Contemporary panpsychism
Explanation
Panpsychism — literally "all-mind" — is the thesis that consciousness is a fundamental and ubiquitous property of reality, present in some form in all physical entities. A perennial philosophy (present in Anaxagoras, Giordano Bruno, Spinoza, Leibniz, Schelling, Whitehead), it has resurged in the 21st century thanks to philosophers such as Galen Strawson, David Chalmers and Philip Goff.
The logic of its resurgence is the following: if the hard problem is real, and if positing consciousness emerging from pure non-conscious matter is mysterious, then the reasonable alternative is to suppose that consciousness was always there, from fundamental particles, although in very primitive forms that only in complex systems such as brains give rise to rich experiences like the human one.
Goff, in Galileo's Error (2019), presents panpsychism as the least bad option: dualism has interaction problems, reductive materialism has the hard problem, eliminativism is counterintuitive to the point of absurdity. Panpsychism is strange but philosophically economical: a single substance (matter, understood panpsychically) explains the continuity between non-living and living, simple and complex.
The most elaborate version is constitutivism: complex experiences are literally constituted by simpler experiences of the system's components. Its most discussed technical problem is the combination problem: how do the micro-experiences of particles combine to give rise to the unified and rich experience of the human subject? Stacking them is not enough; a principle of combination is needed that explains phenomenal unity.
An important variant is panprotopsychism or Russellian monism: particles would not have experience properly speaking, but proto-experiential properties that, organized appropriately, generate experience. This connects with Bertrand Russell's intuition that physics describes structural relations but leaves the intrinsic nature of the physical undetermined.
Panpsychism is no longer seen as exotic. Serious analytic philosophy journals discuss it with the same rigour as any other position, and some scientific theories (Tononi's IIT in its strong interpretations) seem to imply a form of panpsychism. For a future science of consciousness, panpsychism marks a conceptual horizon that can no longer be ignored.
Strengths
- Dissolves the hard problem by positing fundamental consciousness.
- Continuity with Russellian monism and the Spinozist tradition.
- Compatible with integrated information theory.
- Takes the first person seriously without resorting to dualism.
Main critiques
- Combination problem: how do atomic experiences form unified macroscopic experiences.
- Lack of clear empirical consequences: how does a conscious electron differ from a non-conscious one?
- Clashes with common intuition and with the categorical nature of many distinctions.
- Risk of disguised animism, not accepted by mainstream science.