Written and collected by by Zia H Shah MD, Chief Editor of the Muslim Times

Introduction

Panpsychism is the doctrine that consciousness is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of physical reality goodreads.com. In contrast to orthodox materialism, which treats consciousness as emerging only at complex levels (e.g. in brains), panpsychism contends that even the most elementary constituents of the world (such as subatomic particles) possess some form of mind or experience. This idea has both ancient roots and a growing contemporary following. Proponents argue panpsychism offers an elegant solution to the “hard problem” of consciousness – the mystery of how physical processes produce subjective experience – by asserting that consciousness already exists at nature’s ground level. Critics, however, charge that panpsychism is philosophically incoherent and scientifically untestable, amounting to a speculative leap rather than a genuine explanation. This article presents a scholarly critique of panpsychism, drawing on historical formulations (Spinoza, Leibniz) and modern defenders (Philip Goff, Galen Strawson), and evaluates its strengths and weaknesses. We will examine whether panpsychism’s core claims – particularly the intrinsic nature argument and its ability to solve the combination problem – cohere logically, and how the view stands in relation to physicalism and dualism. We also assess scientific objections regarding its compatibility with neuroscience and empirical testability. Throughout, counterarguments from panpsychists will be considered to provide a balanced evaluation of this provocative theory of consciousness.

Historical Foundations of Panpsychism

Ideas resembling panpsychism date back to antiquity. In Plato’s Timaeus, the world is described as a single living being with a soul, and Aristotle suggested that “soul is mingled with everything in the whole universe” daily.jstor.org. During the Renaissance and early modern period, panpsychist themes re-emerged powerfully. Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) advanced a form of dual-aspect monism often interpreted as panpsychist. Spinoza held that there is only one substance (which he identified with God or Nature), but it has infinite attributes, of which mind (thought) and matter (extension) are the two accessible to us iep.utm.edu. Consequently, every individual thing is an expression of both attributes, implying that mental properties pervade the entire natural world. Spinoza famously wrote that “All things are animate in various degrees” daily.jstor.org – in other words, each entity, whether a human or a stone, possesses a spark of mind or life appropriate to its nature. This sweeping vision places human consciousness on a continuum with the rest of reality, rather than as an anomaly. Another important figure was Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716), whose Monadology explicitly endowed the basic units of existence with psychical qualities. Leibniz’s metaphysics posits an infinity of indivisible substances called monads, each a self-contained center of perception: “Monads…possess a number of characteristics that are related to mental qualities”, notably perception and appetite (a primitive drive) iep.utm.edu. Every monad is like a micro-mind, processing an internal flow of perceptions. Leibniz made clear that “all things — even mere aggregates — possess mind, if only in their parts,” declaring “we see that there is a world of creatures, of living beings, of animals, of entelechies, of souls in the least part of matter” iep.utm.edu. In Leibniz’s view, even a humble lump of matter contains a teeming hierarchy of monadic minds (as “a pond full of fish” within each portion of matter), though only organized beings with a dominant monad (like humans, animals, or plants) have a unified consciousness iep.utm.edu.

These historical doctrines differ in detail – Spinoza’s single substance versus Leibniz’s myriad monads – but both portray mental being as ubiquitous in nature rather than emergent. They set important precedents for panpsychism, illustrating one motivation for the view: to avoid the Cartesian bifurcation of reality into mind and matter by instead seeing them as two inseparable aspects of one reality. In Spinoza’s case, matter and mind are just two “attributes” of the same underlying substance iep.utm.edu. In Leibniz’s case, matter is reducible to an assemblage of mind-like monads. Thus, the mind–body problem is dissolved (or at least transformed) because mind is present at every level, not solely in human brains. This panoramic ontological commitment that “everything is alive or mind-endowed” (to use an old phrase) is the essence of panpsychism through the centuries iep.utm.edu. It persisted in various forms after Leibniz – for example, in the 19th-century “mind-stuff” theories and in William James’s neutral monism – but it is in recent decades that panpsychism has re-entered mainstream analytic philosophy of mind.

Panpsychism in Contemporary Philosophy

Over the last two decades, panpsychism has experienced a notable revival as philosophers seek alternatives to the stalemate between strict physicalism and dualism. Modern panpsychists are motivated primarily by the sense that conventional physical science, for all its success, leaves an explanatory gap when it comes to conscious experience. The influential philosopher David Chalmers articulated this gap as the hard problem of consciousness – the puzzle of why and how brain processes are accompanied by subjective feeling. Panpsychism, once dismissed as metaphysical eccentricity, began to gain a hearing after Chalmers and others argued that purely reductive materialist approaches struggle to account for the existence of consciousness at all. As the science writer Olivia Goldhill observed, panpsychism’s resurgence is fueled by the view that “‘traditional’ approaches (materialism and dualism) continue to struggle” with consciousness neurobanter.com. Even Chalmers himself has shown sympathy to panpsychism as a “middle path” solution to the mind–body problem neurobanter.com.

Two of the most prominent contemporary advocates are Galen Strawson and Philip Goff. Each arrives at panpsychism from a slightly different angle, but both see it as the only viable way to “take consciousness seriously” without abandoning a monistic worldview. Strawson provocatively argues that a true physicalism – one that does not deny the reality of consciousness – entails panpsychismndpr.nd.edu. His reasoning is that if consciousness exists as a real feature of nature (which it surely does, given that one’s “experience… is the phenomenon whose existence is more certain than anything else” sjsu.edu), then consciousness must be incorporated into our fundamental ontology. According to Strawson, many self-described physicalists make a “large and fatal mistake” by assuming we know enough about matter to declare mind something fundamentally separate. In fact, he contends, we have “no good reason to think we know what matter is” in itself, apart from its extrinsic behavior philosopher.eu. What we do know is that matter (in certain arrangements) yields experience. So rather than regard consciousness as an inexplicable add-on, Strawson says we should admit that matter itself may have an “experiential” aspect: “Real physicalism…must accept that experiential phenomena are physical phenomena” sjsu.edu. In his memorable phrase, treating consciousness as wholly emerging from non-conscious matter is to stake everything on a “brute emergence…otherwise known as magic,” an approach he ridicules as incoherent. Thus, for Strawson, the only parsimonious solution is to accept that experience is a fundamental feature of the physical world – essentially the panpsychist thesis.

Philip Goff has become another leading voice for modern panpsychism, bringing the debate to a wider audience. In Galileo’s Error (2019) and other writings, Goff emphasizes a historical point: modern science achieved its power by excluding mind from its domain. Galileo, as Goff recounts, drew a sharp distinction between the quantitative, mathematically describable aspects of matter and the qualitative aspects (such as colors, sounds, and feelings), and stipulated that physics would confine itself to the former goodreads.com. This move allowed extraordinary progress, but at the cost of rendering consciousness invisible to physical theory by design plato.stanford.edu. Physics tells us what matter does – through equations and laws – but not what matter is intrinsically. Goff points out that even today, our physical description of an electron consists of abstract properties (charge, mass, spin) and behaviors (dispositions to attract or repel), but we have no clue “how the electron is in and of itself” beyond these relational features plato.stanford.edu. This epistemic gap is the basis of what philosophers call the intrinsic nature argument for panpsychism plato.stanford.edu. The argument runs: (1) Physical science describes only the extrinsic, structural, and relational properties of matter, not its intrinsic nature. (2) There must be some intrinsic aspect to matter – “something it is like” to be an electron in itself – otherwise we have an incomplete account of reality. (3) We happen to know of one intrinsic property in the universe: the conscious experience in our own case. Therefore, it is an elegant hypothesis that the intrinsic nature of (at least some) matter is mental, or at least proto-mental. In this way, panpsychism offers to “put consciousness back into the physical world” by identifying it with the hidden inner nature of matter. Goff and Strawson, among others, have championed this neo-Russellian monist view, harkening back to Bertrand Russell’s insight that physics reveals only matter’s structure, not its “intrinsic character.” The upshot is a kind of dual-aspect monism: from the outside, matter is described by science in quantitative terms; from the inside, matter as such might be or instantiate consciousness. This is sometimes called “neutral monism” or Russellian panpsychism, and it situates panpsychism as an alternative to both materialism and dualism. It is neither traditional dualism (it posits no separate substance of mind – mental being is built into matter itself) nor standard physicalism (it says matter cannot be fully described by current physical science, requiring an expansion to include consciousness) philosopher.eu iep.utm.edu. Proponents often see it as a “third way” that avoids the pitfalls of both extremes iep.utm.edu.

In summary, contemporary panpsychists argue that their view uniquely addresses what other theories leave mysterious: it accepts consciousness as a fundamental given and thus, unlike reductive materialism, it does not have to explain consciousness out of nothing. By the same token, unlike substance dualism, it does not bifurcate reality, since there is only one kind of stuff (physical stuff) which has two inseparable aspects, inner (experiential) and outer (physical). This conceptual economy is seen as a virtue. As Goff confidently predicts, “In twenty years’ time, the idea that panpsychism can be quickly dismissed as ‘crazy’ will seem, well, crazy.” goodreads.com Many philosophers (and even a few neuroscientists) are indeed “coming around to the idea that it may be our best hope for solving the problem of consciousness.” However, despite this optimistic rhetoric, serious challenges face panpsychism. We now turn to the key philosophical hurdles and scientific objections that have made panpsychism controversial, along with responses panpsychists offer to defend their framework.

The Combination Problem: Making Many Minds into One

By general agreement, the most formidable challenge to panpsychism is the combination problem plato.stanford.edu. If consciousness resides in fundamental particles or units, how do these myriad tiny minds combine to form the unified, large-scale consciousness of a human or animal? A human brain contains billions of neurons and vastly more fundamental particles; if each of those has some micro-experience, panpsychism must explain how they add up or integrate into the singular conscious perspective you enjoy when you wake up in the morning. William James anticipated this issue in 1890, ridiculing what he called the “mind-dust” theory. In a famous passage that inspires today’s combination problem, James argued that merely summing or aggregating elementary feelings could never produce a higher-level feeling: “Take a hundred [feelings]… pack them as close together as you can… still each remains the same feeling it always was, shut in its own skin… There would be a hundred-and-first feeling [emerging]… but it would be a totally new fact… one could never deduce the one from the others.” In other words, if we imagine little conscious entities combining, the collective consciousness that supposedly results looks like something mysteriously extra – a new entity that is not inherently contained in the parts. James himself was so troubled that he ultimately denied that any genuine combination occurs in nature at all (he opted for a radical metaphysics of “pure experiences” that bypasses the problem) plato.stanford.edu.

For today’s panpsychists, outright denial of combination is not an option – they clearly want to say that many micro-conscious events in a brain do give rise to a unified macro-consciousness (your mind). Thus, they face what is often called the subject-summing problem: How can numerous distinct “subjects” of experience (e.g. electrons or other particles with micro-experiences) merge into a single, combined subject (the mind of a person)? On the face of it, mental subjects seem resistant to merging. We find it easy to imagine material parts forming wholes – physical particles assemble into molecules, bricks assemble into a house – but far harder to imagine conscious parts forming a larger conscious whole. My feeling of thirst and your feeling of thirst do not merge into a collective feeling; likewise, if a neuron in my brain has a faint flicker of experience, and another neuron has its own faint experience, how do these become one experience rather than two experiences occurring in parallel? This is the heart of the combination problem, which even staunch panpsychists admit is unsolved. As one survey puts it bluntly: “It is generally agreed, by proponents and opponents alike, that [this] is the hardest problem facing panpsychism.” Indeed, Philip Goff has written that “the combination problem is the challenge for the panpsychist” and that no existing account is yet fully satisfactory.

Critics argue that this problem may be a fatal flaw. If no plausible mechanism of “mental combination” can be provided, panpsychism would merely relocate the mystery of consciousness rather than resolving it – the mystery reappears in the question of how micro-experiences combine. Some philosophers have formulated strong versions of this objection, contending that under certain assumptions, combining subjects might be logically impossible (a view sometimes called the “no-summing argument”) philarchive.orgphilarchive.org. For example, one line of argument holds that conscious subjects are inherently indivisible unities (an idea going back to Leibniz and Kant), so you can’t literally fuse them into a new subject without destroying their identity. If true, this would mean constitutive panpsychism – the version where tiny consciousnesses compose larger ones – is a non-starter. Skeptics of panpsychism often press this point: how can 2 + 2 ever equal 1? How can many minds yield a single mind? Without an answer, they claim, panpsychism remains a mere promissory note. As the biologist Jerry Coyne quips, panpsychists say “humans are conscious because all the matter in their brains is conscious,” but this raises the issue: “How does the rudimentary consciousness of electrons, atoms, and molecules combine… to create a much more sophisticated kind of consciousness?” – a problem, he notes, that panpsychist philosophers “have no solution” for whyevolutionistrue.com.

Panpsychist philosophers are acutely aware of the combination problem and have proposed various responses. One straightforward move is to deny that fundamental consciousness is segmented in the way critics imagine. Some panpsychists favor cosmopsychism – the idea that the universe as a whole is the fundamental locus of consciousness (a kind of “cosmic mind”), and individual minds are derivative from that, rather than vice versa. This flips the problem: instead of combining trillions of micro-minds upward, cosmopsychism envisions a single universal consciousness that somehow “subdivides” into the myriad minds of creatures (thereby facing a de-combination or “decombination” problem, which is another difficult issue) plato.stanford.edu iep.utm.edu. Other panpsychists stick with the more intuitive “micropsychist” picture (fundamental particles are conscious) but seek a special glue for combination. One idea is the postulation of “phenomenal bonding” relations – unknown fundamental psychophysical relations that could bind separate experiences into a unified state philarchive.org. For instance, instead of assuming micro-experiences combine purely by their own aggregation, one might suppose there is an intrinsic relation or force (akin to how physical particles bond chemically or physically) that joins subjects into larger subjects. This is speculative, but not obviously incoherent: after all, nature contains many surprising emergent relations (think of how quantum entanglement links particles in ways that defy classical separability). Panpsychists suggest we may similarly need to posit new basic principles to account for mental combination. Goff has explored a version of this, admitting that our ordinary concepts don’t reveal how experiences could fuse, but proposing that an as-yet-unknown “bonding relation” at the level of consciousness might exist philarchive.org. If we lack a concept of such a relation, that might just indicate the limits of our imagination, not the impossibility of the fact.

In practice, panpsychists adopt a stance of optimistic humility here: they concede that no complete combination theory exists yet, but they liken their situation to other incomplete research programs in science. Just as Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection was initially incomplete without a genetic mechanism (which was elucidated decades later), panpsychists suggest that their framework may be valid even if one crucial piece (the combination mechanism) is currently missing plato.stanford.edu. They view the combination problem as a research project to be worked on over time, not an insuperable paradox. Importantly, they argue that unsolved does not equal unsolvable. For example, integrated information theory (IIT) in neuroscience offers a model in which consciousness corresponds to the integration of information in a system – according to IIT, any system with a non-zero measure of integrated information (denoted Φ) has some degree of consciousnessthereader.mitpress.mit.edu. IIT thus implies a kind of panpsychism ( consciousness “extends… to non-evolved physical systems previously assumed to be mindless” in a “pleasing and parsimonious” way thereader.mitpress.mit.edu), and IIT’s mathematical framework provides a possible bridge for understanding combination: higher Φ values emerge from the combination of system components. Proponents note that neuroscientists Giulio Tononi and Christof Koch explicitly embrace this panpsychist-friendly view, suggesting that even simple networks (or particles in certain configurations) have elemental consciousness. While IIT is not identical to panpsychism, it shows that serious scientific theories can at least make panpsychism coherent and quantifiable in principle, indicating that combination might be tractable in a rigorous way.

In evaluating the combination problem, a critic will say the panpsychist has not yet delivered a clear solution – and this is true. The worry remains that without a mechanism, panpsychism “solves” the hard problem only by pushing the explanatory burden down to the micro-level, where it languishes in mystery. The panpsychist reply is that at least their view acknowledges the burden (unlike materialism, which they claim simply denies or ignores the existence of a hard problem), and that they have lines of inquiry for addressing it. Furthermore, panpsychists can argue that even if combination is a genuine puzzle, it may not be worse than the mystery any view faces in explaining consciousness. After all, if one rejects panpsychism, one presumably believes that consciousness somehow emerges from completely non-conscious matter – but that is also utterly mysterious (it is often dubbed the “emergence problem” or the “magic hypothesis” by panpsychists sjsu.ed). In Strawson’s words, to suppose that you can get sentience from utterly insentient stuff is to embrace a miracle: “the [ontological] emergence of the experiential from the wholly non-experiential… is magic, and therefore unacceptable” sjsu.edu. So either way, there is a combination/construction problem: the panpsychist needs micro-to-macro combination, the materialist needs non-experiential-to-experiential “combination” (emergence ex nihilo). Panpsychists prefer to move the mystery to a place where it might have an answer (combination) rather than leave it as a sheer miracle. This dialectic remains at the cutting edge of philosophical debates. Presently, the combination problem stands as an unsolved but actively debated issue, and many observers agree it is the make-or-break test for panpsychism’s viability.

The Intrinsic Nature Argument: Mind as Matter’s Hidden Aspect

One of panpsychism’s central philosophical arguments in its favor is the intrinsic nature argument, briefly touched on above. It asserts that panpsychism provides a uniquely satisfying answer to a glaring gap in our scientific worldview: namely, science describes matter only in terms of structure, relations, and behavior, and says nothing about what matter is like in itself. To illustrate this gap, philosophers often invoke the example of physics and consciousness: Physics can tell us that certain brain processes (neural firings, etc.) correlate with conscious experiences, but it cannot derive the subjective quality of those experiences from its purely quantitative laws. More generally, physics characterizes particles by their dispositions (e.g. an electron has charge – meaning it repels other electrons, attracts protons, etc.). But as long as we remain in this external, relational description, we haven’t answered a very natural question: what is the electron intrinsically (when it’s not doing anything, so to speak)? Panpsychism answers: at base, the electron, like all fundamental entities, has an experiential aspect as part of its intrinsic nature. Thus, the only thing we know for certain about the intrinsic character of matter is that at least some matter (brains) has an intrinsic character of consciousness – so by a kind of inductive leap, perhaps all matter shares in that intrinsic conscious nature plato.stanford.edu.

This argument has an impressive pedigree. Leibniz hinted that the difference between matter and mind is one of degree of clarity of perception, not an absolute difference in kind (thereby proposing an intrinsic, perceiving nature to all matter). In the 20th century, Bertrand Russell and Arthur Eddington developed the notion that physics reveals only relational properties of things. Eddington wrote that science gives us “structure but not texture” of the world – the external skeleton, not the inner filling philosopher.eu. Contemporary panpsychists like Goff explicitly invoke this lineage: modern science has been superb at modeling the behavior of matter (the “mathematical relationships” in nature) but “provides no explanation of why matter behaves in that way” or what underlies those patterns goodreads.com. The intrinsic nature argument thereby turns the tables on the usual presumption that physics is nearly complete. It suggests that there is a huge blindspot in our world-picture: we have been so focused on the objective description of matter that we’ve neglected the subjective reality that could be present behind the equations.

Panpsychism posits consciousness (or proto-consciousness) as this hidden internal aspect. An oft-cited reason for doing so is parsimony at the metaphysical level. We know consciousness exists (in us), and we know consciousness is not captured by structural descriptions alone (the famous qualia or qualitative feels are left out of purely functional accounts). So rather than invent some entirely new kind of substance or abandon the hope of a unified ontology, panpsychists say: let’s extend what we directly know (experience) to fill the gap in what physics leaves out. In theory, this could achieve a very tight explanatory closure: everything remains physical (there is no ghostly substance), but “physical” now has an expanded meaning – it includes intrinsic experiential being. Thus, when we ask why a certain physical process produces a sensation of red, the answer would be: because the intrinsic nature of that process just is a reddish experience (at the micro-level or some integrated level). In short, panpsychism identifies the felt qualities of mind with the intrinsic properties of matter. This move solves the hard problem in a conceptual sense: there is no mystery of how the extrinsic (matter) gives rise to the intrinsic (mind), because extrinsic and intrinsic are simply two sides of the same coin.

Critics of panpsychism do not necessarily concede the intrinsic nature argument. Some physicalists adopt what is called a “dispositional essentialist” view – they claim that matter might have only dispositions and no separate intrinsic properties at all . On this view, asking “what is matter in itself?” might be a wrong question: matter just is the set of things it does (its causal role). If so, the alleged gap is illusory. However, as panpsychist philosophers point out, dispositional essentialism faces its own philosophical critiques – notably, an infinite regress if one says every property is just a disposition to trigger another property, with no grounding reality. Even setting that debate aside, a frequent objection is that even if matter has an intrinsic aspect, it doesn’t have to be consciousness. Why not some unknown, non-experiential quiddity? Perhaps the intrinsic nature of matter is something like a primitive “proto-physical” field that is neither mental nor familiar physics – a kind of neutral stuff that only in certain combinations gives rise to mind. This view (often called panprotopsychism) is a close cousin of panpsychism plato.stanford.edu. Panpsychists respond that positing a completely unknown non-mental intrinsic property doesn’t actually help explain consciousness: it would be like trying to explain light by postulating an unseen “x-factor” without showing how it produces light. By contrast, positing that intrinsic properties just are or include experiential ones means we already have a grip on what they are (since we are instances of them). In effect, panpsychism says: we know what consciousness is like (in our case), so using it as the intrinsic essence of matter yields a substantive, non-arbitrary story – matter feels a certain way from the inside, and in complex brains that “feeling of matter from the inside” manifests as the rich consciousness we introspect. If one posits a non-experiential intrinsic entity, one will still have to explain later how that produces consciousness; hence one is back to a hard problem. Thus, panpsychists argue their view is the more economical and explanatorily illuminating: it directly ties the knot between the physical and the phenomenal by uniting them at the fundamental level.

Nonetheless, not everyone is convinced that the intrinsic nature argument really rescues panpsychism from mystery. One line of criticism is that it edges toward an unfalsifiable speculation: since by definition intrinsic properties are not directly observable by external measurement, saying “electrons have conscious interiors” can seem like a just-so story. It might make the world more conceptually satisfying, but how could we ever tell if it’s true? We return to this concern in the next section on testability. Another critique is that the intrinsic nature argument alone does not establish full-blown panpsychism; it could be that only certain complex systems have an intrinsic experiential aspect (for example, maybe only living cells do, or only certain quantum systems do). Panpsychists usually assume the simplest route – that all fundamental entities share this feature – but some theorists explore more selective variants (sometimes jokingly called “some-psychism”). The panpsychist will counter that any line you draw (say, at the level of atoms or cells) is arbitrary without an independent reason, and that it’s simpler to suppose a basic uniformity: “all matter has some mind-like quality, even if exceedingly minimal.” This aligns with Occam’s razor in a certain sense: instead of saying consciousness emerges only in special conditions (which would be a second kind of property appearing late in cosmic history), panpsychism says the universe has had the same kind of properties (physical-experiential) from the start, only arranged differently over time iep.utm.edu.

In sum, the intrinsic nature argument is a positive case for panpsychism’s plausibility. It leverages a real explanatory lacuna in standard physicalism and offers a solution that many find conceptually attractive. Even some philosophers who do not fully embrace panpsychism acknowledge the appeal of the Russellian insight that something beyond structure must underlie consciousness. The debate here is not so much a direct refutation but whether this move is necessary or the “best” solution. Panpsychists claim that by giving matter an experiential dimension, they achieve a unified theory of reality where the mental is no longer a strange outsider but woven into the very fabric of existence. Detractors worry that this move, while ingenious, might be a kind of metaphysical excess – adding qualities to particles that, beyond explaining consciousness in principle, do no further work. We can only know the intrinsic natures by their effects, and if those effects are the same as ordinary physics, then the move risks looking like a philosophical epicycle (an elegant one, perhaps, but speculative). This trade-off between explanatory depth and empirical economy is at the heart of assessing panpsychism’s merit.

Between Physicalism and Dualism: Is Panpsychism a “Middle Way”?

Panpsychism’s advocates often pitch it as a middle path that avoids the pitfalls of both extreme materialism and Cartesian dualism iep.utm.edu. It is essentially a form of monism – there is one kind of stuff in the world (the physical), but that stuff has both an inward (experiential) and outward (structural) face. In this respect, panpsychism can be aligned with Spinoza’s legacy (one substance, multiple attributes) and with certain interpretations of quantum mechanics or information theory that hint at an underlying unity of mind and matter. Is panpsychism truly distinct from physicalism and dualism, or is it just a variant of one of them? Philosophically, one might classify panpsychism as a non-reductive physicalism or as a property dualism (because particles have two types of properties: physical and mental). Strawson, as noted, insists it is “real physicalism” – he even chastises fellow materialists for implicitly being dualists when they exclude consciousness from the physical world. In his view, once you recognize consciousness as physical, you haven’t introduced anything non-physical at all; you’ve just recognized what the physical encompasses. Other philosophers, however, are uneasy with calling panpsychism “physicalism,” since it stretches “physical” far beyond its ordinary usage. Traditionally, physicalism means everything can be described by the language of physics or is constituted by what physics talks about. Panpsychism would force a dramatic expansion of physics to include subjective qualities. From the standpoint of mainstream physicalism, that looks like adding a fundamentally new element to world—so some critics say panpsychism is effectively a subtle form of dualism, not of substances but of properties (matter has physical properties and irreducible mental properties) sjsu.edu. If those mental properties cannot be derived from physical theory, then the panpsychist has arguably introduced a breach in the physicalist program. Panpsychists reply that the breach was always there (consciousness cannot be derived from current physical theory – that’s the whole problem), and their move simply acknowledges it honestly. Whether one calls that move an “expansion of physicalism” or a “departure from physicalism” is somewhat semantic.

An important aspect of this discussion is whether panpsychism truly solves the mind–body problem or merely restates it in different terms. Panpsychism eliminates the need to explain how consciousness emerges from utterly non-conscious matter (since on their view, it doesn’t; consciousness was there all along in basic form). But one could argue it still must explain how exactly the specific consciousness we know (human thoughts, perceptions, etc.) arises from the simpler forms. This is again the combination problem. If that remains mysterious, some say panpsychism has not really gained ground over emergentism. Panpsychists often invoke analogies to defend their approach as more continuous and thus preferable: for example, consider life. Vitalists once thought life could not arise from non-life. We now know complex chemistry can produce self-replicating, metabolizing systems (life) from non-living components. Some analogize consciousness to life and suggest perhaps it could “emerge” similarly. Strawson’s rebuttal is instructive: he notes that what made life’s emergence acceptable is that life (when defined in purely biological terms, absent any sentience) turned out to be fully explainable by physics and chemistry – it was just complicated order, not an ontologically new kind of being sjsu.edu. But consciousness, being experiential, is not like that; it’s not captured by structure alone. Therefore, he argues, the analogy fails – “Life (without consciousness) reduces [to physics]; experience doesn’t.” If one agrees with that assessment, then panpsychism indeed seems to have an edge over emergent physicalism, by building mind into the basic level and avoiding a magic step of “something wholly new” appearing later. This is why panpsychism is sometimes marketed as the only viable non-dualist option: either you say mind emerges inexplicably (which is akin to accepting magic), or you say mind was always present (panpsychism), or you introduce a separate mental substance (dualism) which raises interaction issues. Panpsychists pick the second as the most coherent.

Another question is how radical panpsychism is willing to be about the nature of the physical world. Some interpretations blur the line between panpsychism and idealism (the view that ultimately only mind exists). If every aspect of matter has a mind-side, one might start to wonder if matter is anything over and above those mind-sides plus their relations. An extreme panpsychist might say that what we call “physical reality” is just how shared mental entities appear to each other – an idea not unlike certain versions of Eastern philosophy or Western idealism. However, most contemporary panpsychists stop short of full-blown idealism; they still affirm a mind-independent world out there, just one that happens to be permeated with mind-like qualities. They align more with dual-aspect monism: one underlying stuff with two inherent aspects. In practice, this keeps them within a monist, quasi-“physicalist” camp, even as they expand what “physical” means.

In evaluating this middle-way claim, one should note that panpsychism does avoid some notorious problems of classical dualism. For instance, Descartes’s substance dualism faced the interaction problem: if mind and matter are totally distinct, how do they causally interact? Panpsychism sidesteps this because mind and matter are not two independent substances – a particle’s mental aspect and physical aspect are two facets of the same thing, so there is no question of bridging a metaphysical chasm between alien realms. The causal relations among particles (described by physics) automatically involve their mental aspect as well. Thus, panpsychism can claim to be more coherent than Cartesian dualism, which postulated two fundamentally different domains. On the flip side, panpsychism also purports to avoid the eliminativist or epiphenomenalist tendencies of some hardline physicalism. Materialist theories that treat consciousness as an illusion or merely a byproduct with no causal power are deeply unsatisfying to many, as they deny the evident reality and efficacy of our experiences. Panpsychism would never call consciousness an illusion – it elevates consciousness to a fundamental place. By doing so, it also ensures consciousness can be causally relevant (since every physical event has an aspect of experience, mental causation is just part of physical causation). In these ways, panpsychism really does stake out a distinctive position, aiming to capture the truths in both physicalism (the unity of nature, no supernatural mind-stuff) and dualism (the reality of mind cannot be denied) philosopher.eu.

Still, some philosophers remain unconvinced that panpsychism is much more than renaming the problem. For them, either you have a workable reductive explanation (which panpsychism explicitly avoids attempting for consciousness), or you admit a brute fact (which panpsychism effectively does: consciousness is just fundamental). In that light, panpsychism might look closer to a form of property dualism with an infinite proliferation of souls (every particle a soul), which is a rather extravagant picture of reality. Whether that extravagance is a cost or a benefit depends on one’s philosophical temperament – is it more extravagant to posit innumerable tiny consciousnesses, or to posit one grand miracle of emergence at the human level, or to posit two separate substances? Different thinkers answer differently. Galen Strawson humorously notes that many people’s initial reaction to panpsychism is an “incredulous stare” – the idea seems absurd or crazy, to think that a photon or a spoon has any sort of experience plato.stanford.edu. Yet as Strawson and Goff point out, we’ve accepted counterintuitive ideas in science before (relativity, quantum mechanics, etc.), and if panpsychism has strong theoretical virtues, its seeming strangeness is not a decisive strike against it plato.stanford.edu. “We should assess panpsychism on its explanatory power and theoretical virtue, rather than the fact many find it strange,” writes Goff. In other words, panpsychists seek to normalize their view as a serious hypothesis: maybe “the idea that panpsychism is crazy will itself seem crazy” in a few decades. At the very least, panpsychism forces us to examine our assumptions about what “physical reality” entails, and it shines a light on the often neglected question of what philosophers call the “qualitative” or “first-person” aspects of the world. Whether or not one accepts panpsychism, its resurgence has undoubtedly stimulated fresh thinking about consciousness and the metaphysics of nature.

Scientific Scrutiny: Is Panpsychism Testable or Useful?

A crucial dimension of the debate is how panpsychism intersects with empirical science, particularly neuroscience and physics. Can panpsychism be integrated with scientific knowledge, and does it yield any testable predictions or explanations? Critics in the scientific community tend to be skeptical. Cognitive scientist Anil Seth has bluntly stated that panpsychism “remains very much a fringe proposition within consciousness science and is not taken seriously by many” neurobanter.com. Neuroscience has made strides correlating specific brain processes with aspects of consciousness (for example, particular neural oscillations or network dynamics seem associated with conscious awareness). These findings arise from a broadly materialist methodology: treat consciousness as an outcome of certain complex interactions. From that perspective, panpsychism might appear irrelevant – one can map brain states to mental states without ever mentioning fundamental particle consciousness. Seth argues that “consciousness science is getting along just fine without [panpsychism]”, implying that introducing it does not solve any practical scientific problem neurobanter.com philosopher.eu. The empirical payoff of panpsychism is thus called into question.

One of the starkest critiques is that panpsychism is untestable. If an electron has a speck of consciousness, how would we know? Electrons behave the same under panpsychist assumptions as they do under standard physics – since panpsychists do not usually claim the mental aspect changes the particle’s publicly observable behavior (if it did, we’d presumably have noticed anomalies in physics experiments). Thus, the theory seems to lack empirical bite. As Jerry Coyne puts it, “the claim that inanimate objects like electrons, rocks, and spoons have a form of consciousness is untestable in any way, and so the theory is a non-explanation: a kind of metaphysical claim that will lead nowhere” whyevolutionistrue.com. This sentiment is common among scientifically-minded critics: panpsychism doesn’t tell us how a brain produces the specific experiences it does, nor does it suggest new experiments – it simply says “everything has consciousness” and leaves our usual scientific models unchanged. In this view, panpsychism fails the criterion of a scientific theory. At worst, some deride it as quasi-mystical or compare it to unfalsifiable notions like an animistic “soul” in everything, dressed up in philosophical language. Such skeptics often align panpsychism with the likes of Deepak Chopra or New Age thinking, suggesting it attracts people who want a magical or romantic view of nature rather than hard-nosed empiricists. (Panpsychists would strongly contest this caricature, noting that serious philosophers and even some physicists consider it a viable hypothesis, not a mystical doctrine.)

What would it take for panpsychism to be testable? This is a challenging question. In principle, if panpsychism is true, then something like IIT’s Φ might be measurable and correlate with reports of consciousness, and as our detection methods improve we might find consciousness in simpler and simpler systems down the hierarchy. For example, if one could establish a reliable indicator of minimal consciousness in a simple organism or even in an artificial micro-system, that might indirectly support the idea that consciousness pervades matter. But the absence of such evidence so far keeps panpsychism as a speculative interpretation rather than an evidenced fact. Some proponents suggest that panpsychism could inspire new approaches in neuroscience – for instance, taking seriously that certain information integration or quantum processes in the brain have an intrinsic side might guide research into precise physical correlates of conscious unity. Currently, however, the mainstream approach (finding neural correlates and computational properties) proceeds independently of any panpsychist assumption. Neuroscientist and philosopher Christof Koch, who is sympathetic to panpsychism via IIT, acknowledges that for now any attribution of consciousness to simpler systems (let alone particles) remains an extrapolation: “The extent to which consciousness is shared across the entire animal kingdom, let alone across all of life’s vast domain, is at present difficult to establish.” thereader.mitpress.mit.edu We simply have no clear method to detect consciousness in creatures that cannot report it. Koch still finds it “parsimonious” that consciousness could extend very far down – but parsimony is a theoretical virtue, not a direct empirical confirmation.

Another scientific concern is whether panpsychism is compatible with known neuroscience or whether it injects contradictions. On the face of it, panpsychism does not conflict with any empirical finding – it doesn’t say neurons don’t fire or brains aren’t important; it just says even those firing neurons have an experiential aspect. However, one might worry about causal over-determination. If every particle is conscious, does that consciousness do anything for the particle’s behavior, or is it epiphenomenal? Panpsychists usually adopt the stance that the micro-level consciousness is not an independent causal agent; rather, the physical and experiential aspects are two ways of describing the same process. This is akin to how, in physics, an electron’s charge and its electric field behavior are not two separate causes but one reality described differently. Therefore, they would claim there’s no conflict with neuroscience’s causal explanations: those explanations are correct, and they are describing the “outside view” of what, on the inside, is a conscious process. For practical purposes, a neuroscientist can continue describing neural firings leading to behavior without referencing panpsychism at all – and that’s fine by the panpsychist, because it’s just the same event seen from a third-person perspective. The added value of panpsychism is not in altering any predictions, but in completing the story by adding what physics leaves out (the first-person perspective). This position, while coherent, does reinforce the critique that panpsychism is “causally inert” as far as science is concerned. It doesn’t predict any new phenomena; it just interprets known phenomena differently. Some philosophers argue this makes consciousness causally irrelevant – if physical laws are complete, the consciousness aspect doesn’t change what happens. Panpsychists like Strawson would retort that this line of thinking is confused: of course consciousness is causally effective – we know our conscious decisions affect our actions – it’s just that its effect is executed via the physical aspect. There aren’t two separate chains of causation, one mental and one physical; there’s one psychophysical chain. But because science only tracks the physical chain, it looks as if consciousness (the intrinsic aspect) isn’t doing anything, when in fact it is the thing in-itself that is doing it! This view ties into long-standing debates about mental causation and the interpretation of physics, and it remains philosophically contentious.

One potential scientific upside to panpsychism is that it might inspire a more integrative science of consciousness. Goff and others have called for a “post-Galilean” science that doesn’t restrict itself to third-person data but attempts to incorporate first-person data as fundamental goodreads.com. While this is more of a promissory vision, the idea would be to combine neuroscience with phenomenology in a single framework, possibly requiring new scientific tools or principles. So far, however, this remains speculative. It is worth noting that certain interpretations of quantum mechanics (like von Neumann–Wigner or some interpretations by Henry Stapp or others) have flirted with consciousness being fundamental, but mainstream physics has not adopted those ideas in testable ways. Integrated Information Theory’s panpsychist implication is one concrete strand where empirical research (measuring Φ in brains, etc.) could eventually bear on panpsychist claims, though IIT itself doesn’t assert electrons are conscious – only systems with integrated information above zero, which strictly includes even simple logic gates to a tiny degree, so implicitly it’s a continuum.

Panpsychists respond to the testability objection by arguing that lack of direct testability now does not imply the view is worthless. They point out that many scientific theories started as bold hypotheses that exceeded experimental access at first (for example, the multiverse theory or string theory today are largely untestable so far, yet are seriously discussed) whyevolutionistrue.com. The key, they argue, is that panpsychism should eventually cohere with a broader theory that does have testable ramifications. For instance, if panpsychism is true, then a theory like IIT which aligns with it might be the correct theory of consciousness, and IIT can be partly tested (one can try to verify its predictions about which systems are conscious). Alternatively, they say that we might conceive of clever tests in the future – e.g. identifying signatures of consciousness in small systems via sensitive measurements or creative theoretical work that finds subtle differences between a panpsychist universe and a non-panpsychist universe. Admittedly, no clear such test has been proposed yet, so this is, at present, more hope than substance.

A distinct scientific shortcoming is that panpsychism does not currently guide research or detail mechanisms at the macro level. Neuroscientists seek to understand how brain activity yields cognition and specific experiences. Panpsychism doesn’t tell them that, other than stating that somehow those brain activities are constituted by micro-experiences. For example, it doesn’t explain why the neural oscillations in the 30-70 Hz range correlate with conscious awareness, or why frontal-parietal networks seem crucial for reportable experiences. Those are questions any complete theory of consciousness must answer, and panpsychism as such doesn’t address them. A panpsychist could adopt any of the standard neuroscientific theories (like Global Workspace Theory, Higher-Order Thought theory, etc.) and simply append “… and all the underlying neurons have experiential intrinsic natures.” That addition doesn’t yet improve the theory’s predictive or explanatory power regarding cognitive function. It simply adds a philosophical gloss. Thus, one might say panpsychism is neutral or irrelevant to the day-to-day science of mind. Panpsychists might reply that, yes, it runs in parallel to the empirical project: it answers a metaphysical question (what is consciousness in the fabric of reality) rather than a functional question (how does the brain enable abilities). Both levels are important, and neglecting the metaphysical question leads to an incomplete worldview even if the science progresses. They might also argue that once the metaphysical picture is accepted, it could subtly influence scientific models – for instance, if we know that consciousness is fundamental, we might be less inclined to chase neural correlates as the whole story and more inclined to look for principles of integration or realize that even simple systems might have glimmers of experience (changing how we interpret animal or AI consciousness, for example).

In weighing the scientific credibility of panpsychism, a fair assessment is that as of now, panpsychism is more a framework than a concrete theory with empirical support. It’s a way of interpreting the relationship between mind and matter that could, in principle, dovetail with future science, but at present it neither conflicts with science nor is confirmed by it. That status leads some to dismiss it as “not even false” (meaning not testable). However, from a philosophy of science perspective, one could view panpsychism as a form of scientific metaphysics – an overarching hypothesis about nature that might shape future theory-building. Proponents like Goff argue that if panpsychism provides the “best explanation of the existence of human and animal consciousness” and is the “most parsimonious theory of the intrinsic nature of matter (given that the only clue we have as to matter’s intrinsic nature is that some of it involves consciousness)”, then we have reason to accept it “in spite of its prima facie strangeness.”plato.stanford.eduplato.stanford.edu In other words, its strength lies in explanatory coherence and parsimony at the metaphysical level rather than novel empirical content. Whether that is enough to count as a successful theory is a matter of debate. Many scientists would demand at least the prospect of empirical differentiation, whereas panpsychists emphasize the way their view elegantly fits consciousness into nature without contradicting anything. The coming years may see more collaboration between philosophy and neuroscience to devise ways to indirectly support or refute such views (for instance, if consciousness were somehow shown to require a certain complexity threshold, that might challenge the idea it’s truly ubiquitous; conversely, if simple systems like isolated neurons or computer chips with integrated information exhibit signs of consciousness, that might favor panpsychism).

Panpsychist Rejoinders to Objections

To balance this critique, it is important to give voice to how panpsychists respond to the many objections raised. We have already touched on several responses in context – here we summarize the key counterarguments panpsychists offer in defense of their theory:

• “The Incredulous Stare” Objection (Panpsychism is absurd or intuitively crazy): Panpsychists often point out that intuition is a poor guide to truth at the frontiers of knowledge. Scientific history is rife with once “crazy”-sounding ideas that turned out correct (e.g. space-time curvature, quantum superposition) plato.stanford.edu. The strangeness of panpsychism – that electrons or amoebas might have experience – is acknowledged, but they urge us to judge the theory by its explanatory power, coherence, and logical consistency, not by knee-jerk reaction. As Goff quips, dismissing panpsychism as crazy without argument may itself look crazy in hindsight goodreads.com. If panpsychism provides a viable solution to the hard problem and avoids deeper incoherencies, then its counterintuitiveness should be tolerated. After all, every theory of consciousness has counterintuitive elements (even materialism asks us to believe that subjective qualities somehow just are complex neural firings – a pretty strange identity if one thinks about it).
• Combination Problem: Panpsychists acknowledge this as their most serious issue but argue it is in principle solvable with sustained effort. They do not view it as a defeat, but as a research program. By analogy, early chemists knew that somehow hydrogen and oxygen combine to form water with totally different properties, even though that seemed mysterious; eventually the molecular structure was understood. Similarly, they believe a new conceptual structure will eventually clarify mental combination. Some propose specific models (phenomenal bonding, fusion, etc.), while others explore alternate panpsychist models like cosmopsychism to bypass the problem. Crucially, they maintain that the combination problem, however difficult, is no harder (and likely easier) than the problem materialism faces in getting mind from utterly mindless matter sjsu.edu. They frequently turn the challenge back: if one finds micro-consciousness combination inconceivable, one should find emergence from zero-consciousness even more inconceivable – so the competitor theories are in an even worse position. As for the possibility that combination is fundamentally incoherent, panpsychists typically reject this, often by questioning the assumptions (for instance, the assumption that subjects are metaphysically simple or can’t form composites may be denied – after all, brains seem to combine information from many signals into one experience, so perhaps nature already shows combination happening, it’s just that we don’t yet know how to describe it). The fact that “almost all panpsychists accept [the combination] challenge” and are actively working on it is presented as a virtue – it’s a problem to be solved, not a reason to abandon the theory plato.stanford.edu.
• Scientific Irrelevance/Testability: In response to the charge that panpsychism makes no difference scientifically, panpsychists offer a few replies. First, they argue that science is not only about prediction, but also about understanding. If panpsychism greatly increases our understanding of what consciousness is and how it fits into nature, that is a significant theoretical virtue even if direct testing is tricky. They also note that the same criticism could apply to many accepted theoretical frameworks in science that are hard to test (like interpretations of quantum mechanics, or string theory) whyevolutionistrue.com. Second, panpsychists can point to frameworks like IIT as instances where a theory consistent with panpsychism yields measurable quantities (Φ) and empirical research. If IIT or related theories pan out, they would bolster the panpsychist perspective that consciousness is a graded, ubiquitous phenomenon thereader.mitpress.mit.edu. Some have suggested that panpsychism could lead to novel hypotheses – for example, if consciousness is fundamental, maybe it could play a role in certain quantum processes (this is speculative, but ideas of “orchestrated collapse” in microtubules or other unconventional theories have been floated). While mainstream panpsychists don’t pin their hopes on such fringe ideas, they remain open-minded that as science advances, avenues to detect traces of consciousness in simpler systems might emerge (for instance, some have discussed looking for behavioral analogs of pain/pleasure responses in bacteria or even algorithms, guided by the notion that some minimal experience might be present). Third, panpsychists sometimes argue that current neuroscience is not as close to explaining consciousness as some critics think – yes, we have correlations, but the fundamental explanatory gap is still gaping. Thus, saying neuroscience “does fine without panpsychism” glosses over the fact that neuroscience has bracketed out the hard problem entirely (focusing on easier problems of correlation and function) philosopher.eu. In their view, ignoring a problem is not solving it; a mature science of consciousness might eventually need to expand its ontology. If one accepts this, then panpsychism could be seen as laying conceptual groundwork for that expansion.
• “It’s just metaphysics” (and metaphysics is unnecessary): Panpsychists like Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes respond that metaphysics can legitimately go beyond current empirical science when trying to address questions science leaves open philosopher.eu. Dismissing panpsychism for being metaphysical is, they argue, short-sighted, because every approach to consciousness ultimately has metaphysical assumptions. Materialism has the metaphysical assumption that physical structure is all that exists; dualism has the assumption of two substances; panpsychism assumes an underlying continuity of mind in matter. The question is which assumption yields the most coherent picture. They also note that if one believes consciousness is a real phenomenon that needs explaining, then refusing to engage metaphysically (as some hardline materialists do by calling consciousness an illusion or bypassing the hard problem) is unsatisfactory or even “immature.” From this perspective, panpsychism’s willingness to tackle foundational questions is a strength, not a weakness, even if it currently reaches beyond the empirically verifiable. Additionally, panpsychists emphasize parsimony in a broader sense: they claim it’s more parsimonious to assume one kind of stuff (with dual-aspects) than two completely different kinds of stuff (dualism) or one kind of stuff with an inexplicable radical emergence (standard physicalism). So while panpsychism adds something (experience to all matter), it also avoids invoking arbitrary divides or miracles. This, they contend, is a virtue by the criteria of theoretical simplicity and coherence.
• Misconceptions (e.g. “rocks are conscious”): Panpsychists often clarify that their view does not imply that everyday objects like rocks or tables have a unified consciousness in the way animals do philosopher.eu. A rock is, in their view, an aggregate of myriad particles; it has no overall integration or “dominant monad” (to use Leibniz’s term), so panpsychists would generally say the rock as a whole is not conscious – but the particles (or the fundamental entities constituting it) each have their very simple experience. Thus the oft-quoted phrase “panpsychism says spoons are conscious” is a straw man philosopher.eu. What panpsychism really says is that if you were able to probe inside a spoon at the level of its fundamental constituents, each might have some unimaginably rudimentary proto-experience. This is an important nuance, showing that panpsychism isn’t asserting human-like awareness everywhere, but a spectrum of consciousness correlating with complexity. Higher-level minds (like ours) are rich and unified because of intricate structural integration; lower-level ones are extremely basic and disconnected. The intuitive absurdity of attributing a mind to a rock dissolves when one understands panpsychists aren’t saying the rock dreams or thinks – rather, the particles in the rock “feel” in the most attenuated sense (perhaps analogous to how a single cell might have a faint experience, as some theories like integrated information suggest).

In sum, panpsychists present their view as a serious, if revolutionary, synthesis: it treats consciousness as a fundamental feature of the universe (like mass or charge), thus purportedly solving the hard problem at a stroke; it fits this assumption into a monistic metaphysics that learns from both physics (structure) and phenomenology (experience); and it actively engages with known objections, admitting challenges but offering rebuttals and paths forward. The balanced verdict on panpsychism must appreciate these self-defenses: it is not a naive idea but a carefully considered position that remains on the table in philosophy of mind. Whether it will ultimately be vindicated or refuted is, as of 2025, an open question.

Conclusion

Panpsychism invites us to radically rethink the place of mind in nature. Historically, it carries forward a lineage from the likes of Spinoza’s dictum that “all things are animate in various degrees” daily.jstor.org and Leibniz’s vision of a living universe composed of perceiving monads iep.utm.edu. In contemporary form, it emerges as a response to the perceived failure of reductive physicalism to account for consciousness, offering the bold proposal that consciousness is as fundamental as space, time, or energy – an intrinsic feature of matter itself. This proposition yields a philosophically rich framework that indeed avoids some classical problems (it is resolutely monist, escaping Cartesian dualism’s interaction dilemma, and it refuses to trivialize or eliminate consciousness as some materialist models do). It provides a candidate solution to the hard problem by relocating it at the foundations of physics, and it aligns with the Russell-Eddington insight about the incomplete nature of our scientific description of reality plato.stanford.edu.

However, as our critique has detailed, panpsychism also faces substantial challenges. The combination problem remains its Achilles heel on the theoretical side, with no consensus solution yet – a fact that panpsychists themselves acknowledge even as they work to address it plato.stanford.edu. The worry is that panpsychism may have merely postponed the mystery of consciousness unless it can demonstrate a credible route from micro-experience to macro-experience. On the scientific side, panpsychism’s lack of testable implications and apparent dispensability to existing scientific practice make it hard to validate or falsify. It straddles an uneasy boundary between metaphysics and science: deeply motivated by empirical phenomena (consciousness exists) yet not empirically distinguishable given current tools. Some scientists thus regard it as an intriguing but ultimately non-functional worldview – one that might be true or false, but either way does not change how we conduct research on the brain and mind whyevolutionistrue.com neurobanter.com.

Is panpsychism philosophically coherent? In large measure, it is a coherent possibility – no one has shown a clear contradiction in the idea that matter has experiential attributes. It even finds a natural consonance with certain interpretations of quantum reality and information theory. The main coherence test lies in solving combination, as discussed. Is panpsychism likely true? That remains a matter of intuition and theoretical preference until more evidence or compelling arguments emerge. Detractors lean toward simpler worldviews (why multiply minds beyond necessity?), whereas proponents argue that the necessity is inescapable if we are to have any account of consciousness at all ndpr.nd.edu sjsu.edu.

Importantly, panpsychism has spurred valuable interdisciplinary dialogue. It forces physicalists to clarify why they believe consciousness only arises late and not everywhere, and it forces panpsychists to grapple with complex systems theory and neuroscience to make their case plausible. It has also prompted novel ideas like microphenomenology and enriched discussions in the philosophy of mind by refusing to accept easy answers. Whether or not one ultimately endorses panpsychism, engaging with its claims can deepen our understanding of both consciousness and the assumptions behind our world-picture.

In conclusion, this critique finds that panpsychism, while daring and elegant in some respects, remains a hypothesis in search of a mechanism and in need of empirical resonance. Its philosophical appeal is undeniable: it offers a unifying vision that could resolve the mind–body schism by fiat of ontology. Yet its scientific credentials are not yet convincing, and it may risk explaining the obscure by the more obscure (trading one mystery for many microscopic ones). A balanced view might be that panpsychism is a thought-provoking framework that should be taken seriously but cautiously. It challenges us to expand our imagination of nature’s possibilities, even as it challenges its own advocates to firm up the theory’s explanatory framework. As research on consciousness progresses – in neuroscience, psychology, and even physics – we may get closer to answering whether mind is an emergent rarity or an inherent feature of the cosmos. Until then, panpsychism remains a compelling, if controversial, player in the grand quest to understand consciousness: a theory that “hangs around” (as its critics wryly note) whyevolutionistrue.com, continuously inviting us to expand our conception of what matter and mind could be.

Sources:

• Spinoza, B. Ethics (1677). (Panpsychist interpretation of Spinoza’s dual-aspect monism: “All things are animate in various degrees” daily.jstor.org).
• Leibniz, G.W. Monadology (1714). (Every substance has perception; “a world of living creatures… in the least part of matter” iep.utm.edu).
• Strawson, G. (2006). “Realistic Monism: Why Physicalism Entails Panpsychism,” Journal of Consciousness Studies, 13(10-11): 3–31. (Argues denying experiential reality is not real physicalism sjsu.edu, and that emergent non-experiential -> experiential is “magic” sjsu.edu).
• Goff, P. (2017). Consciousness and Fundamental Reality. (Develops the intrinsic nature argument; critique of dispositionalism plato.stanford.edu).
• Goff, P. (2019). Galileo’s Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness. (Popular exposition of panpsychism: defines panpsychism goodreads.com; notes increasing openness to it goodreads.com; addresses “crazy” objection goodreads.com).
• James, W. (1890). The Principles of Psychology, vol. 1, ch. 6. (The classic “mind-dust” critique: combination problem inspiration plato.stanford.edu).
• Chalmers, D. (2016). “The Combination Problem for Panpsychism,” in Panpsychism, eds. Goff et al. (Taxonomy of combination issues).
• Integrated Information Theory: Tononi, G. et al. (2016). Nature Reviews Neuroscience 17(7): 450–461. (Consciousness as integrated information; implies ubiquity to some degree thereader.mitpress.mit.edu).
• Koch, C. (2014). “Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist” & related writings. (Neuroscientist sympathetic to panpsychism, discussing how IIT suggests consciousness “here, there and everywhere” thereader.mitpress.mit.edu).
• Seth, A. (2018). “Consciousness: The ‘Real’ Problem,” NeuroBanter Blog. (Critique of panpsychism as unhelpful and fringe neurobanter.com).
• Coyne, J. (2020). Why Evolution Is True blog, “Panpsychism hangs around like an unwanted guest.” (Sharp criticism: calls it untestable non-explanationwhyevolutionistrue.com).
• Roelofs, L., & Van Gulick, R. (2022). “Panpsychism”, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy plato.stanford.edu. (Comprehensive overview; outlines intrinsic nature argument plato.stanford.edu, objections like incredulous stare plato.stanford.edu, combination problem and responsesplato.stanford.edu).
• Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Panpsychism” (D. Skrbina). (Historical survey; quotes Leibniz iep.utm.edu and others; notes panpsychism as third way between dualism and materialism iep.utm.edu).
• Sjöstedt-Hughes, P. (2018). “Against Anil Seth’s Criticism of Panpsychism.” (Defends panpsychism’s intellectual credibility; science’s limits on hard problem philosopher.eu