Illustration of the Neoplatonic concept of the World Soul emanating from The Absolute, in some ways a precursor to modern 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 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.
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 during the middle years of the
twentieth 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" has its origins with the Greek term pan (πᾶν : "all, everything, whole") and psyche (ψυχή: "soul, mind") as the unifying center of the mental life of us humans and other living creatures." Psyche comes from the Greek word ψύχω (psukhō, "I blow") and may mean life, soul, mind, spirit, heart, and 'life-breath'. The use of psyche is controversial due to it being synonymous with soul, a term usually taken to have some sort of supernatural quality; more common terms now found in the literature include mind, mental properties, mental aspect, and experience.
Terminology
The philosopher David Chalmers, who has explored panpsychism as a viable theory, distinguishes between microphenomenal experiences (the experiences of microphysical entities) and macrophenomenal experiences (the experiences of larger entities, such as humans).
History
Ancient
Panpsychist views are a staple theme in pre-Socratic Greek philosophy. According to Aristotle, Thales (c. 624 – 545 BCE) 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 (who saw the underlying principle or arche as nous or mind), Anaximenes (who saw the arche as pneuma or spirit) and Heraclitus (who said "The thinking faculty is common to all").
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 (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.
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 was based on Hellenistic philosophies such as Neoplatonism and Gnosticism also made use of the Platonic idea of the anima mundi.
Renaissance
Illustration of the Cosmic order by Robert Fludd, where the World Soul is depicted as a woman
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 (such as John Scotus Eriugena), 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" (Deus sive Natura)
which has the aspects of mind (thought) and matter (extension).
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 (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 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 (1861–1947). 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 (which he
called occasions) 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 article "Realistic Monism: Why Physicalism Entails Panpsychism." Its prominent proponents in the United States include Christian de Quincey, Leopold Stubenberg, David Ray Griffin, and David Skrbina. In the United Kingdom the case for panpsychism has been made in recent decades by Galen Strawson, Gregg Rosenberg, Timothy Sprigge, and Philip Goff. 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 [and] those that are mere
darkness." The Canadian philosopher William Seager has also defended panpsychism.
In 1990, the physicist David Bohm
published "A New theory of the relationship of mind and matter", a
paper propounding a panpsychist theory of consciousness based on Bohm's interpretation of quantum mechanics. Bohm has a number of followers among philosophers of mind both in the United States (e.g. Quentin Smith) and internationally (e.g. Paavo Pylkkänen). The doctrine 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.
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.
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.
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 (1996) 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 ("nothing comes from nothing") 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".
Nagel notes that new physical properties are discovered through
explanatory inference from known physical properties; following a
similar process, mental properties would seem to derive from properties
of matter not included under the label of "physical properties", and so
they must be additional properties of matter. He also argues that "the
demand for an account of how mental states necessarily appear in
physical organisms cannot be satisfied by the discovery of uniform
correlations between mental states and physical brain states." Furthermore, Nagel argues mental states are real by appealing to the inexplicability of subjective experience, or qualia,
by physical means. Nagel ties panpsychism to the failure of emergentism
to deal with metaphysical relation: "There are no truly emergent
properties of complex systems. All properties of complex systems that
are not relations between it and something else derive from the
properties of its constituents and their effects on each other when so
combined." Thus he denies that mental properties can arise out of complex relationships between physical matter.
Critics of panpsychism could
deny proposition (2) 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 (4) 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:
... we cannot suppose that so enormous a jump from one creature to another should have occurred at any point in the process of evolution as the introduction of a fact entirely different and absolutely separate from the physical fact. It is impossible for anybody to point out the particular place in the line of descent where that event can be supposed to have taken place. The only thing that we can come to, if we accept the doctrine of evolution at all, is that even in the very lowest organism, even in the Amoeba which swims about in our own blood, there is something or other, inconceivably simple to us, which is of the same nature with our own consciousness ...
Quantum physics
Philosophers such as Alfred North Whitehead have drawn on the indeterminacy observed by quantum physics to defend panpsychism. A similar line of argument has been repeated subsequently by a number of thinkers including the physicist David Bohm, anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff and philosophers such as Quentin Smith, Paavo Pylkkänen, and Shan Gao.
The advocates of panpsychist quantum consciousness theories see quantum
indeterminacy and informational but non-causal relations between
quantum elements as the key to explaining consciousness. This approach has also been taken by Michael Lockwood (1991).
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' (das innere Wesen) and 'natural force' (Naturkraft), 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" (see above).
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:
Panpsychists hold that consciousness emerges from the combination of billions of subatomic consciousnesses, just as the brain emerges from the organization of billions of subatomic particles. But how do these tiny consciousnesses combine? We understand how particles combine to make atoms, molecules and larger structures, but what parallel story can we tell on the phenomenal side? How do the micro-experiences of billions of subatomic particles in my brain combine to form the twinge of pain I’m feeling in my knee? If billions of humans organized themselves to form a giant brain, each person simulating a single neuron and sending signals to the others using mobile phones, it seems unlikely that their consciousnesses would merge to form a single giant consciousness. Why should something similar happen with subatomic particles?
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 (that is, it tends to presuppose a definition
for mentality without describing it in any real detail). 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 (i.e., in terms of the behaviors
described by science), 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
A
diagram summarizing Cartesian dualism, physicalism, idealism, and
neutral monism, four positions to which panpsychism has been compared in
various ways
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 (as well as to materialism and dualism). 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
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. 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 (as well as sometimes dual aspect theory) 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 (panpsychism) or that it emerges higher up
(emergentism).
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
The
form of panpsychism under discussion in the contemporary literature is
more specifically known as panexperientialism, the view that conscious experience is present everywhere at a fundamental level. Panexperientialism can be contrasted with pancognitivism, 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.
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. The ecological phenomenology developed in the writings of the American cultural ecologist and philosopher, David Abram, is often described as a form of panexperientialism, as is the "poetic biology" developed by Abram's close associate, the German biologist Andreas Weber.
Whitehead's metaphysics incorporated a scientific worldview similar to Einstein's theory of relativity into the development of his philosophical system. His 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. This experience is not consciousness;
there is no mind-body duality under this system, since mind is seen as a
particularly developed kind of experience. Whitehead was not a subjective idealist, and while his occasions of experience (or "actual occasions") resemble Leibniz's monads, they are described as constitutively interrelated. He embraced panentheism,
with God encompassing all occasions of experience and yet still
transcending them. Whitehead believed that these occasions of experience
are the smallest element in the universe—even smaller than subatomic particles. Building off Whitehead's work, process philosopher Michel Weber argues for a pancreativism.
Panprotopsychism
Panprotopsychism is a theory related to panpsychism. It is discussed as a viable theory of consciousness in the works of David Chalmers.
Cosmopsychism
Cosmopsychism
is the theory that the cosmos is a proper whole, a unified object that
is ontologically prior to its parts. 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
In the art of the Japanese rock garden, the artist must be aware of the "ishigokoro" ('heart', or 'mind') of the rocks [52]
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 (Buddha nature) and classifiable in western terms as psychophysical." According to Advaita Vedanta, the non-dualistic school of Hinduism, Brahman is the underlying consciousness that is the foundation of all reality.
East Asian Buddhism
According to D. S. Clarke, panpsychist and panexperientialist aspects can be found in the Huayan and Tiantai (Jpn. Tendai) 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" (心,shin).
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" (Sansui kyô).
