Galen Strawson
Starting from the one thing he says he is absolutely sure of, experience, he concludes that matter must already have contained it: if nothing comes from nothing, a consistent physicalism leads to panpsychism.
British
British philosopher, known for his panpsychism: holding experience to be the most certain datum and brute emergence to be unintelligible, he argues that a consistent physicalism entails that matter is already, at its fundamental level, experiential. He also works on the self and on moral responsibility.
Justification
Strawson starts from a certainty he judges firmer than any theory: experience exists, it is what we are most sure of. He then refuses brute emergence: that matter utterly devoid of inwardness should produce lived experience by sheer complexification strikes him as not mysterious, but unintelligible. If one also holds that everything is physical, only one way out remains: the physical already contains, at its fundamental level, something experiential. He therefore presents his panpsychism as a real physicalism, not as adding mind to otherwise inert matter.
"Realistic Monism — Why Physicalism Entails Panpsychism" (2006)
Justification
Strawson does not refuse every emergence: the liquidity of water is perfectly intelligible from the behaviour of molecules, and that is the model of what he accepts. What he rejects is brute emergence, that of a radically new property arising from constituents bearing no trace of it: whatever emerges must be intelligible from that out of which it emerges. Applied to experience, this refusal leads him not to classical but to panpsychism: if lived experience cannot arise from what contains none of it, then it was already there.
"Realistic Monism" (2006)