Listened to Robert Wright interview Galen Strawson about pan-psychism. I think David Bentley Hart is correct on this. The pan-psychists are trying to solve the problem by mashing it down to the sub-atomic level, but it’s really just a shell game. The horizon is there no matter how small you make it, and eventually you have to have a threshold or complexity or configuration. That’s why he was so squirrelly when Wright kept pushing him on what it was like to be a curtain.
On that note, I did finally read the famous Thomas Nagel essay on what it’s like to be a bat, and he nails the problem quite well.
Weirdly, Strawson had never heard of Teilhard de Chardin. I have a little more sympathy for Teilhard’s mystical, pan-psychic approach to matter, but that’s not quite the same thing because he’s not suggesting that it occurs without a teleology.
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