If consciousness doesn’t need to combine in the way many have assumed it must for a panpsychic reality to be possible, then we don’t face a combination problem at all. As we have seen, experiences of consciousness need not be continuous or maintained as individual selves or subjects. Nor do they necessarily need to be extinguished when the smaller constituents of matter combine to make more complex systems, like brains. The illusion of being a self, along with an experience of continuity over time through memory, may in fact be a very rare form of consciousness.
