Panpsychism

What it is

Panpsychism is the view that consciousness, or something proto-conscious, is a fundamental and pervasive feature of physical reality — present at the bottom level rather than appearing suddenly partway up.

Almost everyone's first reaction is that this means rocks have thoughts. It does not, and the misunderstanding is worth clearing immediately.

Panpsychists distinguish sharply between fundamental physical entities and ordinary composite objects. The claim is that basic constituents — call them particles, fields, whatever physics ends up with — have some extremely simple experiential property, unimaginably far from thought, memory or selfhood. A rock is a heap. Heaps do not have unified experience on this view any more than a bucket of sand has a shape of its own. Your brain, by contrast, is organised in a way that plausibly does produce something unified.

The most discussed version is Russellian monism, which starts from a genuine gap in physics. Physics describes what things do — their causal and structural relations, mass as resistance to acceleration, charge as disposition to attract and repel. It never says what they intrinsically are, underneath the doing. Russellian monism proposes that the intrinsic nature filling that role is experiential. Physics is a complete description of structure, and consciousness is what the structure is made of.

Where it came from

The intuition is old and widespread. Presocratics attributed soul to the world. Spinoza held that thought and extension are two attributes of one substance, so mentality is coextensive with everything. Leibniz's monads are simple substances each with something like perception.

The direct modern ancestor is Bertrand Russell's The Analysis of Matter (1927), together with work by Arthur Eddington in the same period, which set out the structure-versus-intrinsic- nature argument that carries the position today. William James took the general idea seriously. Alfred North Whitehead built an entire process philosophy in which experience is the basic unit of reality.

Then it more or less vanished from respectable philosophy for fifty years, and returned around the turn of this century — pushed back by the hard problem, as philosophers looked for options that were neither dualism nor a physicalism that seemed stuck. Galen Strawson, Philip Goff and David Chalmers have been the most prominent recent advocates. Goff's Galileo's Error (2019) is the popular statement.

How it is used

In academic philosophy of mind it functions as a third way, and its appeal is structural: it avoids the interaction problem that troubles dualism, because there is only one kind of stuff, and it avoids the emergence problem that troubles physicalism, because consciousness does not have to appear from nothing.

The cost is that it moves the mystery rather than removing it, which its advocates concede.

Outside philosophy it is enthusiastically annexed by spiritual writers as a scientific endorsement of animism, of a conscious universe, or of the idea that everything is connected in a way that matters practically. This is a longer stretch than it looks. A universe in which electrons have unimaginably simple experiential properties is not thereby a universe that knows you exist, has intentions toward you, or can be petitioned. Panpsychism says the lights are faintly on everywhere. It does not say anyone is looking back.

What we can and cannot say

We can say this is no longer a fringe position. It is published in mainstream journals, defended by philosophers with serious reputations, and taken as a live option rather than an eccentricity — a genuine change from thirty years ago, and one worth reporting accurately because it cuts against the assumption that the academy dismisses everything unusual.

We can say the argument from intrinsic natures is real. Physics really is silent about what things are beneath what they do, and something has to be there.

We can say the standing objection is the combination problem, and that it is severe. If each fundamental constituent has its own minimal experience, how do billions of them combine into a single unified subject reading this sentence? Your experience is not a crowd. Micro- experiences do not obviously add up to a macro-experience the way micro-masses add up to a mass, and William James raised essentially this objection in 1890, before the modern revival began. Solutions have been proposed. None commands agreement, and some panpsychists regard it as their position's version of the hard problem — which would be an awkward outcome for a view adopted to escape that problem.

We cannot say it is testable. No experiment currently distinguishes a panpsychist world from a physicalist one, since both predict identical observations, and it is not clear what such an experiment would even look like. That places it, for now, in the category of positions argued for on explanatory grounds rather than settled by evidence — which is respectable, and is not the same as being confirmed.

Further reading

• Philip Goff, Galileo's Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness (2019) — the accessible modern case.
• Galen Strawson, "Realistic Monism: Why Physicalism Entails Panpsychism" (2006) — the provocative argument that a consistent physicalist should already be a panpsychist.
• Hedda Hassel Mørch, "The Argument for Panpsychism from Experience of Causation" and her writing on the combination problem — for the objection taken seriously by someone sympathetic.