Panpsychism is the idea that mental properties are not restricted to humans and other organisms with highly developed nervous systems, nor even to living things. Rather, according to panpsychism consciousness is a property of everything in the natural world. That is to say, in addition to possessing physical properties such as mass, energy and charge, every constituent of the natural world also possesses mental properties.
The idea has ancient roots but as a modern Western concept it can be traced back to the 17th and 18th century philosophers Baruch Spinoza and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. In the 20th century a form of panpsychism was espoused by Bertrand Russell, but for the most part the idea has been out of favour. In recent years, however, panpsychism has enjoyed something of a resurgence in the fields of consciousness studies and philosophy of mind. This is because, as odd as the idea may seem at first blush, it does suggest an approach that some believe can solve the problems faced by two opposing models of the mind-body relationship. Dualism conceives of the mind as a non-physical entity, which raises the question of how a non-physical entity can have effects on and be affected by physical entities. Physicalism, on the other hand, has difficulty accounting for all aspects of consciousness thru physical mechanisms. Panpsychism promises to solve both these problems at a single blow, so it is perhaps not surprising that there are people involved in investigating the questions pertaining to consciousness who are seriously considering it.
One of panpsychism’s most prominent defenders is philosopher Philip Goff of Durham University in the UK. He has been a bit more prominent than usual lately, having just published a book meant for a general audience called Galileo’s Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness. I have not yet read this book, but there is an abundance of readily available material in which he describes his position. For example:
A discussion/debate with physicist Sean Carroll on his “Mindscape” podcast.
A written debate with fellow philosopher Massimo Pigliucci.
The lecture recorded in the video below (I will just observe that, IMHO, his arguments are made that much more appealing by the fact that he sounds like he could be the fifth member of The Beatles) :
He’s also one of the co-authors of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy‘s entry on panpsychism, which as a result is likely reflective of many of his views.
Based on the above and other sources, I offer this summary of his argument: Goff starts by considering the very nature of science itself, which by his account was set in place by Galileo who determined the natural world was best understood through the language of mathematics. Galileo also recognized, however, that there were qualitative aspects of the world that could not be mathematically quantified, such as the way a colour looks or a food tastes to us. These, he believed, did not arise from the natural world but, rather, from the soul of the observer. Quantitative science is able to give a full account of the physical world that exists apart from the observer. Crucial for Goff’s argument, however, is the fact that science, as conceived by Galileo, was not even intended to help understand the qualitative aspects of our world and, as such, cannot be used to understand the universe in its entirety.
Goff sees his ideas as closely aligned with and building on those put forth by Bertrand Russell and Arthur Eddington in the 1930’s. Russell and Eddington took the view that while physics is well-suited to understanding the behaviour of the things in its purview, it is unable to say anything about their nature. That is to say, even though we can use physics to describe the mass, charge and spin of an electron, and predict with great accuracy how it will behave under specific conditions, this only amounts to a description of what an electron does. It does not tell us what an electron is. Its fundamental nature remains a quality that cannot be captured in the mathematical, quantitative language of science.
When we turn to the topic of consciousness a similar problem arises. For all we have discovered about the physical workings of the brain, we still have not arrived at a satisfactory account of how these physical and chemical processes give rise to the qualitative experiences that characterize consciousness. In Goff’s view, this is not just because our scientific knowledge is incomplete, and he does not believe that when our scientific understanding is complete we will have such an account. His position is that it is not possible, even in principle, for a complete scientific understanding of the brain to explain consciousness, because science (as currently practiced) is simply the wrong tool for the job.
In this view, consciousness is not some anomalous entity or process that is poorly understood because it stands apart from anything in the universe. Rather, there is nothing else in the universe that we understand so well, because we are able to experience it directly, from the “inside” as it were. “Consciousness” is not here viewed as something that emerges only from particular arrangements of neural tissue. It is, instead, a fundamental aspect of all reality. This is not to say, however, that all of reality experiences the world in the same way that we do. If it is hard enough to imagine what it is like to be a bat, how much more difficult it is to imagine what it is like to be an electron? For that reason, I wonder if it would not be less confusing to use a more neutral and less freighted term like “nature” for the qualitative aspects of reality that Goff is describing, but then that might de-emphasize the radical nature of what he is proposing.
What I find most interesting about this argument is that it situates the problem of consciousness in a broader context, and this is touched on in the discussion with Carroll. Carroll keeps bringing things back to his own field of physics, where in his view once every single physical parameter of a particle has been determined, and its behaviour can be described and predicted thru mathematical formulae, our job is done. We have completely described this particle in all respects, and there is nothing more that can be known about it. He sees the issue of consciousness as no different, except that our understanding the brain processes that underlie consciousness is considerably less complete than that of the physical aspects of the electron. If and when our knowledge of those brain processes is complete, he says, our work there will also be done. Goff, of course, disagrees.
The parallel I see is that in physics, despite the extreme accuracy of the mathematical equations used to characterize the wave function of a particle or system under quantum mechanics, there remains a dissatisfying sense that we still don’t know what these formulae actually describe. What is a particle doing when it is not being measured? There are a number of possible interpretations of quantum mechanics, each very different from the other, and all of of which remain on the table because there is no experiment that can be done to confirm or refute any of them. If I understand Goff correctly, this problem is one side of a coin, the other side of which is the problem of consciousness. The thing that is described by the wave function has a qualitative aspect that cannot be captured by mathematical science. This aspect he calls “consciousness” and it is the same sort of thing that makes up the qualitative aspect of how we experience the world. This is made explicit when he says to Carroll that he views the properties of an electron (its charge, spin, mass, etc.) as expressions of its “consciousness.” This suggests to me that his use of the word “consciousness” is much broader than the sense with which we are most familiar.
All well and good. But I then find myself in the situation I often do when considering non-physicalist models of the mind: What do we do with them? Goff draws a comparison to scientific theories like general relativity, which began as rather outlandish-sounding ideas. However, these could still be tested thru quantitative science. Goff is suggesting that we need a “new science” that will allow us to test the qualitative aspects of the universe with the same degree of reliability that we can its quantitative aspects. Only then will we be able to understand consciousness. But what would such a “new science” look like? Should we even assume that such a thing can exist? Is there any reason to consider it a better bet to put one’s money on this “new science” ever being developed, as opposed to waiting for the regular “old” science to answer the problem of consciousness?
Returning yet again to quantum physics: For most of the past century the dominant paradigm there has been the Copenhagen Interpretation which takes the position that, since we can know nothing of the universe except through measurement, it is pointless to engage in endless debate over what the universe is doing when it is not measured. The intuition that there is a “something” that exists behind the mathematical construct of the wave function of a particle is perhaps as difficult to shake as the perception that our phenomenal consciousness exists. But it may be that, even if both exist, they are beyond our abilities to fully grasp. The Copenhagen Interpretation has often been summarized by the aphorism “Shut up and calculate.” Perhaps the equivalent in consciousness studies could be “Shut up and correlate.”