What Is Panpsychism?

Is Our Universe Conscious?

What Is Panpsychism?

REFERENCES

Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy - Panpsychism

Philosophy Now - The Case for Panpsychism

The University of Toronto - Panpsychism

Discover - Panpsychism: The Trippy Theory That Everything From Bananas to Bicycles Are Conscious

Britannica - panpsychism

* * * * * *

Panpsychism

From  Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Not to be confused with Hylozoism.

Illustration of the Neoplatonic concept of the anima mundi emanating from The Absolute, in some ways a precursor to modern panpsychism

In the philosophy of mind, panpsychism (/pænˈsaɪkɪzəm/) is the view that the mind or a mind-like aspect is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of reality.^[1] It is also described as a theory that "the mind is a fundamental feature of the world which exists throughout the universe".^[2] It is one of the oldest philosophical theories, and has been ascribed to philosophers including Thales, Plato, Spinoza, Leibniz, William James,^[3] Alfred North Whitehead, Bertrand Russell, and Galen Strawson.^[1] In the 19th century, panpsychism was the default philosophy of mind in Western thought, but it saw a decline in the mid-20th century with the rise of logical positivism.^[3][4] Recent interest in the hard problem of consciousness and developments in the fields of neuroscience, psychology, and quantum mechanics have revived interest in panpsychism in the 21st century.^[4][5][6]

Overview

Etymology

For a definition of the term "panpsychism", see the Wiktionary entry panpsychism.

The term panpsychism comes from the Greek pan (πᾶν: "all, everything, whole") and psyche (ψυχή: "soul, mind").^[7]: 1 The use of "psyche" is controversial because it is synonymous with "soul", a term usually taken to refer to something supernatural; more common terms now found in the literature include mind, mental properties, mental aspect, and experience.

Concept

Panpsychism holds that mind or a mind-like aspect is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of reality.^[1] It is also described as a theory in which "the mind is a fundamental feature of the world which exists throughout the universe".^[2] Panpsychists posit that the type of mentality we know through our own experience is present, in some form, in a wide range of natural bodies.^[7] This notion has taken on a wide variety of forms. Some historical and non-Western panpsychists ascribe attributes such as life or spirits to all entities (animism).^[8] Contemporary academic proponents, however, hold that sentience or subjective experience is ubiquitous, while distinguishing these qualities from more complex human mental attributes.^[8] They therefore ascribe a primitive form of mentality to entities at the fundamental level of physics but do not ascribe mentality to most aggregate things, such as rocks or buildings.^[1][9][10]

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).^[11]

Philip Goff draws a distinction between panexperientialism and pancognitivism. In the form of panpsychism under discussion in the contemporary literature, conscious experience is present everywhere at a fundamental level, hence the term panexperientialism. Pancognitivism, by contrast, is the view that thought is present everywhere at a fundamental level—a view that had some historical advocates, but no present-day academic adherents. Contemporary panpsychists do not believe microphysical entities have complex mental states such as beliefs, desires, and fears.^[1]

Originally, the term panexperientialism had a narrower meaning, having been coined by David Ray Griffin to refer specifically to the form of panpsychism used in process philosophy (see below).^[8]

History

See also: Anima mundi (World soul) and Microcosm–macrocosm analogy

Antiquity

Two iwakura – a rock where a kami or spirit is said to reside in the religion of Shinto

Panpsychist views are a staple in pre-Socratic Greek philosophy.^[4] According to Aristotle, Thales (c. 624 – 545 BCE), the first Greek philosopher, posited a theory which held "that everything is full of gods".^[12] Thales believed that magnets demonstrated this. This has been interpreted as a panpsychist doctrine.^[4] Other Greek thinkers associated with panpsychism include Anaxagoras (who saw the unifying 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").^[8]

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).^[8] 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.^[13]

Stoicism developed a cosmology that held that the natural world is infused with the divine fiery essence pneuma, directed by the universal intelligence logos. The relationship between beings' individual logos and the universal logos was a central concern of the Roman Stoic Marcus Aurelius. The metaphysics of Stoicism finds connections with Hellenistic philosophies such as Neoplatonism. Gnosticism also made use of the Platonic idea of anima mundi.

Renaissance

Illustration of the Cosmic order by Robert Fludd, where the World soul is depicted as a woman

After Emperor Justinian closed Plato's Academy in 529 CE, neoplatonism declined. Though there were mediaeval theologians, such as John Scotus Eriugena, who ventured what might be called panpsychism, it was not a dominant strain in philosophical theology. But in the Italian Renaissance, it enjoyed something of a 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 term panpsychism into philosophical vocabulary. According to Bruno, "There is nothing that does not possess a soul and that has no vital principle".^[8] Platonist ideas resembling the anima mundi (world soul) also resurfaced in the work of esoteric thinkers such as Paracelsus, Robert Fludd, and Cornelius Agrippa.

Early modern

In the 17th century, two rationalists, Baruch Spinoza and Gottfried Leibniz, can be said to be panpsychists.^[4] 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's view is that there are infinitely many absolutely simple mental substances called monads that make up the universe's fundamental structure. While it has been said that George Berkeley's idealist philosophy is also a form of panpsychism,^[4] 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.^[14]

19th century

In the 19th 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, William Kingdon Clifford and Thomas Carlyle^[15] as well as psychologists such as Gustav Fechner, Wilhelm Wundt, Rudolf Hermann Lotze all promoted panpsychist ideas.^[4]

Arthur Schopenhauer argued for a two-sided view of reality as 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".^{[citation needed]}

Josiah Royce, the leading American absolute idealist, held that reality is a "world self", a conscious being that comprises 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 is suffused with mind, which he associated with spontaneity and freedom. Following Pierce, William James also espoused a form of panpsychism.^[16] 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^[8]

English philosopher Alfred Barratt, the author of Physical Metempiric (1883), has been described as advocating panpsychism.^[17][18]

In 1893, Paul Carus proposed a philosophy similar to panpsychism, "panbiotism", according to which "everything is fraught with life; it contains life; it has the ability to live".^{[19]: 149 [20]}

20th century

Bertrand Russell's neutral monist views tended toward panpsychism.^[8] The physicist Arthur Eddington also defended a form of panpsychism.^[5] The psychologists Gerard Heymans, James Ward and Charles Augustus Strong also endorsed variants of panpsychism.^{[21][19]: 158 [22]}

In 1990, the physicist David Bohm published "A new theory of the relationship of mind and matter," a paper based on his interpretation of quantum mechanics.^[23] The philosopher Paavo Pylkkänen has described Bohm's view as a version of panprotopsychism.^[24]

One widespread misconception is that the arguably greatest systematic metaphysician of the 20th century, Alfred North Whitehead, was also panpsychism's most significant 20th-century proponent.^[4] This misreading attributes to Whitehead an ontology according to which the basic nature of the world is made up of atomic mental events, termed "actual occasions".^[4][8] But rather than signifying such exotic metaphysical objects—which would in fact exemplify the fallacy of misplaced concreteness Whitehead criticizes—Whitehead's concept of "actual occasion" refers to the "immediate experienced occasion" of any possible perceiver, having in mind only himself as perceiver at the outset, in accordance with his strong commitment to radical empiricism.^[25]

Contemporary

Panpsychism has recently seen a resurgence in the philosophy of mind, set into motion by Thomas Nagel's 1979 article "Panpsychism"^[26] and further spurred by Galen Strawson's 2006 realistic monist article "Realistic Monism: Why Physicalism Entails Panpsychism".^[27][28][29] Other recent proponents include American philosophers David Ray Griffin^[1] and David Skrbina,^[4][19] British philosophers Gregg Rosenberg,^[1] Timothy Sprigge,^[1] and Philip Goff,^[5][30] and Canadian philosopher William Seager.^[31] 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".^[32][33]

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.^[34]

In 2019 cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman published The Case Against Reality: How evolution hid the truth from our eyes. Hoffman argues that consensus reality lacks concrete existence, and is nothing more than an evolved user-interface. He argues that the true nature of reality is abstract "conscious agents".^[35] Science editor Annaka Harris argues that panpsychism is a viable theory in her 2019 book Conscious, though she stops short of fully endorsing it.^[36][37]

Panpsychism has been postulated by psychoanalyst Robin S. Brown as a means to theorizing relations between "inner" and "outer" tropes in the context of psychotherapy.^[38] Panpsychism has also been applied in environmental philosophy by Australian philosopher Freya Mathews,^[39] who has put forward the notion of ontopoetics as a version of panpsychism.^[40]

The geneticist Sewall Wright endorsed a version of panpsychism. He believed that consciousness is not a mysterious property emerging at a certain level of the hierarchy of increasing material complexity, but rather an inherent property, implying the most elementary particles have these properties.^[41]

Varieties

Panpsychism encompasses many theories, united only by the notion that mind in some form is ubiquitous.^[8]

Philosophical frameworks

Cosmopsychism

Cosmopsychism hypothesizes that the cosmos is a unified object that is ontologically prior to its parts. It has been described as an alternative to panpsychism,^[42] or as a form of panpsychism.^[43] Proponents of cosmopsychism claim that the cosmos as a whole is the fundamental level of reality and that it instantiates consciousness. They differ on that point from panpsychists, who usually claim that the smallest level of reality is fundamental and instantiates consciousness. Accordingly, human consciousness, for example, merely derives from a larger cosmic consciousness.

Panexperientialism

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.^[8] Whitehead's 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.^[4] Building on Whitehead's work, process philosopher Michel Weber argues for a pancreativism.^[44] Goff has used the term panexperientialism more generally to refer to forms of panpsychism in which experience rather than thought is ubiquitous.^[1]

Panprotopsychism

Panprotopsychists believe that higher-order phenomenal properties (such as qualia) are logically entailed by protophenomenal properties, at least in principle. This is similar to how facts about H₂O molecules logically entail facts about water: the lower-level facts are sufficient to explain the higher-order facts, since the former logically entail the latter. Similarly, adherents of panprotopsychism believe that "protophenomenal" facts logically entail the existence of consciousness. Protophenomenal properties are usually picked out through a combination of functional and negative definitions: panphenomenal properties are those properties that logically entail phenomenal properties (a functional definition), which are themselves neither physical nor phenomenal (a negative definition).^[45]

Panprotopsychism is advertised as a solution to the combination problem: the problem of explaining how the consciousness of microscopic physical things might combine to give rise to the macroscopic consciousness of the whole brain. Because protophenomenal properties are by definition the constituent parts of consciousness, it is speculated that their existence would make the emergence of macroscopic minds less mysterious.^[9] The philosopher David Chalmers argues that the view faces difficulty with the combination problem. He considers it "ad hoc", and believes it diminishes the parsimony that made the theory initially interesting.^[46]

Russellian monism

Wikisource has original text related to this article:

The Relation of Sense-Data to Physics

Wikisource has original text related to this article:

The Analysis of Mind

Russellian monism is a type of neutral monism.^[46][47] The theory is attributed to Bertrand Russell, and may also be called Russell's panpsychism, or Russell's neutral monism.^[9][46] Russell believed that all causal properties are extrinsic manifestations of identical intrinsic properties. Russell called these identical internal properties quiddities. Just as the extrinsic properties of matter can form higher-order structure, so can their corresponding and identical quiddities. Russell believed the conscious mind was one such structure.^[48][9]

Religious or mystical ontologies

Advaita Vedānta

Main article: Advaita Vedanta

Advaita Vedānta is a form of idealism in Indian philosophy which views consensus reality as illusory.^[49] Anand Vaidya and Purushottama Bilimoria have argued that it can be considered a form of panpsychism or cosmopsychism.^[50]

Animism and hylozoism

Further information: Animism and Hylozoism

Animism maintains that all things have a soul, and hylozoism maintains that all things are alive.^[8] Both could reasonably be interpreted as panpsychist, but both have fallen out of favour in contemporary academia.^[8] Modern panpsychists have tried to distance themselves from theories of this sort, careful to carve out the distinction between the ubiquity of experience and the ubiquity of mind and cognition.^[1][11]

Buddha-nature

Main article: Buddha-nature

In the art of the Japanese rock garden, the artist must be aware of the "ishigokoro" ('heart', or 'mind') of the rocks.^[51]

Buddha-nature is an important and multifaceted doctrine in Mahayana Buddhism that is related to the capacity to attain Buddhahood.^[52][53] In numerous Indian sources, the idea is connected to the mind, especially the Buddhist concept of the luminous mind.^[54] In some Buddhist traditions, the Buddha-nature doctrine may be interpreted as implying a form of panpsychism. Graham Parks argues that most "traditional Chinese, Japanese and Korean philosophy would qualify as panpsychist in nature".^[51]

The Huayan, Tiantai, and Tendai schools of Buddhism explicitly attribute Buddha-nature to inanimate objects such as lotus flowers and mountains.^[7]: 39 This idea was defended by figures such as the Tiantai patriarch Zhanran, who spoke of the Buddha-nature of grasses and trees.^[51][55] Similarly, Soto Zen master Dogen argued that "insentient beings expound" the teachings of the Buddha, and wrote about the "mind" (心, shin) of "fences, walls, tiles, and pebbles". The 9th-century Shingon figure Kukai went so far as to argue that natural objects such as rocks and stones are part of the supreme embodiment of the Buddha. According to Parks, Buddha-nature is best described "in western terms" as something "psychophysical".^[51]

Scientific theories

Conscious realism

It is a natural and near-universal assumption that the world has the properties and causal structures that we perceive it to have; to paraphrase Einstein's famous remark, we naturally assume that the moon is there whether anyone looks or not. Both theoretical and empirical considerations, however, increasingly indicate that this is not correct.

— Donald Hoffman, Conscious agent networks: Formal analysis and applications to cognition

See also: Map–territory relation

Conscious realism is a theory proposed by Donald Hoffman, a cognitive scientist specialising in perception. He has written numerous papers on the topic^[56] which he summarised in his 2019 book The Case Against Reality: How evolution hid the truth from our eyes.^[35] Conscious realism builds upon Hoffman's former User-Interface Theory. In combination they argue that (1) consensus reality and spacetime are illusory, and are merely a "species specific evolved user interface"; (2) Reality is made of a complex, dimensionless, and timeless network of "conscious agents".^[57]

The consensus view is that perception is a reconstruction of one's environment. Hoffman views perception as a construction rather than a reconstruction. He argues that perceptual systems are analogous to information channels, and thus subject to data compression and reconstruction. The set of possible reconstructions for any given data set is quite large. Of that set, the subset that is homomorphic in relation to the original is minuscule, and does not overlap with the subset that is efficient or easiest to use.^{[citation needed]}

For example, consider a graph, such as a pie chart. A pie chart is easy to understand and use not because it is perfectly homomorphic with the data it represents, but because it isn't. If a graph of, for example, the chemical composition of the human body were to look exactly like a human body, then we could not understand it. It is only because the graph abstracts away from the structure of its subject matter that it can be visualized. Alternatively, consider a graphical user interface on a computer. The reason graphical user interfaces are useful is that they abstract away from lower-level computational processes, such as machine code, or the physical state of a circuit-board. In general, it seems that data is most useful to us when it is abstracted from its original structure and repackaged in a way that is easier to understand, even if this comes at the cost of accuracy. Hoffman offers the "fitness beats truth theorem"^[58] as mathematical proof that perceptions of reality bear little resemblance to reality's true nature.^[59] From this he concludes that our senses do not faithfully represent the external world.

Even if reality is an illusion, Hoffman takes consciousness as an indisputable fact. He represents rudimentary units of consciousness (which he calls "conscious agents") as Markovian kernels. Though the theory was not initially panpsychist, he reports that he and his colleague Chetan Prakash found the math to be more parsimonious if it were.^[60] They hypothesize that reality is composed of these conscious agents, who interact to form "larger, more complex" networks.^[61][35]

Axioms and postulates of integrated information theory

Integrated information theory

Main article: Integrated information theory

Giulio Tononi first articulated Integrated information theory (IIT) in 2004,^[62] and it has undergone two major revisions since then.^[63][64] Tononi approaches consciousness from a scientific perspective, and has expressed frustration with philosophical theories of consciousness for lacking predictive power.^[34] Though integral to his theory, he refrains from philosophical terminology such as qualia or the unity of consciousness, instead opting for mathematically precise alternatives like entropy function and information integration.^[62] This has allowed Tononi to create a measurement for integrated information, which he calls phi (Φ). He believes consciousness is nothing but integrated information, so Φ measures consciousness.^[65] As it turns out, even basic objects or substances have a nonzero degree of Φ. This would mean that consciousness is ubiquitous, albeit to a minimal degree.^[66]

The philosopher Hedda Hassel Mørch's views IIT as similar to Russellian monism,^[67] while other philosophers, such as Chalmers and John Searle, consider it a form of panpsychism.^[68][69] IIT does not hold that all systems are conscious, leading Tononi and Koch to state that IIT incorporates some elements of panpsychism but not others.^[34] Koch has called IIT a "scientifically refined version" of panpsychism.^[70]

In relation to other theories

A diagram depicting four positions on the mind-body problem. Versions of panpsychism have been likened to each of these positions as well as contrasted to them.

Because panpsychism encompasses a wide range of theories, it can in principle be compatible with reductive materialism, dualism, functionalism, or other perspectives depending on the details of a given formulation.^[8]

Dualism

Further information: Mind–body dualism

David Chalmers and Philip Goff have each described panpsychism as an alternative to both materialism and dualism.^[9][5] Chalmers says panpsychism respects the conclusions of both the causal argument against dualism and the conceivability argument for dualism.^[9] 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.^[1] By contrast, Uwe Meixner argues that panpsychism has dualist forms, which he contrasts to idealist forms.^[71]

Emergentism

Further information: Emergentism

Panpsychism is incompatible with emergentism.^[8] In general, theories of consciousness fall under one or the other umbrella; they hold either that consciousness is present at a fundamental level of reality (panpsychism) or that it emerges higher up (emergentism).^[8]

Idealism

Further information: Idealism

There is disagreement over whether idealism is a form of panpsychism or a separate view. Both views hold that everything that exists has some form of experience.^{[citation needed]} According to the philosophers William Seager and Sean Allen-Hermanson, "idealists are panpsychists by default".^[14] Charles Hartshorne contrasted panpsychism and idealism, saying that while idealists rejected the existence of the world observed with the senses or understood it as ideas within the mind of God, panpsychists accepted the reality of the world but saw it as composed of minds.^[72] Chalmers also contrasts panpsychism with idealism (as well as materialism and dualism).^[73] Meixner writes that formulations of panpsychism can be divided into dualist and idealist versions.^[71] He further divides the latter into "atomistic idealistic panpsychism", which he ascribes to David Hume, and "holistic idealistic panpsychism", which he favors.^[71]

Neutral monism

Main article: Neutral monism

Neutral monism rejects the dichotomy of mind and matter, instead taking a third substance as fundamental that is neither mental nor physical. Proposals for the nature of the third substance have varied, with some theorists choosing to leave it undefined. This has led to a variety of formulations of neutral monism, which may overlap with other philosophies. In versions of neutral monism in which the world's fundamental constituents are neither mental nor physical, it is quite distinct from panpsychism. In versions where the fundamental constituents are both mental and physical, neutral monism may lead to panpsychism, panprotopsychism, or dual aspect theory.^[74]

In The Conscious Mind, David Chalmers writes that, in some instances, the differences between "Russell's neutral monism" and his property dualism are merely semantic.^[46] Philip Goff believes that neutral monism can reasonably be regarded as a form of panpsychism "in so far as it is a dual aspect view".^[1] Neutral monism, panpsychism, and dual aspect theory are grouped together or used interchangeably in some contexts.^[46][75][6]

Physicalism and materialism

Further information: Physicalism and Materialism

Chalmers calls panpsychism an alternative to both materialism and dualism.^[9] Similarly, Goff calls panpsychism an alternative to both physicalism and substance dualism.^[5] Strawson, on the other hand, describes panpsychism as a form of physicalism, on his view the only viable form.^[29] Panpsychism can be combined with reductive materialism but cannot be combined with eliminative materialism because the latter denies the existence of the relevant mental attributes.^[8]

Arguments for

Hard problem of consciousness

But what consciousness is, we know not; and how it is that anything so remarkable as a state of consciousness comes about as the result of irritating nervous tissue, is just as unaccountable as the appearance of the Djin when Aladdin rubbed his lamp in the story, or as any other ultimate fact of nature.

— Thomas Henry Huxley (1896)

Main article: Hard problem of consciousness

It evidently feels like something to be a human brain.^[76] This means that when things in the world are organised in a particular way, they begin to have an experience. The questions of why and how this material structure has experience, and why it has that particular experience rather than another experience, are known as the hard problem of consciousness.^[6] The term is attributed to Chalmers. He argues that even after "all the perceptual and cognitive functions within the vicinity of consciousness" are accounted for, "there may still remain a further unanswered question: Why is the performance of these functions accompanied by experience?"^[77]

Though Chalmers gave the hard problem of consciousness its present name, similar views were expressed before. Isaac Newton,^[78] John Locke,^[79] Gottfried Leibniz,^[80] John Stuart Mill,^[81] Thomas Henry Huxley,^[82] Wilhelm Wundt,^[4] all wrote about the seeming incompatibility of third-person functional descriptions of mind and matter and first-person conscious experience. Likewise, Asian philosophers like Dharmakirti and Guifeng Zongmi discussed the problem of how consciousness arises from unconscious matter.^{[83][84][85][86]} Similar sentiments have been articulated through philosophical inquiries such as the problem of other minds, solipsism, the explanatory gap, philosophical zombies, and Mary's room. These problems have caused Chalmers to consider panpsychism a viable solution to the hard problem,^[75][9][87] though he is not committed to any single view.^[75]

Brian Jonathan Garrett has compared the hard problem to vitalism, the now discredited hypothesis that life is inexplicable and can only be understood if some vital life force exists. He maintains that given time, consciousness and its evolutionary origins will be understood just as life is now understood.^[88] Daniel Dennett called the hard problem a "hunch", and maintained that conscious experience, as it is usually understood, is merely a complex cognitive illusion.^[89][90] Patricia Churchland, also an eliminative materialist, maintains that philosophers ought to be more patient: neuroscience is still in its early stages, so Chalmers's hard problem is premature. Clarity will come from learning more about the brain, not from metaphysical speculation.^[91][92]

Solutions

In The Conscious Mind (1996), Chalmers attempts to pinpoint why the hard problem is so hard. He concludes that consciousness is irreducible to lower-level physical facts, just as the fundamental laws of physics are irreducible to lower-level physical facts. Therefore, consciousness should be taken as fundamental in its own right and studied as such. Just as fundamental properties of reality are ubiquitous (even small objects have mass), consciousness may also be, though he considers that an open question.^[46]

In Mortal Questions (1979), Thomas Nagel argues that panpsychism follows from four premises:^{[1][28]: 181}

• P1: There is no spiritual plane or disembodied soul; everything that exists is material.
• P2: Consciousness is irreducible to lower-level physical properties.
• P3: Consciousness exists.
• P4: Higher-order properties of matter (i.e., emergent properties) can, at least in principle, be reduced to their lower-level properties.

Before the first premise is accepted, the range of possible explanations for consciousness is fully open. Each premise, if accepted, narrows down that range of possibilities. If the argument is sound, then by the last premise panpsychism is the only possibility left.

• If (P1) is true, then either consciousness does not exist, or it exists within the physical world.
• If (P2) is true, then either consciousness does not exist, or it (a) exists as distinct property of matter or (b) is fundamentally entailed by matter.
• If (P3) is true, then consciousness exists, and is either (a) its own property of matter or (b) composed by the matter of the brain but not logically entailed by it.
• If (P4) is true, then (b) is false, and consciousness must be its own unique property of matter.

Therefore, if all four premises are true, consciousness is its own unique property of matter and panpsychism is true.^{[28]: 187 [4]}

Mind-body problem

Dualism makes the problem insoluble; materialism denies the existence of any phenomenon to study, and hence of any problem.

— John R. Searle, Consciousness and Language, p. 47

Further information: Mind–body problem

In 2015, Chalmers proposed a possible solution to the mind-body problem through the argumentative format of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis.^[9] The goal of such arguments is to argue for sides of a debate (the thesis and antithesis), weigh their vices and merits, and then reconcile them (the synthesis). Chalmers's thesis, antithesis, and synthesis are as follows:

1. Thesis: materialism is true; everything is fundamentally physical.
2. Antithesis: dualism is true; not everything is fundamentally physical.
3. Synthesis: panpsychism is true.

(1) A centerpiece of Chalmers's argument is the physical world's causal closure. Newton's law of motion explains this phenomenon succinctly: for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Cause and effect is a symmetrical process. There is no room for consciousness to exert any causal power on the physical world unless it is itself physical.

(2) On one hand, if consciousness is separate from the physical world then there is no room for it to exert any causal power on the world (a state of affairs philosophers call epiphenomenalism). If consciousness plays no causal role, then it is unclear how Chalmers could even write this paper. On the other hand, consciousness is irreducible to the physical processes of the brain.

(3) Panpsychism has all the benefits of materialism because it could mean that consciousness is physical while also escaping the grasp of epiphenomenalism. After some argumentation Chalmers narrows it down further to Russellian monism, concluding that thoughts, actions, intentions and emotions may just be the quiddities of neurotransmitters, neurons, and glial cells.^[9]

Problem of substance

Physics is mathematical, not because we know so much about the physical world, but because we know so little: it is only its mathematical properties that we can discover. For the rest our knowledge is negative.

— Bertrand Russell, An Outline of Philosophy (1927)

See also: Intrinsic and extrinsic properties

Rather than solely trying to solve the problem of consciousness, Russell also attempted to solve the problem of substance, which is arguably a form of the problem of infinite regress.^{[citation needed]}

(1) Like many sciences, physics describes the world through mathematics. Unlike other sciences, physics cannot describe what Schopenhauer called the "object that grounds" mathematics.^[93] Economics is grounded in resources being allocated, and population dynamics is grounded in individual people within that population. The objects that ground physics, however, can be described only through more mathematics.^[94] In Russell's words, physics describes "certain equations giving abstract properties of their changes". When it comes to describing "what it is that changes, and what it changes from and to—as to this, physics is silent".^[48] In other words, physics describes matter's extrinsic properties, but not the intrinsic properties that ground them.^[95]

(2) Russell argued that physics is mathematical because "it is only mathematical properties we can discover". This is true almost by definition: if only extrinsic properties are outwardly observable, then they will be the only ones discovered.^[48] This led Alfred North Whitehead to conclude that intrinsic properties are "intrinsically unknowable".^[4]

(3) Consciousness has many similarities to these intrinsic properties of physics. It, too, cannot be directly observed from an outside perspective. And it, too, seems to ground many observable extrinsic properties: presumably, music is enjoyable because of the experience of listening to it, and chronic pain is avoided because of the experience of pain, etc. Russell concluded that consciousness must be related to these extrinsic properties of matter. He called these intrinsic properties quiddities. Just as extrinsic physical properties can create structures, so can their corresponding and identical quiddites. The conscious mind, Russell argued, is one such structure.^[48]

Proponents of panpsychism who use this line of reasoning include Chalmers, Annaka Harris,^[96] and Galen Strawson. Chalmers has argued that the extrinsic properties of physics must have corresponding intrinsic properties; otherwise the universe would be "a giant causal flux" with nothing for "causation to relate", which he deems a logical impossibility. He sees consciousness as a promising candidate for that role.^[46] Galen Strawson calls Russell's panpsychism "realistic physicalism". He argues that "the experiential considered specifically as such" is what it means for something to be physical. Just as mass is energy, Strawson believes that consciousness "just is" matter.^[97]: 7

Max Tegmark, theoretical physicist and creator of the mathematical universe hypothesis, disagrees with these conclusions. By his account, the universe is not just describable by math but is math; comparing physics to economics or population dynamics is a disanalogy. While population dynamics may be grounded in individual people, those people are grounded in "purely mathematical objects" such as energy and charge. The universe is, in a fundamental sense, made of nothing.^[94]

Quantum mechanics

In a 2018 interview, Chalmers called quantum mechanics "a magnet for anyone who wants to find room for crazy properties of the mind", but not entirely without warrant.^[98] The relationship between observation (and, by extension, consciousness) and the wave-function collapse is known as the measurement problem. It seems that atoms, photons, etc. are in quantum superposition (which is to say, in many seemingly contradictory states or locations simultaneously) until measured in some way. This process is known as a wave-function collapse. According to the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, one of the oldest interpretations and the most widely taught,^[99][100] it is the act of observation that collapses the wave-function. Erwin Schrödinger famously articulated the Copenhagen interpretation's unusual implications in the thought experiment now known as Schrödinger's cat. He imagines a box that contains a cat, a flask of poison, radioactive material, and a Geiger counter. The apparatus is configured so that when the Geiger counter detects radioactive decay, the flask will shatter, poisoning the cat. Unless and until the Geiger counter detects the radioactive decay of a single atom, the cat survives. The radioactive decay the Geiger counter detects is a quantum event; each decay corresponds to a quantum state transition of a single atom of the radioactive material. According to Schrödinger's wave equation, until they are observed, quantum particles, including the atoms of the radioactive material, are in quantum state superposition; each unmeasured atom in the radioactive material is in a quantum superposition of decayed and not decayed. This means that while the box remains sealed and its contents unobserved, the Geiger counter is also in a superposition of states of decay detected and no decay detected; the vial is in a superposition of both shattered and not shattered and the cat in a superposition of dead and alive. But when the box is unsealed, the observer finds a cat that is either dead or alive; there is no superposition of states. Since the cat is no longer in a superposition of states, then neither is the radioactive atom (nor the vial or the Geiger counter). Hence Schrödinger's wave function no longer holds and the wave function that described the atom—and its superposition of states—is said to have "collapsed": the atom now has only a single state, corresponding to the cat's observed state. But until an observer opens the box and thereby causes the wave function to collapse, the cat is both dead and alive. This has raised questions about, in John S. Bell's words, "where the observer begins and ends".^[101]

The measurement problem has largely been characterised as the clash of classical physics and quantum mechanics. Bohm argued that it is rather a clash of classical physics, quantum mechanics, and phenomenology; all three levels of description seem to be difficult to reconcile, or even contradictory.^[24] Though not referring specifically to quantum mechanics, Chalmers has written that if a theory of everything is ever discovered, it will be a set of "psychophysical laws", rather than simply a set of physical laws.^[46] With Chalmers as their inspiration, Bohm and Pylkkänen set out to do just that in their panprotopsychism. Chalmers, who is critical of the Copenhagen interpretation and most quantum theories of consciousness, has coined this "the Law of the Minimisation of Mystery".^[77]

According to the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, Schrödinger's cat is both dead and alive until observed or measured in some way.

The many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics does not take observation as central to the wave-function collapse, because it denies that the collapse happens. On the many-worlds interpretation, just as the cat is both dead and alive, the observer both sees a dead cat and sees a living cat. Even though observation does not play a central role in this case, questions about observation are still relevant to the discussion. In Roger Penrose's words:

I do not see why a conscious being need be aware of only "one" of the alternatives in a linear superposition. What is it about consciousnesses that says that consciousness must not be "aware" of that tantalising linear combination of both a dead and a live cat? It seems to me that a theory of consciousness would be needed for one to square the many world view with what one actually observes.

Chalmers believes that the tentative variant of panpsychism outlined in The Conscious Mind (1996) does just that. Leaning toward the many-worlds interpretation due to its mathematical parsimony, he believes his variety of panpsychist property dualism may be the theory Penrose is seeking. Chalmers believes that information will play an integral role in any theory of consciousness because the mind and brain have corresponding informational structures. He considers the computational nature of physics further evidence of information's central role, and suggests that information that is physically realised is simultaneously phenomenally realised; both regularities in nature and conscious experience are expressions of information's underlying character. The theory implies panpsychism, and also solves the problem Penrose poses. On Chalmers's formulation, information in any given position is phenomenally realised, whereas the informational state of the superposition as a whole is not.^[87] Panpsychist interpretations of quantum mechanics have been put forward by such philosophers as Whitehead,^[4] Shan Gao,^[102] Michael Lockwood,^[4] and Hoffman, who is a cognitive scientist.^[103] Protopanpsychist interpretations have been put forward by Bohm and Pylkkänen.^[24]

Tegmark has formally calculated the "decoherence rates" of neurons, finding that the brain is a "classical rather than a quantum system" and that quantum mechanics does not relate "to consciousness in any fundamental way".^[104]

In 2007, Steven Pinker criticized explanations of consciousness invoking quantum physics, saying: "to my ear, this amounts to the feeling that quantum mechanics sure is weird, and consciousness sure is weird, so maybe quantum mechanics can explain consciousness"; a view echoed by physicist Stephen Hawking.^[105][106] In 2017, Penrose rejected these characterizations, stating that disagreements are about the nature of quantum mechanics.^[106]

Arguments against

Theoretical issues

See also: Falsifiability

One criticism of panpsychism is that it cannot be empirically tested.^[9] A corollary of this criticism is that panpsychism has no predictive power. Tononi and Koch write: "Besides claiming that matter and mind are one thing, [panpsychism] has little constructive to say and offers no positive laws explaining how the mind is organized and works".^[34]

John Searle has alleged that panpsychism's unfalsifiability goes deeper than run-of-the-mill untestability: it is unfalsifiable because "It does not get up to the level of being false. It is strictly speaking meaningless because no clear notion has been given to the claim".^[68] The need for coherence and clarification is accepted by David Skrbina, a proponent of panpsychism.^[19]: 15

Many proponents of panpsychism base their arguments not on empirical support but on panpsychism's theoretical virtues. Chalmers says that while no direct evidence exists for the theory, neither is there direct evidence against it, and that "there are indirect reasons, of a broadly theoretical character, for taking the view seriously".^[9] Notwithstanding Tononi and Koch's criticism of panpsychism, they state that it integrates consciousness into the physical world in a way that is "elegantly unitary".^[34]

A related criticism is what seems to many to be the theory's bizarre nature.^[9] Goff dismisses this objection:^[1] though he admits that panpsychism is counterintuitive, he argues that Einstein's and Darwin's theories are also counterintuitive. "At the end of the day," he writes, "you should judge a view not for its cultural associations but by its explanatory power".^[30]

Problem of mental causation

Further information: Problem of mental causation

Philosophers such as Chalmers have argued that theories of consciousness should be capable of providing insight into the brain and mind to avoid the problem of mental causation.^[9][107] If they fail to do that, the theory will succumb to epiphenomenalism,^[107] a view commonly criticised as implausible or even self-contradictory.^{[87][108][109]} Proponents of panpsychism (especially those with neutral monist tendencies) hope to bypass this problem by dismissing it as a false dichotomy; mind and matter are two sides of the same coin, and mental causation is merely the extrinsic description of intrinsic properties of mind.^[110] Robert Howell has argued that all causal functions are still accounted for dispositionally (i.e., in terms of the behaviors described by science), leaving phenomenality causally inert.^[111] He concludes, "This leaves us once again with epiphenomenal qualia, only in a very surprising place".^[111] Neutral monists reject such dichotomous views of mind-body interaction.^[110][47]

Combination problem

The combination problem (which is related to the binding problem) can be traced to William James,^[11] but was given its present name by William Seager in 1995.^[112][11] The problem arises from the tension between the seemingly irreducible nature of consciousness and its ubiquity. If consciousness is ubiquitous, then in panpsychism, every atom (or every bit, depending on the version of panpsychism) has a minimal level of it. How then, as Keith Frankish puts it, do these "tiny consciousnesses combine" to create larger conscious experiences such as "the twinge of pain" he feels in his knee?^[113] This objection has garnered significant attention,^[11][113][1] and many have attempted to answer it.^[96][114] None of the proposed answers has gained widespread acceptance.^[11]

Concepts related to this problem include the classical sorites paradox (aggregates and organic wholes), mereology (the philosophical study of parts and wholes), Gestalt psychology, and Leibniz's concept of the vinculum substantiale.^{[citation needed]}

See also

Concepts

• Monadology
• Anima mundi (World soul)
• Egregore
• Gaia hypothesis
• Holographic Universe
• Mana (Mandaeism)
• Maya (illusion)
• Microcosm–macrocosm analogy
• Monistic idealism
• Mythopoeic thought
• Noosphere
• Pandeism
• Panentheism
• Pantheism
• Philosophy of mind
• Polypsychism
• Reflexive monism
• Transpersonal psychology
• Theistic Personalism – doctrine that God is the ground of all being

People

• Aleksei Kozlov
• Alfred North Whitehead
• David Chalmers
• Friedrich Paulsen
• Galen Strawson
• Gerard Heymans
• Gordon Pask
• Iain McGilchrist
• Mary Whiton Calkins
• Paul Carus
• Philip Goff
• Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Notes

1. ^ Jump up to:^{a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o} Goff, Philip; Seager, William; Allen-Hermanson, Sean (2017). "Panpsychism". In Zalta, Edward N. (ed.). Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved September 15, 2018.
2. ^ Jump up to:^a b Bruntrup, Godehard; Jaskolla, Ludwig (2017). Panpsychism: Contemporary Perspectives. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. p. 365. ISBN 978-0-19-935994-3.
3. ^ Jump up to:^a b Koch, Christof (January 1, 2014). "Is Consciousness Universal?". Scientific American. doi:10.1038/scientificamericanmind0114-26. Retrieved September 13, 2018.
4. ^ Jump up to:^{a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p} Seager, William; Allen-Hermanson, Sean (May 23, 2001). "Panpsychism".
5. ^ Jump up to:^{a b c d e} Goff, Philip (2017). "The Case for Panpsychism". Philosophy Now. Retrieved October 3, 2018.
6. ^ Jump up to:^a b c Weisberg, Josh. "The Hard Problem of Consciousness". Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. ISSN 2161-0002. Retrieved September 11, 2018.
7. ^ Jump up to:^a b c Clarke, D.S. Panpsychism: Past and Recent Selected Readings. State University of New York Press, 2004. p.1.
8. ^ Jump up to:^{a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q} Skrbina, David. "Panpsychism". Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. ISSN 2161-0002. Retrieved May 1, 2019.
9. ^ Jump up to:^{a b c d e f g h i j k l m n} Chalmers, David (2015). "Panpsychism and Panprotopsychism" (PDF). In Alter, Torin; Nagasawa, Yugin (eds.). Consciousness in the Physical World: Perspectives on Russellian Monism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-992735-7. Retrieved September 15, 2018.
10. ^ Clarke, David S. (2012). Panpsychism and the Religious Attitude. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. p. 1. ISBN 978-0-7914-5685-9.
11. ^ Jump up to:^{a b c d e f} Chalmers, David (2017). "The Combination Problem for Panpsychism" (PDF). In Brüntrup, Godehard; Jaskolla, Ludwig (eds.). Panpsychism: Contemporary Perspectives. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 179–214. Retrieved April 28, 2019.
12. ^ Aristotle. De Anima 411a7–8.
13. ^ Plato, Timaeus, 29/30; fourth century BCE
14. ^ Jump up to:^a b Berkeley, George (1948-57, Nelson) Robinson, H. (ed.) (1996). "Principles of Human Knowledge and Three Dialogues", pp. ix-x & passim. Oxford University Press, Oxford. ISBN 0192835491.
15. ^ "Panpsychism" . Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 20 (11th ed.). 1911. p. 681.
16. ^ Ford, Marcus P. (1981). William James: Panpsychist and Metaphysical Realist. Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, Vol. 17, No. 2. pp. 158–170.
17. ^ Rogers, Arthur Kenyon. (1922). English and American Philosophy Since 1800: A Critical Survey. New York: Macmillan. p. 326
18. ^ Robinson, Daniel Sommer. (1932). An Introduction to Living Philosophy. New York, Thomas Y. Crowell Company. p. 200
19. ^ Jump up to:^a b c d Skrbina, David. (2005). Panpsychism in the West. MIT Press. ISBN 0-262-19522-4.
20. ^ Carus, Paul. (1893). "Panpsychism and Panbiotism". The Monist. Vol. 3, No. 2. pp. 234–257. JSTOR 27897062
21. ^ Calvert, Ernest Reid. (1942). The Panpsychism of James Ward and Charles A. Strong. Boston University.
22. ^ Blamauer, Michael. (2011). The Mental as Fundamental: New Perspectives on Panpsychism. Ontos. p. 35. ISBN 978-3-86838-114-6
23. ^ Bohm, David (1990). "A new theory of the relationship of mind and matter". Philosophical Psychology. 3 (2): 271–286. doi:10.1080/09515089008573004.
24. ^ Jump up to:^a b c Pylkkänen, Paavo T. I. (2006). Mind, Matter and the Implicate Order (PDF). Berlin: Springer. p. 38. ISBN 9783540480587. S2CID 34480497. Archived from the original (PDF) on November 4, 2019. Retrieved June 1, 2020.
25. ^ Auxier, Randall; Herstein, Gary (2017). The Quantum of Explanation: Whitehead's Radical Empiricism. Routledge. pp. 39–49, 66–81. ISBN 978-1138700161.
26. ^ Nagel, Thomas (1979), "Panpsychism", in Nagel, Thomas (1979). Mortal questions. London: Canto. pp. 181–195.
27. ^ Coleman, Sam (2018). "The Evolution of Nagel's Panpsychism" (PDF). Klesis. 41. Retrieved September 19, 2019.
28. ^ Jump up to:^a b c Nagel, Thomas. Mortal Questions. Cambridge University Press, 1979.
29. ^ Jump up to:^a b Strawson, Galen (2006). "Realistic Monism: Why Physicalism Entails Panpsychism". Journal of Consciousness Studies. Volume 13, No 10–11, Exeter, Imprint Academic pp. 3–31.
30. ^ Jump up to:^a b Cook, Gareth (January 14, 2020). "Does Consciousness Pervade the Universe? - Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about 'panpsychism'". Scientific American. Retrieved January 14, 2020.
31. ^ Seager, William (2006). "The Intrinsic Nature Argument for Panpsychism" (PDF). Journal of Consciousness Studies. 13 (10–11): 129–145. Retrieved February 7, 2019.
32. ^ Papineau, David. "The Problem of Consciousness" (PDF). In Kriegel, Uriah (ed.). Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Consciousness. Oxford University Press. Retrieved September 24, 2019.
33. ^ "Episode 25, Philip Goff and David Papineau Debate: 'Can Science Explain Consciousness?' (Part II)" (Podcast). The Panpsycast Philosophy Podcast. September 3, 2017. Event occurs at 00:27:17. Archived from the original on September 25, 2019. Retrieved September 25, 2019. No, as it happens, I don't think it's crazy. I'm rather sympathetic to panpsychism. But not for the reasons you [Philip Goff] give.
34. ^ Jump up to:^{a b c d e} Tononi, Giulio; Koch, Christof (March 2015). "Consciousness: here, there and everywhere?". Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. 370 (1668): 20140167. doi:10.1098/rstb.2014.0167. PMC 4387509. PMID 25823865.
35. ^ Jump up to:^a b c CircleSoft. "The Case Against Reality". The Book Room at Byron. Archived from the original on August 10, 2020. Retrieved September 1, 2020.
36. ^ Kirkus Reviews. "Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind". Kirkus Reviews. Retrieved September 19, 2019.
37. ^ Epstein, Dmitry (August 23, 2019). "Annaka Harris's 'Conscious' and the Trap of Dualism". Areo Magazine. Retrieved September 19, 2019.
38. ^ Brown, R.S. (2020). Groundwork for a Transpersonal Psychoanalysis: Spirituality, Relationship, and Participation. Abingdon, UK; New York: Routledge.
39. ^ Lucas, Rebecca Garcia (2005). "For Love of Matter: A Contemporary Panpsychism by Freya Mathews". Environmental Values. 14 (4): 523–524.
40. ^ Iovino, Serenella; Oppermann, Serpil (2014). Material Ecocriticism. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press. p. 285. ISBN 978-0-253-01395-8.
41. ^ Steffes, David M. (2007). "Panpsychic Organicism: Sewall Wright's Philosophy for Understanding Complex Genetic Systems". Journal of the History of Biology. 40 (2): 327–361. doi:10.1007/s10739-006-9105-5. PMID 18175605. S2CID 3255830.
42. ^ Nagasawa, Yujin; Wager, Khai (December 29, 2016), "Panpsychism and Priority Cosmopsychism", Panpsychism, Oxford University Press, pp. 113–129, doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199359943.003.0005, ISBN 9780199359943.
43. ^ Goff, Philip (August 24, 2017). "Consciousness and Fundamental Reality". Oxford Scholarship Online. doi:10.1093/oso/9780190677015.001.0001. ISBN 9780190677015.
44. ^ See, e.g., his Whitehead's Pancreativism. The Basics (Foreword by Nicholas Rescher, Frankfurt / Paris, Ontos Verlag, 2006).
45. ^ Chalmers, David (2013). "Panpsychism and Panprotopsychism" (PDF). consc.net.
46. ^ Jump up to:^{a b c d e f g h} David Chalmers (1996) The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory, pp. 153-156. Oxford University Press, New York, ISBN 0-19-511789-1.
47. ^ Jump up to:^a b Irvine, Andrew David (2020), "Bertrand Russell", in Zalta, Edward N. (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2020 ed.), Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, retrieved August 31, 2020.
48. ^ Jump up to:^a b c d Alter, Torin; Pereboom, Derk (2019), "Russellian Monism", in Zalta, Edward N. (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2019 ed.), Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, retrieved August 31, 2020.
49. ^ "Vedanta, Advaita | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy". Retrieved September 1, 2020.
50. ^ Vaidya, Anand; Bilimoria, Purushottama (2015). "Advaita Vedanta and the Mind Extension Hypothesis: Panpsychism and Perception". Journal of Consciousness Studies. 22 (7–8): 201–225.
51. ^ Jump up to:^a b c d Parks, Graham. "The awareness of rocks". Skrbina David, ed. Mind that Abides. Chapter 17.
52. ^ "Why Buddha Nature is one of the most important understandings in Mahayana Buddhism and why Tathagatagarbha Buddha Nature is not the soul". Buddha Weekly: Buddhist Practices, Mindfulness, Meditation. June 25, 2017. Retrieved September 1, 2020.
53. ^ "Definition of BUDDHA-NATURE". www.merriam-webster.com. Retrieved September 1, 2020.
54. ^ Wayman, Alex and Hideko (1990), The Lion's roar of Queen Srimala, p. 42. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass Publishers
55. ^ Groner, Paul, 1946- (2000). Saichō : the establishment of the Japanese Tiandai School : with a new preface. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press. ISBN 0-8248-2371-0. OCLC 44650918.
56. ^ Publications, Donald D. Hoffman.
57. ^ Amanda Gefter (April 21, 2016). "The Evolutionary Argument Against Reality". Quanta Magazine. Retrieved September 1, 2020.
58. ^ Prakash, Stephens, Hoffman, Singh, Fields. "Fitness Beats Truth in the Evolution of Perception". http://cogsci.uci.edu/~ddhoff/FBT-7-30-17.
59. ^ "Experiencing a virtual interface". Big Think. August 9, 2019. Retrieved August 31, 2020.
60. ^ "Making Sense Podcast #178 - The Reality Illusion". Sam Harris. Retrieved September 1, 2020.
61. ^ Fields, Chris; Hoffman, Donald; Prakash, Chetan; Singh, Manish. Conscious agent networks: Formal analysis and application to cognition.
62. ^ Jump up to:^a b Tononi, Giulio (November 2, 2004). "An information integration theory of consciousness". BMC Neuroscience. 5 (1): 42. doi:10.1186/1471-2202-5-42. ISSN 1471-2202. PMC 543470. PMID 15522121.
63. ^ Oizumi, Masafumi; Albantakis, Larissa; Tononi, Giulio (May 8, 2014). "From the Phenomenology to the Mechanisms of Consciousness: Integrated Information Theory 3.0". PLOS Computational Biology. 10 (5): e1003588. Bibcode:2014PLSCB..10E3588O. doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1003588. ISSN 1553-734X. PMC 4014402. PMID 24811198.
64. ^ Tononi, Giulio (January 22, 2015). "Integrated information theory". Scholarpedia. 10 (1): 4164. Bibcode:2015SchpJ..10.4164T. doi:10.4249/scholarpedia.4164. ISSN 1941-6016.
65. ^ Mayner, William G. P.; Marshall, William; Albantakis, Larissa; Findlay, Graham; Marchman, Robert; Tononi, Giulio (2018). "Py Phi: A toolbox for integrated information theory". PLOS Computational Biology. 14 (7): e1006343. arXiv:1712.09644. Bibcode:2018PLSCB..14E6343M. doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1006343. PMC 6080800. PMID 30048445.
66. ^ Mørch, Hedda Hassel (October 1, 2019). "Is the Integrated Information Theory of Consciousness Compatible with Russellian Panpsychism?". Erkenntnis. 84 (5): 1065–1085. doi:10.1007/s10670-018-9995-6. hdl:10852/71730. ISSN 1572-8420. S2CID 126396603.
67. ^ Mørch, Hedda Hassel (2019). "Is the Integrated Information Theory of Consciousness Compatible with Russellian Panpsychism?". Erkenntnis. 84 (5): 1065–1085. doi:10.1007/s10670-018-9995-6. hdl:10852/71730. S2CID 126396603.
68. ^ Jump up to:^a b Searle, John. "Can Information Theory Explain Consciousness?". The New York Review of Books.
69. ^ "How do you explain consciousness? | David Chalmers - YouTube". www.youtube.com. Retrieved August 31, 2020.
70. ^ Keim, Brandon (November 14, 2013). "A Neuroscientist's Radical Theory of How Networks Become Conscious". Wired.
71. ^ Jump up to:^a b c Meixner, Uwe (2016). "Idealism and Panpsychism". In Brüntrup, Godehard; Jaskolla, Ludwig (eds.). Panpsychism: Contemporary Perspectives. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0199359943.
72. ^ Hartshorne, Charles (1950). "Panpsychism". In Ferm, Vergilius (ed.). A History of Philosophical Systems. New York: Rider and Company. pp. 442–453. Retrieved May 6, 2019.
73. ^ Chalmers, David J. (2020). "Idealism and the Mind-Body Problem" (PDF). In Seager, William (ed.). The Routledge Handbook of Panpsychism. Routledge. ISBN 978-1138817135. Retrieved December 2, 2019.
74. ^ Stubenberg, Leopold (2016). "Neutral monism". In Zalta, Edward N. (ed.). Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved September 15, 2018.
75. ^ Jump up to:^a b c Chalmers, David J. (2003). "Consciousness and its Place in Nature" (PDF). In Stich, Stephen P.; Warfield, Ted A. (eds.). The Blackwell Guide to Philosophy of Mind (1st ed.). Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing Ltd. ISBN 978-0631217756. Archived from the original (PDF) on October 3, 2017. Retrieved January 21, 2018.
76. ^ Nagel, Thomas. "What is it Like to be a Bat?". From The Philosophical Review LXXXIII, 4 (October 1974), pp. 435-450.
77. ^ Jump up to:^a b Chalmers, David J. (1995). "Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness". Journal of Consciousness Studies. 2 (3): 200–19.
78. ^ Goff, Philip; Seager, William; Allen-Hermanson, Sean (2020), "Panpsychism", in Zalta, Edward N. (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2020 ed.), Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, retrieved September 3, 2020.
79. ^ Lisman, John E. (June 23, 2017). "Locke's View of the Hard Problem of Consciousness and Its Implications for Neuroscience and Computer Science". Frontiers in Psychology. 8: 1069. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01069. ISSN 1664-1078. PMC 5481348. PMID 28690580.
80. ^ Kulstad, Mark; Carlin, Laurence (2020), "Leibniz's Philosophy of Mind", in Zalta, Edward N. (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2020 ed.), Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, retrieved September 3, 2020.
81. ^ Mill, John Stuart. A System of Logic (1843), Book V, Chapter V, Section 3.
82. ^ Huxley, Thomas Henry; Youmans, William Jay (1868). The Elements of Physiology and Hygiene: A Text-book for Educational Institutions. D. Appleton.
83. ^ Chalmers, David J. Is the Hard Problem of Consciousness Universal?.
84. ^ Arnold, Dan (2015) Philosophy of Mind's Hard Problem in Light of Buddhist Idealism, in Steven Emmanuel, ed., Philosophy's Perennial Questions: Comparing Buddhist and Western Approaches.
85. ^ Bryan Van Norden, Buddhism Comes to China, retrieved December 29, 2021.
86. ^ Tiwald, Justin; Van Norden, Bryan W. eds. (2005), Readings in Later Chinese Philosophy, p. 101. Hackett Publishing.
87. ^ Jump up to:^a b c David Chalmers. The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
88. ^ Garrett, Brian Jonathan (2006). "What the History of Vitalism Teaches Us About Consciousness and the "Hard Problem"". Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. 72 (3): 576–588. doi:10.1111/j.1933-1592.2006.tb00584.x. ISSN 1933-1592.
89. ^ Dennett, Daniel. "The Zombic Hunch: Extinction of an Intuition?" ROYAL INSTITUTE OF PHILOSOPHY MILLENNIAL LECTURE. November 28, 1999.
90. ^ Dennett, Daniel (2016). "Illusionism as an obvious default theory of consciousness" (PDF). Imprint Academic.
91. ^ "26th Distinguished Lecture on Brain, Learning and Memory with Patricia Churchland - YouTube". www.youtube.com. Retrieved August 31, 2020.
92. ^ Baggini, Julian (October 8, 2019). "Out of mind: philosopher Patricia Churchland's radical approach to the study of human consciousness". Retrieved August 31, 2020.
93. ^ Schopenhauer, A. Der Welt als Wille und Vorstellung. Book II, § 17.
94. ^ Jump up to:^a b Tegmark, Max (2014). Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality. New York: Vintage Books. pp. 162–164.
95. ^ Marshall, Dan; Weatherson, Brian (2018), "Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic Properties", in Zalta, Edward N. (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2018 ed.), Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, retrieved September 4, 2020.
96. ^ Jump up to:^a b Harris, Annaka (February 27, 2020). "Consciousness Isn't Self-Centered". Nautilus. Retrieved July 7, 2022.
97. ^ Strawson, Galen (1999). "The Self". In Gallagher, Shaun; Shear, Jonathan (eds.). Models of the Self. Exeter: Imprint Academic. pp. 1–24.
98. ^ "Episode 25: David Chalmers on Consciousness, the Hard Problem, and Living in a Simulation, 49:10 – Sean Carroll". www.preposterousuniverse.com. Retrieved September 2, 2020.
99. ^ Siddiqui, Shabnam; Singh, Chandralekha (May 1, 2017). "How diverse are physics instructors' attitudes and approaches to teaching undergraduate level quantum mechanics?". European Journal of Physics. 38 (3): 035703. Bibcode:2017EJPh...38c5703S. doi:10.1088/1361-6404/aa6131. ISSN 0143-0807.
100. ^ Wimmel, Hermann (1992). Quantum Physics & Observed Reality: A Critical Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. World Scientific. ISBN 978-981-02-1010-6.
101. ^ "Measurement problem - Wikiquote". en.wikiquote.org. Retrieved September 3, 2020.
102. ^ Gao, Shan (2008). "A quantum theory of consciousness". Minds and Machines. 18 (1): 39–52. doi:10.1007/s11023-007-9084-0. S2CID 22587697.
103. ^ Hoffman, D. (2019). The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes. pp. 94-115, 123-124. New York, NY: Norton & Co.
104. ^ Tegmark, Max (July 4, 2000). "Why the brain is probably not a quantum computer" (PDF). Information Sciences. 128 (3–4): 155–179. doi:10.1016/S0020-0255(00)00051-7.
105. ^ Pinker, Steven (January 29, 2007). "The Brain: The Mystery of Consciousness". Time. ISSN 0040-781X. Retrieved September 2, 2020.
106. ^ Jump up to:^a b "Roger Penrose On Why Consciousness Does Not Compute". Nautilus | Science Connected. April 27, 2017. Retrieved March 17, 2022.
107. ^ Jump up to:^a b Chalmers, David (1996). The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 158–60, 172–203. ISBN 0-19-510553-2. OCLC 33101543.
108. ^ Lycan, William G., ed. (1990-01-01). Mind and Cognition: A Reader. Cambridge, Massachusetts, US: Basil Blackwell. ISBN 978-0631160762.
109. ^ Churchland, Paul M. (1989-01-01). A Neurocomputational Perspective: The Nature of Mind and the Structure of Science. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. ISBN 978-0262031516.
110. ^ Jump up to:^a b Stubenberg, Leopold (2018), "Neutral Monism", in Zalta, Edward N. (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2018 ed.), Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, retrieved August 31, 2020.
111. ^ Jump up to:^a b Howell, Robert (2014). "The Russellian Monist's Problems with Mental Causation" (PDF). The Philosophical Quarterly. 65 (258): 22–39. doi:10.1093/pq/pqu058. ISSN 0031-8094. Retrieved May 19, 2019.
112. ^ Seager, William (1995). "Consciousness, information and panpsychism". Journal of Consciousness Studies. 2 (3): 272–288.
113. ^ Jump up to:^a b Frankish, Keith (September 20, 2016). "Why Panpsychism Is Probably Wrong". The Atlantic. Retrieved March 20, 2019.
114. ^ Chalmers, David (2016), Brüntrup, Godehard; Jaskolla, Ludwig (eds.), "The Combination Problem for Panpsychism", Panpsychism, Oxford University Press, retrieved August 31, 2020.

Further reading

Wikisource has the text of the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia article Panpsychism.

Library resources about
Panpsychism

---

• Resources in your library
• Resources in other libraries

• Clarke, D.S., ed. (2004). Panpsychism: Past and Recent Selected Readings. State University of New York Press. ISBN 0-7914-6132-7.
• Skrbina, David (2005). Panpsychism in the West. The MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-69351-6.
• Skrbina, David, ed. (2009). Mind That Abides: Panpsychism in the New Millennium. John Benjamins. ISBN 978-9027252111.
• Blamauer, Michael, ed. (2011). The Mental as Fundamental: New Perspectives on Panpsychism. Gazelle Books. ISBN 978-3-86838-114-6.
• Ells, Peter (2011). Panpsychism: The Philosophy of the Sensuous Cosmos. O Books. ISBN 978-1-84694-505-2.
• Alter, Torin; Nagasawa, Yugin, eds. (2015). Consciousness in the Physical World: Perspectives on Russellian Monism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-992735-7.
• Brüntrup, Godehard; Jaskolla, Ludwig, eds. (2016). Panpsychism: Contemporary Perspectives. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0199359943.
• Goff, Philip (2017). Consciousness and Fundamental Reality. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0190677015.
• Goff, Philip (2019). Galileo's Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness. Pantheon. ISBN 978-1524747961.
• Harris, Annaka (2019). Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind. Harper. ISBN 978-0062906717.
• Seager, William, ed. (2020). The Routledge Handbook of Panpsychism. Routledge. ISBN 978-1138817135.

External links

Wikibooks has more on the topic of: Panpsychism

• List of online classic papers on panpsychism
• Online papers on panpsychism, by various authors, compiled by David Chalmers
• Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy – Panpsychism
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy – Panpsychism

Why Quantum Theory Does Not Support Materialism

article link

article link

video link

Why Quantum Theory Does Not Support Materialism

article link

by Bruce L Gordon, Ph.D.

History and Philosophy of Physics, Baylor University

March 30, 2016

Materialism (or physicalism or naturalism) is the view that the sum and substance of everything that exists is exhausted by physical objects and processes and whatever supervenes causally upon them. The resources available to the materialist for providing an explanation of how the universe works are therefore restricted to material objects, causes, events and processes. Because quantum theory is thought to provide the bedrock for our scientific understanding of physical reality, it is to this theory that the materialist inevitably appeals in support of his worldview. But having fled to science in search of a safe haven for his doctrines, the materialist instead finds that quantum theory in fact dissolves and defeats his materialist understanding of the world.

Before we launch into a more detailed defense of this claim, it will help for those who are unfamiliar with quantum theory to have at their disposal a few non-technical definitions of central concepts. First of all, what is quantum theory? Broadly speaking, it is the mathematical theory describing the behavior of the physical world at the smallest and most fundamental level. It is comprised of quantum mechanics and quantum field theory, along with a variety of associated concepts and applications.Quantum mechanics describes the motion of objects at the atomic and subatomic scale. Fundamental to quantum mechanics is the duality of its phenomena – objects such as electrons and protons behave as either particles or waves depending on the experimental context. Similarly, radiation, such as light, exhibits both wave and particle behavior.

Quantum field theory is the quantum description of systems with an infinite number of degrees of freedom. It is frequently convenient to represent systems consisting of large numbers of objects – such as the ions and electrons in a metal or the nucleons in large nuclei – in the quantum field formalism.

Relativistic quantum field theory combines field theory (for example, the theory of the electromagnetic field), quantum mechanics and special relativity theory into a single mathematical structure. It is one of the primary tools of mathematical physicists. The search continues for an adequate quantum theory of gravity that would successfully express general relativity as a quantum field theory.

Quantum cosmology applies the quantum theory of fields to the question of the origin of the universe and its early development, but an adequate quantum cosmology ultimately requires a complete theory of quantum gravity.

One of the chief characteristics of quantum phenomena is their nonlocality and nonlocalizability. Every time a quantum object or system interacts with another quantum object or system, their existence becomes “entangled” in such a way that what happens to one of them instantaneously affects the other no matter how far apart they have separated. Since local effects obey the constraints of special relativity and propagate at speeds less than or equal to that of light, such instantaneous correlations are called nonlocal, and the quantum systems manifesting them are said to exhibit nonlocality. A result in mathematical physics called Bell’s theorem – after the Irish physicist who proved it – shows that no hidden (empirically undetectable) variables can be added to the description of quantum systems exhibiting nonlocal behavior which would explain these instantaneous correlations on the basis of local considerations.

When such local variables are introduced, the predictions of the modified theory differ from those of quantum mechanics. A series of experiments beginning with those conducted by Alain Aspect at the University of Paris in the 1980s has demonstrated quite conclusively that quantum theory, not some theory modified by local hidden parameters, generates the correct predictions. The physical world, therefore, is fundamentally nonlocal and permeated with instantaneous connections and correlations. Nonlocalizability is a related phenomenon in relativistic quantum mechanics and quantum field theory in which it is impossible to isolate an unobserved quantum object, such as an electron, in a bounded region of space. As we shall see, nonlocality and nonlocalizability present intractable problems for the materialist.

The ground has now been laid to summarize an argument showing not only that quantum theory does not support materialism but also that it is incompatible with materialism. The argument can be formulated in terms of the following premises and conclusion:

• P1. Materialism is the view that the sum and substance of everything that exists is exhausted by physical objects and processes and whatever supervenes causally upon them.

• P2. The explanatory resources of materialism are therefore restricted to material objects, causes, events and processes.

• P3. Neither nonlocal quantum correlations nor (in light of nonlocalizability) the identity of the fundamental constituents of material reality can be explained or characterized if the explanatory constraints of materialism are preserved.

• P4. These quantum phenomena require an explanation.

_____________________________________________

Therefore, materialism/naturalism/physicalism is irremediably deficient as a worldview, and consequently should be rejected as false and inadequate.

The first two premises of this argument are uncontroversial: the first is just a definition and the second is a consequence of this definition. The key premises of the argument are thus the third and fourth; once these are established, the conclusion follows directly. Let’s focus our attention, therefore, on justifying the claims in premises three and four.

In order for a particle to be a material individual, it must possess one or more well-defined and uniquely identifying properties. The prime example of such a property is spatio-temporal location. In order for something to exist as an individual material object, it must occupy a certain volume of space at a certain time. If it does not, then whatever it is – if it’s anything at all – it’s not a material object. The problem for the materialist is that the particles of relativistic quantum mechanics are not so localizable.

Stated roughly, Gerhard Hegerfeldt and David Malament have shown that if one assumes (quite reasonably) that an individual particle can neither serve as an infinite source of energy nor be in two places at once, then that particle has zero probability of being found in any bounded spatial region, no matter how large! In short, the “particle” doesn’t exist anywhere in space, and so, to be honest, it doesn’t really exist at all. Hans Halvorson and Robert Clifton have extended these results and closed some loopholes by showing that the Hegerfeldt-Malament proof still works under conditions that are even more general. In particular, they’ve shown that once relativity is taken into account, there can be no intelligible notion of microscopic material objects. Particle talk has pragmatic utility in relation to macroscopic appearances, but it has no basis in microphysical reality (and this is the rock-bottom reality for the materialist).

The underlying problem is this: there are correlations in nature that require a causal explanation but for which no physical explanation is in principle possible. Furthermore, the nonlocalizability of field quanta entails that these entities, whatever they are, fail the criterion of material individuality. So, paradoxically and ironically, the most fundamental constituents and relations of the material world cannot, in principle, be understood in terms of material substances. Since there must be some explanation for these things, the correct explanation will have to be one which is non-physical – and this is plainly incompatible with any and all varieties of materialism.

One possible materialist strategy of defense is to claim that nonlocal phenomena do not require an explanation since, while they may be a bit puzzling epistemically, they are not, ultimately, metaphysically problematic. This idea that none of the regularities in nature need causal grounding is captured in a concept that David Lewis calls “Humean supervenience.” Humean supervenience is intended as an account of how nature determines what is true about laws and chances quite independently of what we humans believe about the world – in other words, it is still to be understood as an ontological theory, not an epistemic one. The theory takes the fundamental relations of the world to be spatio-temporal in a manner consistent with special relativity, and has an ontology of points – or point-sized occupants of points – along with local qualities that are their intrinsic properties. Everything else supervenes on this spatio-temporal arrangement of local qualities. On this view, observed natural regularities are laws just in case they are the theorems of an axiomatic deductive system whose theorems are true and which strikes an optimal balance between simplicity and informativeness. Lewis postulates that there is exactly one best such system.

But this borders on incoherence. Humean supervenience would require that quantum outcomes, while nonlocally correlated, should nonetheless be understood in terms of local properties. Under such conditions, it becomes necessary to postulate random devices in harmony at spacelike separation without any deeper ontological explanation. Perhaps I can engender the requisite sense of puzzlement in the following way: accepting the plausibility of Humean supervenience in this context would be equivalent to believing that people sitting at typewriters in rooms on opposite sides of the world and simultaneously producing identical texts were not and had never been in communication with each other. The quantum description of the world is at least this improbable under Humean supervenience, with the added wrinkle that no common cause in the history of the system or locally transmitted information can account for the correlation. Incredulity is not just the natural response here, it is a necessary response. When the implications of the concept are grasped, Humean supervenience serves as a reductio of itself. So I repeat: a deeper explanation for quantum nonlocality is required and no physical explanation is possible.

The challenge to making metaphysical sense of quantum theory, therefore, is to give an account of what the world is like when it has an objective structure that does not supervene on material objects. With this stricture, the rather startling answer that begins to seem plausible is that preserving and explaining the objective structure of appearances requires reviving a type of phenomenalism in which our perception of the physical universe is constituted by sense-data conforming to certain structural constraints, but absent a material reality giving rise to these sensory perceptions. What remains, therefore, is an ontology of minds experiencing and generating mental events and processes that, when sensory in character, have a formal structure characterized by the fundamental symmetries and constraints represented in physical theory. The fact that these sensory perceptions are not mostly of our own making points to the falsity of any solipsistic inclination, but it also engenders some metaphysical and epistemological puzzlement. There is, however, one quite reasonable way to ground this ontology and obviate puzzlement: metaphysical objectivity and epistemic intersubjectivity are preserved in a theistic metaphysics that looks a lot like the immaterialism proposed by George Berkeley and Jonathan Edwards.

---

*Bruce Gordon received his Ph.D. in the history of philosophy of physics from Northwestern University. His primary research interests are in the areas of philosophy of science, philosophy of physics, analytic metaphysics, philosophical theology, and questions at the intersection of these disciplines. He has been at Baylor University since 1999 in the role of an administrator and adjunct assistant professor of philosophy. He is currently a scholar in residence at the Baylor Institute for Faith and Learning.