Panpsychism
Panpsychism, in philosophy, is either the view that all parts of matter involve mind, or the more holistic view that the whole universe is an organism that possesses a mind. It is thus a stronger and more ambitious view than hylozoism, which holds only that all things are alive. This is not to say that panpsychism believes that all matter is alive or even conscious but rather that the constituent parts of matter are composed of some form of mind and are sentient.
Panpsychism claims that everything is sentient and that there are either many separate minds, or one single mind that unites everything that is. The concept of the unconscious, made popular by the psychoanalysts, made possible a variant of panpsychism that denies consciousness from some entities while still asserting the ubiquity of mind.
Emergence and Panpsychism
Panpsychism, at least in its stronger forms, is not an intuitive position. We naturally think of much of the universe (rocks, light-waves, etc.) as different from us in a very fundamental way - namely, that we have mind and are conscious, and those other things aren't. Such a division is at the root of many of our ethical views as well. We think that there is something much worse about stabbing an animal with a hot poker than there is about stabbing a rock or a machine (even a complex machine). The reason for that simply seems to be that animals, by virtue of having minds, have a capacity for pain that rocks and circuit boards simply lack.
Given this, it is natural to wonder what motivation panpsychism could possibly have that could weigh against such a well-entrenched intuitive position. The chief motivation becomes more clear when we reflect on the question of how it is that consciousness or minds could appear in the world.
Consider the growth and development of an animal like a cow. We believe that a full-grown cow is a conscious being, but that the individual reproductive cells of its parent-cows and the food they injest are not conscious. Yet sometime after the time when the reproductive cells establish physical contact, a conscious being seems to appear where none had been there before (note that this issue is distinct from the issue of life, since we normally think that there are plenty of non-conscious living beings). On this way of describing things, we can say that consciousness emerges, where this means that a certain property comes into being where it had not existed before.
The emergence of some properties in the world is unmysterious. For instance, as a result of a certain political process, some entity might suddenly acquire the property of being Prime Minister, where it had not been Prime Minister before. The reason this seems unmysterious is that anyone who understands what the property of being Prime Minister is will be able to see how it could have arisen from some combination of other properties (e.g. the property of being a candidate + the property of being voted for by A + the property of being voted for by B, etc.).
Spinoza
Leibniz
References and Recommended Readings
- Clark, D. (2004) Panpsychism: Past and Recent, Albany, SUNY Press.
- Leibniz, G. (1714/1989). Monadology, in G. W. Leibniz: Philosophical Essays, R. Ariew and D. Garber (eds. and trans.), Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company.
- Skrbina, D. (2005). Panpsychism in the West, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
- Spinoza, B. (1677/1985). Ethics, in The Collected Works of Spinoza, E. Curley (ed. and trans.), Princeton: Princeton University Press.
- Sprigge, T.L.S. (1998). "Panpsychism." In E. Craig (Ed.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. London: Routledge.
External links
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy - Panpsychism
- Bibliography on Panpsychism compiled by David Chalmers
- panpsychism.net
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