1 
 
Subjects Simply Sum into Subjects 
Abstract: The view that constitutive panpsychism faces a subject combination problem is rooted 
in the ‘Jamesian’ intuition: the intuition that multiple subjects do not simply sum into a greater, 
composite subject. Most commentators on the subject combination problem  seem to take the 
Jamesian intuition as an unbudgeable psychological given. This has led to the popularity of 
emergentist and ‘bonding’ solutions. But emergentist solutions face the same sorts of issue as 
physicalist emergentism, while bonding solutions are ad hoc and mysterian. Therefore I propose 
we backtrack, and reexamine how unbudgeable the Jamesian intuition really is. A thin conception 
of subjects, adumbrated here, permits us to build a positive conception of subjects summing into 
subjects. There is a number of arguments purporting to show why this sort of pursuit is futile, 
effectively defending the Jamesian intuition, but I argue that they fail. I also include a critique of 
the transparency of subjectivity, a principle which has been used to legitim ate anti-subject-
summing intuitions. By renouncing the Jamesian intuition we clear the way to accepting a 
metaphysical position according to which subjects really do sum into subjects. This dissolves the 
subject combination problem, effectively sparing con stitutive panpsychism from what is 
generally regarded to be its most troublesome issue. 
 
1 INTRODUCTION 
Of all the versions of the combination problem for panpsychism, the subject combination 
problem is the most mulled-over, and seems to be regarded as the most formidable. It asks, 
roughly, how subjects come together to make greater subjects.  The appearance of a problem 
is rooted in the ‘Jamesian’ intuition: the intuition that  subjects do not simply sum into 
subjects. Most commentators on the subject combination problem  seem to treat the Jamesian 
intuition as unbudgeable and ubiquitous (Goff 2009a, 2006, 2016; Coleman 2014; Seager 
2010; Dainton 2011; Chalmers 2016; Mørch 2018). Even philosophers looking favourably on 
the view that subject-summing does in fact occur have tended to concede that the facts must 
therefore clash with intuition, in that respect (Goff 2016; Chalmers 2016). More recently, 
however, Luke Roelofs has made a few cautious steps towards denying feeling the Jamesian 
intuition particularly strongly (Roelofs 2019, especially Ch. 3). In this paper I’d like to add 
my voice alongside Roelofs’s. Although I can conjure up the Jamesian intuition, it is not my 
prevailing intuition. Not these days, at any rate. After a few years thinking about these topics, 
my prevailing intuition has become, in the relevant respect, ‘non -Jamesian’: I conceive of 
subjects as summing into subjects. The significance of being in this position is that I can 
2 
 
easily accept the view that subjects do in fact sum into subjects (because it doesn’t clash with 
my intuition), which means that I don’t encounter a serious problem of subject combination. 
Of course, it’s not very helpful just to declare that my intuition is such that I don’t encounter 
the subject combination problem. If I want to persuade others not to worry, I need somehow 
to incite in them a good-faith renunciation of the Jamesian intuiti on. Metaphysical intuitions 
are not easily undone. Poetry , meditation, time spent on mountaintops —these might be better 
suited to the task than philosophy. But anything I can offer in the service of what will 
hopefully prove to be a growing philosophical l iterature on non-Jamesian perspectives is 
worth offering, I think. 
Let me begin with a quick introduction to panpsychism and the subject combination problem, 
before surveying the popular responses, what motivates them, and what challenges they face. 
This is a good way to stake out my metaphysical position, and to see how it relates to the 
Jamesian intuition. 
2 THE SUBJECT COMBINATION PROBLEM 
Panpsychism is a family of theories that makes consciousness ubiquitous, in one way or 
another. Most panpsychists say that consciousness exists first of all in entities of the very 
small, multiply instantiated kind (e.g. subatomic particles), and derivativ ely in middle-size 
entities like people; this is sometimes called ‘micropsychism.’ Others suggest that subjective 
consciousness exists first of all in the one big entity, the cosmos, and then derivatively in 
entities like people; this is sometimes called ‘ cosmopsychism’ (e.g. Goff 2019). For the 
purposes of this discussion I’ll just focus on micropsychism (which I’ll call ‘panpsychism’), 
but it bears mentioning that the view I am developing is compatible with micropsychism and 
cosmopsychism.  
3 
 
Where microsubjects are the subjects associated with the consciousness of very small entities 
like subatomic particles, and macrosubjects are subjects that common sense associates with 
middle-size entities like people, the subject combination problem is broadly the problem o f 
accounting for the relation between microsubjects and macrosubjects. Chalmers (2016), and 
the literature generally, distinguishes between constitutive and nonconstitutive solutions to 
the subject combination problem. A constitutive solution states that t he difference between 
microsubjects and macrosubjects amounts to a difference in descriptive level, where there is 
no ontological distinction. A nonconstitutive solution states that the distinction between 
macrosubjects and microsubjects is ontological: macrosubjects are new entities, on this view, 
over and above the microsubjects that have in some sense produced them. This is a kind of 
strong emergentism about subjects (see McLaughlin 1992; Strawson 2006).  
The nonconstitutive solution (e.g. Seager 2010; Mørch 2018) faces one main problem. To 
explain why and when macrosubjects emerge on this account, one must apparently postulate 
special inter-ordinal natural laws governing the appearance of new subjects. But,  as Coleman 
(2014) argues, the need to postulate such laws would undermine the appeal of panpsychism, 
to which many (I included) have turned in the interest of escaping the inter-ordinal natural 
laws required by physicalist strong emergentism. 
As for the constitutive solutions, I would distinguish between relational and nonrelational 
variants. The relational constitutive solution introduces some kind of relation into which 
microsubjects must enter if they are to constitute a macrosubject.  Once related in the right 
way, microsubjects ‘bond’ (Goff 2009a, p. 132, 2016, §5), enabling otherwise separately 
experienced qualities to be co-experienced.  
Under the banner of ‘relational’ constitutive solutions I am placing synchronic and diachronic 
accounts of subject formation ( solutions that Chalmers and Goff tend to separate by kind). I 
4 
 
deemphasise this distinction for brevity, and because I want to emphasise  what both accounts 
share in rejecting, namely the claim  that subject combination requires nothing more than the 
sheer coexistence of microsubjects. This is the claim of the nonrelational constitutive 
solution. The nonrelational constitutive solution states that microsubjects simply sum into 
macrosubjects, regardless of their relationship to one another. On this view, it proceeds from 
the nature of subjectivity itself that any two or m ore subjects is a subject. This is the solution 
which I prefer, and which I’ll be pursuing here . 
The chief problem with the nonrelational constitutive solution is this: the notion that subjects 
sum into subjects presents a problem of intelligibility. Of course, it is an axiom of orthodox 
mereology that subjects sum, tout court. If, for instance, there is the Adam -subject and the 
Eve-subject, classical mereology tells us that there is an Adam -subject-and-Eve-subject. 
(Certainly one could dispute classical mereology, but I won’t dispute it here because I don’t 
believe it gets near the heart of the issue (cf. Goff 2016).) But it seems like quite another 
thing to say that subjects sum into things that are themselves subjects . It is very difficult to 
see why it should follow solely from the existence of the Adam -subject and the Eve-subject 
that there is an Adam-and-Eve-subject. This claim—that we cannot make sense of subjects 
summing into subjects —is frequently made and rarely challenged. William James stated it 
most famously: 
… Take a sentence of a dozen words, and take twelve men and tell to each one word. Then 
stand the men in a row or jam them in a bunch, and let each think of his word as intently as he 
will; nowhere will there be a consciousness of the whole sentence. We talk of the ‘spirit of the 
age,’ and the ‘sentiment of the people,’ and in various ways we hypostatize ‘public opinion.’ 
But we know this to be symbolic speech, and never dream that the spirit, opinion, sentiment, 
etc., constitute a consciousness other than, and additional to, that of the several individuals 
5 
 
whom the words ‘age,’ ‘people,’ or ‘public’ denote. The private minds do not agglomerate 
into a higher compound mind. (James 1890, p. 160) 
With typical style James evokes the problem . The intuition expressed here is what I’m calling 
the ‘Jamesian’ intuition. See how Goff concurs: 
Subjects of experience are just not the kind of things that could intelligibly join together to 
form ‘bigger’ subjects of experience, any more than non-experiential things are the kind of 
things that can intelligibly come together to form subjects of experience. (Goff 2006, p. 59) 
And how Coleman underscores: 
Subjects being essentially discrete, pre-existing subjects can make no intelligible contribution 
to the unified subjectivity of a subject they generate in respect of their (the predecessors’) 
subjectivities. The end subject’s unity is precisely in the most direct defiance of the diversity 
and mutual ontological independence of the antecedents, which is what their being a set of 
subjects (at least partly) consists in. (Coleman 2014, p. 36) 
Again, this is the world of thought in which there is an intelligibility problem for the 
nonrelational constitutive solution, and which I want to exit (or, better, never to enter). But I 
dwell on it here to show how it is implicated in the popularity of th e relational constitutive 
solution. The nonrelational constitutive solution with its intelligibility problem and the 
nonconstitutive solution with its requirement of inter -ordinal laws—together these seem to 
form, by most panpsychists’ lights, a Scylla and  Charybdis between which the relational 
constitutive solution presents the only safe course . As mentioned, this style of solution relies 
on special relations into which microsubjects must enter in order for a macrosubject  to obtain. 
All proponents of the relational constitutive solution, however, face the same problem. 1 They 
 
1 Roelofs in 2019 might present an exception, here. In Combining Minds Roelofs offers (1) a relational 
constitutive solution according to which subjective co-consciousness is the deep nature of ‘one or more of the 
fundamental physical relations’ (p. 91), which is supplemented with (2) an attempt to make subject-summing a 
priori graspable. Prima facie (1) and (2) fit together because the physical relations Roelofs has in mind are just 
6 
 
postulate an intelligible link between microsubjects and macrosubjects without in fact 
providing one. By this I mean that an intelligible link between microsubjects and 
macrosubjects, of the kind that is supposedly realised by special relations between 
microsubjects, has simply never been laid bare for the reader. Goff even maintains that, even 
though there is a link between microsubjects and macrosubjects that would be intelligible to a 
notional God, its nature is also unknowable, in principle, to us. Thus  Goff resigns to ‘a kind 
of mysterianism’ (Goff 2016 , p. 294) on this score. 
It is certainly better to postulate intelligible links than to postulate unintelligible links. But, 
other things being equal, it is better to provide intelligible links  than simply to postulate them . 
In particular, if we can overcome the intelligibility problem for nonrelational constitutive 
panpsychism, we should prefer that solution over the vaguely mysterian alternatives currently 
on the market. 
I think we can overcome the intelligibility problem. There is a certain way of viewing things 
that makes subject-summing intelligible. The upshot is that we should support a nonrelational 
constitutive solution. This solution, to recap, is distinctly uncomplicated: there are no truly 
novel emergent subjects and no inter -ordinal laws, microsubjects do not form macrosubjects 
in virtue of bonding, and they needn’t be in any special relation to one another (unless 
coexistence counts). Microsubjects simply sum in to macrosubjects. All they need to do is 
exist, and there you have it. 
 
about ubiquitous, just as subjects would be if subjects simply sum into subjects (see Goff 2016). My reply to 
Roelofs is that (2), if successful, makes (1) explanatorily redundant, so that adopting the nonrelational 
constitutive solution becomes the better choice. In fact, however, Roelofs seems unconfident that (2) is 
successful; he hastens to make theoretical allowances for the prospect that subject combination is a posteriori 
(p. 113–119).  
7 
 
3 TOWARDS A POSITIVE CONCEPTION OF SUBJECT-SUMMING 
The intelligibility problem facing the nonrelational constitutive solution is driven by the 
Jamesian intuition. As we have seen, this is a widespread intuition. Coleman ( 2012, p. 138, 
2014, p. 26), Chalmers (2016, p. 179) and Goff (2006, p.54, 2009a, p. 130) all appeal to 
James explicitly, and the same intuition is entertained favourably by Dainton (2011). It is 
detectable outside panpsychist conversations, too. Lowe (1996, p. 39) and Merricks (2001, p. 
111) invoke something comparable; Block’s (1978) ‘China  brain’ argument against 
functionalism rests on the presumed absurdity of entities that are already subjects composing 
a greater subject; and the Jamesian intuition is even detectable in the Integrated Information 
Theory: Tononi, et al.’s (2014) ‘exclusion’ postulate, which states that ‘at any given time 
there is only one experience having its full content, rather than a superposition of multiple 
partial experiences,’ is supposed to follow from a priori phenomenological axioms. 2   
I think it is the entrenchment of the Jamesian intuition that keeps people from acknowledging 
alternative intuitional systems, rather than the absence of alternatives. Therefore my main 
concern here will be to dismantle some of the thought processes propping up the Jamesian 
intuition. Nonetheless, to coordinate that discussion I must first describe how I think a 
positive conception of subject -summing, a non-Jamesian intuition, should look. I will keep 
this brief, and I certainly don’t expect to incite a eur eka moment in my readers. But it will be 
enough if I can point out the main components of this conception and show where they fit 
together. After that, I will take up the main, deconstructive task.  
 
2 See Mørch (2018) for lucid discussion of the connection between panpsychism and the Integrated Information 
Theory, with an emphasis on the exclusion postulate. 
8 
 
3.1 Thin Subjects 
There may be many ways to flesh out a non-Jamesian intuition. Annaka Harris (2021), for 
instance, endorses an attitude of eliminativism about subjects , inspired by the sense of 
egolessness associated with many meditative practices. But let me advance just one way of 
thinking, the way I tend to think. What I have in mind is something along the lines of what 
Galen Strawson (2003) has called ‘thin’ subjects. Maybe we can get closer to the idea of thin 
subjects by flying by some thicker alternatives. Strawson mentions the following 
conceptions: 
[A] The whole-creature conception dominant in present -day analytic philosophy and 
experimental psychology. 
E.g., the 5'5" subject who coveted emperorship of France. ‘Subject’ in this sense is often 
interchanged with ‘participant’ in experimental writeups. And:  
[B] The traditional inner conception according to which a subject of experience is an 
inner being or presence of some sort.  
E.g., Cartesian egos on a standard exegesis of Descartes. [B]-subjects are often called upon to 
explain why separate experiences can all feel as though they are ‘mine.’  For this to work, [B]-
subjects and experiential contents must be nonidentical (or else, by transitivity, those 
‘separate’ experiences would be identical) . 
Strawson continues, ‘I’ll take it that [A] and [B] both build in the assumption that a subject 
may, and standardly does, continue to exist even when it is not having any experience ’ (2003, 
p. 283). Human creatures can persist during dreamless sleep  and anaesthesia. This is also 
conceivable of subjects on the traditional inner conception, if they are distinct from their 
experiences. But if we get rid of the detail of persistence we begin to carve out an intelligible 
place for: 
9 
 
[C] The thin conception according to which a subject of experience is an inner thing of 
some sort that does not and cannot exist at any given time unless it is having an 
experience at that time. 
If it is true that experience starts when you wake up in the morning and ceases a few minutes 
after you put your head down in the evening, then a thin subject (though not necessarily the 
same one) enters and exits existence at the same points. So thin subjects  may fragment across 
a lifetime. They may be too fragmented to track against a more or less standard notion of 
persons, but just this needn’t touch on their intelligibility.  
Of course, a conceptual distinction between subjects that do and don’t persist without 
experience doesn’t in itself suggest a real distinction. (For all that has been said so far, thin 
subjects might just be thick-subjects-during-waking-consciousness, for instance.) So there is 
more work to be done before we reach a notion of thin subjects that really sets them apart.  
The way to do this requires us to contemplate the character of experien tial content. Take an 
experience of pain. Reflecting, I find that a pain is already, in itself, an I-have-pain. For this 
reason, although I can imagine a pain in a way that conceptually isolates it from a subject in 
the [A] or the [B] sense (again, subjects in this sense are regarded as nonidentical to their 
experiences), I cannot imagine a pain in a way that utterly rids it of some kind of recipient, 
some kind of presence, some kind of ‘me,’ for which the pain is indeed painful. Again, 
speaking phenomenologically,  this ‘me’ does not seem to be ontologically distinct from the 
pain, itself.  
I’m trying to bring to mind the idea that a subject and an experiential quality are identical 
with one another, and with the unitary experience itself . This is what I intend the hyphens to 
communicate when I write that an experience of a pain is already an I-have-pain. From now 
on, ‘experience’ in my dictionary means such a unit. ‘Subject,’ meanwhile, refers to an 
10 
 
experience in a way that emphasises its subjective aspect. It is still possible to talk of 
subjects, in other words. But we need to keep in mind that what distinguishes ‘subject’ and 
‘experience’ are their modes of presentation, not their referents.  Thus the ‘inner thing’ which 
a subject is, according to [C], is a particular, concrete experience.  
In broad strokes, that’s how I think we should be thinking about subjects before approaching 
subject combination. But let me attend to a concern that begins to enter around now. 
Prescient readers might worry that by shifting to this ‘thin’ conception of subjects I have 
ceased talking about what people who grapple with the combination problem are talking 
about. This would be because thin subjects do not fix many of the interesting properties 
standardly associated with subjects, such as personhood, self-consciousness, intelligence, and 
identity over time. 
But I think a concept of subjects with so little baggage is precisely what a panpsychist needs 
while dealing with the subject combination problem. After all, most panpsychists would 
agree that microsubjects lack many or most of these interesting properties. (If there is one 
thing panpsychists can agree on, it is that when someone like Simons ridicules them for 
positing ‘photons with existential angst’ (2006, p. 146) he is attacking a straw man. ) On the 
other hand, there might be beings at the macro -level to which we want to attribute some basic 
subjectivity, but which lack the interesting further properties, such as humans with certain 
cognitive handicaps, and certain nonhuman animals. Therefore, an account of subject 
combination whose concept of subjectivity already has the interesting further properties built 
in would risk positing too much, at both the micro- and the macro-level. 
A better way forward is to treat personhood, self-consciousness, etc. as contingent 
elaborations upon subjectivity in its basic form. The task of explaining these properties can 
then be carried out in a separate discussion, presumably in a way that makes recourse to the 
11 
 
distinctive features of the places where they do arise . For example, if we want to explain the 
presence of personhood , self-consciousness, intelligence and identity over time in 
unhandicapped humans, this explanation can incorporate the memorial and cognitive 
facilities distinctive of unhandicapped humans.  This is beyond our current scope, but it is  an 
important complementary project.  
3.2 Thin Subjectivity and Subject Combination 
I have been unpacking the thin conception of subjectivity on the promise that it aids in our 
efforts to intuit subject-summing. Now I’ll try to describe the link. There are many properties 
of which the following is false: for any two or more things that ha ve property p, their sum has 
p. Two or more things with the property of being an organism do not automatically make 
something with the property of being an organism, for instance. But there are other properties 
which are not like this. Take physicality, for instance. For any two or more things with the 
property of being physical, their sum has the property of bein g physical. Likewise being 
made of atoms, being made of clay, etc. Call properties like this ‘scale -invariant,’ as they are 
invariant across different scales of mereological description. What the examples just given 
happen to share is that they are all ‘su bstantive’ properties as well—I mean, they are 
properties designating the kind of stuff out of which something is made. By all means, not all 
scale-invariant properties are substantive. (Take the property of being bigger than Belgium.) 
But I think I may conjecture that all substantive properties are scale -invariant, as there seems 
to be something special about substantivity from which scale -invariance flows. In particular, 
it is in the nature of substantive properties to subserve, and t hus survive, the kind of property-
variation that does occur when things get summed (e.g. the shift from organism to non -
organism).   
12 
 
On a thin, [C]-type conception, being a subject is like being physical inasmuch as ‘being a 
subject’ means being made out of a certain kind of stuff, in this instance insoluble subject -
quality stuff. Being a subject is substantive. So we shouldn’t be shocked if being a subject 
also begins to seem like the kind of property that is scale-invariant. And, if we can see why 
being a subject is scale-invariant, we can see why subjects sum into subjects. 3 
That was some pretty slapdash metaphysics, but I am trying to adumbrate an intuition, here, 
not to construct an argument. Let me put everything back in context. Return to James’s 
thought experiment. James asks us to imagine an array of twelve men, every ma n thinking 
one word from a twelve-word sentence. 
(a) This sentence comprises twelve different words, so it provides a convenient example . 
Let (a) be distributed among the men, so that one thinks ‘ this,’ another thinks ‘sentence,’ and 
so on. James denies that in a case like this there is a consciousness of  the whole sentence. If 
this can be taken to show that  subjects do not sum into subjects , the following had better be 
true: subject-summing implies that there would be a consciousness of the whole sentence. 
This may be misleading. Subject-summing does not imply that there would be a subject with 
the cognitive facility to tie the dozen words together according to the rules of English syntax. 
So subject-summing does not imply that there w ould be conscious experience remotely like 
the one you had when you read (a). Nonetheless, the argument will work if we take James to 
mean ‘sentence’ in a very liberal way, denoting something very sheer: just a nonsequential, 
nonsyntactical, nonsensical set of word -experiences. It is difficult to form a positi ve 
 
3 Roelofs (2019, p. 84) runs a similar line of thought in relation to ‘primitive’ properties instead of ‘substantive’ 
properties. A primitive property is ‘a property, the most revealing concept of which … cannot be defined in 
terms of any other concepts, except those that are reciprocally definitionally dependent on it.’ I choose to focus 
on substantive properties because I think they make for a more powerful intuition pump. It also bears 
mentioning that primitive properties and substantive properties are not the same. For instance, spatiality is 
primitive, but not substantive. 
13 
 
conception, here, but telescoping (a) into a nonsequential, nonsyntactical, nonsensical set of 
symbols is at least a step in the right direction:  
(b)  
I think (b) represents something closer to what the consciousness of the whole sentence is 
like. Using ‘sentence’ in this sense, it is right that subject-summing implies that there is a 
consciousness of the whole sentence. But then I find it pretty intuitive that there should be a 
consciousness of the whole sentence . First I imagine a dozen word -experiences (made of 
subject-quality stuff), and then I imagine one (b) -like experience (made of subject -quality 
stuff). This is a subtle attentional shift, like the one I make when I shift between imagining an 
array of tesserae and imagining the self -same mosaic. 
I haven’t made the comparison with the mosaic simply because it ought to hold, according to 
my theory. The comparison is phenomenologically grounded. When I shift between  
imagining the twelve experiences and imagi ning the one ‘big’ experience, it really feels to me 
as though all I am doing is summation; it feels the way it feels when I shift my attention from 
the tesserae to the mosaic. So I believe I do have a positive conception of subject -summing. 
3.3 Universalism and Quality Combination 
Before moving on, I’d like to flag a few implications of my position . Firstly, let me come 
clean on one very surprising consequence of subject -summing. Going without special 
conditions for subject combination  means that, for any (any) two or more subjects, their sum 
is a subject. Goff (2016, §7) calls this ‘unrestricted phenomenal composition,’ or  
‘universalism’ (see also Frankish 2021; Roelofs 2019). In conjunction with the panpsychist 
thesis that every microscopic entity is a subject , universalism implies that every concrete 
thing, without restriction, is a subject. Thus strange fusions, such as the sum of Neptune  and 
This 
so 
twelve 
comprises 
sentence 
words 
it 
provides 
a 
convenient 
example 
14 
 
my nose, are subjects. So are gerrymandered things,  such as my nose minus such-and-such an 
atom near its tip. Even the sum of everything,  the cosmos, is a subject.4 
‘Familiar’ subjects—subjects whose existence we readily acknowledge, like you and me —
also exist, according to universalism, but that’s because they count among every concrete 
thing, without restriction. They are not exceptional in respect of being subjects. Universalism 
therefore reframes part of the panpsychist research programme. Assuming universalism, we 
no longer face the metaphysical task of explaining what makes familiar subjects exceptional 
in respect of being subjects. In its place, there is the broadly episte mological task of 
explaining what makes them exceptional in respect of being  ‘familiar.’ Thus our basic 
situation becomes like the situation in classical mereology, where philosophers who accept 
universalism about objects (for any two or more objects, their sum is an object) account for a 
folk practice of restricted quantification  over objects (see Lewis 1986, p. 213; Korman 2007; 
Hirsch 2002, p. 111–2; Markosian 2008, §3). However, the rules according to which  the folk 
quantify over subjects are obviously going to be different. Appealing to the special cognitive 
or memorial facilities of human subjects may again prove fruitful, here. There is a related 
appeal to be made to the functional integrity of human and nonhuman animals, and in §4.1 
I’ll have occasion to explore this a bit . But a truly devoted discussion will have to take place 
elsewhere. 
Secondly, the thin conception of subjectivity implies that, if subjects constitute subjects under 
no special relational conditions, so also qualities constitute qualities under no special 
relational conditions. After all, according to the thin conception, ‘subject’ and ‘quality’ are 
just different ways of talking about  the same unitary properties. So the case of the twelve -
 
4 This does not bring us all the way to Goff’s (2019) cosmopsychism, which is also paired with a form of 
priority monism (see Schaffer 2010), so that the cosmosubject is said to ground the smaller subjects within it. I 
don’t currently wish to take a stand on the direction of grounding (if there is such a thing).  
15 
 
word sentence, for example, is no more a case of nonrelational constitutive subject 
combination than it is a case of nonrelational constitutive quality combination. And this 
feature of my view forces me in a certain direction for solving  panpsychism’s ‘quality 
combination problem’ (Chalmers 2016). However, it does not mean that—implausibly—
appealing to nonrelational constitutive quality combination and nothing else is sufficient for a 
solution. Nonrelational constitutive quality combination is more like a stage setting.  
Take, for example, the aspect of the quality combination problem known as the ‘palette’ 
problem. The palette problem asks how we should account for the astonishing range of 
complex macroqualities—qualities like those experienced by humans —when, according to 
panpsychism, they are composed of only a handful of different kinds of microqualities —
simple qualities like those experienced by quarks. One possible route, here, is to pair 
nonrelational constitutive quality combination with the kind of Russellian panps ychism 
advanced by Mørch (2019), according to which qualities are the ‘interior’ grounds of 
(physico-)functional properties. This way, if there are coherent stories to be told about  how 
an astonishing range of complex functional properties can be constituted by a handful of very 
basic functional properties, then there should be corresponding ‘interior’ stories to be told 
about how an astonishing range of complex macroqualities can be constituted by a handful of 
microqualities. The former will use the language of function, the latter will use the language 
of qualities, but they will elucidate the same structure from top to bottom.   
Of course, we don’t actually have the full functional story in relation to the human brains, so 
we can’t even begin to tell an ‘interior’ story about how microqualities make up human 
macroqualities. But getting complex functional properties from a handful of very basic 
functional properties is not, in principle, mysterious. Even the astonishing functional 
16 
 
properties of an AI interface can be traced, without residue, to an array of simple functional 
properties, e.g. Boolean operators, at the level of the basic code.5 
Another aspect of the quality combination problem is known as the ‘ grain’ problem. The 
grain problem asks how we should account for the non -particulate or ‘smooth’ nature of 
macroqualities when, according to panpsychism,  they are composed of trillions of 
microqualities, and are thus particulate or ‘grainy.’ One possible route, here, is to pair 
nonrelational constitutive quality combination with something like Roelofs’s (2020) 
‘confusion’ thesis, which proposes that macroqualities are in fact particulate, but that they 
appear non-particulate when we introspect because the introspective process ‘confuses’ their 
microqualitative components, presenting them en masse rather than individually. Crucially, 
by attributing the non-particulateness of macroqualities to limited introspective acuity, we 
can avoid attributing it to ‘fusing’ or ‘bonding’ among the microqualities, themselves. Recall 
that avoiding such notions was a major motivator for the nonrelational constitutive solution, 
in the first place. 
4 DISMANTLING THE JAMESIAN INTUITION 
Having said a few words about the positive components of my thinking and shown where 
they fit together, I want to get to the matter of dismantling the Jamesian intuition. I will offer 
a number of separate remarks, to this end. On the whole, I will proceed by raising an 
argument in support of the view that subjects do not sum into subjects, then show where I 
think it errs. Of course, this is not quite the same as dismantling the intuition that subjects do 
not sum into subjects. But it comes to the same thing in as much as the arguments raised are 
 
5 One might object that coding is not a case of ‘nonrelational’ constitution, because the logic gates to which the 
simple functional properties belong must be related to one another in a very specific way in order to produce 
complex functions. But recall that ‘nonrelational’ constitutive quality combination just means that quality 
combination does not rely on the presence of special relations between constituents; it does not mean that 
quality combination precludes the presence of special relations between constituents.   
17 
 
formulations of the intuitions of the people who advance  them. Moreover, I think it is 
generally true that in philosophy (as in psychotherapy) intuitions about the world can seem 
more resistant to dialectical untangling  than they really are—particularly to the people who 
hold them.6 
4.1 Summation and Telepathy 
I am saying that the following state of affairs is intelligible: for any two or more subjects of 
experience, their experiences are combined by a superordinate subject. At once the most 
enticing and weakest reply presents this state of affairs as a manifest phenomenological 
falsehood. It is clear—so runs the objection—that, no matter how deeply I sympathise with 
you, or how closely I smush my face against yours, I don’t experience your pain. I have my 
feelings, you have yours, and that’s the end of it.7 Barry Dainton argues in a way similar to 
this. We must accept, he says, that the experiences of distinct subjects are not bound by an 
overarching subject, because the alternative ‘leads to a result which is obviously very 
implausible, for the experiences of distinct human subjects —you and me, for instance—are 
clearly not mutually co-conscious in this manner’ (2011, p. 257). 
But is this clear? The important thing to remember here is that subject-summing does not 
entail that I can feel your pain. That sounds like telepathy, not subject -summing. What 
subject-summing entails is that a composite subject has the experiences of others  along with 
whatever I am feeling. But I am not the composite subject; I am just myself! So the fact that I 
do not feel your pain does entail that my experiences and yours are not bound together for a 
composite subject. It is not in conflict with subject-summing. 
 
6 Thank you to the anonymous commentator who pointed out the prima facie mismatch between philosophical 
reasoning and the job of dismantling intuitions. 
7 This objection was put to me by an anonymous commentator. 
18 
 
I’ve said enough to defuse the objection, but let me put some momentum towards explaining 
away the Jamesian intuition. It’s not just the case that I don’t have the experiences of the 
composite subject; it is also true, on the whole, that a composite subject will lack the 
cognitive integration, motor control, etc. that it would need in order to  issue something 
recognisable as a report of its subjectivity. This is certainly true of me and you, who do not 
constitute a functionally integrated organism . And it is also true of most strange fusions  I can 
think of, such as the sum of Neptune and my nose . And from this point I think we can 
extrapolate—cautiously, and marking exceptions where they occur —to the following rule: it 
would still seem as though subjects don’t sum into subjects, even if they did. This is to say 
that subject-summing is empirically innocuous, even in spite of its universalist consequences . 
Therefore, to the extent that the Jamesian intuition is empirically based (which Coleman and 
Goff would certainly push back on —I’ll consider their a priori arguments below), it 
shouldn’t be given any special weight. 
4.2 Ignorance 
Back in 2009, Sam Coleman expressed hope that ‘ the difficulties panpsychism faces … are 
not metaphysical ones … They are, instead, difficulties of understanding, and of acceptance 
by philosophers’ (2009, p. 83). Within five years, however, he had come to deny the 
intelligibility of subject-summing unequivocally: not only is it the case that ‘we cannot see 
how the combination of micro -subjects could provide for the existence of a macro -subject,’ 
but ‘we can see how the combination of micro-subjects could not provide for the existence of 
a macro-subject’ (Coleman 2014, p. 29)! 
Here is his main argument. Imagine two particles, each of which is its own subject.  ‘One—
Blue’s—is pervaded by a unitary blueness, the other —Red’s—by redness, and that is all they 
experience, respectively.’ Let’s also suppose that Red and Blue are mereologically simple. 
19 
 
Subject-summing implies that there are three subjects in play: Red, Blue, and the über-
subject, called ‘Ub.’ Coleman writes: 
To say these points of view [Red’s and Blue’s] were present as components in the experiential 
perspective of the über-subject (‘Ub’) would … be to say that Ub experienced a unitary 
phenomenal blueness and a unitary phenomenal redness, i.e. had synchronous experiences as 
of each of these qualities alone, to the exclusion of all others. For it is these qualities each on 
their own that characterise, respectively, the perspectives of the original duo. Experience 
excludes, as well as includes. Yet nowhere does Ub have any such experiences: he precisely 
combines his predecessors’ qualitative experiential contents. Ub doesn’t experience red-to-
the-exclusion-of-(blue-and)-all-else, nor blue-to-the-exclusion-of-(red-and)-all-else, let 
alone—impossibly—both together. Thus the original points of view are not ingredients in 
Ub’s subjectivity. Only their contents—the redness and blueness—are. (Coleman 2014, p. 33) 
Coleman is invoking a fairly compelling principle, here. Intuitively, any adequate 
characterisation of subjective experience must combine two kinds of claim : on the one hand a 
piece of phenomenological language describing some experience, but on the other an ‘and 
that’s all’ clause marking the experience’s limit. Subjects are governed by what we might call 
an Ignorance principle. Ignorance has long been recognised. James put Ignorance 
persuasively when he wrote that every experience exists ‘shut in its own skin, windowless, 
ignorant of what the other feelings are and mean ’ (James 1890, p. 160). Gregg Rosenberg too 
observes that ‘consciousness has inherent boundaries. Only some experiences are part of my 
consciousness; most experiences in the world are not. Arguably, these boundaries are what 
individuate me as an experiencing subject in the world ’ (Rosenberg 2004, p. 80). And shrewd 
Thoreau was aware enough of Ignorance to quip,  ‘I should not talk so much about myself if 
there were anybody else whom I knew as well. Unfortunately, I am confined to this theme by 
the narrowness of my experience ’ (Thoreau 1854, p. 7). 
20 
 
Phrased in relation to subject-summing, Coleman’s argument can be put like this:  
(1) If subject-summing is possible, Red’s experience and Blue’s experience are 
components of Ub’s experience. 
(2) Red’s experience is of red-to-the-exclusion-of-(blue-and)-all-else. 
(3) Blue’s experience is of blue-to-the-exclusion-of-(red-and)-all-else.  
(4) If Red’s experience and Blue’s experience are components of Ub’s experience, then 
Ub’s experience is of red-to-the-exclusion-of-(blue-and)-all-else and blue-to-the-
exclusion-of-(red-and)-all-else. [(2), (3)] 
(5) Something cannot have an experience that is of red and to the exclusion of red (nor of 
blue and to the exclusion of blue).  
(6) Red’s experience and Blue’s experience are not components of Ub’s experience. [(4), 
(5)] 
(7) Subject-summing is impossible. [(1), (6)]  
Here Ignorance is at work in premises (2) and (3). I’m inclined to think that Ignorance is true, 
so that Red and Blue do exclude each other’s experiential contents in something like this 
way. But the argument is still unconvincing. In premise (4) Coleman supposes that the 
combination of Red and Blue into Ub requires that Ub itself takes on the distinctive properties 
of its components. But to assume that a whole must take on the properties distinctive of one 
or more of its proper parts is to commit a fallacy of composition. Take a non-experiential 
analogue. A tomato plausibly ‘excludes, as well as includes’: a tomato has, to adopt the 
idiom, the physical propert y of tomato-to-the-exclusion-of-(lettuce-and)-all-else. Equally 
lettuce has the physical propert y of lettuce-to-the-exclusion-of-(tomato-and)-all-else. But it 
does not follow that something comprising lettuce and tomato would have to have physical 
properties which are both of tomato and to the exclusion of tomato. Counterintuitively, that 
would make salad impossible.  So it seems improper in this context to suppose that the whole 
21 
 
inherits the physical properties distinctive of its proper parts. Instead, those properties belong 
just to the parts. And I think the same account is sensible in relation to experiential properties. 
True enough, blue as such has the experiential property of blue-to-the-exclusion-of-(red-
and)-all-else and Red as such has the experiential property of red-to-the-exclusion-of-(blue-
and)-all-else, but we needn’t assume that  Ub as such has either. So the contradiction flagged 
in (5) never arises.8  
4.3 Privacy 
I just considered the principle Ignorance,  according to which any subject is essentially limited 
to only certain experiences. I accepted Ignorance but denied that it precludes subject -
summing. It is tempting to add another requirement, similar -seeming but importantly 
different. Privacy states that any subject essentially enjoys private access to its experiences, 
free from eavesdropping subjects. Again, this is an idea intimated by Coleman, who gives 
subjects a ‘private qualitative field’ (Coleman 2014, p. 30). Dainton endorses Privacy more 
explicitly when he suggests, ‘if an experience e 1 belongs to a subject S1, it belongs ONLY to 
S1, so e1 cannot also (and simultaneously) belong to a distinct subject S 2’ (Dainton 2014, p. 
246). And the British Idealist Francis Bradley wrote evocatively on the same idea:  
My external sensations are no less private to myself than are my thoughts or my feelings. In 
either case my experience falls within my own circle, a circle closed on the outside; and, with 
all its elements alike, every sphere is opaque to the others which surround it. … In brief, 
 
8 Note for good measure that it is coherent to hold that the distinctive experiential properties of Red and Blue 
are not inherited by Ub and yet maintain that subjectivity is scale-invariant. A physical analogy is helpful here, 
again. A subject deflationist says that the experiential property of red-to-the-exclusion-of-all-else is just a mode 
of subjective stuff. An analogous position on matter (which I don’t necessarily commit to) makes, e.g., the 
physical property of tomato-to-the-exclusion-of-(lettuce-and)-all-else a mode of physical stuff. I think it is clear 
that someone with this view of physical properties could hold that the distinctive physical properties of tomato 
and lettuce are not inherited by a salad (thus allowing for the possibility of salad) and yet maintain that 
physicality is scale-invariant. 
22 
 
regarded as an existence which appears in a soul, the whole world for each is peculiar and 
private to that soul.9 (Bradley 1893, p. 346) 
From the essential privacy of subjective experience one could seemingly mount an argument 
that is stronger than the argument for which Coleman opted, above. For unlike the 
experiential property that is blue-to-the-exclusion-of-all-else, say, the experiential property 
that is blue-such-that-nothing-else-experiences-this-blue prevents by force of logic the 
possibility of Ub. In other words, Privacy is incompatible with subject -summing, because 
subject-summing entails that subjects have (or, speaking carefully, are) experiential qualities 
which are encompassed within superordinate subjects, and Privacy denies this possibility.  
Thankfully, however, I don’t see any strong reason to endorse Privacy. Dainton, Bradley and 
Coleman alike invoke Privacy without arguing for it; apparently this feature of experience is 
self-evincing. But is it? Maybe Privacy seems true. But how would we expect things to seem 
if Privacy were false? Just the same, I think. Try to imagine Privacy suddenly going from true 
to false, perhaps because a superordinate subject, a subject combining your experiences and 
mine, suddenly pops into being. I cannot see why this should bring about a change in how 
things seem to either of us. Instead, we would potter on as ever, obliv ious of our mutual 
eavesdropper. 
The situation is a bit like this. Watching the sun rise above the horizon, it is fair to say that 
geocentrism seems true. But the apparent motion of the sun would be the same if geocentrism 
were false and heliocentrism were true, instead. Therefore, it would be dialectically impotent 
for a geocentrist debating a heliocentrist to point out that geocentrism seems true. Equally, 
Privacy would seem true even if it weren’t . Therefore, it is dialectically impotent for 
 
9 Apparently this passage from Bradley is well known to literary critics (as TS Eliot quotes it in his notes to The 
Waste Land), by whom it was at one time ‘almost universally misinterpreted’ as an expression of solipsism 
(Brooker 1979). It probably warrants pointing out, then, that Privacy does not express or entail solipsism, at 
least ‘hard’ solipsism. There can be many private experiences. 
23 
 
somebody defending Privacy to point out that Privacy seems true.  So I’m justified not to take 
invocations of Privacy too seriously.  
As Goff and Roelofs (2020) point out, t here is a restricted version of Privacy that not only 
seems true, but is true. Consider human subjects of the medically unexceptional kind (so no 
split-brain patients, neurologically conjoined twins, etc.). Subjects of this kind are wholly 
discrete from one another (just as their brains are), without any shared experiences. Therefore 
even if subject-summing in fact occurs the experiences of regular human subjects remain off -
limits to others of their kind. If I restrict  the domain to regular human subjects and reread the 
above passages from Bradley and Dainton, for instance, then everything they say rings true.  
Hopefully readers who feel reluctant to surrender Privacy find some redress in this restricted 
version of the principle. But there is also a diagnostic remark  which I would like to moot, 
here. Plausibly, people who embrace Privacy do so owing to a hasty generalisation from its 
restricted version. It is easy to see how one’s thoughts could slip from the privacy of regular 
human subjects into Privacy, the principle concerning subject s as such. To be sure, this move 
would be an error, since it presupposes that there are not composite subjects which are unlike 
regular human subjects in precisely the sense that they share experiences with some subject. 
But we tend to be preoccupied by reg ular human subjects (partly because composite subjects 
do not self-report, as discussed); so it would be understandable for such an error to occur.    
4.4 Absence of Conception versus Conception of Absence 
Goff (2009b) and Chalmers (2016) sometimes express the Jamesian intuition in terms of the 
conceivability of ‘panpsychist zombies .’ Panpsychist zombies are a spin on ‘regular’ 
zombies, of the kind that Chalmers (e.g. 2009) famously discusses. Panpsychist zombies are 
microphysical and microsubjective duplicates of us  (where panpsychism is assumed true)  
which lack our macrosubjective properties. The panpsychist zombie version of me, for 
24 
 
instance, enjoys my experiential properties, but only from multiple points of view at once, 
and not from one all-encompassing point of view. 
What I have already said about Ignorance and Privacy could be reapplied to explain why 
some people take panpsychist zombies as conceivable. But I want to take this opportunity to 
make a new diagnostic offering. It is a familiar point that the consideration of an entity need 
not grant a priori access to everything that the entity metaphysically entails —not, in any 
case, ‘1-dimensional’ a priori access, so that we are explicitly aware of those entailments, 
can codify them in conceivability premises, etc. This  point is particularly familiar where the 
entailments in question are constitutive facts occupying a lower level of description, for 
instance the chemical facts of water (see Putnam 1975). But hidden essences, so called, 
needn’t be literally hidden; they n eed only elude the primary intention of the terms or 
concepts employed. It seems possible, for instance, that someone unfamiliar with rabbits 
should see the duck in the duck -rabbit while failing to see the rabbit. Equally, someone who 
revels in detail could see in a mosaic a thousand interlocking tesserae while failing to 
recognise the scene that they compose. Likewise it may be possible, even granted a thin 
conception of subjectivity, to conceive of any group of subjects without conceiving of their 
sum: to have one’s expectations set to such a level of description that in considering a group 
of subjects one attends to the many but cannot heed the superordinate subject with which they 
are collectively identical. And it is easy to see how one could mistake th e absence of the 
conceptualisation of any macrosubject for the active conceptualisation of any macrosubject’s 
absence. By this process one might come to the position that panpsychist zombies are 
conceivable. Clearly, however, if one merely neglects to conc eive of a macrosubject 
alongside a group of microsubjects, one is not justified to infer that microsubjects do not 
really constitute macrosubjects. Someone who merely neglects to notice the rabbit in the 
duck-rabbit, for instance, is not justified to concl ude that the duck does not constitute a rabbit 
25 
 
(the duck does constitutive a rabbit, after all). So if this is what the conceivability of 
panpsychist zombies comes to, then the conceivability of panpsychist zombies is compatible 
with subject-summing.  
4.5 The Transparency of Subjectivity 
Another advantage of framing the Jamesian intuition in terms of panpsychist zombies is to set 
up an instructive analogy with the rich existing literature on regular zombies. For instance, 
my general position in relation to panpsychist zombies (of which the  comment above is just 
one articulation) is very similar in form to the position of the ‘ a posteriori physicalist’ in 
relation to regular zombies. My position is that panpsychist zombies are impossible, but 
might still be conceivable (perhaps not to everyo ne, but to Goff) owing to some or another 
conceptual failure.10 Meanwhile, the a posteriori physicalist’s position in relation to regular 
zombies is that regular zombies are impossible, but still conceivable owing to some or 
another conceptual failure. Therefore I am vulnerable to a familiar rebuttal. Defenders of the 
regular zombie argument some times rebut that when it comes to imagining regular zombies 
we are uncommonly immune to conceptual failure because we have ‘transparent’ access to 
phenomenal properties, meaning that we enjoy a priori access to their essential natures 
(Morris 2021; Goff 2017) . Equivalently, Goff (2017, §7.3.2.3) has argued at length that the 
essence of subjectivity is revealed to us a priori. So it seems likely that at the present juncture 
Goff would appeal to the transparency of subjectivity. After all, if it is true that one can 
‘grasp the nature of subjecthood’ (2017 , p. 178), then it must presumably be the case that, 
when one thinks about subjects, one does not fail to register any facts about how subjects 
 
10 It might seem strange that I admit that Goff finds panpsychist zombies conceivable, rather than saying that he 
merely mistakes them for conceivable. But in the sense in which Goff uses ‘conceivable,’ a situation is 
conceivable when an ordinary (as opposed to Godlike) thinker sees no contradiction in it. W ell, Goff is an 
ordinary thinker in this sense, and I believe that he sees no contradiction in panpsychist zombies.    
26 
 
combine. And this would mean that imagining an array of subjects while neglecting to 
imagine their sum (the risk I highlighted above) is an impossibility.  
I have sympathy for certain forms of transparency principle, provided they are sufficiently 
cautious. But Goff’s principle is too brash to be plausible. It seems to face an obvious 
problem. If accessing the essence of subjectivity were so easy, then everybody who thought 
about subjectivity would reach the same conception of it. But there is demonstrably no such 
consensus. I have thought about it, and I have arrived at a conception other than Goff’s: I 
genuinely conceive of subjects summing into  subjects. My conception might be false, but it is  
truly my conception. Therefore we do not have transparent access to the nature of 
subjectivity. 
Goff might reply that the transparency of subjectivity does hold true, but the reason he and I 
have different conceptions is that one of us  is not actually thinking about subjects. 
Presumably the accusation falls on me. Maybe, for instance, I’m actually thinking about mere 
experiential qualities, but the thin conception of subjectivity that I’ve bought into wrongly 
encourages me to apply the misnomer ‘subject’ to qualities. But there is a problem with this 
reply, which I can’t see Goff getting around. Surely, if we grasp what subjectivity essentially 
is, then by inverting its properties we can grasp what subjectivity is  not. In other words, if we 
know that something is a subject iff it is p, we can determine that something  is not a subject 
by determining that it is not p. The transparency of subjectivity therefore precludes the 
possibility of mistaking anything other than a subject for a subject. (Moreover, to r esist this 
point renders the transparency of subjectivity pretty useless; what good would it do Goff to 
know that we can access the essence of subjects, if we can’t also be sure when we are looking 
at subjects?) Goff, then, is forced to accept that he and I are both thinking about subjects. 
And this means that my original objection to the transparency of subjectivity holds.  
27 
 
5 CONCLUSION 
As influential as James’s famous passage has proven, remarkably, he expresses support for 
panpsychism in the same chapter.  As Skrbina (2005, p. 156) points out, i t was not until later 
that these conflicting commitments —the intelligibility problem with subject-summing on the 
one hand, panpsychism on the other —came to blows. The outcome: although he cannot 
‘logically see how a collective experience of any grade whatever can be treated as logically 
identical with a lot of distributive experiences ’ (James 1909, p. 83), the manifest fact, given 
the truth of panpsychism, that subjects do compose new subjects compels him ‘to give up the 
logic, fairly, squarely, and irrevocably ’ (James 1909, p. 86). 
Over the course of this paper I’ve tried to sketch out another world of thought: a world in 
which subject-summing does not present difficulties of intelligibility. Certain traditional ways 
of thinking about what a subject is pull against this aspiration. Recall , for instance, 
conception [A], the whole creature conception. It is clear that two whole creatures do not 
automatically make a whole creature, so subjects conceived in this way clearly do not sum 
into subjects. Likewise for [B], it seems wrong to sup pose that two Cartesian egos 
automatically make a Cartesian ego. But a thin conception of subjectivity proves particularly 
useful. A thin conception makes subjectivity a kind of stuff, similar to physicality, and 
similarly scale-invariant.  
Please note that I never intended to reject [A] and [B], but only to draw attention away from 
them and towards [C]. After all, the claim under contention was that subject -summing is 
unintelligible, and to deny this it is sufficient that to show that there is one conception of 
subjects which facilitates the intelligibility of subject -summing; it is unnecessary to show that 
there are no conceptions that do not.  
28 
 
I don’t think there is much point trying to get up a positive conception of subject -summing 
where the Jamesian intuition is already present and waiting to stifle alternatives, so I have 
made dismantling the Jamesian intuition a primary concern. Again, I tried to maintain a 
‘diagnostic’ spirit by looking at the thoughts of those who entertain the Jamesian intuition 
and then working backwards to some or another error or prejudice. ‘Diagnose’ is an awful, 
patronising word, I know. But my i ntentions have been reconciliatory. My hope is that by 
digging up the Jamesian intuition, roots and all, we might clear the field for a new crop in 
which all can share. The fruit envisioned: a ‘ logic’ of subject-summing which does what 
James’s could not do for him . Contrary to prevailing opinion, I do not think that nonrelational 
constitutive panpsychism requires us to sacrifice good sense.   
29 
 
 
Block, N. (1978). Troubles with functionalism . Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of 
Science, 9, 261–325. 
Brooker, J. S. (1979). F. H. Bradley’s Doctrine of Experience in T. S. Eliot ’s ‘The Waste 
Land’ and ‘Four Quartets’”. Modern Philology, 77 (2), 146–57. 
Chalmers, D. (2009). The Two-Dimensional Argument Against Materialism . In B. 
McLaughlin (ed.), The Oxford Handbook on the Philosophy of Mind . Oxford: Oxford 
University Press. 
Chalmers, D. (2016). The Combination Problem for Panpsychism. In G. Brüntrup & L. 
Jaskolla (eds), Panpsychism. Oxford University Press. 
Coleman, S. (2009). Mind under Matter. In D. Skrbina (ed.), Mind that Abides. John 
Benjamins Publishing Company.  
Coleman, S. (2012). Mental Chemistry: Combination for Panpsychists . Dialectica, 66 (2), 
137–66. 
Coleman, S. (2014). The Real Combination Problem: Panpsychism, Micro -Subjects, and 
Emergence. Erkenntnis, 79 (1), 19–44. 
Dainton, B. (2011). Review of Consciousness and its Place in Nature . Philosophy and 
Phenomenological Research , 83, 238–61. 
Frankish, K. (2021). Panpsychism and the Depsychologization of Consciousness. Aristotelian 
Society Supplementary Volume , 95 (1), 50–70. 
30 
 
Goff, P. & Roelofs, L. (2020). In defence of phenomenal sharing. In L. Bugnon, & M. Nida -
Rumelin (eds.), The Phenomenology of Self -Awareness and the Nature of Conscious 
Subjects. Routledge 
Goff, P. (2006). Experiences Don’t Sum. Journal of Consciousness Studies , 13, 53–61. 
Goff, P. (2009a.). Can the panpsychist get round the combination problem? In D. Skrbina 
(ed.), The Mind that Abides: Panpsychism in the New Millennium , Benjamins 
Publishing. 
Goff, P. (2009b). Why Panpsychism Doesn’t Help us Explain Consciousness , Dialectica, 63, 
289–311. 
Goff, P. (2016). The Phenomenal Bonding Solution to the Combination Problem . In G. 
Brüntrup and L. Jaskolla (eds.), Panpsychism: Contemporary Perspectives . Oxford: 
Oxford University Press. 
Goff, P. (2017). Consciousness and Fundamental Reality. Oxford: Oxford University Press.  
Goff, P. (2019). Cosmopsychism, Micropsychism, and the Grounding Relation . In W. Seager 
(ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Panpsychism . Routledge. 
Harris, A. (2021). A Solution to the Combination Problem and the Future of Panpsychism . 
Journal of Consciousness Studies , 28 (9–10), 129–40. 
Hirsch, E. (2002). Against revisionary ontology. Philosophical Topics, 30, 103–127. 
James, W. (1890 (2007)). The Principles of Psychology , Volume 1. Harvard University Press. 
James, W. (1909 (2008)). A Pluralistic Universe. Rockville, MD: Arc Manor. 
31 
 
Korman, D. (2007). Unrestricted Composition and Restricted Quantification . Philosophical 
Studies, 140 (3), 319–334. 
Lewis, D. (1986). On the Plurality of Worlds. Malden: Blackwell. 
Lowe, E. J. (1996). Subjects of Experience . Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. 
Markosian, N. (2008). Restricted composition. In J. Hawthorne, T. Sider, & D. Zimmerman  
(eds), Contemporary Debates in Metaphysics. Basil Blackwell. 
McLaughlin, B. (1992). The Rise and Fall of British Emergentism. In A. Beckermann, H. 
Flohr & J. Kim (eds), Emergence or Reduction?: Prospects for Nonreductive 
Physicalism. De Gruyter. 
Merricks, T. (2001). Objects and Persons. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 
Mørch, H. H. (2018). Is the Integrated Information Theory of Consciousness Compatible with 
Russellian Panpsychism? Erkenntnis, 84 (5), 1065–85. 
Mørch, H.H. (2019). The Argument for Panpsychism from Experience of Causation . In W. 
Seager (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Panpsychism  (pp. 269-284). Routledge. 
Morris, K. (2021). Phenomenal Transparency and the Transparency of subjecthood . Analysis, 
81, 39–45. 
Putnam, H. (1975). The Meaning of ‘Meaning’ . In K. Gunderson (ed.), Language, Mind, and 
Knowledge. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 
Roelofs, L. (2019). Combining Minds. NY: Oxford University Press. 
Roelofs, L. (2020). Consciousness, Revelation, and Confusion. Dialectica, 74 (1), 61–93. 
32 
 
Rosenberg, G. (2004). A Place for Consciousness . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 
Schaffer, J. (2010). Monism: The Priority of the Whole. Philosophical Review, 119 (1), 31–
76. 
Seager, W. (2010). Panpsychism, Aggregation and Combinatorial Infusion . Mind and Matter, 
8, 167–84. 
Simons, P. (2006). The Seeds of Experience. In A. Freeman (ed.), Consciousness and its 
Place in Nature: Does Physicalism Entail Panpsychism?  Imprint Academic. 
Skrbina, D. (2005). Panpsychism in the West. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.  
Strawson, G. (2003). What Is the Relation between an Experience, the Subject of the 
Experience, and the Content of the Experience? Philosophical Issues, 13, 279–315. 
Strawson, G. (2006). Realistic Monism: Why Physicalism Entails Panpsychism . Journal of 
Consciousness Studies , 13 (10–11), 3–31. 
Thoreau, H. D. (1854 (2016)). Walden. Penguin Books. 
Tononi, G., Oizumi, M., Albantakis, L. (2014). From the Phenomenology to the Mechanisms 
of Consciousness: Integrated Information Theory 3.0 . PLOS Computational Biology , 
10 (5), 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1003588 . 