Panpsychism
Coleman’s Panqualityism
Consciousness as Awareness of Unexperienced Qualities
Sam Coleman holds that the intrinsic nature behind the structure physics describes is made of qualities, the same kind of thing as redness or painfulness, but that these qualities are not in themselves experienced by anyone. Phenomenal consciousness occurs only when a brain becomes aware of organized qualities, which Coleman explains with his quotational higher-order thought theory. Qualities are irreducible and fundamental, while subjects and awareness are reducible.
Sam Coleman
What consciousness is
Consciousness is a relation of awareness to qualities. A quality is only the possible content of an experience; experience occurs when a subject's awareness takes it up.
Mind and body
Physical dispositions supervene on fundamental qualities and physical laws stay intact; Coleman calls this an ‘enriched form of physicalism.’ The qualities we experience are the very qualities that make up physical reality, experienced only contingently.
Mechanism
Quotational higher-order thought: a higher-order state quotes a first-order quality, much as a gallery frame displays a painting, so the quality itself is presented. A quoted quality is conscious and an unquoted one is not.
Core claims
- Subjects cannot sum: each viewpoint is exclusive and bounded, so many micro-subjects cannot compose one macro-subject, and micro-subjectivity is an idle wheel.
- Qualities, unlike subjects, can combine and co-locate, so panpsychists should keep fundamental qualities and drop fundamental subjects.
- A wholly non-qualitative ontology cannot intelligibly yield the qualitative character of experience.
- Apparently separate sensory modalities may be regions of one larger quality-space, so a rich basis of qualities could generate all familiar qualities by recombination.
Criticisms
Chalmers objects that reducing awareness leaves out the phenomenology of awareness itself; Coleman doubts such phenomenology exists. Mihálik argues an explanatory gap remains for our intimate access to qualities, and Rosenberg argues the quotational view wrongly moves worldly qualities into the subject and proposes a first-order version instead.
Implications
- AI consciousness: Conditional
- All matter is qualitative and awareness is a functional relation, so it follows from the view that an artificial system would be conscious if it implemented awareness of qualities in the right way.
- Survival beyond death: Unlikely
- Qualities persist, but subjects and experience depend on a brain's awareness structure, so it follows from the view that a person's experience ends with it.
Related theories
- Russellian Monism (Foundation)
- Rosenthal’s Higher-Order Thought (Influence)
- Feigl's Double Knowledge of Raw Feels (Influence)
- Goff's Panpsychism (Contrast)
Sources
- Mental chemistry: Combination for panpsychists, Sam Coleman (2012)
- The real combination problem: Panpsychism, micro-subjects, and emergence, Sam Coleman (2014)
- Quotational higher-order thought theory, Sam Coleman (2015)
- Phenomenal Qualities: Sense, Perception, and Consciousness, P. Coates, Sam Coleman (eds.) (2015)
- Panpsychism and neutral monism: How to make up one's mind, Sam Coleman (2017)
- Natural acquaintance, Sam Coleman (2019)
- A Panqualityist Manifesto, Sam Coleman (2024)
- An Argument for Unconscious Mental Qualities, Sam Coleman (2025)
- The Analysis of Matter, Bertrand Russell (1927)
- The combination problem for panpsychism, David J. Chalmers (2017)
- Panqualityism, awareness and the explanatory gap, J. Mihálik (2020)
- First-order representationalist panqualityism, H. Rosenberg (2025)