Panpsychism

Historical Development

Panpsychism is the view that consciousness — some form of subjective experience, however rudimentary — is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of the natural world. The word combines the Greek pan ("all") and psyche ("mind" or "soul"), and the basic idea is as old as philosophy itself. The pre-Socratic Thales is reported to have said that all things are full of gods; Plato and Aristotle entertained forms of cosmic soul; and in the seventeenth century the view received its most elaborate formulation in Leibniz's Monadology (1714), where the fundamental units of reality — monads — are windowless centers of perception and appetition, so that every substance has an inner, mental life. Spinoza's Ethics offered a related position: mind and matter are two attributes of a single substance, and everything that exists expresses both.

In the nineteenth century, panpsychism was defended by philosophers as different as William James and Henri Bergson, and Bertrand Russell sketched the position that physics describes only the relational structure of matter while consciousness reveals its intrinsic nature. During the twentieth century's physicalist ascendancy the view was widely dismissed, but it has experienced a striking revival since the 1990s, driven largely by David Chalmers' formulation of the hard problem of consciousness and by the sense that physicalism has failed to close the explanatory gap.

Core Ideas

The core thesis is that mind does not emerge from non-conscious matter at some threshold of complexity; instead, some form of experience is present all the way down. Panpsychists typically distinguish the rich, structured consciousness of human beings from the minimal proto-consciousness attributed to fundamental particles: an electron does not think or feel as we do, but it has an intrinsic, experiential aspect that organized systems of such aspects combine into complex consciousness.

The leading argument is the intrinsic nature argument, rooted in Russell. Physics describes matter relationally — how things interact, how they are measured — but says nothing about what matter is in itself. Since we have direct acquaintance with only one intrinsic nature, our own consciousness, the argument suggests we should suppose that consciousness is the intrinsic nature of matter generally. A second, evolutionary argument holds that if consciousness is a genuine novelty that emerged from purely non-conscious matter, the emergence is a miracle; panpsychism avoids the mystery by denying that consciousness emerged at all.

The hardest objection is the combination problem, raised by William James: even if each particle of your brain has a form of experience, how do billions of micro-experiences combine into the single unified field of your awareness? Contemporary panpsychists have proposed various responses — fusion, organizational integration, and others — but no solution has achieved consensus. A related family of views, panprotopsychism, holds that fundamental matter has properties that are neither mental nor physical as we understand them but that together constitute consciousness when suitably organized.

Major Thinkers

• Thales — the ancient intuition that all things are full of gods
• Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz — the monads of the Monadology
• Baruch Spinoza — mind and matter as attributes of one substance
• William James — defense of panpsychism and statement of the combination problem
• Bertrand Russell — the intrinsic nature argument
• David Chalmers — the contemporary formulation and defense

Contemporary Relevance

Panpsychism is now taken seriously by a significant minority of philosophers as one of the few live options for solving the hard problem of consciousness. It is also increasingly discussed in neuroscience and physics, where theories such as Integrated Information Theory share panpsychism's intuition that consciousness may be far more widespread than common sense supposes. The view also carries ethical implications: if consciousness is ubiquitous, questions about the moral standing of entities we currently treat as non-conscious become less straightforward. Finally, panpsychism converges in interesting ways with Eastern traditions such as Buddhism and nonduality, which likewise resist the sharp divide between mind and matter, making it a rare point of contact between analytic philosophy of mind and contemplative wisdom traditions.

Related Concepts

• Philosophy of mind and consciousness
• What Is Panpsychism? — the entry-level answer
• Dualism and materialism — the rival frameworks
• The hard problem and the explanatory gap
• Qualia and philosophical zombies
• Nonduality and mindfulness