Friday, 6 February 2026

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 Here’s a concise overview of the two philosophical works you asked about — “Superpsychism” by Susan Schneider & Mark Bailey and the Galen Strawson view often summarized by the idea that “There is no mystery of consciousness, and the demand for explanation begs the question.”





🧠 

Superpsychism

 — Susan Schneider & Mark Bailey



Core idea: Superpsychism is a contemporary proposal that combines quantum mechanics, spacetime emergence, and a radical form of panpsychist metaphysics.



🔹 What the theory says



  • The authors argue that two major mysteries — consciousness and the fundamental nature of spacetime — can be connected by rethinking quantum entanglement.  
  • They introduce a “Prototime Interpretation” of physics: a pre-spacetime, quasi-temporal domain (prototime) underlying ordinary time and space.  
  • Based on this, Superpsychism posits that the deepest level of reality is characterized by maximal entanglement, zero entropy, and a kind of holistic integration that the authors interpret as the most fundamental form of consciousness.  
  • Ordinary minds — including human brains, AI, or planetary-scale systems — and even spacetime itself are seen as emergent from this deeper conscious substrate.  




🧩 Relation to panpsychism



  • Superpsychism falls within the broad family of panpsychist views — those that treat consciousness as a fundamental feature of reality. It differs from simpler panpsychism by locating the highest degree of consciousness not in spacetime entities but in a pre-spatiotemporal, maximally entangled structure from which spacetime and ordinary minds arise.  
  • This approach also ties in to some ideas in contemporary quantum-consciousness research by arguing that patterns of entanglement and resonance provide a bridge between physics and conscious experience.  




📌 Why it matters



  • It aims to unify two mysteries — consciousness and the foundations of physics — by making them both emergent from an underlying proto-conscious reality.  
  • It’s highly speculative and not widely accepted in mainstream neuroscience or physics, but it’s part of the expanding philosophical debate about consciousness and reality’s fundamental nature.






🧠 Galen Strawson: 

“There is no mystery of consciousness…”



Strawson’s position (as he expresses it in various writings and interviews) challenges a common framing of consciousness as a profound mystery requiring explanation.



🔹 Key claims



  1. Consciousness is not mysterious per se — we already know what consciousness is from direct first-person experience; you don’t need an elaborate explanation to know what it is because you experience it firsthand.  
  2. Demands for explanation sometimes beg the question — that is, raising the “mystery of consciousness” presupposes that consciousness is a problem that lies outside experience or is inherently hard to conceptualize before reflecting on experience itself. For Strawson, this can confuse how we frame the issue.  
  3. Strawson argues that some philosophers (e.g., eliminative or reductionist accounts that downplay or deny qualia) are mistaken about consciousness precisely because they try to explain it away rather than take the obvious fact of conscious experience seriously.  
  4. Rather than thinking of consciousness as a mysterious extra phenomenon, Strawson’s broader work on “realistic monism” (his term for a physicalism that treats experience as a fundamental physical feature) implies that consciousness should be understood as part of the physical world, not something leaking in from outside it.  




🔹 What “begging the question” means here



  • To beg the question in philosophy means to assume what you’re trying to prove — e.g., assuming consciousness is mysterious before examining the very experience that constitutes consciousness.
  • Strawson suggests that many debates about consciousness are misconceived because they implicitly assume a gap between experience and explanation that may not be justified once experience itself is taken as the starting point.  




📌 How this contrasts with other views



  • Traditional formulations of the “hard problem” (Chalmers and others) treat consciousness as deeply puzzling because subjective experience seems difficult to relate to physical processes.  
  • Strawson, however, insists we already know what consciousness is and that the only genuine puzzle arises when people unnecessarily exclude experience from their ontology and explanations.  






🧩 Summary Comparison


View

Core Claim

Relation to Consciousness

Superpsychism (Schneider & Bailey)

Consciousness and spacetime emerge from a deeper proto-conscious quantum reality

Places consciousness at the heart of fundamental physics via panpsychist-like ontology 

Strawson’s no-mystery critique

Consciousness isn’t a deep mystery because we already know what it is from experience

Challenges traditional framing of the hard problem and suggests issues arise when explanations beg the question 





🧠 Quick Takeaways



  • Superpsychism is a bold fusion of quantum theory and panpsychism that treats fundamental reality as intrinsically conscious, with spacetime and ordinary minds emerging from that deeper level.  
  • Strawson’s stance isn’t a specific explanatory theory so much as a meta-philosophical critique: he argues that consciousness isn’t inherently mysterious when we start from the obvious fact of experience itself, and that assuming a mystery in advance can be philosophically misleading.  





If you want, I can expand this with direct excerpts or arguments from each paper (e.g., key passages or debates from responses to Superpsychism) or relate these ideas to other major theories of consciousness. Would you like that?


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