Panpsychism
In philosophy of mind, panpsychism is the view that the mind or consciousness is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of reality. It is also described as a theory that "the mind is a fundamental feature of the world which exists throughout the universe". It is one of the oldest philosophical theories and has been ascribed, in some form, to philosophers including Thales, Plato, Spinoza, Leibniz, Schopenhauer, William James, Alfred North Whitehead, and Bertrand Russell. In the 19th century, panpsychism was the default philosophy of mind in Western thought, but it saw a decline in the mid-20th century with the rise of logical positivism. Recent interest in the hard problem of consciousness and developments in the fields of neuroscience, psychology, and quantum mechanics have revived interest in panpsychism in the 21st century, because it addresses the hard problem directly.
Overview
Etymology
The term panpsychism comes from the Greek pan and psyche. The use of "psyche" is controversial, because it is synonymous with "soul", a term usually taken to refer to something supernatural; more common terms now found in the literature include mind, mental properties, mental aspect, and experience.Concept
Panpsychism holds that mind, or a mind-like aspect, is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of reality. It is sometimes defined as a theory in which "the mind is a fundamental feature of the world which exists throughout the universe". Panpsychists posit that the type of mentality we know through our own experience is present, in some form, in a wide range of natural bodies. This notion has taken on a wide variety of forms. Some historical and non-Western panpsychists ascribe attributes such as life or spirits to all entities. Contemporary academic proponents, however, hold that sentience or subjective experience is ubiquitous, while distinguishing these qualities from more complex human mental attributes. They therefore ascribe a primitive form of mentality to entities at the fundamental level of physics, but may not ascribe mentality to most aggregate things, such as rocks or buildings.Terminology
The philosopher David Chalmers, who has explored panpsychism as a viable theory, distinguishes between microphenomenal experiences, and macrophenomenal experiences.Philip Goff draws a distinction between panexperientialism and pancognitivism. In the form of panpsychism under discussion in the contemporary literature, conscious experience is present everywhere at a fundamental level, hence the term panexperientialism. Pancognitivism, by contrast, is the view that thought is present everywhere at a fundamental level—a view that had some historical advocates but has no present-day academic adherents. Contemporary panpsychists do not believe microphysical entities have complex mental states, such as beliefs, desires, and fears.
Originally, the term panexperientialism had a narrower meaning, having been coined by David Ray Griffin to refer specifically to the form of panpsychism used in process philosophy.
History
Antiquity
Panpsychist views are a staple in pre-Socratic Greek philosophy. According to Aristotle, Thales, the first Greek philosopher, posited a theory which held "that everything is full of gods". Thales believed that magnets demonstrated this. This has been interpreted as a panpsychist doctrine. Other Greek thinkers associated with panpsychism include Anaxagoras, Anaximenes, and Heraclitus.Plato argues for panpsychism in his Sophist, in which he writes that all things participate in the form of Being, and that it must have a psychic aspect of mind and soul. In the Philebus and Timaeus, Plato argues for the idea of a world soul or anima mundi. According to Plato:
This world is indeed a living being endowed with a soul and intelligence... a single visible living entity containing all other living entities, which by their nature are all related.
Stoicism developed a cosmology that held that the natural world is infused with the divine fiery essence pneuma, directed by the universal intelligence logos. The relationship between beings' individual logos, and the universal logos was a central concern of the Roman Stoic Marcus Aurelius. The metaphysics of Stoicism finds connections with Hellenistic philosophies, such as Neoplatonism. Gnosticism also made use of the Platonic idea of anima mundi.
Renaissance
After Emperor Justinian closed Plato's Academy in 529 CE, neoplatonism declined. Though there were mediaeval theologians, such as John Scotus Eriugena, who ventured into what might be called panpsychism, it was not a dominant strain in philosophical theology. But in the Italian Renaissance, it enjoyed something of a revival in the thought of figures such as Gerolamo Cardano, Bernardino Telesio, Francesco Patrizi, Giordano Bruno, and Tommaso Campanella. Cardano argued for the view that soul or anima was a fundamental part of the world, and Patrizi introduced the term panpsychism into philosophical vocabulary. According to Bruno, "There is nothing that does not possess a soul and that has no vital principle". Platonist ideas resembling the anima mundi also resurfaced in the work of esoteric thinkers such as Paracelsus, Robert Fludd, and Cornelius Agrippa.Early modern
In the 17th century, two rationalists, Baruch Spinoza and Gottfried Leibniz, can be said to be panpsychists. In Spinoza's monism, the one single infinite and eternal substance is "God, or Nature", which has the aspects of mind and matter. Leibniz's view is that there are infinitely many absolutely simple mental substances called monads that make up the universe's fundamental structure. While it has been said that George Berkeley's idealist philosophy is also a form of panpsychism, Berkeley rejected panpsychism and posited that the physical world exists only in the experiences minds have of it, while restricting minds to humans and certain other specific agents.19th century
In the 19th century, panpsychism was at its zenith. Philosophers such as Arthur Schopenhauer, C.S. Peirce, Josiah Royce, William James, Eduard von Hartmann, F.C.S. Schiller, Ernst Haeckel, William Kingdon Clifford and Thomas Carlyle as well as psychologists such as Gustav Fechner, Wilhelm Wundt, Rudolf Hermann Lotze all promoted panpsychist ideas.Arthur Schopenhauer argued for a two-sided view of reality as both Will and Representation. According to Schopenhauer, "All ostensible mind can be attributed to matter, but all matter can likewise be attributed to mind".
Josiah Royce, the leading American absolute idealist, held that reality is a "world self", a conscious being that comprises everything, though he did not necessarily attribute mental properties to the smallest constituents of mentalistic "systems". The American pragmatist philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce espoused a sort of psycho-physical monism in which the universe is suffused with mind, which he associated with spontaneity and freedom. Following Pierce, William James also espoused a form of panpsychism. In his lecture notes, James wrote:
Our only intelligible notion of an object in itself is that it should be an object for itself, and this lands us in panpsychism and a belief that our physical perceptions are effects on us of 'psychical' realities
English philosopher Alfred Barratt, the author of Physical Metempiric, has been described as advocating panpsychism.
In 1893, Paul Carus proposed a philosophy similar to panpsychism, "panbiotism", according to which "everything is fraught with life; it contains life; it has the ability to live".
20th century
's neutral monist views tended toward panpsychism. The physicist Arthur Eddington also defended a form of panpsychism. The psychologists Gerard Heymans, James Ward and Charles Augustus Strong also endorsed variants of panpsychism.In 1990, the physicist David Bohm published "A new theory of the relationship of mind and matter", a paper based on his interpretation of quantum mechanics. The philosopher Paavo Pylkkänen has described Bohm's view as a version of panprotopsychism.
One widespread misconception is that the arguably greatest systematic metaphysician of the 20th century, Alfred North Whitehead, was also panpsychism's most significant 20th century proponent. This misreading attributes to Whitehead an ontology according to which the basic nature of the world is made up of atomic mental events, termed "actual occasions". But rather than signifying such exotic metaphysical objects—which would in fact exemplify the fallacy of misplaced concreteness Whitehead criticizes—Whitehead's concept of "actual occasion" refers to the "immediate experienced occasion" of any possible perceiver, having in mind only himself as perceiver at the outset, in accordance with his strong commitment to radical empiricism.
Contemporary
Panpsychism has recently seen a resurgence in the philosophy of mind, set into motion by Thomas Nagel's 1979 article "Panpsychism" and further spurred by Galen Strawson's 2006 realistic monist article "Realistic Monism: Why Physicalism Entails Panpsychism". Other recent proponents include American philosophers David Ray Griffin and David Skrbina, British philosophers Gregg Rosenberg, Timothy Sprigge, Philip Goff, and Canadian philosopher William Seager. The British philosopher David Papineau, while distancing himself from orthodox panpsychists, has written that his view is "not unlike panpsychism" in that he rejects a line in nature between "events lit up by phenomenology those that are mere darkness".The integrated information theory of consciousness, proposed by the neuroscientist and psychiatrist Giulio Tononi in 2004 and since adopted by other neuroscientists such as Christof Koch, postulates that consciousness is widespread and can be found even in some simple systems.
In 2019, cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman published The Case Against Reality: How evolution hid the truth from our eyes. Hoffman argues that consensus reality lacks concrete existence, and is nothing more than an evolved user-interface. He argues that the true nature of reality is abstract "conscious agents". Science editor Annaka Harris argues that panpsychism is a viable theory in her 2019 book Conscious, though she stops short of fully endorsing it.
Panpsychism has been postulated by psychoanalyst Robin S. Brown as a means to theorizing relations between "inner" and "outer" tropes in the context of psychotherapy. Panpsychism has also been applied in environmental philosophy by Australian philosopher Freya Mathews, who has put forward the notion of ontopoetics as a version of panpsychism.
The geneticist Sewall Wright endorsed a version of panpsychism. He believed that consciousness is not a mysterious property emerging at a certain level of the hierarchy of increasing material complexity, but rather an inherent property, implying the most elementary particles have these properties.