Current Philosophy

🧠 Everything is Alive: The Metaphysics of Panpsychism

Written by

L. Silas Sterling

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We have spent much of our time in this series treating consciousness as a riddle to be solved—a mysterious property that somehow attaches itself to certain complex biological systems. We have explored the materialist “User Illusion” of Daniel Dennett and the functionalist idea that the mind is merely what the brain does. But as we have seen, every theory that attempts to “extract” mind from “dead matter” eventually hits a wall. They all rely on a “miracle of emergence”—the idea that if you simply stack enough unthinking bricks in a specific configuration, they will eventually start to have opinions.

As we have hinted in almost every recent installment, there is another way. We moved toward this alternative when we discussed Alfred North Whitehead’s “Process Philosophy,” which views the universe as a flow of living events rather than a heap of dead parts. We saw it again in Galen Strawson’s argument that matter must be experiential to exist at all, and in David Chalmers’ definition of the “Hard Problem,” which forced us to consider consciousness as a fundamental building block. Even Thomas Nagel’s critique of materialism suggested that the “potential” for mind must be present in the universe from its first moments, while Integrated Information Theory (IIT) provided a mathematical framework for how that consciousness might be structured.

Now, we arrive at the formal destination of those early breadcrumbs: Panpsychism.

Panpsychism offers a radical, yet remarkably sane, alternative: consciousness does not “emerge” at all. Instead, it is a fundamental, ubiquitous feature of the physical world. From the electron to the galaxy, the universe is not made of “dead stuff,” but of “mind-stuff.” While this sounds like the height of mysticism, modern defenders like Philip Goff and Hedda Hassel Mørch argue that it is actually the most parsimonious way to understand physics. If we take “unadulterated” panpsychism seriously, we aren’t adding magic to the universe; we are simply filling in the logical blanks that materialism is forced to leave empty.

The Distinction Between Extrinsic and Intrinsic

To understand what panpsychism is, one must first distinguish between how physics describes an object and what that object is “in itself.” Philip Goff argues that modern physics is an extrinsic science. It describes matter entirely in terms of its behavior, its mathematical relationships, and its effects on other matter. When a physicist defines an electron by its “mass” or “charge,” they are describing how it resists acceleration or how it responds to an electromagnetic field. These are descriptions of dispositions—what a thing does to something else.

The theory focuses on the intrinsic nature of that matter. The logical argument—often traced back to Bertrand Russell—is that for a relationship or a behavior to exist, there must be an underlying “entity” that is doing the behaving. Logic suggests that you cannot have a universe composed entirely of “doings” without any “beings.” Imagine a world where every object is defined only by how it moves other objects; you eventually fall into an infinite regress of relationships with no actual things at the center. Panpsychism identifies this “being”—the internal reality of the particle—as a simple form of experience. This is often referred to as Double-Aspect Theory: matter has an external, physical aspect (what it does) and an internal, mental aspect (what it is).

Galileo’s Error and the Quantitative Bias

Philip Goff identifies the root of the current “mind-body” impasse in what he calls “Galileo’s Error.” In the 17th century, Galileo made a deliberate trade-off to facilitate the birth of modern science. He stripped the “qualitative” aspects of reality—color, taste, smell, and feeling—out of the physical world to make it mathematically manageable. He placed these “secondary qualities” into the mind, leaving the physical world as a collection of “primary qualities” like size, shape, and motion.

This move was incredibly successful for the advancement of physics, but Goff argues it created a “blind spot” that we are only now acknowledging. Materialism today tries to use the quantitative language of Galileo to explain the qualitative feelings that Galileo purposefully excluded. Panpsychism posits that these qualities did not actually disappear from the physical world. They remain as the “intrinsic nature” of the matter Galileo was measuring. By treating consciousness as a fundamental constant—similar to mass or charge—panpsychists like Goff attempt to put the “quality” back into the “quantity,” suggesting that experience is simply what the “math” of physics feels like from the inside.

The “Flesh” of the Universe and Causal Power

Hedda Hassel Mørch provides a central pillar of this view by arguing that physics is “conceptually thin.” It provides the mathematical “skeleton” of the universe but says nothing about the “flesh” that occupies that skeleton. Mørch uses the analogy of a game of chess: you can map every rule, every possible movement, and the geometry of the board, but those rules do not tell you if the pieces are made of wood, plastic, or pure light. Physics is silent on the internal “stuff” of the universe.

A significant portion of Mørch’s work focuses on Causal Power. In a purely materialist world, we see “regularities”—A follows B. We see a white billiard ball hit a red one, and the red one moves. However, physics can only tell us that they do move in a regular pattern; it cannot tell us why they must move. There is no “necessity” visible in the math. Mørch suggests that consciousness provides the “glue” for causation. We know from our own internal experience that there is a “necessity” to certain mental states; for example, the feeling of pain causes the desire to avoid the source of pain. There is an internal, logical link between the feeling and the action. Panpsychism suggests that this “internal” causal power is what is actually happening at the subatomic level. The “force” that physics describes as a mathematical field is, from the inside, a primitive form of “drive” or “tendency.”

The Combination Problem and Structural Integration

The primary technical challenge for this theory—and one David Chalmers has written about extensively—is the Combination Problem: how do millions of small “proto-conscious” particles merge into a single, unified human subject? If every atom in a brain is conscious, it is not immediately clear why we don’t experience a fragmented collection of independent, microscopic thoughts. To address this, panpsychists look to the geometry of Integrated Information Theory (IIT). IIT suggests that consciousness is maximized in systems that are highly integrated. While a stone has many conscious atoms, they are not interacting in a way that creates an irreducible “whole.” Their informational “Phi” ($\Phi$) is low.

In a human brain, the high level of causal interconnectivity allows the individual sparks of experience to “overlap” and integrate into a single, complex narrative. In this framework, the “Self” is the point of maximum informational integration within a panpsychist field. The “Combination Problem” is thus shifted from a mystery of magic to a challenge of architecture—how the universe weaves small threads of feeling into a unified tapestry.

Constitutional Monism vs. Emergentism

This view is a form of Constitutive Monism. It argues that the universe is made of one type of “stuff,” and that stuff is both physical and mental. This stands in direct opposition to “Emergentism,” the standard materialist view which claims consciousness is a “new” property that appears only when matter reaches a certain level of complexity—much like how “liquidity” emerges from H2O molecules.

Mørch and Goff argue that the analogy to liquidity is flawed. You can explain liquidity entirely by looking at the arrangement and movement of molecules; there is no “logical gap.” However, you cannot explain “feeling” by looking at the arrangement of “non-feeling” parts. There is a “deductive gap” between the movement of matter and the presence of experience. For the theory to remain logically consistent, the “feeling” must be present in the fundamental constituents of reality. As David Chalmers has noted, if you want a conscious brain at the end of the process, you must have conscious building blocks at the beginning.

Cosmopsychism: The Top-Down Alternative

While most panpsychism is “bottom-up,” a variation known as Cosmopsychism starts from the “top-down.” This view suggests that the universe as a whole is the primary conscious subject, and individual human minds are “localized” fragments of that universal consciousness. This variation addresses the Combination Problem by reversing it. Instead of asking how small minds become a big mind, it asks how one big mind “differentiates” into many small things. This aligns with certain interpretations of quantum mechanics where the “wave function of the universe” is seen as the primary reality. In both versions, the core claim remains: the physical universe is fundamentally composed of the same experiential “stuff” that constitutes our own minds.

The Parsimony of the Living World

Ultimately, the informative value of panpsychism lies in its parsimony. It provides a “Unified Field Theory” for the mind and the body. Instead of having to explain two separate worlds—the “dead” world of physics and the “vibrant” world of the mind—panpsychism suggests they are two sides of the same coin. It allows us to maintain the rigor of physical science while acknowledging the reality of our own internal lives. By identifying consciousness as an intrinsic feature of matter, we move away from a world where the mind somehow “pops” into existence, and toward a world where the mind is a fundamental part of the cosmic fabric. This shift doesn’t change the equations of physics, but it changes our understanding of what those equations are actually describing.

📚 Recommended Reading on the Metaphysics of Panpsychism

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