Combining Minds - Paperback

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.