Galen Strawson Blockers and Laughter: Panpsychism, Archepsychism, Pantachepsychism 1. Introduction There’s been hot and heavy talk of panpsychism since the first edition of the collective volume Consciousness and its Place in Nature was published in 2006. 1 Much of it has been confusing. There’s been the usual terminological chaos, but some progress has — I think — been made. I endorsed the core idea of panpsychism in 1994, in Mental Reality (ch. 3): the archepsychist idea (see p. 354 below) that consciousness or experience must be among the fundamental features of concrete reality. I haven’t changed my basic view since then, but I have changed the way I put it. I’ve also read more of what was written on the subject in the past, in the Western tradition; especially between 1870 and 1940. I’ve found that almost everything I’ve wanted to say has been said before, often somewhat differently, but often very well. 2 William Kingdon Clifford’s defence of panpsychism is relatively well known (Clifford 1874, 1875). So also, now, is Arthur Eddington’s (see e.g. Eddington 1928, chs. 12 and 13). Few, however, know of the work by Morton Prince, a full-on panpsychist who was one of the ear- lier fully explicit exponents of the so-called mind–brain identity the- ory: ‘states of mind and neural activities are identical’, he wrote in 1885; ‘consciousness and the brain process are identical’. 3 Gerard [1] When I cite a work I give the date of first publication or occasionally the date of composi- tion, while the page reference is to the published version listed in the bibliography. [2] I’ve recently been reading a posthumous collection of papers by Sprigge (Sprigge 2011), in which he also says, excellently, many of the things I say. See also Sprigge (1983). [3] 1885, p. 44; 1904, p. 447. As Sprigge says, ‘Anything going for the identity theory is evi- dence for the truth of panpsychism, as was realized long ago by philosophers such as Josiah Royce’ (1983: 102). Some think that the so-called mind–brain identity theory,