This approach views physics as describing structure, and not the underlying nonstructural elements. Interest picked up again in the 2000s, thanks both to recognition of the “hard problem” and to increased adoption of the structural-realist approach in physics, explains Chalmers. Thinkers including philosopher Bertrand Russell and physicist Arthur Eddington made a serious case for panpsychism, but the field lost momentum after World War II, when philosophy became largely focused on analytic philosophical questions of language and logic. Goff, who has written an academic book on consciousness and is working on another that approaches the subject from a more popular-science perspective, notes that there were credible theories on the subject dating back to the 1920s. Because it applies to all structures-not just the human brain-Integrated Information Theory shares the panpsychist view that physical matter has innate conscious experience. Tononi argues that something will have a form of “consciousness” if the information contained within the structure is sufficiently “integrated,” or unified, and so the whole is more than the sum of its parts. One of the most popular and credible contemporary neuroscience theories on consciousness, Giulio Tononi’s Integrated Information Theory, further lends credence to panpsychism. There have been several credible academic books on the subject in recent years, and popular articles taking panpsychism seriously. Philosophers at NYU, home to one of the leading philosophy-of-mind departments, have made panpsychism a feature of serious study. Interest in panpsychism has grown in part thanks to the increased academic focus on consciousness itself following on from Chalmers’ “hard problem” paper. Any kind of aggregation gives you consciousness.” “Rocks will be conscious, spoons will be conscious, the Earth will be conscious. “Rather, the table could be understood as a collection of particles that each have their own very simple form of consciousness.”īut, then again, panpsychism could very well imply that conscious tables exist: One interpretation of the theory holds that “any system is conscious,” says Chalmers. “Panpsychists usually don’t take tables and other artifacts to be conscious as a whole,” writes Hedda Hassel Mørch, a philosophy researcher at New York University’s Center for Mind, Brain, and Consciousness, in an email. ![]() Panpsychism doesn’t necessarily imply that every inanimate object is conscious. ![]() ![]() This isn’t meant to imply that particles have a coherent worldview or actively think, merely that there’s some inherent subjective experience of consciousness in even the tiniest particle. These particles then come together to form more complex forms of consciousness, such as humans’ subjective experiences. Panpsychism offers an attractive alternative solution: Consciousness is a fundamental feature of physical matter every single particle in existence has an “unimaginably simple” form of consciousness, says Goff.
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