Panpsychism

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Panpsychism, in philosophy, is either the view that all parts of matter involve mind, or the more holistic view that the whole Universe is an organism that possesses a mind (see pandeism, pantheism, panentheism and cosmic consciousness). It is thus a stronger and more ambitious view than animism or hylozoism, which holds only that all things are alive. This is not to say that panpsychism believes that all matter is alive or even conscious but rather that the constituent parts of matter are composed of some form of mind and are sentient.

Panpsychism claims that everything is sentient and that there are either many separate minds, or one single mind that unites everything that is. The concept of the unconscious, made popular by the psychoanalysts, made possible a variant of panpsychism that denies consciousness from some entities while still asserting the ubiquity of mind.

Panexperientialism, as espoused by Alfred North Whitehead, is a less bold variation, which credits all entities with phenomenal consciousness but not with cognition, and therefore not necessarily with fully-fledged minds.

Panprotoexperientialism is a more cautious variation still, which credits all entities with non-physical properties that are precursors to phenomenal consciousness (or phenomenal consciousness in a latent, undeveloped form) but not with cognition itself, or with conscious awareness.

In relation to other metaphysical positions

Panpsychism can be understood as a form of idealism - the metaphysical view that says the fundamental constituents of reality are mental (a view that holds that matter is dependent on minds, or that only mental qualities exist- a type of substance monism). However, whereas Berkeleyan idealism holds that matter exists only in the mind, panpsychism holds that all material entities have minds — and an existence of their own, independent from human observers.

Eliminative Materialism, the view that there is no such thing as mind, but only matter- is incompatible with panpsychism.

Materialism, the view that ultimately there is only matter, is compatible with panpsychism just in case the property of mindedness is always attributed to matter. However, most thinkers who take a materialist or physicalist approach to the mind-body problem only attribute mind to certain highly-organised beings, and attribute it in virtue of their structural, functional and behavioural attributes. This means that once a brain falls below a certain level of functioning (in death or perhaps deep coma) there would no longer be a mind associated with it. Panpsychists often reverse the physicalist's belief that the mental emerges from the mechanistic operation of matter. Instead, they say, mechanical behaviour is derived from primitive mentality of atoms and molecules — as are sophisticated mentality and organic behaviour, the difference being attributed to the presence or absence of complex structure in a compound object. So long as this inverted emergence, the derivation of non-mental properties from mental ones, is in place, panpsychism is not a form of property dualism.

No form of panpsychism attributes full, human-style consciousness to the fundamental constituents of the universe, therefore all versions need a certain amount of emergence — that is, weak emergence, in which more sophisticated versions of basic properties emerge at a higher level. No version of panpsychism requires strong emergence, in which high-level properties do not have any low-level precursors or basis, and instead emerge "from nothing". Indeed, avoidance of strong emergentism is one of the motivations for panpsychism. "Strong emergence, if it exists, can be used to reject the physicalist picture of the world as fundamentally incomplete. By contrast, weak emergence can be used to support the physicalist picture of the world". Thus, "weak emergence" would be incompatible with any non-physicalism, such as psychism (including panpsychism); whereas "strong emergence" would support non-physicalism, such as psychism (including panpsychism). Furthermore, because "strong emergence" has a holistic outlook, it is particularly amenable to universalist holistic panpsychism ("one single mind that unites everything that is" as "universal soul" etc. of Neo-platonic metaphysics).

Hylopathism argues for a similarly universal attribution of sentience to matter. Few writers would advocate a hylopathic materialism, although the idea is not new; it has been formulated as "whatever underlies consciousness in a material sense, i.e., whatever it is about the brain that gives rise to consciousness, must necessarily be present to some degree in any other material thing". Similar ideas have been attributed to philosopher David Chalmers. However, there are also varieties of monism that don't presuppose (like materialism and idealism do) that mind and matter are fundamentally separable. An example is neutral monism first introduced by Spinoza and later propounded by William James. Panpsychism can be combined with this view.

Panexperientialism, panprotoexperientialism, and panprotopsychism

Panexperientialism or panprotopsychism are related concepts. Alfred North Whitehead incorporated a scientific worldview into the development of his philosophical system similar to Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. His ideas were a significant development of the idea of panpsychism, also known as panexperientialism, due to Whitehead’s emphasis on experience, though the term itself was first applied to Whitehead's philosophy by David Ray Griffin many years later. Process philosophy suggests that fundamental elements of the universe are occasions of experience, which can be collected into groups creating something as complex as a human being. This experience is not consciousness; there is no mind-body duality under this system as mind is seen as a very developed kind of experience. Whitehead was not a subjective idealist and, while his philosophy resembles the concept of monads first proposed by Leibniz, Whitehead’s occasions of experience are interrelated with every other occasion of experience that has ever occurred. He embraced panentheism with God encompassing all occasions of experience, transcending them. Whitehead believed that the occasions of experience are the smallest element in the universe--even smaller than subatomic particles.

Criticism

In the history of philosophy

The view of the world as a macrocosm in relation to man (which is a microcosm, respectively) was a staple theme in Greek philosophy. In that view it was natural to think about the world in anthropomorphic terms. The view passed into the medieval period via Neoplatonism, and became shared by Leibniz, Schelling, Schopenhauer and many others.

Idea of "animated atom" in Russian cosmism in the early 20th century.

Josiah Royce (1855-1916), the leading American absolute idealist, held to the panpsychist view, though he didn't necessarily attribute mental properties to the smallest constituents of mentalistic "systems".

The panpsychist doctrine has recently been making some kind of a comeback in the American philosophy of mind — for example, Christian de Quincey and Leo Stubenberg have each recently defended it. In the philosophy of mind, panpsychism is one possible solution to the so-called hard problem of consciousness. The doctrine has also been applied in the field of environmental philosophy through the work of Australian philosopher, Freya Mathews.

In the psychoanalytic tradition

Carl Jung, who is maybe best known for his idea of collective unconscious, wrote that "psyche and matter are contained in one and the same world, and moreover are in continuous contact with one another", and that it was probable that "psyche and matter are two different aspects of one and the same thing". (orig. source unknown, cited in Danah Zohar & Ian Marshall, SQ: Connecting with our Spiritual Intelligence, Bloomsbury, 2000, p. 81). This could be interpreted as panpsychism, apparently of the neutral monism variety.

Other manifestations

Panpsychism and emergentism can be seen as alternative ways to bridge the more extreme positions of crude reductionism and crude holism. Panpsychism differs from emergentism in that according to panpsychism, even the smallest physical particles have mental characteristics. Emergentism claims that though the particles be mindless, some systems formed by them, and by nothing but them, do possess mental attributes. The human brain is a case in point.

Gaia theory, which views the biosphere as a self-regulating system, that maintains homeostasis in relation to many vital chemical and physical variables, is sometimes interpreted as panpsychism, because some think that any goal-directed behavior qualifies as mental. However, the goal-directed behavior of the biosphere, as explained by the Gaia theory, is an emergent function of organised, living matter, not a quality of any matter. Thus Gaia theory is more properly associated with emergentism than panpsychism.

The label "naive" (vs. "philosophical") panpsychism is sometimes used to mean, not a doctrine defended by any philosopher, but the attitude of primal people and children to think of even inanimate objects as sentient and/or intentional. This is the same as animism. This attitude of "naive" philosophy could be considered a vestigial Eurocentric belief in the inaccuracy or unimportance of non-Western world views. It could be considered to exist only as a colonial artifact utilized as a tool of domination to discredit the philosophical contributions of the colonized. In addition it downplays the possible role that indigenous philosophies may have played in the formation of panpsychist ideas in the Western world.

Panpsychism, as a view that the universe has "universal consciousness", is shared by some forms of religious thought: theosophy, pantheism, cosmotheism and panentheism.

Panpsychism also plays a part in Hindu, Buddhist, Dzogchen and Shinto mysticism.

Dzogchen Semde and Bardo literature

According to the Dzogchen tradition, there is nothing which is non-sentient, or stated differently, everything is sentient technically Panpsychism and this is the view of Dzogchen Semde or "mind series" the principal text of which is the Kulayarāja Tantra. Moreover, two of the English scholars that opened the discourse of the Bardo literature of the Nyingma Dzogchen tradition, Evans-Wentz & Jung (1954, 2000: p.10) specifically with their partial translation and commentary of the Bardo Thodol into the English language write of the "One Mind" (Tibetan: sems nyid gcig; Sanskrit: *ekacittatva; *ekacittata; where * denotes a possible Sanskrit back-formation) thus:

"The One Mind, as Reality, is the Heart which pulsates for ever, sending forth purified the blood-streams of existence, and taking them back again; the Great Breath, the Inscrutable Brahman, the Eternally Unveiled Mystery of the Mysteries of Antiquity, the Goal of all Pilgrimages, the End of all Existence."

This "One Mind" is none other than the "sphere of the great circle" (Tibetan: thig le chen po'i klong) of "self-awareness" (Tibetan: rang rig) of the Samten Migdron a text like the Kulayaraja Tantra that is also of the Semde class of Dzogchen literature and an important historical source of Dzogchen as it was recovered from the Dunhuang manuscripts.

Notes

Walter Yeeling Evans-Wentz, Carl Gustav Jung (1954, 2000). The Tibetan book of the great liberation, or, The method of realizing nirvāṇa through knowing the mind. Oxford University Press US, 2000. ISBN 0195133153, 9780195133158. Source: (accessed: Sunday March 7, 2010)
Karmay, Samten Gyaltsen (2007). The Great Perfection (rDzogs chen): A Philosophical and Meditative Teaching of Tibetan Buddhism. Second Edition. Volume II. Boston: Brill's Tibetan Studies Library. ISBN 9789004151420, pp.107-108
theg pa'i mchog rnal 'byor gyi phul yang tog/ rgyal ba ril gyi yum a ti yo ga'i don btsan pa ni/ mtshan rdzogs pa (p.291) chen po zhes bya ste/ ci'i phyir zhe na/ bsam gyis mi khyab pa'i chos thams cad ma brtsal lhun rdzogs pa'i don/ gcer grol go bar bya ba'i phyir zhib tu bstan te/ de lta bu'i theg pa thams cad kyi yang mdzod spyi mes chen po 'di'i ngo bo lhun gyis grub pa'i ngang nyid kyi don/ rang rig pas mngon sum khong du chud nas blor bzhag par byar yang med pa'i don chen po rang gi rig pa la gsal bar bya ba yang/ ji ltar shes par bya zhe na/ shin tu rnal 'byor gyi theg pa 'di la/ rgyud lung man ngag gi gzhung ltar/ dang po gzhal bya'i chos gcig la/ rang gi so sor rtogs pa'i shes rab kyis gzhal bar byar yang med pa ste/ de ci'i phyir zhe na/ chos so cog tu grags pa thams cad/ ye gdod ma nyid nas spu ma brjes mdog ma bsgur bar rang byung gi ye shes thig le chen po'i klong du sangs rgyas pa'i rang bzhin la/ dngos po gzhal byar su yis mthong/ gtan tshigs su (p.292) yis bstan/ grub pa'i mtha' ci zhig chol/ 'jal byed gang gis byas te/ de dag gi ngo bo so so ba med pa'i phyir ma dmigs so/