I’ve had some great philosophical interactions with Sean Carroll, of late. I was on Sean’s podcast a while back, and more recently he kindly contributed to a volume of essays responding to my book Galileo’s Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness (I counter-responded to all of the essays, including Sean’s, here). We then debated this for three hours on the Mind Chat podcast I host with Keith Frankish. Finally, Sean wrote this blog post summarising his reflections on the Mind Chat discussion.

At the end of the post, Sean conceded that, if panpsychism is true, consciousness underlies my behaviour in the same way that the hardware of my computer underlies its behaviour. However, he then went on to make a surprising statement: because of substrate independence, the panpsychist can’t claim that ‘consciousness gets any credit at all for our behavior in the world.’

Why not? I really don’t get where Sean’s coming from here. The term ‘substrate independence’ just means that the same function can be realised by different hardware. It certainly doesn’t mean that hardware doesn’t do anything! If my consciousness underlies my behaviour in the same way the hardware of my laptop underlies Microsoft Word, that’s as much of a causal role for consciousness as anyone could reasonably want.

I’m so glad Sean and I ended on a point of agreement: consciousness does ground behaviour on a panpsychist worldview.