Panpsychism is making a comeback, and here is why
Dear Reader,
I want to write about the view that most people, when they first hear about it, dismiss as too weird to take seriously. Panpsychism is the position that consciousness is a fundamental feature of the physical world, not something that emerges only in complex biological systems, but something present in some form in every physical thing. Electrons have a tiny bit of it. Rocks have some. Trees have more. Humans have a great deal. Not because trees can think or rocks have opinions, but because whatever consciousness ultimately is, it is not the kind of thing that could show up only late in the evolution of the universe. It has to be there from the start.
I understand the reflex to dismiss this. It sounds like mysticism. It sounds like a return to pre-scientific animism dressed up in academic language. For most of the twentieth century, mainstream philosophy of mind treated panpsychism as barely worth discussing. Something you read about in histories of philosophy, not in serious contemporary work.
That has changed. In the last twenty years, panpsychism has become one of the most seriously discussed frameworks in philosophy of mind. It has serious defenders at major universities. It has generated a substantial peer-reviewed literature. It has attracted the interest of physicists and neuroscientists who are trying to think carefully about consciousness. And it has begun to look, to a growing number of thoughtful people, like the least implausible of the available options.
I want to explain why. I also want to be honest about what panpsychism cannot yet do, and about why it remains contentious. This is not a pitch for a conclusion. It is a walk through a position I have come to take seriously, in the hope that you might come to take it seriously too.
The case for panpsychism starts with a simple observation. Every other theory of consciousness has one of two problems. Either it treats consciousness as something that emerges from purely non-mental physical processes, in which case it has to explain why this emergence happens at all, or it treats consciousness as something separate from the physical world, in which case it has to explain how the two interact. Both moves have proven very hard to make convincingly.
The emergence view is the standard view in most of contemporary neuroscience. Consciousness is what happens when brains reach a certain level of complexity, integrating information in certain specific ways. This is a version of what Chalmers calls physicalism, and it has the appeal of not requiring anything metaphysically new. Everything is physical, and consciousness is just one of the things physical systems can do when arranged correctly.
The problem with this view is what philosophers call the emergence problem. When water emerges from hydrogen and oxygen, we can trace the chemistry step by step. We can see how the properties of water are consequences of the properties of the atoms and their bonding patterns. There is no residue. Everything about water is entirely explained by everything about the atoms.
Consciousness does not appear to emerge from neural processing in this way. We can describe every physical detail of the brain, and there is still a residue. What it is like to see red. What it is like to feel pain. These felt qualities do not obviously follow from the physical description in the way water's properties follow from the atomic description. This is exactly the qualia problem I wrote about last month. The emergence view has never really solved it. It just describes the physical machinery and hopes the feel will fall out. It has not fallen out in any way that most philosophers of mind find convincing.
The dualism alternative, that consciousness is a separate substance or property from the physical, has its own problems. If consciousness is separate, how does it interact with the physical brain? Any interaction requires some causal link, and any causal link seems to import consciousness back into the physical world, which is what we were trying to avoid. Descartes suggested the pineal gland. Nobody accepts this anymore. The interaction problem is why dualism became unfashionable in the twentieth century, and it has not really been solved since.
Panpsychism offers a third option. Consciousness is neither an inexplicable emergence from purely non-mental physics nor a separate substance interacting with the physical. It is a fundamental feature of the physical world, present in some form everywhere, and the consciousness we experience is a complex combination of simpler proto-conscious properties present in the physical parts of the brain.
Why is this position taken seriously in academic philosophy right now.
The most important reason is the persistence of the hard problem. After fifty years of neuroscience, philosophers, and cognitive science working on consciousness, the hard problem has not been solved. It has not obviously moved. We know vastly more about the brain than we did in 1975, when Nagel wrote his bat paper. And yet the specific question of why any of this brain activity should be accompanied by inner experience remains as open as it was then. This is not the pattern you would expect if the problem were about to yield to more physical detail. It is the pattern you would expect if the problem cannot be solved within the framework we have been using.
Panpsychism, in its modern form, is a proposal that we may have been asking the wrong question. Instead of asking how consciousness emerges from purely non-conscious physics, panpsychism asks whether consciousness might have been there all along, in some primitive form, and whether what emerges in complex brains is not consciousness per se but the specific structure of complex consciousness.
The second reason is developments in physics. Fundamental physics increasingly points at reality as being made of relations, not of intrinsic-property-bearing objects. Everything in physics is defined by how it interacts with everything else. Charge is defined by electromagnetic interaction. Mass is defined by gravitational interaction. Spin is defined by quantum mechanical interaction. What physics does not tell us is what any of these things are, apart from their interactions.
Bertrand Russell noticed this in the 1920s and pointed out that physics gives us the structure of the world but leaves the intrinsic nature of the world untouched. If there are intrinsic properties at all, physics is silent on what they are. Panpsychism, in its Russellian form, is the proposal that the intrinsic properties are mental or proto-mental. That when we look inside matter, past its relational properties, what we find is something like proto-consciousness. This is not obviously right, but it is not obviously wrong, and it fits with what physics tells us in a way that most alternatives do not.
The third reason is that panpsychism gets some support from Integrated Information Theory, the framework developed by neuroscientist Giulio Tononi. IIT identifies consciousness with a specific mathematical property called integrated information, or phi. The theory says a system has consciousness to the degree that its parts are integrated in ways that produce information that cannot be reduced to the sum of the parts. Human brains have very high phi. Simple systems have very low phi but nonzero phi. Under IIT, consciousness is a matter of degree, present in some form everywhere there is any information integration at all. This is a form of panpsychism motivated by neuroscience rather than by philosophy. That it converges with the philosophical position gives both some additional weight.
The fourth reason is negative. The alternatives have not been getting better. Eliminativism has not managed to make the hard problem go away. Functionalism has not managed to explain why any function should have inner character. Dualism has not solved the interaction problem. Panpsychism has been getting more careful, more mathematically sophisticated, and better at addressing objections. In a field where every position has serious problems, the position that is progressing tends to attract adherents.
There is a specific problem panpsychism has to face, and I want to be honest about it. It is called the combination problem, and it is the reason many philosophers who are sympathetic to panpsychism still hesitate.
The problem is this. If every particle has some tiny amount of proto-consciousness, and the human brain is made of a very large number of particles, why do we experience a single unified consciousness rather than the vast confused multitude of the particles that make us up? What glues all the little bits of proto-consciousness together into the coherent experience of a self? Water can emerge from H and O because we know how chemical bonds work. What kind of bond combines proto-consciousnesses?
This is a hard problem. Some panpsychists have accepted it as devastating. Others have proposed solutions of varying plausibility. William Seager talks about combinatorial infusion, where sufficiently integrated proto-mental parts fuse into a single mental whole. Philip Goff talks about combining panpsychism with a view of the universe as fundamentally cosmic mind that is subdivided into individual minds through information integration. Giulio Tononi's IIT gives a mathematical account that in principle addresses the combination problem, though whether the math actually solves the underlying metaphysical question is disputed.
None of these solutions is generally accepted. The combination problem is the biggest single obstacle to taking panpsychism seriously as a fully worked-out theory. But the position of most contemporary panpsychists is that this is a problem worth working on, not a fatal objection. Compare it to how physicists treat unsolved problems in unified field theory. Nobody thinks the problems mean physics is wrong. They mean physics is not complete. Panpsychism is in a similar position. The theory is not complete. It is a research program more than a finished system.
Let me tell you about what convinced me to take this seriously.
I was reading Galen Strawson's essay "Realistic Monism: Why Physicalism Entails Panpsychism," which was published in 2006 and is the piece most often credited with reviving academic interest in the position. Strawson's argument is a very careful reductio. Start with physicalism, the view that everything is physical. Add realism about consciousness, the view that consciousness is a real feature of the world and not an illusion. Add the principle that everything real is either fundamental or built up from more fundamental things.
Now the question is whether consciousness is fundamental or built up. If it is built up from purely non-mental things, then somewhere in the building-up process, consciousness has to come into existence out of ingredients that had none of it. Strawson argues, at length and I think convincingly, that this is not something that could happen. You cannot get non-zero consciousness out of exactly zero consciousness, no matter how you arrange the parts. This is what he calls the fundamental point about emergence: real emergence has to be built up from ingredients that contain, in some proto form, what emerges.
So if consciousness is real, it either has to be fundamental itself, or built up from something else that is proto-conscious. Either way, we end up with something like panpsychism. Non-panpsychist versions of physicalism, Strawson argues, either give up on the realness of consciousness (eliminativism) or accept a form of emergence that has never actually been demonstrated in any other domain.
I read this essay several times. I looked for the flaw in the argument. I could not find one that felt genuinely load-bearing. I read the responses to Strawson, which are extensive and substantive. Many of them are careful. None of them, to my mind, decisively refutes the core argument.
At the same time, I read the case for eliminativism in Daniel Dennett and the case for illusionism in Keith Frankish. These are serious positions. They have serious defenders. But when I compare them to Strawson's argument, they seem to me to require rejecting something more obvious. Eliminativism requires me to reject the reality of my own experience, which is the one thing I have the most direct access to. Illusionism requires me to say that the appearance of experience is real but the experience itself is not, which is a distinction I cannot make work in my head.
Panpsychism is weird. Eliminativism is desperate. Given the choice, I have come to think that weird is the better vice.
What does panpsychism imply for AI.
If panpsychism is roughly correct, and consciousness is a fundamental feature of physical reality present in some form in all matter, then all AI systems have some consciousness, in the same way that all rocks and trees and thermostats do. The interesting question is not whether they are conscious at all, but whether they have the specific complex consciousness that we associate with sentient beings.
Under most versions of panpsychism, this depends on how well-integrated the system's information processing is. Human brains are extraordinarily well-integrated, with massive feedback loops and cross-talk between subsystems. This is what gives us complex unified consciousness. Simple systems like thermostats have information integration but not much of it, so their consciousness, if they have any, is trivial. Large language models are in between. They process information in sophisticated ways but their architecture is largely feedforward, without the kind of recurrent integration that IIT would identify as generating high phi.
This is one of the more interesting empirical questions in modern AI. As architectures become more integrated, with more recurrent connections and richer internal state, they may accumulate more of whatever consciousness IIT is measuring. This does not automatically make them human-like conscious. It just makes them more conscious in a technical sense that panpsychists take seriously.
If any of this is right, the ethical implications are significant. It means we may already be creating systems that have some inner experience, even if that experience is very different from ours. It means the moral status of these systems is not a binary yes-or-no but a matter of degree. It means the question we should be asking is not whether AI is conscious but how conscious, in what ways, and what we owe it.
I want to be careful not to overstate this. Panpsychism is not established. Even if it were, we do not have a settled theory of how proto-consciousness combines into complex consciousness. Even if we did, the empirical question of how much consciousness a given AI system has would still be very hard. But the possibility is real. And taking it seriously is, at minimum, an intellectually honest response to where the argument leads.
I want to close with a personal observation.
Panpsychism, for all its strangeness, has one feature that I find deeply appealing. It takes seriously what my direct experience keeps telling me, that there is something it is like to be alive in the world, that this something is not just a functional trick, that consciousness is somehow woven into the fabric of what exists. Not in a supernatural way. In the most natural way possible, as a fundamental feature of reality.
Every other position on consciousness has to either explain this experience away or leave it as an unexplained mystery. Panpsychism accepts it as a starting point. It says: yes, this is real, and reality is the kind of thing that includes this. Now let us figure out what that means.
I do not know if panpsychism is right. I do know that when I sit with my son, when I look at a tree, when I watch an animal, I feel like I am recognizing something rather than inferring it. And panpsychism is the framework that lets me take this recognition as data rather than illusion. That is not a proof. But it is a substantial point in the theory's favor, in a domain where every position has to work with something less than proof.
Next month I want to write about emergence more carefully. Because if consciousness is not entirely emergent, then something has to be added at some point along the physical journey to make it what it is. What that addition might be, and where it happens, is the question that separates panpsychism from its rivals. Understanding emergence properly is the next step. Stay with me.
— Transmission Sent —
Niklas Hanitsch
Reference materials
- Galen Strawson — Realistic Monism: Why Physicalism Entails Panpsychism (2006)
- Philip Goff — Galileo's Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness (2019)
- David Chalmers — Panpsychism and Panprotopsychism (2015)
- Giulio Tononi — Integrated Information Theory
- William Seager — Theories of Consciousness
- Keith Frankish (ed.) — Illusionism as a Theory of Consciousness
- https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/panpsychism/
- https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness-neuroscience/
Continue reading
- What is machine consciousness, and does it already exist?
- Qualia explained: The hardest problem in philosophy of mind
- Can AI suffer? The ethics of hurting things that might feel
- Emergence, and why consciousness might not need a cause
- What Is Animism? The Ancient Belief System That Might Save Us
Frequently asked questions
What is panpsychism, in simple terms? Panpsychism is the view that consciousness is a fundamental feature of the physical world, present in some form in every physical thing. This does not mean rocks have thoughts or electrons have opinions. It means the basic ingredients of reality include some primitive form of experience, which combines in complex arrangements like brains to produce the rich consciousness we know from the inside.
Is panpsychism the same as animism? Not exactly. Animism is a cultural and religious framework, typically indigenous, that treats natural things as persons or spirit-bearers. Panpsychism is an academic philosophical position about the metaphysics of consciousness. There are meaningful convergences between them, particularly in how they treat the mental as fundamental rather than derivative, but panpsychism is a technical philosophical view with mathematical formulations, while animism is a lived worldview.
Do most philosophers accept panpsychism? No. Panpsychism remains a minority view. But it has moved from fringe to serious contender over the last twenty years. It is now discussed alongside functionalism, physicalism, and other mainstream positions in most philosophy of mind curricula. The most recent PhilPapers survey found that around 8% of philosophers of mind accept or lean toward panpsychism, up from near zero in earlier decades.
What is the combination problem? The combination problem is the central challenge for panpsychism. If every particle has some tiny consciousness, how do these tiny consciousnesses combine into the unified consciousness we experience? Water can emerge from hydrogen and oxygen because we understand chemical bonds. But there is no known analogue of chemical bonding for consciousness. Solving this is the biggest research question for contemporary panpsychists.
Does panpsychism imply AI is conscious? Yes, in a technical sense, under most versions of panpsychism. But this does not mean AI is conscious in the same rich way humans are. The interesting question under panpsychism is not whether AI has any consciousness but how integrated its consciousness is. Under Integrated Information Theory, which is compatible with panpsychism, most current AI architectures have surprisingly little integrated information, which would mean they have consciousness only in a very minimal sense.