Overdrawing on Experience: Panpsychism and the Limits of First-Person Warrant

Panpsychism is often motivated by an appeal to the epistemic privilege of consciousness. Physical science seems to describe matter in structural, relational, dispositional, or dynamic terms, while consciousness is known directly from the first-person point of view. This paper argues that this appeal supports less than panpsychism requires. First-person experience establishes consciousness as a datum and shows that the experiences with which we are acquainted have determinate phenomenal character. It does not, by itself, disclose bare metaphysical subjectivity, micro-experience, proto-experience, cosmic subjectivity, hidden phenomenal fields, or relations of phenomenal inheritance. Those posits may still be defended, but they must be defended as theoretical posits and judged by their explanatory work. The argument does not derive consciousness from organization. Rather, it asks what explanatory work remains for a hidden phenomenal base once organization explains the structure of ordinary consciousness. The conclusion is not that panpsychism is false. It is that panpsychism forfeits the special authority of first-person evidence once it moves beyond ordinary consciousness into hidden phenomenal ontology.