Panpsychism

The panpsychist argument usually starts from a version of the hard problem: physical science describes structure and function, how parts of a system relate and behave, but never touches the intrinsic, felt quality of experience, and no amount of added structural detail seems able to close that gap by itself. Rather than accepting an unexplained emergence of experience once matter becomes complex enough, as standard materialism does, panpsychists propose that some primitive form of experience is there in matter from the start, however faint, and that complex consciousness in brains is a highly organized combination of vastly simpler experiential elements already present in their basic physical constituents.

Alfred North Whitehead built the most systematic version of this in Process and Reality, arguing that the ultimate units of reality are not enduring bits of matter at all but momentary events of experience, each one prehending, taking account of, the events that preceded it, with what we call material objects being stable patterns of these experiential events rather than the basic furniture of the world. The position's hardest problem in turn is the so-called combination problem: explaining how many simple, separate micro-experiences, in atoms or particles, could combine into the single, unified experience of a person, rather than remaining a mere crowd of tiny separate perspectives.

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.