Since the dawn of philosophy, the human being has asked himself several questions: to what extent is consciousness something only human? Do other animals have consciousness? even the simplest ones? could rocks, water, grasses… all this have consciousness?

Panpsychism is the set of philosophical doctrines in which it is defended that consciousness is not something exclusive to the human species, that other living beings and even inanimate elements can have it or have subjective perceptions of the world that surrounds them.

What is panpsychism?

The word panpsychism (from the Greek “bread”, “everything, anything” and “psiche” “soul, mind”) refers to the set of philosophical doctrines in which it is held that it is not only people who have a conscience . In other words, panpsychists believe that other forms of life or even objects that at first sight we would call inanimate can possess properly conscious qualities or have a subjective perception of the world around them.

It should be noted that panpsychist ideas are not all the same. There are those who defend the view that it is not only animals that, from a very anthropocentric perspective, could be classified as superior or that, thanks to their more or less large and developed brains, would be capable of harbouring consciousness. This vision of consciousness has also been related to insects, plants and even microorganisms. The most extensive and radical panpsychism defends the idea that subjective experience is ubiquitous: it is found in everything.

Historical background

In the following, we will briefly look at each period in which panpsychist doctrines have been presented in one form or another, their authors and what their exact vision of the concept of consciousness was in all, or almost all, things.

1. Classical Greece

Although they did not have a specific term to define the idea found in the concept of panpsychism, since Ancient Greek times they philosophized about consciousness and subjective experience .

In times before the Socratic school, Thales of Miletus, who is considered the first philosopher, defended the idea that “everything was full of gods”, that is, he had a pantheistic vision of nature.

According to Thales, within each object, each animal, each grain of sand, there was something with properties similar to what we understand by consciousness . This idea is considered one of the first panpsychist doctrines.

Years later, Plato, expounding his philosophy, defended the idea that all things, insofar as they are something and therefore exist, must have some property that can also be found in the mind and soul, things that, for him, also existed. The world, in Plato’s view, was something with a soul and intelligence, and that each element that made it up was also a living entity.

2. Renaissance

With the advent of the Middle Ages, Greek philosophy fell into obscurity, as did many other Hellenic knowledge and contributions.

However, centuries later, thanks to the arrival of the light that was the Renaissance, panpsychist ideas managed to resurface and figures such as Gerolamo Cardano, Giordano Bruno and Francesco Patrizi contributed with their visions. In fact, it is to this last Italian philosopher that we owe the invention of the expression “panpsychism”.

For Cardano the soul, which could well be understood as conscience, was a fundamental part of the world, something that could not be separated from reality.

Giordano Bruno considered that nothing in this world could come without a soul or without having a vital principle . Everything must have an essence that, to a greater or lesser extent, reminds us of what we human beings identify as consciousness.

3. 17th Century

Baruch Spinoza and Gottfried Leibniz presented two panpsychist doctrines.

Spinoza talks about the fact that reality is made up of a single substance , which is eternal and which would become like something synonymous with God or with the concept of Nature. We would all be a whole, something conscious but in its totality.

Instead, Leibniz talks about the idea that reality is made up of small, infinite and indivisible conscious units (monads) which are the fundamental structures of the universe, something like the atoms of consciousness.

4. 20th Century

At the beginning of the 20th century, the most outstanding figure of panpsychism is Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947). In his ontology, he presented the idea that the basic nature of the world is made up of events and processes, which are created and destroyed. These processes are elementary events, which he calls “occasions” and are part of the idea of the mental. For him, mental operations had an impact on the constitution of nature, they shaped reality.

Carl Jung argued that psyche and matter were contained in the same world, and that they were in constant contact with each other. Psyche and matter are two different aspects of the same thing, as if they were part of the same coin.

Panpsychism today

With the arrival of World War II, panpsychist doctrines were losing strength to logical positivism. However, they achieved a certain recovery in 1979 with the publication of the article “Panpsychism” by Thomas Nagel. Later, other authors, as it is the case of Galen Strawson with his article of 2006 Realistic Monism: Why Physicalism Entails Panpsychism dared to approach in a much more scientific way than ever the concept of panpsychism.

Today there is the idea that consciousness is one of the fundamental truths of human existence . Each of us is aware of what we feel, of what we perceive. Perhaps we do not have enough linguistic skill to be able to express it, but we have a subjective perception of reality. Our consciousness is what we know in the most direct way possible; there is no way to separate ourselves from it.

However, in the same way that it is much closer to us than the desk where we work, the glasses or the clothes we wear, it is in turn the aspect of ourselves, as a species that continues to produce more mystery. What is consciousness?

David Chalmers, Australian analytical philosopher, has been talking about his panpsychist vision of reality, from a much more current perspective and with a language more appropriate to the century we are in, if we compare it with Plato or Schopenhauer. In fact, he expounds it very extensively in his book The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory (1996), in which he explains the need to understand to what extent it is not necessary to accept that other living beings, however basic they may be, can have consciousness .

In this book he talks about two problems that science faces when trying to understand human consciousness, which show that it is not possible to completely discard the idea of consciousness outside the human species. He calls these two problems the easy problem and the difficult problem of consciousness:

The Easy Problem of Consciousness

With easy problem of the conscience he talks about how science, especially the neurosciences, have tried to investigate about the conscience but establishing, a priori, the object of study that they want to approach. That is to say, it specifies in each investigation an aspect related to the consciousness and describes it in an empirically observable way. Thus, we speak of consciousness as the ability to discriminate, categorize and react to a certain stimulus, or to fix attention, to control purposeful behaviour .

To better understand this idea, let’s look at a rather descriptive example. Let’s think about how human beings see colors. Scientists know that the fact that we see something red, green, or blue is because objects with those colors emit light rays with different wavelengths.

Thus, these rays, upon entering the eye, impinge upon the cones, the cells specialized in color distinction. Depending on the wavelength, one type of cone or another will be activated. When activated, these cones will send an electrical impulse that will go through the optic nerve and this will reach the areas of the brain in charge of processing color.

All this is a very brief explanation of the neurobiological correlates of colour perception in the human eye, and could be verified by means of an experiment in distinguishing objects with different colours , neuroimaging techniques that show which areas are activated when doing this activity, etc. It is empirically demonstrable.

The difficult problem of consciousness

Chalmers explains in his book that science is not prepared, and perhaps never will be, to demonstrate through empirical techniques how the experience of a particular stimulus occurs. We are not talking about how they are activated according to which cells or brain areas; we are talking about the subjective experience itself: how can it be recorded?

When we think or perceive a stimulus, it is clear that we process it, like the previous case of colour, however there is a subjective aspect that cannot be explained in such a scientific way. How is it possible to see the colour green as a green colour? Why that particular colour? Because in front of a certain wavelength we perceive just that colour and not another one?

Not only humans have a conscience

As we were saying before, the idea of panpsychism, that is, that everything has a conscience or a soul, suggests that objects which at first sight do not seem at all like something with a certain conscience might actually have one.

Nowadays, and in the same line as with classical philosophers such as Leibniz, there are those who defend that each particle possesses a consciousness and, as a whole, can create more complex systems, as would be the case with human consciousness. Each particle has a minimum consciousness that, added to those of the others, generates a greater one .

Until relatively recently, the idea that only human beings were capable of experiencing anything was quite widespread, both in the scientific field and in general culture. It was more or less accepted that other animal species, especially large primates or complex animals, could feel a subjective experience and be, to a greater or lesser extent, conscious.

However, the American neuroscientist Christof Koch believes that it does not make much sense to think that only phylogenetically close humans and animals can have consciousness is not as logical as one might think.

While he doesn’t go for such a radical view as that a stone can feel when it’s kicked, he does argue that, until proven otherwise, the idea that multicellular organisms cannot experience pain or pleasure is not at all as crazy as might be thought.

They may have an infinitely more vague sense than humans of being alive, but this does not mean that they do not feel it. With smaller brains, or even something that can be called a brain, their sense of awareness will be less sophisticated than ours, but it will still be there. It would be a living being that would have its own way of feeling in a subjective way.

Another interesting case is that of plants . Stefano Mancuso, in his interesting book Sensitivity and intelligence in the plant world presents his research about the intelligent behaviour of plants, to which he comes to give conscience.

While it is difficult to talk about the idea of plants being self-aware, his research group, based on their investigation, concluded that plants are far from being considered passive organisms: they have to have some kind of awareness, from which their intelligence would be extracted, in order to adapt the way they do.

Criticisms of panpsychism

The greatest criticism made of panpsychism, and using terms inspired by the idea of the difficult problem of consciousness, is the so-called “combination problem” . How do these small particles with supposedly tiny consciousnesses assemble it to form a more complex consciousness?

Starting from the idea that our atoms are conscious particles and from their combination comes our human consciousness, which is more complex and, so to speak, “more self-conscious”: what if we humans were like conscious particles? Is humanity, as a whole, a conscious super-organism? Is nature, as Spinoza said, a conscious substance? How do we do this to ourselves in order to be doing something with a higher consciousness, without us being aware of it?

Bibliographic references:

  • Chalmers, D. J. (2019) Idealism and the Mind-Body Problem. In Seager, William (ed.). The Routledge Handbook of Panpsychism. Routledge. ISBN 978-1138817135.
  • Chalmers, D. (2015). “Panpsychism and Panprotopsychism. In Alter, Torin; Nagasawa, Yugin (eds.). Consciousness in the Physical World: Perspectives on Russellian Monism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-992735-7.
  • Crick, F.C.; Koch, C. (1990). “Towards a Neurobiological theory of Consciousness” (PDF). Seminars Neurosci. 2: 263-275.
  • Chalmers, D. J. (1995). “Facing up to the problem of consciousness”. Journal of Consciousness Studies 2 (3): 200-219.
  • Nagel, T., (1974), “What’s it Like to be a Bat?”, The Philosophical Review, 83(4): 435-450. doi:10.2307/2183914
  • Nagel, T. (1979), “Panpsychism”, in Nagel’s Mortal Questions, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 181-195
  • Mancuso, S. and Viola, A. (2015). Sensitivity and intelligence in the plant world. Gutenberg Galaxy. ISBN: 9788416252633