panpsychist

Panpsychism is the view that mind or consciousness is a fundamental and ubiquitous aspect of reality. A panpsychist is someone who endorses this view, arguing that mental properties are intrinsic to matter or that all entities possess some form of experience, even at the smallest scales. Variants range from those who attribute proto-conscious properties to elementary particles to those who hold that complex systems exhibit richer mental life as combinations of simpler experiences. Some writers distinguish panpsychism from panexperientialism, which emphasizes experience as a primitive property of matter, while cosmopsychism regards the cosmos as a single conscious entity. Micropsychism is a related idea that even the basic constituents of matter have tiny experiences.

Historically, panpsychist ideas appear in the lineage of Leibniz’s monads and in Spinoza-influenced readings, with later modern discussions by William James and Bertrand Russell contributing to a broader interest. In the 20th and 21st centuries, process philosophers such as Alfred North Whitehead offered panexperientialist elements, and contemporary philosophers such as Galen Strawson and Philip Goff have defended panpsychism as a serious option in the philosophy of mind. David Chalmers has also discussed panpsychist ideas as part of debates on the hard problem.

Key debates include the combination problem—how micro-experiences aggregate into macro-level consciousness—and questions about empirical testability and ontological economy. Proponents argue that panpsychism preserves a form of ontological simplicity by treating mind as a basic feature of nature rather than something that must arise suddenly from non-conscious matter. Critics favor physicalist or emergent explanations and challenge the explanatory power of panpsychism.