In philosophy of mind, panpsychism () is the view that the mind or a mind-like aspect 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".
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 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 (see below).
Plato argues for panpsychism in his Sophist, in which he writes that all things participate in the Platonic form of Being and that it must have a psychic aspect of mind and soul ( psyche). 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.Plato, Timaeus, 29/30; fourth century BCE
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 Stoic physics finds connections with Hellenistic philosophies such as Neoplatonism. Gnosticism also made use of the Platonic idea of anima mundi.
Arthur Schopenhauer argued for a two-sided view of reality as both Will and Representation ( Vorstellung). 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 Pragmaticism 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.Ford, Marcus P. (1981). William James: Panpsychist and Metaphysical Realist. Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, Vol. 17, No. 2. pp. 158–170. 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 (1883), has been described as advocating panpsychism.Rogers, Arthur Kenyon. (1922). English and American Philosophy Since 1800: A Critical Survey. New York: Macmillan. p. 326Robinson, Daniel Sommer. (1932). An Introduction to Living Philosophy. New York, Thomas Y. Crowell Company. p. 200
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".Skrbina, David. (2005). Panpsychism in the West. MIT Press. .Carus, Paul. (1893). "Panpsychism and Panbiotism". The Monist. Vol. 3, No. 2. pp. 234–257.
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 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.
The integrated information theory of consciousness (IIT), 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.Brown, R.S. (2020). Groundwork for a Transpersonal Psychoanalysis: Spirituality, Relationship, and Participation. Abingdon, UK; New York: Routledge. 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.
Panprotopsychism is advertised as a solution to the combination problem: the problem of explaining how the consciousness of microscopic physical things might combine to give rise to the macroscopic consciousness of the whole brain. Because protophenomenal properties are by definition the constituent parts of consciousness, it is speculated that their existence would make the emergence of macroscopic minds less mysterious. The philosopher David Chalmers argues that the view faces difficulty with the combination problem. He considers it "ad hoc", and believes it diminishes the parsimony that made the theory initially interesting.David Chalmers (1996) , pp. 153–156. Oxford University Press, New York, .
The Huayan school, Tiantai, and Tendai schools of Buddhism explicitly attribute Buddha-nature to inanimate objects such as lotus flowers and mountains. This idea was defended by figures such as the Tiantai patriarch Zhanran, who spoke of the Buddha-nature of grasses and trees.
Similarly, Soto Zen master Dogen argued that "insentient beings expound" the teachings of the Buddha, and wrote about the "mind" (心, shin) of "fences, walls, tiles, and pebbles". The 9th-century Shingon Buddhism figure Kukai went so far as to argue that natural objects such as rocks and stones are part of the supreme embodiment of the Buddha. According to Parks, Buddha-nature is best described "in western terms" as something " psychophysical".Parks, Graham. "The awareness of rocks". Skrbina David, ed. Mind that Abides. Chapter 17.
The consensus view is that perception is a reconstruction of one's environment. Hoffman views perception as a construction rather than a reconstruction. He argues that perceptual systems are analogous to information channels, and thus subject to data compression and reconstruction. The set of possible reconstructions for any given data set is quite large. Of that set, the subset that is Homomorphism in relation to the original is minuscule, and does not necessarily—or, seemingly, even often—overlap with the subset that is efficient or easiest to use.
For example, consider a graph, such as a pie chart. A pie chart is easy to understand and use not because it is perfectly homomorphic with the data it represents, but because it is not. If a graph of, for example, the chemical composition of the human body were to look exactly like a human body, then we could not understand it. It is only because the graph abstracts away from the structure of its subject matter that it can be visualized. Alternatively, consider a graphical user interface on a computer. The reason graphical user interfaces are useful is that they abstract away from lower-level computational processes, such as machine code, or the physical state of a circuit-board. In general, it seems that data is most useful to us when it is abstracted from its original structure and repackaged in a way that is easier to understand, even if this comes at the cost of accuracy. Hoffman offers the "fitness beats truth theorem"Prakash, Stephens, Hoffman, Singh, Fields. "Fitness Beats Truth in the Evolution of Perception". http://cogsci.uci.edu/~ddhoff/FBT-7-30-17. as mathematical proof that perceptions of reality bear little resemblance to reality's true nature. From this he concludes that our senses do not faithfully represent the external world.
Even if reality is an illusion, Hoffman takes consciousness as an indisputable fact. He represents rudimentary units of consciousness (which he calls "conscious agents") as . Though the theory was not initially panpsychist, he reports that he and his colleague Chetan Prakash found the math to be more parsimonious if it were. They hypothesize that reality is composed of these conscious agents, who interact to form "larger, more complex" networks.Fields, Chris; Hoffman, Donald; Prakash, Chetan; Singh, Manish. Conscious agent networks: Formal analysis and application to cognition.
The philosopher Hedda Hassel Mørch's views IIT as similar to Russellian monism, while other philosophers, such as Chalmers and John Searle, consider it a form of panpsychism. IIT does not hold that all systems are conscious, leading Tononi and Koch to state that IIT incorporates some elements of panpsychism but not others. Koch has called IIT a "scientifically refined version" of panpsychism.
In The Conscious Mind, David Chalmers writes that, in some instances, the differences between "Russell's neutral monism" and his property dualism are merely semantic. Philip Goff believes that neutral monism can reasonably be regarded as a form of panpsychism "in so far as it is a dual aspect view". Neutral monism, panpsychism, and dual aspect theory are grouped together or used interchangeably in some contexts.
Though Chalmers gave the hard problem of consciousness its present name, similar views were expressed before. Isaac Newton,. John Locke, Gottfried Leibniz,. John Stuart Mill,Mill, John Stuart. A System of Logic (1843), Book V, Chapter V, Section 3. Thomas Henry Huxley, Wilhelm Wundt, all wrote about the seeming incompatibility of third-person functional descriptions of mind and matter and first-person conscious experience. Likewise, Asian philosophers like Dharmakirti and Guifeng Zongmi discussed the problem of how consciousness arises from unconscious matter.Chalmers, David J. Is the Hard Problem of Consciousness Universal?.Arnold, Dan (2015) Philosophy of Mind's Hard Problem in Light of Buddhist Idealism, in Steven Emmanuel, ed., Philosophy's Perennial Questions: Comparing Buddhist and Western Approaches.Bryan Van Norden, .Tiwald, Justin; Van Norden, Bryan W. eds. (2005), Readings in Later Chinese Philosophy, p. 101. Hackett Publishing. Similar sentiments have been articulated through philosophical inquiries such as the problem of other minds, solipsism, the explanatory gap, philosophical zombies, and Mary's room. These problems have caused Chalmers to consider panpsychism a viable solution to the hard problem,
Brian Jonathan Garrett has compared the hard problem to vitalism, the now discredited hypothesis that life is inexplicable and can only be understood if some vital life force exists. He maintains that given time, consciousness and its evolutionary origins will be understood just as life is now understood. Daniel Dennett called the hard problem a "hunch", and maintained that conscious experience, as it is usually understood, is merely a complex cognitive illusion.Dennett, Daniel. " The Zombic Hunch: Extinction of an Intuition?" ROYAL INSTITUTE OF PHILOSOPHY MILLENNIAL LECTURE. November 28, 1999. Patricia Churchland, also an eliminative materialist, maintains that philosophers ought to be more patient: neuroscience is still in its early stages, so Chalmers's hard problem is premature. Clarity will come from learning more about the brain, not from metaphysical speculation.
In Mortal Questions (1979), Thomas Nagel argues that panpsychism follows from four premises:
Before the first premise is accepted, the range of possible explanations for consciousness is fully open. Each premise, if accepted, narrows down that range of possibilities. If the argument is sound, then by the last premise panpsychism is the only possibility left.
Therefore, if all four premises are true, consciousness is its own unique property of matter and panpsychism is true.
(2) On one hand, if consciousness is separate from the physical world then there is no room for it to exert any causal power on the world (a state of affairs philosophers call epiphenomenalism). If consciousness plays no causal role, then it is unclear how Chalmers could even write this paper. On the other hand, consciousness is irreducible to the physical processes of the brain.
(3) Panpsychism has all the benefits of materialism because it could mean that consciousness is physical while also escaping the grasp of epiphenomenalism. After some argumentation Chalmers narrows it down further to Russellian monism, concluding that thoughts, actions, intentions and emotions may just be the quiddities of neurotransmitters, neurons, and glial cells.
(1) Like many sciences, physics describes the world through mathematics. Unlike other sciences, physics cannot describe what Schopenhauer called the "object that grounds" mathematics.Schopenhauer, A. Der Welt als Wille und Vorstellung. Book II, § 17. Economics is grounded in resources being allocated, and population dynamics is grounded in individual people within that population. The objects that ground physics, however, can be described only through more mathematics. In Russell's words, physics describes "certain equations giving abstract properties of their changes". When it comes to describing "what it is that changes, and what it changes from and to—as to this, physics is silent". In other words, physics describes matter's extrinsic properties, but not the intrinsic properties that ground them..
(2) Russell argued that physics is mathematical because "it is only mathematical properties we can discover". This is true almost by definition: if only extrinsic properties are outwardly observable, then they will be the only ones discovered. This led Alfred North Whitehead to conclude that intrinsic properties are "intrinsically unknowable".
(3) Consciousness has many similarities to these intrinsic properties of physics. It, too, cannot be directly observed from an outside perspective. And it, too, seems to ground many observable extrinsic properties: presumably, music is enjoyable because of the experience of listening to it, and chronic pain is avoided because of the experience of pain, etc. Russell concluded that consciousness must be related to these extrinsic properties of matter. He called these intrinsic properties quiddities. Just as extrinsic physical properties can create structures, so can their corresponding and identical quiddites. The conscious mind, Russell argued, is one such structure.
Proponents of panpsychism who use this line of reasoning include Chalmers, Annaka Harris, and Galen Strawson. Chalmers has argued that the extrinsic properties of physics must have corresponding intrinsic properties; otherwise the universe would be "a giant causal flux" with nothing for "causation to relate", which he deems a logical impossibility. He sees consciousness as a promising candidate for that role. Galen Strawson calls Russell's panpsychism "realistic physicalism". He argues that "the experiential considered specifically as such" is what it means for something to be physical. Just as mass is energy, Strawson believes that consciousness "just is" matter.
Max Tegmark, theoretical physicist and creator of the mathematical universe hypothesis, disagrees with these conclusions. By his account, the universe is not just describable by math but is math; comparing physics to economics or population dynamics is a disanalogy. While population dynamics may be grounded in individual people, those people are grounded in "purely mathematical objects" such as energy and charge. The universe is, in a fundamental sense, made of nothing.
The measurement problem has largely been characterised as the clash of classical physics and quantum mechanics. Bohm argued that it is rather a clash of classical physics, quantum mechanics, and phenomenology; all three levels of description seem to be difficult to reconcile, or even contradictory. Though not referring specifically to quantum mechanics, Chalmers has written that if a theory of everything is ever discovered, it will be a set of "psychophysical laws", rather than simply a set of physical laws. With Chalmers as their inspiration, Bohm and Pylkkänen set out to do just that in their panprotopsychism. Chalmers, who is critical of the Copenhagen interpretation and most quantum theories of consciousness, has coined this "the Law of the Minimisation of Mystery". many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics does not take observation as central to the wave-function collapse, because it denies that the collapse happens. On the many-worlds interpretation, just as the cat is both dead and alive, the observer both sees a dead cat and sees a living cat. Even though observation does not play a central role in this case, questions about observation are still relevant to the discussion. In Roger Penrose's words:
I do not see why a conscious being need be aware of only "one" of the alternatives in a linear superposition. What is it about consciousnesses that says that consciousness must not be "aware" of that tantalising linear combination of both a dead and a live cat? It seems to me that a theory of consciousness would be needed for one to square the many world view with what one actually observes.Chalmers believes that the tentative variant of panpsychism outlined in The Conscious Mind (1996) does just that. Leaning toward the many-worlds interpretation due to its mathematical , he believes his variety of panpsychist property dualism may be the theory Penrose is seeking. Chalmers believes that information will play an integral role in any theory of consciousness because the mind and brain have corresponding informational structures. He considers the computational nature of physics further evidence of information's central role, and suggests that information that is physically realised is simultaneously phenomenally realised; both regularities in nature and conscious experience are expressions of information's underlying character. The theory implies panpsychism, and also solves the problem Penrose poses. On Chalmers's formulation, information in any given position is phenomenally realised, whereas the informational state of the superposition as a whole is not. Panpsychist interpretations of quantum mechanics have been put forward by such philosophers as Whitehead, Shan Gao, Michael Lockwood, and Hoffman, who is a cognitive scientist.Hoffman, D. (2019). The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes. pp. 94–115, 123–124. New York, NY: Norton & Co. Protopanpsychist interpretations have been put forward by Bohm and Pylkkänen.
Tegmark has formally calculated the "decoherence rates" of neurons, finding that the brain is a "classical rather than a quantum system" and that quantum mechanics does not relate "to consciousness in any fundamental way". Hagan et al. criticize Tegmark's estimate and present a revised calculation that yields a range of decoherence rates within the realm of physiological relevance.
In 2007, Steven Pinker criticized explanations of consciousness invoking quantum physics, saying: "to my ear, this amounts to the feeling that quantum mechanics sure is weird, and consciousness sure is weird, so maybe quantum mechanics can explain consciousness"; a view echoed by physicist Stephen Hawking. In 2017, Penrose rejected these characterizations, stating that disagreements are about the nature of quantum mechanics.
John Searle has alleged that panpsychism's unfalsifiability goes deeper than run-of-the-mill untestability: it is unfalsifiable because "It does not get up to the level of being false. It is strictly speaking meaningless because no clear notion has been given to the claim". The need for coherence and clarification is accepted by David Skrbina, a proponent of panpsychism.
Many proponents of panpsychism base their arguments not on empirical support but on panpsychism's theoretical virtues. Chalmers says that while no direct evidence exists for the theory, neither is there direct evidence against it, and that "there are indirect reasons, of a broadly theoretical character, for taking the view seriously". Notwithstanding Tononi and Koch's criticism of panpsychism, they state that it integrates consciousness into the physical world in a way that is "elegantly unitary".
A related criticism is what seems to many to be the theory's bizarre nature. Goff dismisses this objection: though he admits that panpsychism is counterintuitive, he argues that Einstein's and Darwin's theories are also counterintuitive. "At the end of the day," he writes, "you should judge a view not for its cultural associations but by its explanatory power".
Concepts related to this problem include the classical sorites paradox (aggregates and organic wholes), mereology (the philosophical study of parts and wholes), Gestalt psychology, and Leibniz's concept of the vinculum substantiale.
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