I have been working on a paper titled ‘forming a positive concept of the phenomenal bonding relation for constitutive panpsychism’, which I have had accepted for publication in the journal dialectica.

The paper has recently been published online and in the most recent issue. If you follow this link, here, then you can read the paper – if you don’t have institutional access don’t worry, it is open access so it won’t be behind a paywall.

In the paper I argue that the Phenomenal Bonding view of panpsychism is not as dismal as people may think. Philip Goff has recently argued that we cannot form a concept of the phenomenal bonding relation, however I respond to Goff arguing that we can form a positive concept of the phenomenal bonding relation.

Here is the abstract of the paper, hopefully it piques your interest:

‘Philip Goff has recently argued that due to the ‘subject-summing problem’, panpsychism cannot explain consciousness. The subject-summing problem is a problem which is analogous to the physicalist’s explanatory gap; it is a gap between the micro-experiential facts and the macro-experiential facts. Goff also suggests that there could be a solution by way of a ‘phenomenal bonding relation’, but believes that this solution is not up to scratch because we cannot form a positive not-merely-role-playing concept of this relation. In this paper, I argue that the phenomenal bonding solution is up to scratch. I argue that the panpsychist, by carefully inspecting their phenomenology and scrutinising their concepts, can form a positive concept of the phenomenal bonding relation. By doing this they can start to get around their explanatory gap’