the having is the knowing." On this view even a perfectly memoryless subject experiencing a sequence of colors exhibits cognition and intentionality, a point Strawson finds in William James's "omnipresence of cognition" (James, 1890). The supposed problem of how cognitive experience arose from non-cognitive experience therefore dissolves, and cognition and Desire* are "equiprimordial, perfectly coeval."

How did the astonishing variety of human experience—thoughts about Diophantine equations, or about the way Billie Holiday sings just behind the beat—develop from primordial experience? Strawson compares a vast state-space of bodily forms, in which leptons and quarks arrange themselves into cells, immune systems, opposable thumbs, mosquitoes, and mountains, with a parallel state-space of experience. He concedes that the analogy is not imaginatively helpful, since we have no clear conception of basic experience. But evolution can only work on what it finds, and, by Orgel's Second Rule, "Evolution is cleverer than you are": it is no harder for evolution to build complex experience from "always-already cogni-sensori-affective Ur ψ" than to build the leafy sea dragon or the eye from primitive bodily stuff, and there is "no fundamental difficulty in the so-called combination problem" (Strawson, 2027).

Reception and Position

Reviewing Strawson's book subtitled, "Does Physicalism Entail Panpsychism?", philosopher Jerry Fodor shares Strawson's intuition that the hard problem is "not going to get solved for free" and "views that we cherish will be damaged in the process." Fodor concludes, "If you want an idea of just how hard the hard problem is, and just how strange things can look when you face its hardness without flinching, this [Strawson's book] is the right book to read" (Fodor, 2007).

Strawson's social constructivist view: “Panpsychism is not a new theory, but it is newly popular, and it is still widely held to be ‘absurd’. It remains to be seen whether it will ever advance to ‘obvious’”^[2] (Strawson, 2019b).

Footnotea

[1]. Strawson uses "physicalism" and "materialism" interchangeably as ontological descriptors, though at one point preferring "physicalism" because "matter" is now specially associated with mass-energy while "physical" is more encompassing. In his most recent work, he follows David Lewis in treating the two as synonymous "in spite of the fact that there is more to the physical than matter" (Lewis, 1994; Strawson, 2027).

For the uses of "materialism" and "physicalism" in Landscapex, see Footnote 12 of "Exploring Consciousness" (following here): "Materialism" and "physicalism" are roughly equivalent ontological terms, often used interchangeably, although physicalism can cover wider territory, including properties that the laws of physics describe, e.g., space, time, energy, matter. Moreover, physicalism can connote more epistemological matters, in terms of how we can know things. Materialism can be distinguished as the more restrictive term, meaning all that is real is matter and its equivalents. It connotes more ontological concerns, in terms of what really exists. In this Landscape, we go more with "materialism," which also maintains historical continuity.

[2]. Strawson's quote follows his reference to William James: “‘First, you know, a new theory is attacked as absurd,’ William James once remarked; ‘then it is admitted to be true, but obvious and insignificant; finally it is seen to be so important that its adversaries claim that they themselves discovered it.’”

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