Publisher's Synopsis
This explores the possibility of composite consciousness: phenomenally conscious states
belonging to a composite being in virtue of the consciousness of, and relations among, its parts. We
have no trouble accepting that a composite being has physical properties entirely in virtue of the
physical properties of, and relations among, its parts. But a long-standing intuition holds that
consciousness is different: my consciousness cannot be understood as a complex of interacting
component consciousnesses belonging to parts of me. I ask why: what is it about consciousness that
makes us think it so different from matter? And should we accept this apparent difference?
'Combinationism' - the thesis that intelligibly constitutive composition is possible in the
experiential realm - bears on many debates in the metaphysics of mind. Constitutive panpsychism's
need for combinationism is at the centre of recent criticism of the theory, but physicalists also need
an account of how the consciousness, or lack thereof, in two cerebral hemispheres and a whole brain,
or a human being and their head, or a social group and its individual members, can be intelligibly
related. And further back in history, the supposed simplicity of the soul was held to rule out any
form of materialism, in a tradition of argument stretching from Plotinus to Brentano. With an eye to
this diversity of debates, I examine the prospects for combinationists with a range of different
background views about the nature of consciousness, the ontological status of the subject, the
behaviour of the physical part-whole relation, and the notions of constitution and explanation
themselves.
