panpsychism

Panpsychism is the view that consciousness or mind-like properties are fundamental features of the world and are present, in some form, throughout nature. According to panpsychists, mental properties are not exclusive to brains or animals but are intrinsic to matter, either in all its constituents or at least at the most basic levels. The idea seeks to explain why physical processes are associated with experience by positing a continuum of experiential character from the smallest particles to complex organisms.

Variants include panexperientialism, which holds that all entities have some kind of experience; panprotopsychism, which holds that basic stuff bears proto-mental properties that become full consciousness only in certain configurations; and cosmopsychism, which attributes some form of consciousness to the universe as a whole. Some philosophers distinguish micropsychism (mind-like properties at the quantum or subatomic level) from macro-level consciousness.

Historical roots extend to ancient philosophy, and in modern times philosophers such as Leibniz (monads with perception) and Spinoza (parallelism) have been cited as precursors. In the 20th century, Alfred North Whitehead developed a comprehensive process view in which experience is fundamental to reality. In contemporary philosophy, figures such as Galen Strawson and Philip Goff have argued for panpsychism as a plausible solution to the hard problem of consciousness, while David Chalmers and others have discussed cosmopsychism as a related approach.

Critics raise the combination problem: how do numerous low-level experiences combine into a unified, high-level consciousness? Others question the empirical bite of the view and whether it is testable or parsimonious. Proponents respond that psychology and neuroscience face explanatory limits, and that framing consciousness as fundamental avoids arbitrary exclusion of phenomenal properties from basic physics.