Panpsychism

In very general terms, the thesis of panpsychism is that throughout nature there is mentality, that the mentality of which each of us is aware in our own thoughts and experiences is present in various forms in a wide range of natural bodies... Those that have minds (souls) are those whom we describe as seeing, hearing, feeling, and believing.

For such thinkers there is no reason to limit mind to humans and (perhaps) higher animals; in fact, they have reasons—both intuitive and rational—to claim that mind is best conceived as a general phenomenon of nature. As such, mind would exist, in some form, in all things. This concept is called panpsychism... As a meta-theory, it simply holds that, however one conceives of mind, such mind applies to all things... In the forms of animism and polytheism, it was probably the dominant view for most if not all of the pre-historical era. Eastern cultures have a nearly continuous record of panpsychist writings, right through the modern era... Aristotelian philosophy and Christian theology emerged and subverted it for a number of centuries, but it made a comeback with the naturalist philosophers of the sixteenth century.

Depending on how these principles [fundamentality and ubiquity] are more exactly specified, many different forms of panpsychism can be developed. For example, if the fundamentality of the mental is taken as absolute, so that no other feature of reality is similarly ontologically basic, then panpsychism appears as *idealism or *phenomenalism... Panpsychism can be usefully contrasted with the opposing doctrine of *emergentism: the view that certain attributes apply to complex systems which do not apply to the systems' constituents.

[Anne Conway's posthumous 1690] treatise [Principia Philosophiae Antiquissimae ac Recentissimae], the first philosophical paper published by a woman, was one of the first modern articulations of panpsychism, the idea that consciousness is fundamental to the natural world.

Panpsychism is the idea that everything, every particle, the ink on the page, the atoms, all have some infinitesimal degree of psyche or consciousness, and somehow this consciousness is combined in some way from our cells and the rest of our bodies to create this kind of superconsciousness. It sounds crazy. There are some very serious people who believe in it.

Whitehead devised such a conception, which to my mind definitely supersedes the panpsychisms of the history of metaphysics.

The genius of modern panpsychisms has proved to be their capacity to incorporate rather than reject the mechanistic point of view.

This seems to be due to one factor that they all—the various idealisms, phenomenalisms, positivisms, and panpsychisms—have in common: They reject, or at least fail to endorse, the idea of “matter.”