Panpsychism sits close to a great deal of animist and shamanic practice across the traditions this atlas covers, in which rivers, mountains, and animals are treated as having their own kind of awareness or agency rather than being simply inert matter awaiting a human mind to notice them; the philosophical claim and the religious intuition are not identical, since panpsychism is a metaphysical thesis about the ultimate constituents of matter rather than a claim about particular spirits or deities, but the family resemblance is real and worth naming plainly. Hylozoism, the closely related claim that matter as such is alive rather than merely experiential, overlaps with panpsychism without being quite the same position, and the two are often run together in older sources.
Contemporary philosophers of mind such as Galen Strawson and Philip Goff have revived panpsychism seriously in recent decades, arguing it is a more economical solution to the hard problem than either standard materialism, which cannot explain how experience arises from the wholly non-experiential, or dualism, which cannot explain how two totally different substances interact. Panpsychism's hardest standing objection has a name: the combination problem, coined by the philosopher William Seager in 1995 though traced back to an argument William James raised, asks how the minimal experience supposedly present in matter's smallest constituents could ever combine into the single, unified experience of a person, a gap the theory has not closed.