Panpsychism
In philosophy of mind, panpsychism is the view that 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." It holds that mentality is present in all natural bodies that have unified and persisting organization, which most proponents define in a way that excludes objects such as rocks, trees, and human artifacts.
Panpsychism is one of the oldest philosophical theories, and has been ascribed to philosophers including Thales, Plato, Spinoza, Leibniz, William James, Alfred North Whitehead, and Galen Strawson. During the nineteenth century, panpsychism was the default theory in philosophy of mind, but it saw a decline in the mid-20th century with the rise of logical positivism. The recent interest in the hard problem of consciousness has revived interest in panpsychism.
Etymology
The term "panpsychism" comes from the Greek pan and psyche. Psyche comes from the Greek word ψύχω and may mean life, soul, mind, spirit, heart, or 'life-breath'. 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 also described as a theory that "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. Contemporary academic proponents hold that sentience or subjective experience is ubiquitous, while distancing these qualities from complex human mental attributes; they ascribe a primitive form of mentality to entities at the fundamental level of physics but do not ascribe it to most aggregates, such as rocks or buildings. On the other hand, some historical theorists ascribed attributes such as life or spirits to all entities.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 which had some historical advocates, but has not garnered present-day academic adherents. As such, contemporary panpsychists do not believe microphysical entities have complex mental states such as beliefs, desires, fears, and so forth. Originally, however, 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
Ancient
Panpsychist views are a staple theme 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 this was demonstrated by magnets. This has been interpreted as a panpsychist doctrine. Other Greek thinkers who have been 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 which held that the natural world was infused with a divine fiery essence called pneuma, which was directed by a universal intelligence called logos. The relationship of the individual logos of beings with 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 the anima mundi.
Renaissance
After the closing of Plato's Academy by the Emperor Justinian in 529 CE, Neoplatonism declined. Though there were mediaeval Christian thinkers who ventured what might be called panpsychist ideas, it was not a dominant strain in Christian thought. In the Italian Renaissance, however, panpsychism enjoyed something of an intellectual 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 actual term panpsychism into the philosophical vocabulary. According to Giordano 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 period
In the seventeenth century, two rationalists can be said to be panpsychists, Baruch Spinoza and Gottfried Leibniz. In Spinoza's monism, the one single infinite and eternal substance is "God, or Nature" which has the aspects of mind and matter. Leibniz' view is that there are an infinite number of absolutely simple mental substances called monads which make up the fundamental structure of the universe. While it has been said that the idealist philosophy of George Berkeley is also a form of pure panpsychism and that "idealists are panspychists by default", it has also been argued that such arguments conflate mentally-constructed phenomena with minds themselves. 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 nineteenth 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 and William Kingdon Clifford as well as psychologists such as Gustav Fechner, Wilhelm Wundt and Rudolf Hermann Lotze all promoted panpsychist ideas.Arthur Schopenhauer argued for a two-sided view of reality which was 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 was a "world self", a conscious being that comprised everything, though he didn't 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 was 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
In 1893, Paul Carus proposed his own philosophy similar to panpsychism known as 'panbiotism', which he defined as "everything is fraught with life; it contains life; it has the ability to live."
20th century
In the twentieth century, the most significant proponent of the panpsychist view is arguably Alfred North Whitehead. Whitehead's ontology saw the basic nature of the world as made up of events and the process of their creation and extinction. These elementary events are in part mental. According to Whitehead: "we should conceive mental operations as among the factors which make up the constitution of nature."Bertrand Russell's neutral monist views tended toward panpsychism. The physicist Arthur Eddington also defended a form of panpsychism.
The psychologist Carl Jung, who is known for his idea of the collective unconscious, wrote that "psyche and matter are contained in one and the same world, and moreover are in continuous contact with one another", and that it was probable that "psyche and matter are two different aspects of one and the same thing". The psychologists James Ward and Charles Augustus Strong also endorsed variants of panpsychism.
The geneticist Sewall Wright endorsed a version of panpsychism. He believed that the birth of consciousness was not due to a mysterious property of increasing complexity, but rather an inherent property, therefore implying these properties were in the most elementary particles.
Contemporary
The panpsychist doctrine 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, and 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."Panpsychism has also been applied in environmental philosophy by Australian philosopher Freya Mathews. Science editor Annaka Harris explores panpsychism as a viable theory in her book Conscious, though she stops short of fully endorsing the view.
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.
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. However, it 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 referred to IIT as a "scientifically refined version" of panpsychism. The philosopher Hedda Hassel Mørch has argued that with minor modifications, IIT would be compatible with "Russelian panpsychism."
Arguments in favor
Hard problem of consciousness
In the philosophy of mind, panpsychism is one possible solution to the so-called hard problem of consciousness. David Chalmers, who formulated the hard problem of consciousness, has argued panpsychism is one of multiple viable theories of consciousness in The Conscious Mind and subsequent work. Chalmers argues against any reductive solution to the hard problem of consciousness by presenting three related arguments: the explanatory argument, the conceivability argument, and the knowledge argument. He then discusses three possible non-reductive explanations of consciousness but leaves open the correct solution.Hegelian argument
In a subsequent paper, Chalmers has built on his previous exploration of panpsychism and said that a "Hegelian" argument is the most convincing argument for panpsychism, although he admits that it is not definitive. The argument is Hegelian because it is based on Hegelian dialectic and the concepts of thesis, antithesis and synthesis.Chalmers uses the materialist argument from causal closure as his thesis and the conceivability argument for mind–body dualism as his antithesis. Chalmers argues that each argument is persuasive, and that the most persuasive way to resolve both simultaneously is to adopt a form of panpsychism, which is the synthesis of the two arguments.
Chalmers, however, takes his argument further, and argues that for the thesis of panpsychism there is a separate antithesis of panprotopsychism—the proposition that everything in existence is proto-conscious as opposed to conscious. Chalmers tentatively proposes Russellian monism as a synthesis but he does not fully embrace this option and instead sees panpsychism and panprotopsychism as more plausible options.
Non-emergentism
Alleged problems with emergentism are often cited by panpsychists as grounds to reject reductive theories of consciousness. This argument can be traced back to the psychologist Wilhelm Wundt, who applied the phrase ex nihilo nihil fit in this context – saying thus the mental cannot arise from the non-mental.Thomas Nagel
In the article "Panpsychism" in his 1979 book Mortal Questions, Thomas Nagel defines panpsychism as "the view that the basic physical constituents of the universe have mental properties", which he claims are non-physical properties. Nagel argues that panpsychism follows from four premises:- "Material composition", or commitment to materialism.
- "Non-reductionism", or the view that mental properties cannot be reduced to physical properties.
- "Realism" about mental properties.
- "Non-emergence", or the view that "there are no truly emergent properties of complex systems".
Critics of panpsychism could deny proposition of Nagel's argument. If mental properties are reduced to physical properties of a physical system, then it does not follow that all matter has mental properties: it is in virtue of the structural or functional organization of the physical system that the system can be said to have a mind, not simply that it is made of matter. This is the common functionalist position. This view allows for certain man-made systems that are properly organized, such as some computers, to have minds. This may cause problems when is taken into account. Also, qualia seem to undermine the reduction of mental properties to brain properties.
Evolutionary
The most popular empirically based argument for panpsychism stems from evolution and is a form of the non-emergence argument. This argument begins with the assumption that evolution is a process that creates complex systems out of pre-existing properties but yet cannot make "entirely novel" properties. William Kingdon Clifford argued that:Quantum physics
Philosophers such as Alfred North Whitehead have drawn on the indeterminacy observed by quantum physics to defend panpsychism. Advocates of panpsychist theories based on quantum physics see quantum indeterminacy and informational but non-causal relations between quantum elements as the key to explaining consciousness. Other philosophers who have defended panpsychism on the basis of quantum physics include Shan Gao and Michael Lockwood. Those who have defended panprotopsychism, a variant on panpsychism, on the basis of quantum phsyics include the physicist David Bohm and the philosopher Paavo Pylkkänen.Intrinsic nature
These arguments are based on the idea that everything must have an intrinsic nature. They argue that while the objects studied by physics are described in a dispositional way, these dispositions must be based on some non-dispositional intrinsic attributes, which Whitehead called the "mysterious reality in the background, intrinsically unknowable". While we have no way of knowing what these intrinsic attributes are like, we can know the intrinsic nature of conscious experience which possesses irreducible and intrinsic characteristics. Arthur Schopenhauer argued that while the world appears to us as representation, there must be 'an object that grounds' representation, which he called the 'inner essence' and 'natural force', which lies outside of what our understanding perceives as natural law.Galen Strawson has called his form of panpsychism "realistic physicalism", arguing that "the experiential considered specifically as such – the portion of reality we have to do with when we consider experiences specifically and solely in respect of the experiential character they have for those who have them as they have them – that 'just is' physical".
Arguments against
One criticism of panpsychism is that it cannot be empirically tested. David Chalmers responds that while no direct evidence exists for the theory, neither is there direct evidence against it, and that he believes "there are indirect reasons, of a broadly theoretical character, for taking the view seriously".A related criticism is what seems to many to be the theory's bizarre nature. John Searle states that panpsychism is an "absurd view" and that thermostats lack "enough structure even to be a remote candidate for consciousness." Philip Goff, on the other hand, writes that many theories now known to be true have faced resistance due to their intuitive strangeness, and that such intuitions should therefore not be used to assess theories.
The combination problem is frequently discussed as an objection to panpsychism. It can be traced to the writing of William James, but was given its present name by William Seager in 1995. While numerous solutions have been proposed, they have yet to gain widespread acceptance. Keith Frankish explains the combination problem as follows:
Some have argued that the only properties shared by all qualia are that they are not precisely describable, and thus are of indeterminate meaning within any philosophy which relies upon precise definition according to these critics. The need to define better the terms used within the thesis of panpsychism is recognized by panpsychist David Skrbina, and he resorts to asserting some sort of hierarchy of mental terms to be used. Thus only one fundamental aspect of mind is said to be present in all matter, namely, subjective experience. Another panpsychist response has been that we already know what qualia are through direct, introspective apprehension; and we likewise know what conscious mentality is by virtue of being conscious. For Alfred North Whitehead, third-person description takes second place to the intimate connection between every entity and every other which is, he says, the very fabric of reality. To take a mere description as having primary reality is to commit the "fallacy of misplaced concreteness".
By placing subjective experience as the intrinsic nature of the physical world, panpsychists hope to avoid the problem of mental causation. However, Robert Howell has argued that all the causal functions are still accounted for dispositionally, leaving phenomenality causally inert. He concludes: "This leaves us once again with epiphenomenal qualia, only in a very surprising place."
Another criticism of panpsychism has been that it is not useful for explaining the functions of the brain. Giulio Tononi and Christof Koch write that while panpsychism integrates consciousness into the physical world in a way that is "elegantly unitary," its "beauty has been singularly barren. Besides claiming that matter and mind are one thing, it has little constructive to say and offers no positive laws explaining how the mind is organized and works."
In relation to other theories
Idealism
Writing in 1950, Charles Hartshorne said that panpsychism, in contrast to many forms of idealism, holds that for all minds there is a single, external, spatio-temporal world, which is not just ideas in a divine mind. He said panpsychism was thus a form of realism. David Chalmers also contrasts panpsychism to idealism. On the other hand, Uwe Meixner argues that panpsychism can come in both dualistic and idealist forms. He further divides the latter into "atomistic idealistic panpsychism," which he ascribes to David Hume, and "holistic idealistic panpsychism," which he favors.Dualism
describes panpsychism as an alternative to both materialism and dualism. Philip Goff similarly describes panpsychism as an alternative to both physicalism and substance dualism. Chalmers describes panpsychism as respecting the conclusions of both the causal argument against dualism and the conceivability argument for dualism. Goff has argued that panpsychism avoids the disunity of dualism, under which mind and matter are ontologically separate, as well as dualism's problems explaining how mind and matter interact.Neutral monism
The relationship between neutral monism and panpsychism is complex, and further complicated by the variety of formulations of neutral monism. In versions of neutral monism in which the fundamental constituents of the world are neither mental nor physical, it is quite distinct from panpsychism. On the other hand, in versions where the fundamental constituents are both mental and physical, neutral monism is closer to panpsychism or at least dual aspect theory. Neutral monism and panpsychism are sometimes grouped together as similar theories.Physicalism and materialism
Panpsychism encompasses many theories, united by the notion that consciousness is ubiquitous; these can in principle be reductive materialist, dualist, or something else. Galen Strawson maintains that panpsychism is a form of physicalism, on his view the only viable form. On the other hand, David Chalmers describes panpsychism as an alternative to both materialism and dualism. Philip Goff similarly describes panpsychism as an alternative to both physicalism and substance dualism.Emergentism
Panpsychism is incompatible with emergentism. In general, theories of consciousness fall under one or the other umbrella; they either hold that consciousness is present at a fundamental level of reality or that it emerges higher up.Animism and hylozoism
Panpsychism is distinct from animism or hylozoism, which hold that all things have a soul or are alive, respectively. Neither animism nor hylozoism has attracted contemporary academic interest.Variants
Panexperientialism is associated with the philosophies of, among others, Charles Hartshorne and Alfred North Whitehead, although the term itself was invented by David Ray Griffin in order to distinguish the process philosophical view from other varieties of panpsychism. Whitehead's process philosophy argues that the fundamental elements of the universe are "occasions of experience," which can together create something as complex as a human being. Building off Whitehead's work, process philosopher Michel Weber argues for a pancreativism. Philip Goff has used the term panexperientialism more generally to refer to forms of panpsychism in which experience rather than thought is ubiquitous.Panprotopsychism is a theory related to panpsychism. It is discussed as a viable theory of consciousness in the works of David Chalmers.
Cosmopsychism is the theory that the cosmos is a proper whole, a unified object that is ontologically prior to its parts. It has been described as an alternative to panpsychism or as a form of panpsychism. Proponents of cosmopsychism claim that the cosmos as a whole is the fundamental level of reality and that it instantiates consciousness, which is how the view differs from panpsychism, where the claim is usually that the smallest level of reality is fundamental and instantiates consciousness. Accordingly, human consciousness, for example, is merely derivative from the cosmic consciousness.
In Eastern philosophy
According to Graham Parkes: "Most of traditional Chinese, Japanese and Korean philosophy would qualify as panpsychist in nature. For the philosophical schools best known in the west — Neo-confucianism and Japanese Buddhism – the world is a dynamic force field of energies known as qi or bussho and classifiable in western terms as psychophysical." Anand Vaidya and Purushottama Bilimoria have argued that Advaita Vedanta, an influential school of Hindu philosophy, incorporates a form of panpsychism, more specifically a form of cosmopsychism.East Asian Buddhism
According to D. S. Clarke, panpsychist and panexperientialist aspects can be found in the Huayan and Tiantai Buddhist doctrines of Buddha nature, which was often attributed to inanimate objects such as lotus flowers and mountains. Tiantai patriarch Zhanran argued that "even non-sentient beings have Buddha nature."Who, then, is "animate" and who "inanimate"? Within the assembly of the Lotus, all are present without division. In the case of grass, trees and the soil...whether they merely lift their feet or energetically traverse the long path, they will all reach Nirvana.
The Tiantai school was transmitted to Japan by Saicho, who spoke of the "buddha-nature of trees and rocks".
According to the 9th-century Shingon Buddhist thinker Kukai, the Dharmakaya is nothing other than the physical universe and natural objects such as rocks and stones are included as part of the supreme embodiment of the Buddha. The Soto Zen master Dogen also argued for the universality of Buddha nature. According to Dogen, "fences, walls, tiles, and pebbles" are also "mind". Dogen also argued that "insentient beings expound the teachings" and that the words of the eternal Buddha "are engraved on trees and on rocks... in fields and in villages". This is the message of his "Mountains and Waters Sutra".