Combination problem
Overview
The combination problem is the central objection to panpsychism: if experience is a fundamental property of the smallest physical constituents, how do the many tiny experiences of the particles that make up a brain combine into the single, unified experience of a person, with none of the parts' points of view surviving in it? William James stated it in The Principles of Psychology (1890): take a hundred feelings and pack them together as closely as you like, and they remain a hundred feelings; no hundred-and-first feeling of the whole appears. The decombination problem is the same difficulty facing cosmopsychism and analytic idealism from the other direction: how one universal mind becomes billions of separate ones with no access to each other.
Notes
- Modern panpsychists (Philip Goff, David Chalmers) acknowledge the problem is unsolved and distinguish several forms of it: the subject combination problem (how do many subjects make one subject?), the quality combination problem (how do micro-qualities make the qualities we experience, such as the taste of coffee?), and the structure problem (why does macro-experience have the structure it does?).
- My view, under Panpsychism and Idealism: the problem is the hard problem with the sign changed. Panpsychism was adopted to avoid explaining how the non-experiential becomes experiential; it now has to explain how many experiences become one, and it has no more of an answer. The physicalist has one hard problem. The panpsychist has one too, plus an extra axiom.
- The problem does not arise for a physicalist, because on that view experience is a property of a certain arrangement and not of the ingredients (Emergence). There is nothing to combine; there is something to organise.