Panpsychists

Panpsychists are adherents of panpsychism, a family of theories in the philosophy of mind that maintains mental properties are fundamental aspects of reality and are present, to some degree, in all things. In its strongest form, consciousness or proto-conscious experience is ubiquitous; in more modest versions, basic experiential traits are intrinsic to matter and scale up through organization to yield higher levels of consciousness. Some distinctions are drawn between panpsychism and panexperientialism, the latter emphasizing experience itself rather than full, sentient consciousness.

Historical roots are debated, but ideas resembling panpsychism appear in the work of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (monads with mental properties) and Baruch Spinoza (mind–body monism). In the 20th century, Alfred North Whitehead and, later, naturalized forms of panpsychism gained traction. In contemporary philosophy, philosophers such as Galen Strawson and Philip Goff defend various versions of panpsychism as a solution to the difficulty of explaining consciousness within physicalism, while others explore hybrid or emergent frameworks.

Critics raise problems such as the combination problem: how are many small experiential states unified into a single subject? Other objections concern explanatory scope and empirical testability. Proponents argue that panpsychism preserves a form of causal continuity between mind and matter and avoids dualistic gaps, offering a parsimonious account of consciousness's place in nature. Debate continues in analytic philosophy and cognitive science, with ongoing discussions about its implications for science, ethics, and metaphysics.