In philosophy, panpsychism is the view that all matter has a mental aspect, or, alternatively, all objects have a unified center of experience or point of view. Baruch Spinoza, Gottfried Leibniz, Gustav Theodor Fechner, Friedrich Paulsen, Ernst Haeckel, Charles Strong, and partially William James are considered panpsychists.
Panexperientialism, as espoused by Alfred North Whitehead, is a less bold variation, which credits all entities with phenomenal consciousness but not with cognition, and therefore not necessarily with full-fledged minds.
Panprotoexperientialism is a more cautious variation still, which credits all entities with non-physical properties that are precursors to phenomenal consciousness (or phenomenal consciousness in a latent, undeveloped form) but not with cognition itself, or with conscious awareness.
The term "panpsychism" has its origins with the term pan, meaning "throughout" or "everywhere", and psyche, meaning "soul" as the unifying center of the mental life of us humans and other living creatures."[1]
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.
Panpsychism can be understood as related to a number of other metaphysical positions.
It agrees with idealism that in a sense everything is mental, but whereas idealism treats most things as mental content, panpsychism treats everything as mind. Also unlike idealism, panpsychism does not deny the existence, in some sense, of physical properties, although they may be relegated to a secondary status.
Superficially, panpsychism seems to be a form of property dualism, since it regards everything as having both mental and physical properties. However, some panpsychists say mechanical behaviour is derived from primitive mentality of atoms and molecules—as are sophisticated mentality and organic behaviour, the difference being attributed to the presence or absence of complex structure in a compound object. So long as the reduction of non-mental properties to mental ones is in place, panpsychism is not a form of property dualism. Note that this kind reductionism is the opposite of reductive physicalism.
There are also varieties of monism that don't presuppose (like materialism and idealism do) that mind and matter are fundamentally separable. An example is neutral monism first introduced by Spinoza and later propounded by William James. Panpsychism can be combined with this view.
Reductive physicalism, a form of monism, is incompatible with panpsychism. Materialism, if held to be distinct from physicalism, is compatible with panpsychism insofar as mental properties are attributed to physical matter, which is the only basic substance.
Panpsychism is related to the more holistic view that the whole Universe is an organism that possesses a mind (see pandeism, pantheism, panentheism and cosmic consciousness). It is claimed to be distinct from animism or hylozoism, which hold that all things have a soul or are alive, respectively. Gustav Theodor Fechner claimed in "Nanna" and "Zend-Avesta" that the Earth is a living organism whose parts are the people, the animals and the plants.
Hylopathism argues for a similarly universal attribution of sentience to matter. Few writers would advocate a hylopathic materialism, although the idea is not new; it has been formulated as "whatever underlies consciousness in a material sense, i.e., whatever it is about the brain that gives rise to consciousness, must necessarily be present to some degree in any other material thing". Similar ideas have been attributed to philosopher David Chalmers.
No form of panpsychism attributes full, human-style consciousness to the fundamental constituents of the universe, therefore all versions need a certain amount of emergence—that is, weak emergence, in which more sophisticated versions of basic properties emerge at a higher level. No version of panpsychism requires strong emergence, in which high-level properties do not have any low-level precursors or basis, and instead emerge "from nothing". Indeed, avoidance of strong emergentism is one of the motivations for panpsychism.
Panexperientialism or panprotopsychism are related concepts. Alfred North Whitehead incorporated a scientific worldview into the development of his philosophical system similar to Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. His ideas were a significant development of the idea of panpsychism, also known as panexperientialism, due to Whitehead’s emphasis on experience, though the term itself was first applied to Whitehead's philosophy by David Ray Griffin many years later. Process philosophy suggests that fundamental elements of the universe are occasions of experience, which can be collected into groups creating something as complex as a human being. This experience is not consciousness; there is no mind-body duality under this system as mind is seen as a very developed kind of experience. Whitehead was not a subjective idealist and, while his philosophy resembles the concept of monads first proposed by Leibniz, Whitehead’s occasions of experience are interrelated with every other occasion of experience that has ever occurred. He embraced panentheism with God encompassing all occasions of experience, transcending them. Whitehead believed that the occasions of experience are the smallest element in the universe—even smaller than subatomic particles.
In his book titled Mortal Questions, Thomas Nagel defines panpsychism as, "the view that the basic physical constituents of the universe have mental properties,"[2] effectively claiming the panpsychist thesis to be a type of property dualism. Nagel argues that panpsychism follows from four premises:
(1) "Material composition", or commitment to materialism. (2) "Nonreductionism", or the view that mental properties cannot be reduced to physical properties. (3) "Realism" about mental properties. (4) "Nonemergence", 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. Also, he 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."[3] Furthermore, Nagel argues mental states are real by appealing to the inexplicability of subjective experience, or qualia, by physical means.
Many arguments for panpsychism claim physicalism is incapable of accounting for subjective experience or qualia; also, the problems found with emergentism are often cited by panpsychists as grounds to reject physicalism.
Most physicalists argue against panpsychism by denying (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 view allows for certain man-made systems that are properly organized, such as some computers, to be said 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.
Another criticism is that it can be demonstrated 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. This has been something of a blow to panpsychism in general, since some of the same problems seem to be present in panpsychism in that it tends to presuppose a definition for mentality without describing it in any real detail. The need to define the terms used within the thesis of panpsychism is recognized by panpsychist David Skrbina,[4] and he resorts to asserting some sort of hierarchy of mental terms to be used. This is motivation to argue for panexperientialism rather than panpsychism, since only the most fundamental meaning of mind is what is present in all matter, namely, subjective experience. The panpsychist answers both these challenges in the same way: we already know what qualia are through direct, introspective apprehension; and we likewise know what conscious mentality is by virtue of being conscious. For someone like 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".
One response is to separate the phenomenal, non-cognitive aspects of consciousness—particularly qualia, the essence of the hard problem of consciousness—from cognition. Thus panpsychism is transformed into panexperientialism. However, this strategy of division generates problems of its own: what is going on causally in the head of someone who is thinking—cognitively of course—about their qualia?
The view of the world as a macrocosm in relation to the human microcosm was a staple theme in Greek philosophy. In that view it was natural to think about the world in anthropomorphic terms. The view passed into the Medieval period via Neoplatonism, and was shared by Leibniz, Schelling, Schopenhauer and many others.
Josiah Royce (1855–1916), the leading American absolute idealist, held to the panpsychist view, though he didn't necessarily attribute mental properties to the smallest constituents of mentalistic "systems".
The panpsychist doctrine has recently been making a comeback in the American philosophy of mind—for example, Christian de Quincey and Leo Stubenberg have each recently defended it. In the United Kingdom the case for panpsychism has been made by Galen Strawson.[5] In the philosophy of mind, panpsychism is one possible solution to the so-called hard problem of consciousness. The doctrine has also been applied in the field of environmental philosophy through the work of Australian philosopher Freya Mathews.
Carl Jung, who is maybe best known for his idea of 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".[6] This could be interpreted as panpsychism, apparently of the neutral monism variety.
Panpsychism and emergentism can be seen as alternative ways to bridge the more extreme positions of crude reductionism and crude holism. Panpsychism differs from emergentism in that according to panpsychism, even the smallest physical particles have mental characteristics. Emergentism claims that though the particles are mindless, some systems formed by them, and by nothing but them, do possess mental attributes. The human brain is a case in point.
Gaia theory, which views the biosphere as a self-regulating system, that maintains homeostasis in relation to many vital chemical and physical variables, is sometimes interpreted as panpsychism, because some think that any goal-directed behavior qualifies as mental. However, the goal-directed behavior of the biosphere, as explained by the Gaia theory, is an emergent function of organised, living matter, not a quality of any matter. Thus Gaia theory is more properly associated with emergentism than panpsychism.
So-called naive panpsychism, as opposed to philosophical panpsychism, is sometimes used to refer to the idea of inanimate objects as sentient and/or intentional. This is similar to animism. The attitude of labeling this philosophy "naive" could be considered a vestigial Eurocentric belief in the inaccuracy or unimportance of non-Western world views. It could be considered to be a colonial artifact utilized as a tool of domination to discredit the philosophical contributions of the colonized. In addition, it downplays the possible role that indigenous philosophies may have played in the formation of panpsychist ideas in the Western world.
Panpsychism, as a view that the universe has "universal consciousness", is shared by some forms of religious thought: theosophy, pantheism, cosmotheism and panentheism.
Panpsychism also plays a part in Hindu, Buddhist, Dzogchen and Shinto mysticism.
William James in his later writings assumes some position called 'a pluralistic panpsychism'.
According to a common misunderstanding, in the Dzogchen tradition , particularly Dzogchen Semde or "mind series" the principal text of which is the Kulayarāja Tantra, there is nothing which is non-sentient, i.e. everything is sentient.. Moreover, two of the English scholars that opened the discourse of the Bardo literature of the Nyingma Dzogchen tradition, Evans-Wentz & Jung (1954, 2000: p. 10) specifically with their partial translation and commentary of the Bardo Thodol into the English language write of the "One Mind" (Tibetan: sems nyid gcig; Sanskrit: *ekacittatva; *ekacittata; where * denotes a possible Sanskrit back-formation) thus:
"The One Mind, as Reality, is the Heart which pulsates for ever, sending forth purified the blood-streams of existence, and taking them back again; the Great Breath, the Inscrutable Brahman, the Eternally Unveiled Mystery of the Mysteries of Antiquity, the Goal of all Pilgrimages, the End of all Existence."[7]
It should be borne in mind, that Evans-Wentz never studied the Tibetan language and that the lama who did the main translation work for him was of the Gelukpa Sect and is not known to have actually studied or practiced Dzogchen.
According to the translation with commentary, "Self-Liberation Through Seeing with Naked Awareness", by John Myrdhin Reynolds, the phrase, "It is the single nature of mind which encompasses all of Samsara and Nirvana," occurs only once in the text and it refers not to "some sort of Neo-Platonic hypostasis, a universal Nous, of which all individual minds are but fragments or appendages", but to the teaching that, "whether one finds oneself in the state of Samsara or in the state of Nirvana, it is the nature of the mind which reflects with awareness all experiences, no matter what may be their nature." This can be found in Appendix I, on pages 80–81.
Reynolds elucidates further with the analogy of a mirror. To say that a single mirror can reflect ugliness or beauty, does not constitute an allegation that all ugliness and beauty is one single mirror.
| Wikisource has the text of the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia article Panpsychism. |
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