Panpsychism

Panpsychism is the philosophical view that phenomenal experience is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of reality — that some form of mind or experience is present not only in humans and animals but in all physical matter, at every scale. It is the most ancient theory of mind and, increasingly, the most respectable one to hold among professional philosophers of mind who find both Functionalism and Eliminative Materialism inadequate.

The appeal of panpsychism is precisely its refusal to explain consciousness away or derive it from the non-conscious. Its central liability is the combination problem: granting that electrons or neurons have proto-experiential properties, no convincing account explains how these micro-experiences combine into the unified, structured phenomenal field of human experience. Solving the combination problem without reintroducing all the difficulties panpsychism was supposed to solve remains the open wound in the view.

Whether panpsychism is a genuine theory of Consciousness or an elegant surrender to the hard problem — a way of making mystery foundational rather than dissolving it — is the question its critics press hardest.