Panpsychism
Panpsychism is the view that mentality is a fundamental and widespread feature of the natural world. The word comes from the Greek pan (all) and psyche (mind or soul). In its usual modern form it holds that the basic constituents of matter have some extremely simple form of experience, and that human consciousness is built up from it.[1]
Panpsychism does not say that rocks think or that electrons have feelings like ours. The experience it attributes to basic matter is assumed to be unimaginably simple.
History
Established scholarshipVersions of the idea appear among the earliest Greek philosophers. The Renaissance thinker Francesco Patrizi introduced the term in the sixteenth century. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Spinoza and Leibniz each built systems in which mind runs all the way through nature. See Spinoza, Leibniz, and William James.
The view was widely held in the nineteenth century, by Gustav Fechner, William Clifford, and for a time William James. It faded in the twentieth century as behaviorism and logical positivism made talk of inner experience unfashionable.[2]
It returned with Thomas Nagel's 1979 essay "Panpsychism," and gained ground after David Chalmers framed the hard problem of consciousness in the 1990s.[3] It is now a recognized minority position, defended in detail by Galen Strawson and Philip Goff among others.
Why philosophers hold it
Established scholarship- It avoids brute emergence. If matter is wholly without experience, consciousness must appear from nothing at some level of complexity. Panpsychists find that harder to believe than the alternative.
- Physics describes what matter does, not what it is. Bertrand Russell and Arthur Eddington pointed out that physical science captures structure and behavior. The intrinsic nature of matter is left open. Panpsychism proposes that experience fills that gap.
- It keeps one world. Unlike dualism, it needs no second kind of substance.
The combination problem
Established scholarshipThe main objection is that no one can explain how tiny experiences add up to one unified mind. William James put the worry in 1890: a hundred feelings, however arranged, are still a hundred feelings and not one. William Seager named it the combination problem.[4] It remains unsolved.
Other objections are that the view is untestable and that it strikes most people as incredible.
Relation to Universal Panpsychism
Framework claimUniversal Panpsychism shares the starting claim that consciousness is fundamental. It then differs in direction. It begins from one universal mind and works downward, which makes it closer to cosmopsychism. It also adds purpose, souls, and continuity after death. None of those follows from academic panpsychism, and its defenders do not argue for them. See Universal Panpsychism.
See also
References
- Goff, P., Seager, W., & Allen-Hermanson, S. (2022). Panpsychism. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy. Stanford University.
- Skrbina, D. (2005). Panpsychism in the West. MIT Press.
- Nagel, T. (1979). Panpsychism. In Mortal questions (pp. 181-195). Cambridge University Press.
- Seager, W. (1995). Consciousness, information and panpsychism. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2(3), 272-288.
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