Panpsychism
[8] Contemporary academic proponents, however, hold that sentience or subjective experience is ubiquitous, while distinguishing these qualities from more complex human mental attributes.
In the form of panpsychism under discussion in the contemporary literature, conscious experience is present everywhere at a fundamental level, hence the term panexperientialism.
[1] Originally, the term panexperientialism had a narrower meaning, having been coined by David Ray Griffin to refer specifically to the form of panpsychism used in process philosophy (see below).
[8] Plato argues for panpsychism in his Sophist, in which he writes that all things participate in the form of Being and that it must have a psychic aspect of mind and soul (psyche).
[13]Stoicism developed a cosmology that held that the natural world is infused with the divine fiery essence pneuma, directed by the universal intelligence logos.
Though there were mediaeval theologians, such as John Scotus Eriugena, who ventured what might be called panpsychism, it was not a dominant strain in philosophical theology.
But in the Italian Renaissance, it enjoyed something of a revival in the thought of figures such as Gerolamo Cardano, Bernardino Telesio, Francesco Patrizi, Giordano Bruno, and Tommaso Campanella.
Cardano argued for the view that soul or anima was a fundamental part of the world, and Patrizi introduced the term panpsychism into philosophical vocabulary.
[8] Platonist ideas resembling the anima mundi (world soul) also resurfaced in the work of esoteric thinkers such as Paracelsus, Robert Fludd, and Cornelius Agrippa.
[4] In Spinoza's monism, the one single infinite and eternal substance is "God, or Nature" (Deus sive Natura), which has the aspects of mind (thought) and matter (extension).
Schiller, Ernst Haeckel, William Kingdon Clifford and Thomas Carlyle[15] as well as psychologists such as Gustav Fechner, Wilhelm Wundt, Rudolf Hermann Lotze all promoted panpsychist ideas.
[citation needed] Josiah Royce, the leading American absolute idealist, held that reality is a "world self", a conscious being that comprises everything, though he didn't necessarily attribute mental properties to the smallest constituents of mentalistic "systems".
The American pragmatist philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce espoused a sort of psycho-physical monism in which the universe is suffused with mind, which he associated with spontaneity and freedom.
[21][19]: 158 [22] In 1990, the physicist David Bohm published "A new theory of the relationship of mind and matter," a paper based on his interpretation of quantum mechanics.
[4] This misreading attributes to Whitehead an ontology according to which the basic nature of the world is made up of atomic mental events, termed "actual occasions".
[31] The British philosopher David Papineau, while distancing himself from orthodox panpsychists, has written that his view is "not unlike panpsychism" in that he rejects a line in nature between "events lit up by phenomenology [and] those that are mere darkness".
[35] Science editor Annaka Harris argues that panpsychism is a viable theory in her 2019 book Conscious, though she stops short of fully endorsing it.
Panexperientialism is associated with the philosophies of, among others, Charles Hartshorne and Alfred North Whitehead, although the term itself was invented by David Ray Griffin to distinguish the process philosophical view from other varieties of panpsychism.
[8] Whitehead's process philosophy argues that the fundamental elements of the universe are "occasions of experience", which can together create something as complex as a human being.
Various books of the Lorber Revelations say that specifica, closely resembling Leibniz's monads, form the most basic, irreducible substance of all physical and metaphysical creation.
[58][62] Similarly, Soto Zen master Dogen argued that "insentient beings expound" the teachings of the Buddha, and wrote about the "mind" (心, shin) of "fences, walls, tiles, and pebbles".
[77] Because panpsychism encompasses a wide range of theories, it can in principle be compatible with reductive materialism, dualism, functionalism, or other perspectives depending on the details of a given formulation.
[81] In The Conscious Mind, David Chalmers writes that, in some instances, the differences between "Russell's neutral monism" and his property dualism are merely semantic.
[95] Daniel Dennett called the hard problem a "hunch", and maintained that conscious experience, as it is usually understood, is merely a complex cognitive illusion.
[96][97] Patricia Churchland, also an eliminative materialist, maintains that philosophers ought to be more patient: neuroscience is still in its early stages, so Chalmers's hard problem is premature.
After some argumentation Chalmers narrows it down further to Russellian monism, concluding that thoughts, actions, intentions and emotions may just be the quiddities of neurotransmitters, neurons, and glial cells.
Bohm argued that it is rather a clash of classical physics, quantum mechanics, and phenomenology; all three levels of description seem to be difficult to reconcile, or even contradictory.
Leaning toward the many-worlds interpretation due to its mathematical parsimony, he believes his variety of panpsychist property dualism may be the theory Penrose is seeking.
[94] Panpsychist interpretations of quantum mechanics have been put forward by such philosophers as Whitehead,[4] Shan Gao,[109] Michael Lockwood,[4] and Hoffman, who is a cognitive scientist.
[30] Philosophers such as Chalmers have argued that theories of consciousness should be capable of providing insight into the brain and mind to avoid the problem of mental causation.
