18 theories
Panpsychism: theories of consciousness
Consciousness is a basic feature of the physical world. The fundamental particles and fields of physics have experiential, or proto-experiential, properties, and in brains these combine into the full awareness of a human or animal.
Open Panpsychism on the mapAll theories A–Z
Panpsychism puts some trace of mind wherever there is matter, and perhaps wherever there is spacetime. Its appeal comes from the hard problem. If no arrangement of wholly nonconscious parts seems able to produce experience, perhaps the parts were never wholly nonconscious. The idea is ancient, with roots in animist religion, Greek thought, Leibniz’s monads and Indian schools such as Vedānta, and it has gained ground among analytic philosophers in recent decades.
The usual argument goes back to Bertrand Russell. Physics describes what matter does, its structure and dispositions, and says nothing about what matter intrinsically is. Panpsychists propose that this inner nature is experiential. Consciousness then needs no special origin. It was present all along and becomes rich and unified in brains.
Versions differ over where the mind sits. Micropsychism gives experience to the smallest physical units. Panprotopsychism gives them only proto-experiential properties that are not yet conscious. Cosmopsychism starts from the universe as a single conscious whole. Galen Strawson, Philip Goff and David Chalmers are leading contemporary defenders, and Alfred North Whitehead’s process philosophy treats moments of experience as the basic events of nature.
The hardest question is the combination problem. Nobody has shown how countless tiny subjects add up to one unified human mind, and Yujin Nagasawa argues the step may be impossible to demonstrate even if panpsychism is true. John Searle objected that consciousness comes in discrete units and cannot be spread over the universe ‘like a thin veneer of jam’.
Good places to start
- Goff's Panpsychism Consciousness as Fundamental and Ubiquitous Feature of Reality
- Strawson’s Panpsychism Theory ‘Real Materialism Entails Panpsychism’
- Whitehead's Process Theory Consciousness as Process-Relational Panexperientialism
- Panprotopsychism Protophenomenal properties combine to generate consciousness
- Cosmopsychism Theory The Universe as Fundamental Conscious Subject
All 18 theories
- Micropsychism Theory Consciousness as Micro-level Phenomenal Property
- Panprotopsychism Protophenomenal properties combine to generate consciousness
- Cosmopsychism Theory The Universe as Fundamental Conscious Subject
- Qualia Force Theory Consciousness as an Emergent Deep Feature of Physical Reality
- Qualia Space Theory Consciousness as an Independent, Non-Reducible Dimensional Feature of Reality
- Chalmers’s Panpsychism Consciousness as the Intrinsic Nature of Physics
- Strawson’s Panpsychism Theory ‘Real Materialism Entails Panpsychism’
- Goff's Panpsychism Consciousness as Fundamental and Ubiquitous Feature of Reality
- Tye’s Irreducible Consciousness Irreducible On/Off Consciousness Transferred from the Fundamental
- Mørch's Phenomenal-Causal Powers Panpsychism Consciousness as the Causal Powers of Matter
- Schneider and Bailey’s Entangled Superpsychism Superconsciousness in Entanglement Beneath Spacetime
- Coleman’s Panqualityism Consciousness as Awareness of Unexperienced Qualities
- Kadić's Monadic Panpsychism Human Experience as Relationally Constituted Microsubjects
- A. Harris’s Panpsychism as Fundamental Field ‘Consciousness as a Fundamental Intrinsic Field’
- Sheldrake’s Self-Organizing Systems at all Levels of Complexity Theory ‘Mind or Consciousness at all Levels of Nature’
- Wallace’s Panpsychism Inside Physics Consciousness as the Intrinsic Nature of Physics
- Whitehead's Process Theory Consciousness as Process-Relational Panexperientialism
- Starrett’s Radical Panpsychism Experience as the Dynamics of Degrees of Freedom