2.1 As will be seen, however, aside from materialsm there is one other candidate for a unitary monist ontology open to the science-savvy philosopher with strong nerves and a thick skin. For Chalmers' honest embrace of what materialists deride as the ultimate philosophical doomsday scenario stems from the alleged failure of every conceivable monism to accommodate the evidence. Its argument could be sound only if we've got our supervenience base right. If our conception of the ultimate "low-level" facts is wrong, then a reductive explanation of the human mind is potentially feasible. The ontological unity of science can still be salvaged. This proposal isn't nearly as far-fetched as it sounds. For the historical track-record of science-derived candidates for ontological primitives is poor. Indeed, on all but purely and vacuously causal notions of reference, the ontological record is dismal; and reference-failure is historically the norm. True believers in scientific progress can of course point to ever-greater predictive and explanatory power, a more mathematically unified description, aeroplanes that fly and working video-recorders, etc. It seems obvious that we know more than our ancestors - and indeed more than our younger selves. Paradigm-enthusiasts, on the other hand, adopt a less triumphalist tone in reviewing the history of science. They can't see how to dispense with descriptivist notions of reference altogether; and having always been wrong before doesn't entail that one is now right. The paradigm-fanciers tend to scorn the simple-minded Whiggism and rational reconstructionist fables colouring the standard text-books. They are far more impressed by the dis-continuities in our notions of the stuff of the world. What's the point in getting the formulae right i.e. the "standard model" in physics, if you fundamentally don't know what you're talking about?

2.2 At any rate, these days dualism of any kind is not an option that a scientifically well-versed philosopher takes on lightly. Chalmers is clearly extremely well-versed. He isn't a wanton mystery-monger either. Understandably, he doesn't exactly relish the "dualist" label. It brings too much extraneous philosophical baggage. Only his intellectual integrity, I suspect, leads him to use it at all. On the PR front, he might have done better politically to use a different tag - perhaps some sort of pan-informationalist monism with two irreducible attributes - though in fact that position is only one of his options and perhaps does too great a violence to language. Anyway, Chalmers generally endorses, rightly I think, the experimentally well-attested causal closure of the physical world. Causal closure is normally interpreted as imposing a brutally effective constraint on the metaphysical excesses of qualia-freaks and their allies. It also puts paid to apologists for divine intervention; though down here at the research-labs, members of the living dead are disturbingly frequent callers to the doorsteps of Lower Rock Gardens. So Chalmers first carefully examines all the scientifically-informed options before nailing his own ontological colours to the mast.

2.3 The positive theory of consciousness he outlines is courageously unfashionable. Indeed one fears its public advocacy may set a professionally dangerous example to untenured junior academics. The account is non-reductive. Yet it still aspires to be explanatory. It takes the guise of a non-Cartesian dualism based schematically on:

• first, principles of structural coherence and organisational invariance: a sort of non-reductive functionalism. Systems with the same functional organization as a conscious system will also be conscious
  
  
• second, a double-aspect view of information. Information,"a difference that makes a difference", is fundamental to the Chalmers cosmos. He extends Shannon's technical, non-semantic, bit-capacity definition of information so it embraces both a physical and an experiential element. Daringly, he suggests that perhaps wherever there is any form of causal interaction there is also experience.

2.5 Chalmers also treats with admirable respect, however, a very radically conservative family of options for naturalising consciousness within an ontologically unitary scientific world-picture. One of the offshoots of this family consists in a mathematico-physically formalised species of panpsychism. A naturalistic panpsychism embraces, or can be construed as embracing, the technical apparatus of theoretical gr/qc physics in its entirety. There's no need to start adding unknown fields and forces to explain consciousness. There's no need, and in fact it's grossly unprincipled, to start messing up the symmetry of the [relativised] Universal Schrodinger Equation by invoking collapsing wave functions. Such manoeuvres are unphysical and hopelessly ad hoc. They are no way to work awkward anomaly of consciousness back into the scientific plot.

2.6 Within a panpsychist framework, and in current analytic idiom, everything that exists "supervenes" on the properties of the world's elemental qualia-stuff. This elemental what-it's-likeness is the primordial "fire" whose behaviour the QM field-theoretic etc apparatus mathematically describes. Panpsychism is an idea which may take an intellectually traumatised ex-materialist some getting use to; but then time heals, or so one is told.

2.7 Unsurprisingly, the traditional keepers of the scientific canon are unlikely to roll over and surrender its official interpretation without a fight. Philosophical trespassing on the physicists' tribal domain has a habit of provoking disciplinary turf-wars. The philosophers usually lose; or at least blink first. No one, in any case, is going to be seen as a fount of oracular wisdom if they find mending the toaster a major technological challenge. Yet the historical precedents for decoupling a scientific formalism from its received ontology are strong. This is so even (or arguably especially) within the discipline of physics itself (cf the classical paradigm versus quantum mechanics etc). It's not as though the property of insentience were somehow written into, or formally entailed by anything explicitly represented within, the canonical formalism. Nor does insentience serve any unique functional role in biology. What's it good for? What fresh predictions does the hypothesis lead to? Why commit oneself to an unverifiable piece of metaphysical speculation which runs counter to the only piece of direct knowledge of the world one has? In fact, just so long as its constituents are functionally well-disposed, there doesn't seem anything that bits of field-theoretic microphenomenology couldn't do just as well instead.

2.8 Incendiary nonsense? Well, what our descendants conceive of as "science" may involve a very alien metaphysic to our own. Certainly, some ideas are too useful not to be rescued from their ancestors. In particular, the experimental method and the use of mathematics in understanding and manipulating the stuff of the world are too important as techniques of inquiry to be left to the ideological materialists who currently dominate the traditional intellectual power-structures. Happily, the Net is allowing untutored barbarians into the gates of the scholarly citadel; and the vagaries of keyword info-hunting via manipulable search-engines offer an unrivalled opportunity to corrupt unindoctrinated youth.

2.9 At its most Idealistic extreme, a panpsychist approach assumes that the values of a minimal, and ontologically primitive what-it's-likeness are exhaustively encoded by the solutions to field(?)-theoretic equation(s) of the Theory of Everything. The maths says it all. There's no need to import anything else and graft it on, or for that matter to spin anything else irreducible off. We live in a Multiverse where mathematical literalism works. The downside is we're presently not much better than medieval numerologists at deciphering the significance of the formulae. Yet like aspirant sorcerers, we know that getting the quasi-magical symbols even slightly wrong can sometimes have catastrophic practical consequences.

2.10 On a panpsychist worldview, composite mental states are shifting coalitions of elemental psychons - though not in Eccles' original sense of the term. These minimal bits of what-it's-likeness are scarcely Leibnizian monads either. And they're certainly not little classically well-behaved psychic billiard-balls. For rather than forming, as one might pre-reflectively suppose any such properties ought to, pointillist aggregates of consciousness - mere psychotic patterns of discrete subjectivity - organic minds exemplify instead a fleeting and classically inexplicable unity.

How come? This is currently an area of active research and spirited debate. So here's a breathlessly biased, one-paragraph whistle-stop tour.

2.11 Chalmers, wearing his pan-informationist hat, suggests the unity of consciousness can be explained by the way types of information is processed (p309 is tantalisingly brief). On the other hand, the "grainlessness" of DNA-driven experiential manifolds may just conceivably be explicable by the non-additive nature of quantum mechanical wave-functions. As Seager stresses, invoking QM can't generate consciousness de novo. What it can do is show how the stuff of the world can be non-additively re-arranged into phenomenologically unitary minds. If this is what the equations are telling us, then primitive psychons form superpositions in the quantum mechanical sense. A superposition of states itself forms a genuinely new state with properties different from the properties of the mixture. Hence quantum wholes are not just the sum of their parts and we're more than just a handful of mind-dust. So William James, who coined the term, was wrong. Next, co-opting and adapting a no-collapse interpretation of Hameroff's work for our purposes, interesting human mental states may be unwittingly manifesting a macro- or meso-scopic quantum coherence which orthodoxy assumes they are too hot to handle. Unitary experience, on this conception, derives from formally identical panpsychist analogues of tubulin states of microtubules. The biophysical details are still somewhat speculative.

2.12 In a less conservative vein, one may predict that in distant millennia larger and more sustained coherent states will self-organise into phenomenologically richer, subtler, vaster, more intense, more self-aware and unimaginably more interesting virtual worlds than the cartoonish patterns our minds exemplify at present. No longer will most of our consciousness get sculpted into functional analogues of brute insentience - medium-sized dry objects in the service of selfish DNA. Nor, more generally, will the different modalities of experience be essentially geared to modelling the immediate environment of a genetic host organism in a way which tends to promote its reproductive success. The next few billion years of consciousness, however, is a topic which might take us further afield.

2.13 Of course, the physicists' canonical equations aren't standardly construed as encoding the interrelationships of fields of micro-qualia. Transposing the idiom of physics into talk of e.g. symmetry-transformations of subjectivity etc, sounds more like a recipe for schizophrenic word-salad than a plea for scientifically-informed philosophy. At least until figures of Chalmers' calibre started giving panpsychist conjectures a respectful if cautiously dissentient hearing, a willingness to grant the existence of consciousness anywhere phylogenetically "lower" than worms [if perhaps not as high as Daniel Dennett] belonged to the scientific lunatic-fringe. Many practising scientists would still be suitably scandalised; and they'd cheerfully consign the very idea to the madhouse once more. It is so obviously wrong. If, however, the canonical mathematics describes a world whose animating fire is unknown, then there's nothing on current evidence to rule out the parsimonious hypothesis that the intrinsic nature of everything is sentience. This property alludes not to some ethereal wisp of consciousness tacked on to inert atoms, strings, p-branes, strings, fields etc. Or rather that's emphatically not the version of panpsychism canvassed here. The property consists instead in minimal, self-intimating what-it's-likeness itself.

2.14 This switch in perspective may seem pretty radical. Yet in other ways it's exceedingly conservative. Today's book of scientific success-stories just gets recast in different idiom. Non-equilibrium thermodynamics and statistical mechanics work just as well with a different sort of stuff. Simple, self-replicating patterns ['organisms'] within the primordial field-theoretic what-it's likeness eventually come to function as structurally invariant analogues of the Darwinian materialist's genotype/phenotype model of multicellular life. Self-reproducing, information-bearing patterns of quasi-discrete, base-paired micro-sentience have stumbled across one highly effective way of leaving more copies of themselves. Lest this sound New Age-like, it should be stressed that these structures of microsentience don't promote their own inclusive fitness by throwing up vehicles hosting hippified minds which go on to commune with Nature in celebration of cosmic consciousness. On the African savannah, this is a good way to end up as lunch. Instead, information-bearing patterns of micro-qualia have enhanced their fitness by coding for vehicles hosting skull-encased macro-minds. These minds simulate something different - squalid, harsh and cruelly adaptive, i.e. the everyday world of apparently medium-sized physical objects. Our genes include the instructions for, in effect, self-assembling, self-differentiating patterns of subjectivity. These patterns functionally coalesce into egocentric - because genes are selfish - 'material object'-ridden virtual worlds. Such worlds, whether dreamed up in REM while the host organism sleeps or environmentally-selected after one wakes, feature simulacra of insentient classical objects. Intrinsically subjective stuff can simulate something else altogether. In fact many of the several tens of thousands of genes expressed solely in the mind/brain are coding for the substrates of virtual macroscopic worlds. Virtual macroscopic worlds are 'what it's like' to be a superposition of the mind/brain's topographic maps.

2.15 One tempting cop-out would describe the field-theoretic ur-stuff as mere proto-consciousness. Like proto-pregnancy, this notion will need a lot to make it work. Moreover, it still leaves the momentous shift from an alleged proto-consciousness to the real thing dangling as an unexplained bolt-from-the-blue. Granted, consciousness manifestly varies in intensity as well as mode. Searing pain is sharper than a barely-noticeable ache. Yet even on the otherwise fruitful dimmer-switch model, there's all the difference in the world between complete insentience - an interesting if shamelessly ungrounded hypothesis which yields no testable predictions - and the world's putative first micro-tickle. The 'proto-' escape-route can't magic away a radical discontinuity between sentience of any texture at all and its hypothesised absence.

2.16 The point can be expressed a little more forcefully. On the evidence disclosed by one notable if organisationally atypical part of the world - the part whose noumenal essence one exemplifies rather than conjectures on at one remove - then "matter" is indescribably weirder than any simple-minded physicalist checklist of its attributes would allow. Michael Lockwood, I think, has done most to put across this point to contemporary philosophers; though he disavows panpsychism. Most radically, mass-energy self-intimatingly is - rather than adventitiously has - irreducibly first-personal, subjective and indexical properties. Taken as an empirically-grounded generalisation to the properties of the rest of the entire world, such a leap is admittedly dizzyingly implausible to products of a conventional scientific training. If one discounts all psychological queasiness as irrelevant, however, then there's no substantive ground for thinking pure panpsychism/idealistic monism is improbable. The question is open. Insentience needs arguing for; not thoughtlessly presupposing. In frustration at its re-emergence as a live option to close the explanatory gap, panpsychism's materialistic debunkers usually rely on knee-jerk ridicule rather than rationality to carry their case. "You can't be serious!" one may be told, as though bien pensant earnestness were a sure-fire recipe for truth. Strictly speaking, though, it is the posit of insentience elsewhere in the world which constitutes the speculative, counter-inductive, and perhaps semantically unnaturalisable metaphysics.

2.17 This isn't to say one can't, on the face of it, conceive of places elsewhere - and moments elsewhen - which lack ontologically idealistic status completely. For naturalistic panpsychism entails the existence of pervasive fields etc of a sort of what-it's-likeness which is presumably so minimal in its phenomenal texture - at least in high-entropy and low-energy regimes - that one can almost imagine subtracting it altogether. This mental process of subtraction apparently leaves fields of insentient who-knows-whatness in its place. However, our ability to perform such exercises of the imagination don't entail that Absolute Insentience is really feasible; nor even that it is - who knows - strictly intelligible. The intuition that follows these spurious reality-checks, namely that panpsychism is too implausible to take seriously, is nonetheless unlikely to be searchingly challenged. This is because only some sort of materialism still smells right to the twentieth/twenty-first-century scientific-mind.

2.18 Naturally, for certain human purposes, the structure and ascribed function of our constituent cosmic mind-dust is more important than its particular minimal phenomenal character. It is functionally irrelevant in our classificatory scheme if the more-or-less discrete constituents comprising, for instance, a digital computer consist in any sort of rudimentary consciousness. If they do, such silicon etc., consciousness presumably amounts in any case to a mere aggregate of quasi-punctate and mutually unaware wisps of what-it's-likeness. This stands in contrast to the massive parallelism supporting organic wetware's (warm and quantum-coherent?) experiential manifolds.

2.19 Yet this functional irrelevance doesn't entail that an intrinsic phenomenal character is absent in digital computers. If it were demonstrably absent, then the case for dualism would actually be strengthened. Instead, the boringly minimal phenomenal character which a silicon etc computer's micro-constituents may instantiate simply doesn't bear on their functional role in a particular computer program. 'Deep Thought' doesn't know it's playing chess. A given program - as we would interest-relatively construe it - will be implemented on stuff which is interesting to us precisely insofar as it's systematically interpretable as doing something radically different from inertly subsisting as minimal psychic dross - or indeed subsisting as the patterns of insentient mass-energy that we might unreflectively assume.

2.20 Or at least that's one particular panpsychist perspective. Chalmers, by contrast, suspects sentience itself, and all its values, arises in the information-bearing and substrate-independent role of innumerable micro-functional states. The Conscious Mind adapts and extends the notion of information in Shannon's technical, extrinsic and relational sense so that it correlates with intrinsic phenomenal consciousness - perhaps as a brute psychophysical principle or natural law. In this double-aspect scheme, information is a sort of tertium quid realised throughout the physical and phenomenal world. The internal aspects of information states are phenomenal. The external aspects are physical. "...Or as a slogan: Experience is information from the inside; physics is information from the outside." (p305)

2.21 Chalmers stresses repeatedly that his positive proposals are tentative. It's not that the McGinn and the new mysterians are necessarily wrong. They insist, as does Chalmers, that mind is a wholly natural phenomenon, yet they argue that The World-Knot may never be unravelled or dissolved by any strands of its own parts because they are constitutionally incapable of it. It's just that mysterianism doesn't - any more than global scepticism - represent a very fruitful strategy for finding out anything. At the very least, Chalmers' proposals are an example of the sort of conceptual revolution which a failure to vindicate the ontological unity of the world in either of its two traditional categories might precipitate.

2.22 I still think Chalmers is too quick to dismiss the chances of straight scientific monism. Perhaps pill-popping panpsychist Everettistas aren't best qualified to sound a note of caution; however, I wouldn't seek to dissuade them. In clinging to a conservatively-conceived ontological unity of the world, the modern panpsychist will still want to exploit the substrate-neutral language of functionalist accounts of mind and the information-theoretic paradigm as valuable heuristic tools. The framework offers a very useful conceptual handle on what's going on. What he doesn't do is reify information. God is not a computer programmer - though the different values of His primitives can sometimes take on an information-like role. A research project which aims to explore how primal "concrete" micro-properties, -objects or -events can in varying degree simulate the existence and quasi-autonomous behaviour of successive functional virtual levels of what would otherwise be radically alien abstract objects is more promising, I think, than a strategy coming from the opposite direction. The rival "Olympian" strategy presupposes the existence of (in one sense) "high-level" abstract objects. It then has to deal how they can be realised or instantiated in, or supervene on, or at least relate to, concreta. I don't see how it can be done.

2.23 Likewise, and in a similar spirit of wholesome opportunism, the panpsychist helps himself to the formal apparatus of the natural sciences. He simply discards, in the manner we discarded the luminiferous ether or early quasi-classical models of a miniature atomic solar system, the morass of sordid mental images with which we paradoxically associate materialistic ontology. Often unavowed, these little pictures of what the stuff of the world must supposedly consist of are in fact - if purest mathematico-physically encoded panpsychism is the case - an excrescence which we mentally glue onto the field-theoretic formalism. The pictures themselves derive both from our genetically predisposed model of macroscopic "perception" - fundamentally the Sellars' 'Manifest Image' of the world bequeathed from our childhood - and an ill-conceived faith that contemporary physics yields us knowledge of essences as well as relations.

2.24 Needless to say, the twin bugbears of a scientised panpsychism or an ontologically hybrid property-dualism are not the only reality-models competing for our allegiance. Yet they're the only two candidates for authentic bedrock to the world that I'll consider here. Why does The Conscious Mind decline neat panpsychism as a monist option?

2.25 Chalmers affirms that the role played by simplicity in scientific explanation "cannot be overstated". (p216). He is also a materialist, or at least a physicalist, by temperament. He disavows any mystical or religious leanings; not enough soul-stirring entheogens, perhaps. Nevertheless, he finds that sheer intellectual honesty compels him to argue for a scientifically domesticated brand of dualism. This is because, after painstakingly evaluating the explanatory options canvassed by all of today's acknowledged philosophico-scientific heavyweights, he finds that "almost everything in the world can be reductively explained; but consciousness may be an exception"(xv).

2.26 Consciousness, Chalmers argues, is a fundamental property of the Cosmos. There isn't any more primitive property in terms of which it can be explained. It nonetheless (and there is some tension here, IMO) "arises" from, or occurs "in virtue of" (p243) physical matter. Just as a matter of brute empirical fact, the physical and explanatory basis of our phenomenal judgements is, apparently, also the physical basis of qualia themselves. A first-personal aspect, Chalmers contends, is unaccountably emergent from the [notionally] third-person-understandable substrate - every minute and in a womb near you.

2.27 At this point, one can't stop oneself asking how, why, when, and in what form, did this momentous spark of subjectivity first occur if everything had been ticking along quite fine without it? [but see next] Why does universal insentience break down and spin off [or a-causally begin to correlate or co-vary with] a junior, intimately linked, but nonetheless irreducible partner? For what reason do physical systems with the same abstract organisation "...give rise to the same kind of conscious experience, no matter what they are made of"? If psychophysical laws exist, we will surely want to know why they exist. This urge to understand the connection is likely to nag us whether or not the question is (post-)humanly answerable.

2.28 Perhaps, as Chalmers suggests, we may eventually learn that these questions are idle or ill-posed. The linkage may constitute a fundamental law, or perhaps a meta-law, of nature: systematic psychophysical correlations are something we must just learn to accept. On this sort of account, psycho-physical laws have always existed. But until physical systems evolved that satisfied the relevant antecedent conditions, there could be no consciousness (p171). Yet if Chalmers is right, then Nature's core principles might actually be messier and less simple, or at least their theoretical elegance more heavily disguised, than the regulative unifying ideology of theoretical physics would have us suppose.

2.29 Hidden simplicity and symmetry, however, have been two of the most fertile clues which physics has given us - or so we imagine - as to the underlying principles on which the world works. Arguably, they shouldn't be surrendered without putting up a more tenacious fight. Moreover the concepts that Chalmers cites as the sorts of physical primitive which we must just take as read - for explanation must allegedly come to a stop somewhere - are in fact the topics of hard if inconclusive investigation even now: mass, via some variant of the proposed Higgs-mechanism; electric charge as a manifestation of extra compactified "Kaluza-Klein" dimensions; and space-time itself, as a derived property in a post-classical successor to general relativity.

2.30 This isn't remotely to deny there are still too many ostensibly arbitrary and ill-understood values of (what are currently treated as) basic physical parameters. These we have just to "put in by hand". Their arbitrariness must still count as provisional. We've no need, or not yet at any rate, to elevate our ignorance itself into a meta-scientific principle. Perhaps we'll theorise that broken symmetries are manifested differently elsewhere in other inflated domains of the Multiverse as an expression of some still dimly-imagined universal symmetry. Perhaps the answer will be something else again. Yet one needs to know a great deal about anything to be confident that it is inexplicable; and if one doesn't, then one can't.

2.31 It is worth contrasting the modern-day dualist and panpsychist options here a bit further. Chalmers advocates a research program that seeks to discover what will ideally be a simple set of psychophysical principles. His conceptual framework amounts to a sort of non-reductive functionalism. Within it, we would seek to correlate the multitudinous flavours of consciousness with a presumably equally multitudinous cast of functions. The explanatory gulf between the physical and the phenomenal is to be remedied by a series of functionalist bridging-laws.

2.32 One of the troubles with functions, however, is that they tend to be discernible only as comparatively "high-level", interest-relative constructs. They're not arbitrary, admittedly. Yet they are convention-bound and hard to individuate. Presumably some do, and some don't, 'give rise to' sentience. Yet there's nothing conventional about sentience, as distinct from our ascriptive practices in recognising and classifying it. On a dualist analysis, even if a complete set of psychophysical bridging principles were to be established, there would seem an almost irresistible compulsion to ask how, and indeed why, consciousness can "arise" from matter and energy [Is there any principled reason why it can't, say, "fall out", "levitate", "capsize"? The implausibility argument against panpsychism cuts both ways; though aggressive materialism surely deserves to be the primary target] "Arising" and its spatial kith and kin is a recurrent metaphor in almost all discussions of consciousness. Materialists, epiphenomenalists and scientific property-dualists alike rely on it heavily. Yet it is a creaky, unilluminating and deeply suspect turn of speech. Both it and its motley retinue of metaphorical relatives need to be painstakingly pulled apart - and perhaps discarded. For their use encourages something easy to repudiate, but hard to prevent, namely the habit of imagining some sort of diaphanous ectoplasm wafting up or hovering around gooey grey brainy wetware - even though one knows, and freely avows, that such a picture is hopelessly ill-conceived. Naturally, no one in polite society is arguing that this crude picture is actually correct. Yet a little introspection suggests that one's thinking 'about' consciousness is steeped in a submerged imagery of all sorts of dubious philosophical goings-on. Some of them one would rather not talk about - and for quite understandable reasons.

2.33 More function-troubles now rear their head. In living organisms, neo-Darwinism has taught us how to cash out the appearance of purpose-built design as mere causally-contrived simulation honed by the processes of natural selection. So when, precisely, do the simulations progressively wrought by low-level causal interactions need to be supplemented by an irreducible ontology of qualia-generating functions - rather than simply lending themselves (more easily) to quasi-functional description? Do the functions do any causal work independently of the substrates in which they are (in tainted top-downspeak) realised? And if so, how? Why do functions generate their own, wholly non-conventional phenomenology? Why don't some functions, evidently, generate their own distinctive phenomenology (group minds etc)? Can't the playing out of crass causal processes allow simulations which just get better and better?

2.34 Worse still, innumerable states of consciousness haven't been harnessed into playing any particular functional, behavioural, information-playing role at all. They are no less real. The astonishing modes of sentience inducible by DMT, for instance, are intellectually fascinating beyond belief. Yet their interest doesn't lie in their non-existent - and indeed not even counterfeit - functional role in our informational economy - though conceivably, millennia hence, they might play a quasi-informational role somewhere else. Their interest certainly doesn't lie in their (in)fidelity in tracking or causally co-varying (etc) with the mind-independent environment in Darwinian fitness-enhancing ways. If any sort of functionalist story is to be told here, it is at present totally obscure.

2.35 Further still, there are problems with what might seem even archetypal candidates for non-reductive functional correlates. This is because a mode of experience can sometimes get decoupled from any quasi-functional role which it does normally more-or-less play. The pain of some malignant cancers, for instance, is as nasty and intensely conscious as you can get. Yet it isn't functional to anything; and, tragically, it doesn't cease hurting.

2.36 Selection pressure, it should freely be acknowledged, has predisposed, moulded and selected our composite manifolds of sentience in such a way that they assume their present guise. In that sense, Darwinism and evolutionary psychology "explain" the way our minds work. Yet selection pressure hasn't, and couldn't, create the primitive elements of the psycho-chemical architecture on which natural selection gets to work. So by contrast with a naturalised dualist strategy, a panpsychist research-program is ontologically simpler, cleaner and more theoretically elegant. It's not tied to ill-individuated and interest-relative functions for its elemental ontology. Thus panpsychism is also in principle - and here an air of paradox derives merely from an unfortunate equivocation - more objective.

2.37 In what sense? Well, for example, I can't put into words many elements of the experiential manifold (mind/virtual world) which I now instantiate. Yet - on the perspective under discussion - its constituent textures are precisely encoded by, and homomorphic with, the formalism which would more normally be taken to describe the states of my brain. These equations are, fundamentally, those of quantum mechanics. And just as we can determine what would normally be physically interpreted as the magnetic moment of the electron, for instance, to an accuracy of one part in hundreds of millions, likewise the texture of experience (I'm betting) is precisely encoded with such astonishing accuracy too. Alas the sort of intellectual travelogue found here belies the austere exactitude of the coding I'm talking about.

2.38 A more convenient approximation of the correct formalism might take the guise of the connection and activation evolution equations of the panpsychist analogue of the neural nets I exemplify. Either way, a formalism which embodies an amazingly efficient algorithmic compression of all the values of sentience is ready to hand. This is, potentially, our cognitive good fortune. The scenario couldn't have happened the other way around: a touchy-feely ontology wouldn't have helped in discovering, say, the laws of electromagnetism. Au contraire. We owe the hieroglyphics of sentience to the formal successes of traditional materialism. Finding the psychophysical Rosetta stone so we can read off all its solutions is another matter.

2.39 Of course, unless and until we do work out how to decode it, then laying claim to prior ownership of an accurate formalism rings hollow. It's all very well being told that naturalistic panpsychism is potentially more precise and objective than any functionalist dualism because the exact values of its qualia could be, in principle - if only we knew how to do it - exactly "read off" from the QM formalism that exhaustively describes their changes. For all the practical good it does, one might as well be told the key to the cosmos lies in a structural generalisation of "abracadabra". Yet whereas a scientised panpsychism ties the values of qualia to the presumptive mathematically-expressible nature of the world - itself a form of structural invariance between current rival physical and phenomenal conceptual schemes - the interest-relativity of functionalist idiom means the connection between the maths and the textures of consciousness on such a scheme would be far more subtle and elusive. Tying maths, physics and consciousness together by positing that contemporary science is really about the mathematical structures of sentience is far more elegant and intellectually satisfying; on my current chemical regimen, at any rate.