Concept

Panpsychism

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Panpsychism

The philosophical position that experiential or proto-experiential properties are fundamental to reality — not products of sufficiently complex biology, but features of the cosmos at every scale. Panpsychism is the metaphysical position defended by Iain McGilchrist in The Matter with Things (2021), and a live position in contemporary philosophy of mind.

The core argument

The ‘hard problem’ of consciousness (Chalmers): why and how does subjective experience arise from physical processes? Why does brain activity feel like anything at all? No physicalist account has explained the transition from electrochemical signalling to phenomenal experience. The explanatory gap is not a gap in knowledge but, panpsychists argue, a gap in principle.

McGilchrist’s formulation: ‘Nobody has the slightest idea how consciousness could come from biochemistry.’ If consciousness cannot emerge from unconscious matter, it must be foundational — an ontological primitive (a thing that cannot be reduced to or derived from anything more basic). Ramachandran and Blakemore, in the Oxford Handbook of Science, concede that we ‘may just have to accept that consciousness is an ontological primitive.’

This does not imply that rocks are conscious in the way humans are. It implies that experiential properties are present — in attenuated or proto form — throughout nature, and that what we call consciousness in humans is a complex, highly organised manifestation of something more basic.

Galen Strawson reaches the same conclusion by the opposite road — not against physicalism but through it. On his real physicalist view, physics describes only the structure of reality, captured in equations, and is silent about the intrinsic nature of the stuff whose structure it measures (Russell’s ‘quiddity’). So the assumption that the physical is by nature non-conscious is smuggled in, not read off the science. Given that experience is undeniably real, that everything real is physical, and that there is no radical (magical) emergence — the arising of consciousness from the wholly non-conscious ‘would be unintelligible even to God’ — experience must already be a fundamental physical feature, the intrinsic nature the equations leave untouched. On this route panpsychism is not an alternative to physicalism but its honest terminus, and illusionism (denying experience to save non-conscious physics) is the incoherent move. See Galen Strawson on Panpsychism, Physicalism, and Why Consciousness Is Foundational.

The competing view (Searle / biological naturalism)

John Searle’s position: consciousness is a specific biological phenomenon that evolved at least twice (vertebrates and cephalopods). It is expensive to maintain. It serves a defined function: generating a subjective movie of the world in which the organism is embedded and believes itself to be acting. Intelligence — however sophisticated — is not consciousness. E. coli follows a glucose gradient; a self-driving car learns routes; both are intelligent and neither is conscious. The architecture for subjective experience requires specific neuronal support.

This is the Jim Rutt position in the EP 154–155 conversations and the view held by the majority of neuroscientists and philosophers of mind.

Where mainstream views differ

Panpsychism is a minority view but not a fringe view. It is defended by philosophers including David Chalmers, Galen Strawson, and Philip Goff. The main objections:

  1. The combination problem: how do micro-experiential properties (if they exist at quarks, atoms, neurons) combine to produce unified human consciousness? The problem of combination may be as hard as the hard problem itself.
  2. Parsimony: attributing experience to electrons violates Occam’s razor without explanatory gain, unless experience can be defined rigorously at that scale.
  3. Conflation with intelligence: McGilchrist’s slime-mould example (a piece of slime mould retains maze-memory after separation from the whole) demonstrates distributed adaptive intelligence, not consciousness.

Relation to quantum mechanics

McGilchrist aligns with the minority (~15–20% of physicists) who believe consciousness is implicated in quantum measurement — that field collapse is not merely a matter of system size but involves the observer’s consciousness. The majority (~85%) hold that measurement is a physical process independent of consciousness. Feynman: ‘If you understand quantum mechanics, you don’t understand quantum mechanics.’ McGilchrist acknowledges he is not a physicist and vets his physics claims with sympathetic colleagues.

In the wiki