Panpsychism: Is Everything Conscious?

The Five Most Controversial Ideas in the Study of Consciousness [Part 5]

This week, we continue our series on The Five Most Controversial Ideas in the Study of Consciousness with Panpsychism. Panpsychism has gained some popularity recently, but it remains one of the more provocative concepts in the philosophy of mind.

This week, we’re asking three main questions:

• What is panpsychism?

• Why might someone believe in panpsychism? and

• What are the main arguments against panpsychism?

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This article is Part 5 in the series on The Five Most Controversial Ideas in the Study of Consciousness.

Part 1:

The Homunculus Fallacy and the Infinite Regress

Part 2:

Substance Dualism and the Interaction Problem

·Part 3:

Solipsism -- It's Just You

Part 4:

Epiphenomenalism: Is Consciousness a By-Product?

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Q1. What is Panpsychism?

Panpsychism is a strange one. It’s the idea that everything — from humans and animals to plants, particles and even rocks — is conscious. The idea has gained some popularity recently, but it’s not new. The view has a long history in both Eastern and Western philosophy.

At its core, panpsychism believes consciousness is a fundamental property of the universe, similar to properties like mass or charge. So, consciousness is ubiquitous.

Panpsychism comes in many different flavours. We won’t go into all the distinctions here, but I want to highlight one. Panpsychists tend to split between constitutive and non-constitutive panpsychism. The main difference is that non-constitutive panpsychism believes macro-consciousness, like our consciousness, is not derived from smaller micro-consciousnesses. Instead, macro-consciousness might emerge from matter (perhaps when a system is sufficiently complex or integrated). In contrast, constitutive panpsychists believe macro-consciousness is derived from micro-consciousnesses.

Non-constitutive panpsychism is worth exploring, but let’s leave that for when we discuss Giulio Tononi’s Integrated Information Theory of Consciousness. In this article, we’ll focus on constitutive panpsychism because it is currently the more fashionable form of panpsychism. For brevity, I will use panpsychism throughout this article but just know I mean constitutive panpsychism, not non-constitutive panpsychism.

Q2. Why might someone believe in panpsychism?

For many, panpsychism provides a middle ground between the unsatisfying views of dualism and physicalism. As we have discussed a few times now, dualism — the view that the mind and brain are made of different substances — is troubled by the interaction problem.

Physicalism—which we haven’t discussed in detail yet—is troubled by the hard problem of consciousness. David Chalmers argues physicalism cannot explain how consciousness—for example, the experience of redness—could possibly be reduced to the brain. It doesn’t matter how much you look; you will never find redness in the brain.

Panpsychism attempts to bridge this divide between dualism and physicalism. It avoids the interaction problem because there is only one substance — the physical. And it avoids the hard problem because consciousness is a fundamental property, not an emergent one.

Panpsychism also avoids another problem that can arise in some forms of physicalism — where exactly do we draw the boundary between consciousness and no consciousness? Most of us would agree humans are conscious. And (I assume) most would agree a light switch is not conscious. What about a bacterium, a sea sponge, an ant, a snake, a dog, a newborn baby? Pinpointing the exact point at which we draw the line between conscious and non-conscious is challenging for some forms of physicalism. Panpsychism avoids this problem because all matter has the fundamental property of consciousness. Panpsychists don’t need to draw a line.

Q3: What are the main arguments against panpsychism?

There are many problems with panpsychism, but most thinkers see one main problem—the combination problem. We’ll review the combination problem, but first, let’s briefly review the scientific objection.

1. The scientific objection

Panpsychism hypothesises that consciousness is a fundamental property of reality, but some assert it offers no mechanism, explanation, or evidence for this claim. Worse, some argue, even if scientists wanted to find evidence to support this claim, there is no method to test for the presence of consciousness in things like electrons or quarks. Panpsychism can neither be proved nor disproved. Its claims are unverifiable. In science, theories that cannot be proven wrong are called unfalsifiable theories. Unfalsifiable theories are unscientific.

2. The combination problem

The most significant and pressing problem for panpsychism is the combination problem. How can micro-consciousnesses combine to give macro-consciousnesses?

The combination problem is not just one problem. Here, I will focus on just a few of the key issues. For a much more detailed analysis of the combination problem, I recommend The Combination Problem for Panpsychism by David Chalmers.

The subject-summing problem

The core claim of panpsychism is that micro-level entities have consciousness — which we can think of as fundamental micro-consciousnesses. These individually distinct micro-consciousnesses must combine to produce the macro-consciousness we’re familiar with. However, it is unclear how they do this. How do distinct micro-consciousnesses combine into new unified macro-consciousness systems such as brains?

The very idea of combining consciousnesses doesn’t seem to fit with our experience of consciousness. We feel our conscious experience is one unified experience, not a collection of trillions of separate consciousnesses.

Perhaps micro-consciousnesses simply merge together when they are in close proximity to one another. But that doesn’t seem correct, either. Consider a rock composed of billions of micro-consciousnesses in close proximity—there is no evidence this produces macro-consciousness like a brain. And if you put your head near your friend’s head, it doesn’t seem like your consciousness merges with theirs.

Panpsychism does not yet provide a satisfactory explanation for how consciousness combines or why the combining seems to stop at the brain level.

Where do micro-consciousnesses go?

There are a few other tricky problems to address: What happens to the micro-consciousnesses when they combine into macro-consciousness? Do the micro-consciousnesses of particles somehow disappear or get absorbed when integrated into the macro-consciousness of a brain? That seems difficult to swallow — it would mean all the micro-consciousnesses are erased every time matter reorganises.

Alternatively, panpsychism could propose that there is both a macro-consciousness of the entire system—like a human brain—and separate micro-consciousnesses of all the components that make up the system. Each part at each level within that system simultaneously has different consciousnesses in parallel. But that leads to an overwhelming proliferation of consciousnesses at all levels, with no clear divide between conscious wholes and their conscious parts.

One popular way to avoid the combination problem is to claim micro-consciousnesses don’t actually combine at all (this is called the reductionist approach). But this view doesn’t seem to align with our everyday experience of a single unified conscious experience.

3. Panpsychism of the Gaps

There is a theological concept in which gaps in scientific understanding are solved by claiming God provides the explanation. For example, before we understood the biological origins of life, God was the explanation given for the first living organisms. This reasoning is called the God of the Gaps — when there is a gap in our scientific understanding, we fill the gap by defaulting to God.

Some have argued panpsychism does to consciousness what God of the Gaps reasoning does to science in general. Is panpsychism simply Panpsychism of the Gaps? Does panpsychism merely plug our gap in understanding consciousness with the assertion that consciousness is a fundamental property?

For some, claiming consciousness is a fundamental property of the universe solves the problem of explaining consciousness. But for others, there simply isn’t any evidence to justify a belief in the claims. These panpsychism critics argue panpsychism is simply an assertion that, when accepted, avoids the problems inherent in dualism and physicalism, but there are no good reasons to believe it to be true.

For more on this argument, I recommend the following clip where Alex O’Connor interviews Philip Goff:

The Sum Up

Despite its issues, panpsychism remains a popular yet provocative view in the study of consciousness.

Panpsychism is the last theory in our series on The Five Most Controversial Ideas in the Study of Consciousness. Of course, the five ideas I have covered are not the only controversial ideas in consciousness research. A good case could be made for putting all consciousness theories on the list.

Are there any obvious theories I missed? Which theories would you include? Let me know in the comments.

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