Panpsychism is the belief that mind is fundamental and ubiquitous in the natural world.

Panpsychism resolves a dilemma within realism: mind is itself elemental or else mind arises from non-mental elements.

If you opt for the latter, you must explain how mind arises.

If you opt for the former, you have to explain why there is no evidence of mentality in the elemental. Why can we not see evidence of the inner life of the atom?

For this and other reasons, the panpsychist position cannot be held consistently. Rather we have to turn to mind as neither pervading the cosmos nor emerging from it but instead giving reality itself meaning and thereby allowing us to talk about existence.

Irish philosopher and Bishop of Cloyne, George Berkeley (1685-1753 CE) famously asked, “If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” The question is self-contradictory. Assuming trees are not conscious of themselves (which may not be true), objects like trees and sounds are ideas in the mind. If there are no people (or thinking beings) to perceive those ideas, then we cannot talk about their existence. Rather, a statement of a thing’s existence is about the idea of a thing consciously perceived and not some deeper hidden reality.

This turns the dilemma of panpsychism on its head, arguing that consciousness is neither intrinsic to a material cosmos nor emergent from it but underlies all that exists nevertheless.

It also belies the statements such as that of the late Stephen Hawking, who on a 1995 TV show claimed:

The human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate size planet, orbiting round a very average star in the outer suburb of one among a billion galaxies. We are so insignificant that I can’t believe the whole universe exists for our benefit. That would be like saying that you would disappear if I closed my eyes.

It is worth asking, though, perhaps not if you would disappear if I closed my eyes, but rather, if no one had any knowledge of you and you were unconscious, would you exist? 

This is what Berkeley argued, but we cannot go that far. Rather, we have to grapple with a universe where the material world and the mind co-exist.

This is why the mind is a dilemma that finds no satisfactory resolution.

The ancient Greeks tried to contend with the mind in various ways, and, while it is overly simplistic to cast ancient philosophers as conforming to one side or the other of a modern argument, some ideas leaned one way or another.

Presocratic Anaxagoras of Clazomenae (c. 500-425 BCE) claimed that nous (a Greek word meaning “intellect” or “mind”) was the mover of the cosmos.

He also theorized that there was no “coming to be” nor “passing away” in a clear parallel to contemporary Buddhist thought that there is no birth or death. Rather he believed in mixture and separation. Metaphysically, objects, including people, are not born nor do they die. Rather they are mixtures and separations of ingredients that never lose their intrinsic character. This is kind of like chemistry.

Where Anaxagoras deviates from reductionism is that he believes that everything is in everything. Thus, every ingredient is everywhere at all times. While this does not agree with the theory of the periodic table (which seems to be what he meant, i.e., that all material components were present in all things), it does in a sense agree with fundamental physics where all elementary particles are manifestations of fields that exist everywhere all the time.

Although he did not identify nous with God or any gods, the mind was everywhere, moving everything but not ethically or purposefully as Socrates, Plato, and certainly Aristotle wanted their God to be doing. Thus, Anaxagoras’s theory contained elements of what would later be termed panpsychism or the ubiquity of mind.

Democritus (c. 460-370 BC) whose atomic theory reduced everything to blind, material atoms argued the opposite side. His atomic theory worked well for understanding how material objects could arise from simpler components, but Democritus could not account for sensory experience. Rather than deal with it, he began a tradition that modern atheist philosophers from David Hume to Daniel Dennett along with scientist-celebrities-turned-poor-philosophers such as Stephen Hawking and Richard Dawkins would carry on: pretend conscious experiences are not real!

by convention sweet and by convention bitter, by convention hot, by convention cold, by convention color; but in reality atoms and void

In other words, consciousness was an illusion.

None of these ideas spread very far, and we only know of Anaxagoras from quotations by other authors like Plato. Plato’s theory of the soul captured the Western World for about 1500 years after this. In particular, second-century CE middle-Platonist Plutarch was popular right at the time that Christianity was formulating its doctrines and had an outsized impact on its understanding of the soul and thereby the mind. 

Plutarch says that your mind is an immortal being trapped within your body. Some Christians took this idea and formed the Gnostic movements. They argued that the material world was evil and corrupt, the product of a lesser god identified as Yahweh of the Old Testament. They argued that the One True God had sent Jesus Christ to liberate Christians from the material world created by Yahweh so that they could join him in a realm of pure thought. He was to do this by imparting secret knowledge (Gnosis, hence “Gnostic”) to some of his disciples who would then pass it on to those worthy of receiving it.

Christian Bishops, such as the second-century St. Irenaeus of Lyons, pushed back against these heresies, and Gnosticism died out. 

Meanwhile, Aristotle disagreed with his mentor Plato and said the soul was the form of the body, and it perished with it upon death. Thus, Aristotle argued for a kind of monism (oneness) to oppose his teacher’s dualism. This didn’t jibe with Church teaching, however, and was considered a dangerous idea. St. Thomas Aquinas, when he sought to combine Aristotle with Church doctrine in the thirteenth century, argued to keep Plato’s theory of immortality but with a diminished soul. 

Aquinas’s theory was that the soul could not process sense perceptions but could only perceive ideas. The intellect, that higher part of the mind, was preserved at death, and all other parts were left behind in the body until the Resurrection returned it to a new body. In doing so, he bridged the gap between Plato, Aristotle, and the Church while logically demolishing the Platonic idea of the corruptness of the material world. The body and soul were better together, not apart. Thus, Aquinas developed a kind of dualism-lite.

René Descartes (1596-1650 CE) swung the pendulum back towards Plato arguing for a more complete dualism but with a different goal. He wanted to define what was subject to the mechanistic order of rational science, i.e., the material world, and what was subject to free will, i.e., the mind or soul. Thus there is an objective world “out there” that works according to deterministic physical law and a soul “in here” that enables conscious perception and acts of the will. 

Galileo and Newton followed suit by dividing the qualities of objects between those that exist “in the mind” such as color, smell, and taste, and those that exist “in the object” like size, weight, and motion.

But Descartes, Galileo, and Newton were all trying to have the cake of the theory of mind while eating it, too.

Contemporaries such as Spinoza (1632-77 CE) and Leibniz (1646-1716 CE), on the other hand, opposed dualism, arguing for a cosmos of unified mind and matter. For Spinoza, science was a way of studying the mind of God, not mechanistic matter. Our minds were simply extensions of the God-mind.

A few philosophers such as Hobbes argued the opposite that only material things existed. He even came to believe that God was a kind of material being—he gets points for consistency. He was perhaps the first to argue that the mind was a kind of computer centuries before computers were invented and that there can be no thought apart from the body. He interpreted sensory perception as an internal mimicking of the outer world, but, like Democritus, Hobbes did not venture a materialist theory of consciousness. (I would argue that such a theory may not be possible.)

While the panpsychists had the advantage of avoiding a dualistic view of the material world, they had trouble explaining how the microconsciousness of, say atoms, forms into the macroconsciousness of the brain. Why does the brain have macroconsciousness but an equivalent number of atoms in a pot of oatmeal, a block of steel, or my arm not? Is the brain akin to a magnet where the consciousnesses all align in the same way that atomic spin does in magnets, creating an overall force? No one knows. 

This problem is called “subject-summing” and is the greatest contemporary obstacle of panpsychism even today.

While rationalist philosophers attempted to reconcile the mind with the material world, idealists (such as Kant and Berkeley) attacked the root of the tree. 

Berkeley in particular argued that material things did not exist at all. Hence, dualism was a fallacy because it presumed that one needed to account for the material world. The mind simply perceived ideas and all things were ideas. Things we think of as being “real” are simply more real ideas than things we only imagine or hallucinate.

Berkeley unfortunately was guilty of the same mistake as Democritus in sweeping away the problem that we are perceiving something, not simply our own minds. Wittgenstein, in the early to mid-twentieth century, corrected this fallacy when he argued that the problem wasn’t that material things didn’t exist. We just cannot talk about them, and only the things we can talk about have any reality for a philosopher. We cannot say if the tree falling in the forest made a sound. It is not a philosophical argument against dualism. It is a Zen koan, a question whose answer cannot be expressed logically because it holds two contradictory ideas in tension with a greater truth behind it that cannot be expressed in words.

And this gets at the true nature of the mind. 

All the categories that Galileo and Newton placed in the mind (like color and taste) or out in the world (like size and weight) are really all in the mind. There is no such thing as size or weight of a thing because there is no such thing as a thing outside the mind. Nevertheless, one cannot deny that the material world exists, but one cannot affirm it either because one cannot describe what kind of existence that is. One cannot make logical statements about things beyond perception.

One can try to argue that consciousness arises from the material world through a panpsychistic or other emergent process. Or one can argue that the mind and material world emerge from a common source but are fundamentally separate. These are realist approaches. 

One can also argue that the material world itself arises through a process of consciousness. 

Yet all these fall short because they all try to prioritize one aspect over another without any justification.

The alternative is that consciousness and the material world both emerge from one another. The material world emerges from consciousness in the sense that we can only perceive what is in the mind, but consciousness comes from the material world in the sense that it emerges from a world we cannot perceive. Thus, the world we cannot talk about, the tree falling in the forest, is the source of consciousness but because we cannot talk about it we cannot perceive that source in our own minds.

This suggests that consciousness and the material are one but not as panpsychism would have it.

Rather, consciousness is like DNA in that it encodes aspects of reality, e.g., the form of a member of a species as information, but that DNA emerges from the reality of the species itself. The DNA can never completely encode the organism it is a part of but nevertheless is essential to its propagation. Likewise, consciousness, by its perception of reality, creates reality but that reality is far greater than can be perceived.

There are hints of this idea in the anti-realist thought of physicist John Wheeler, who argued that conscious observers, by observing quantum processes, were creating the reality they observed. In other words, there was no underlying reality at all until they observed the outcome of a quantum experiment. Yet, after having observed it, that outcome was as real as anything and entirely independent of their minds. Thus, their minds gave birth to a new reality.

Yet, even in a realist theory that denies the influence of the subject over the experiment, metaphysically, one can apply this idea to ideas in the mind that form from sense perceptions and create reality. What after all is a tree and a sound but a set of ideas that require a conscious mind to form? This is doubly true for quantum theory where what we observe is subject to the choices the observers make, as you can show from well-known experiments involving entanglement. Likewise, observers in different states of motion and different gravitational fields have different perceptions of reality too according to Einstein’s theories of special and general relativity. 

While it is convenient to imagine a knowable objective reality, this is a convenient lie. Everything we observe depends on our state and our mental context. There is no way to observe this objective reality that we pretend is knowable. The state of the observer and the observed are inseparable. Thus, reality and our minds are likewise inseparable and coupled, and the vast ocean of unobserved reality that we presume to exist might as well not be real at all.

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