Panpsychism

15 October 2005

Clouds...

Am I unfair to panpsychism? Joseph McCard tells me he thinks it is not a 'strange idea' at all.

Subjectively at least, it seems strange to me; in fact, the idea that everything has within it at least a spark of consciousness strikes me as faintly nightmarish. So when I walk down the road, I'm treading on countless minds; pushing my way through gassy clouds of, well, conscious entities? Not an agreeable thought. Rationally, more to the point, I still think panpsychism looks like a dead end. The way I see it, the problem before us is to account for the phenomenon of consciousness, which seems an inexplicable anomaly in the mechanistic world described by physics. Panpsychists make the problem easier by taking a different angle - maybe it isn't an anomaly after all, but a ubiqitous property of everything; it just looks like a special property of human beings from a human being's perspective. This is a neat piece of footwork, but in my view the problem it leaves behind - how to account for the difference between our form of consciousness and the form posessed by a lump of iron, say - is just as bad as the one we started with; in addition, we incur the huge metaphysical commitment of all that consciousness out there which is lying around apparently doing nothing.

I think this, or something like it, is still the orthodox view in philosophical circles. Panpsychism is still often regarded as absurd - so much at odds with common sense that it discredits any theory with which it is associated. The 1987 Oxford Companion to the Mind brusquely equates panpsychism with animism, a 'belief common among primitive peoples...'  This is inaccurate as well as inadequate: besides ignoring the more sophisticated forms of panpsychism, it overlooks the fact that Shinto, for example, is animistic but not panpsychist: certain salient creatures and objects are considered to enjoy human-style personality, but it's not believed that everything is animate.

Paraphrasing a bit, Joseph challenges three of the things I said in the earlier piece. First, he does not consider the empirical unprovability of panpsychism is necessarily a problem; lots of things appear to be unprovable, and a panpsychist's knowledge of consciousness is not based on material evidence, anyway, but on subjective experience. I can see that one's knowledge of one's own consciousness is like that, but I'm not sure how you can subjectively know about the consciousness of other objects, unless by some mystic experience. The claim to have such an experience would not in itself be illegitimate, but it would be optimistic to think that your own private experiences could be convincing to those who haven't had similar ones.

Second, Joseph claims Occam's Razor is on his side, because panpsychism allows you to believe the world consists only of consciousness, a very large simplification. I don't know about that: it sounds more like idealism than panpsychism, as if we've moved on from the view that everything has a mind to the distinct view that everything is a mind. I believe it's not uncommon for panpsychist theories to have a tinge of idealism - but to me it seems another kettle of fish altogether, and not therefore an advantage of panpsychism per se.

Third, Joseph addresses the point about what entities qualify for consciousness: is my foot separately conscious? If a brick is conscious, is half of it conscious separately at the same time? I don't mean to present this as a knock-down argument against panpsychism: but it's another problem which I think panpsychists have to deal with. There are various ways this might be done - by distinguishing somehow between real individuals and composites, for example, or by setting up some hierarchical arrangement. Every option has its attractions and its problems, but whichever we take, we incur a further explanatory burden.

So I'm not convinced: but I think I would concede that I haven't done the range and subtlety of panpsychist theories anything like full justice. David Skrbina, earlier this year, published a substantial survey of the history and influence of panpsychistic thought ('Panpsychism in the West'): I'm afraid this is among the many interesting books I haven't yet read, but his article in the JCS (Volume 10, number 3) covers similar ground more briefly.

The first point to acknowledge, perhaps, is that panpsychism does come in many forms. At one end of the spectrum there are indeed more or less animistic views which attribute fully sentient, human-style souls to trees or rivers and so on; somewhere off to one side there are theories which regard the sentience of all individual things as offshoots from a pantheistic universal mind; and more popular in recent times, there are panexperientialist ideas which confer on material objects only a basic capacity for phenomenal experience. This range of views illustrates a point made by Skrbina, namely that panpsychism is not, in itself, a theory of mind, but a view which can coexist with many different theories. It tells us that minds are everywhere, but we can hold any number of different views about their nature.

Skrbina's comprehensive historical survey certainly succeeds in demonstrating the existence of a large number of adherents and sympathisers for panpsychist ideas, though there doesn't seem to be any sense of a panpsychist tradition; it's more a matter of a sequence of individual enthusiasts. In some cases, he finds interesting but (to me at any rate) obscure panpsychists like Francesco Patrizi, who apparently has an ontology with nine different levels; in others, he draws attention to the panpsychist views of people (Cardano, for example, and Fechner) who are slightly more familiar, but whose claims to fame actually stem from largely unrelated intellectual achievements. But he also provides a novel perspective on a number of major figures. I don't know why, but I don't think I'd ever really thought of Leibniz in a panpsychic context. But if the world ultimately consists of monads, and monads are souls, then it surely follows that the world consists of souls. I tend to think of Leibnizian monads as generally more akin to points of view than to full-blown human souls. This suggests another possible property of the spectrum of panpsychist views; that the ontological commitment involved gradually diminishes as we progress across it. To believe that a mountain has human-style thoughts and intentions requires some quite hefty additional beliefs about the world; to believe that everything has the basic qualities required for a dim glow of experience is less of a stretch. If you downgrade the commitment enough, at some point you end up with a theory which is undoubtedly true, but has ceased to be very interesting (or very panpsychistic for that matter): you merely believe that everything has the capacity to be part of a mind.

Could it be that a gradual drift in this direction will eventually eliminate genuinely panpsychist ideas? Not, I think, any time soon; there's a lot more to be said on the subject yet.