Panpsychism: what it is, and philosophical theories that defend it

Since the dawn of philosophy, the human being has asked himself several questions: to what extent is consciousness something uniquely human? Do other animals have consciousness? even the simplest? The rocks, the water, the grass… could all of this have consciousness?

panpsychism It is the set of philosophical doctrines in which it is defended that consciousness is not something exclusive to the human species, that other living beings and even inanimate elements can have it or have subjective perceptions of the world that wraps up.

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What is panpsychism?

The word panpsychism (from the Greek “pan”, “everything, anything” and “psyché” “soul, mind”) refers to the set of philosophical doctrines in which it is maintained that it is not only people, beings, who have a conscience. That is, panpsychists believe that other forms of life or even objects that, at first glance, we would call inanimate, they may possess properly conscious qualities or have a subjective perception of the world that surrounds.

It should be noted that panpsychist ideas are not all the same. There are those who defend the view that not only animals that, from a very anthropocentric perspective, could be classify as superior or that, thanks to their more or less large and developed brain, they would be capable of housing consciousness. This vision of being aware has also been related to insects, plants and even microorganisms. The most extensive and radical panpsychism defends the idea that subjective experience is ubiquitous: it is found in everything.

Historical background

Below we will briefly see each period in which doctrines have been presented, in one way or another. panpsychists, their authors and what was their exact view of the concept of consciousness in all, or almost all, stuff.

1. Classic Greece

Although they did not have a specific term to define the idea found in the concept of panpsychism, Since the time of Ancient Greece, it has been philosophized about consciousness and subjective experience..

In times before the Socratic school, Thales of Miletus, who is considered the first philosopher, he defended the idea that "everything was full of gods", that is, he had a pantheistic vision of nature.

According to Thales, within each object, each animal, each grain of sand, there was something with properties similar to what we understand by consciousness.. This idea is considered one of the first panpsychist doctrines.

Years later, Plato, expounding his philosophy, defended the idea that all things, insofar as they are something and, therefore, exist, must have some property that can also be found in the mind and soul, things that, for him, also they existed. The world, from the vision of Plato, was something with a soul and intelligence, and that each element that composed it was also a living entity.

2. Renaissance

With the arrival of the Middle Ages, Greek philosophy fell into darkness, as did many other Hellenic knowledges and contributions.

However, centuries later, Thanks to the arrival of the light that the Renaissance represented, panpsychist ideas managed to resurface and figures such as Gerolamo Cardano, Giordano Bruno, and Francesco Patrizi contributed visions of him. In fact, it is to this last Italian philosopher that we owe the invention of the expression “panpsychism”.

For Cardano the soul, which could well be understood as consciousness, was a fundamental part of the world, something that could not be separated from reality.

Giordano Bruno considered that nothing in this world could come without a soul or without having a vital principle.. Everything had to have an essence that, to a greater or lesser extent, was reminiscent of what we human beings identify as consciousness.

3. XVII century

Baruch Spinoza and Gottfried Leibniz presented two panpsychist doctrines.

Spinoza says that reality is made up of a single substance, which is eternal and would come to be something synonymous with God or the concept of Nature. We would all be a whole, something conscious but in its entirety.

Instead, Leibniz speaks of the idea that reality is made up of small conscious units, infinite and indivisible (monads) which are the fundamental structures of the universe, something like the atoms of the awareness.

• You may be interested: "Baruch Spinoza: biography of this Sephardic philosopher and thinker"

4. Twentieth century

Arrived at the 20th century, the most outstanding figure of panpsychism we have in Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947). In his ontology, he presented the idea that the basic nature of the world is made up of events and processes, that they are created and that they are destroyed. These processes are elementary events, which he calls "occasions" and are part of the idea of ​​the mental. For him, mental operations had an impact on the constitution of nature, they shaped reality.

Carl Jung He argued that the psyche and matter were contained in the same world, and that they were in constant contact with each other. Psyche and matter are two different aspects of the same thing, as if they were part of the same coin.

panpsychism today

With the arrival of the Second World War, the panpsychist doctrines were losing strength in the face of logical positivism. However, they made a comeback in 1979 with the publication of the article "Panpsychism" by Thomas Nagel. Later, other authors, such as Galen Strawson with his 2006 article Realistic Monism: Why Physicalism Entails Panpsychism dared to approach the concept of panpsychism much more scientifically than ever before.

Today we have the idea that consciousness is one of the fundamental truths of human existence. Each of us is aware of what we feel, what we perceive. Perhaps we do not have enough linguistic skills to be able to express it, but we have a subjective perception of reality. Our consciousness is what we know in the most direct way possible, there is no way to separate ourselves from it.

However, in the same way that it is much closer to us than the desk where we work, the glasses or the clothes we wear, is in turn the aspect of ourselves, as a species that most mystery follows us producing. What is consciousness?

David Chalmers, an Australian analytical philosopher, has been speaking about his panpsychist view of reality, from a much more current perspective and with a language more typical of the century in which we are if we compare it with Plato or Schopenhauer. He actually exposes it very extensively in his book The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory (1996), in which he explains the need to understand to what extent it is not necessary to accept that other living beings, however basic they may be, can have consciousness.

In this book he talks about two problems that science faces when trying to understand consciousness which show that it is not possible to completely discard the idea of ​​consciousness outside the species human. He calls these two problems the easy problem and the hard problem of consciousness:

The easy problem of conscience

With an easy problem of consciousness, he talks about how science, especially neuroscience, has treated to investigate about consciousness but establishing, a priori, the object of study they want approach. That is, it is specified in each investigation on an aspect related to consciousness and they describe it in an empirically observable way. So that, We speak of conscience as the ability to discriminate, categorize and react to a certain stimulus, or fix attention, control deliberate behavior.

To better understand this idea, let's see a fairly descriptive example. Let's think about how human beings see colors. Scientists know that the fact that we see something red, green or blue is due to the fact that objects with those colors emit light rays with different wavelengths.

Thus, these rays, when entering the eye, affect the cones, the cells specialized in color distinction. Depending on the wavelength, one type of cone or another will be activated. When activated, these cones will send an electrical impulse that will go through the optic nerve and, this, will reach the areas of the brain responsible for processing color.

All this is a very brief explanation of what are the neurobiological correlates of color perception in the human eye, and could be verified by an experiment of distinguishing objects with different color, neuroimaging techniques that show which areas are activated when doing this activity, etc. It is empirically provable.

The difficult problem of conscience

Chalmers states in his book that science is not ready, and perhaps never will be, to demonstrate through empirical techniques how the experience of a specific stimulus occurs. We are not talking about how they are activated according to which cells or brain areas; we talk about the subjective experience itself: how can it be recorded?

When we think or perceive a stimulus, it is clear that we process it, as in the previous case of color, however there is a subjective aspect that cannot be explained in such a scientific way. How is it possible for us to see the color green as the color green? Why that particular color? Why in front of a certain wavelength do we perceive just that color and not another?

Not only human beings have consciousness

As we were commenting before, the idea of ​​panpsychism, that is, that everything has a conscience or soul, gives understand that objects that at first do not seem like something with a certain consciousness could have it in TRUE.

Today, and along the same lines as with classical philosophers like Leibniz, there are those who defend that each particle possesses a consciousness and, as a whole, they can create more complex systems, as would be the case with consciousness human. Each particle has a minimum consciousness that, added to those of the others, generates a greater.

Until relatively recently, the idea that only human beings were capable of experiencing anything was pretty widespread, both in science and in culture general. It was more or less accepted that other animal species, especially large primates or complex animals, could feel a subjective experience. and be, to a greater or lesser extent, aware.

However, the American neuroscientist Christof Koch considers that it does not make much sense to think that only phylogenetically close humans and animals can have consciousness is not as logical as it could be to think

Although it does not go to a vision as radical as that of a stone can feel when it is kicked, it does defend that, until it is demonstrated On the contrary, the idea that multicellular organisms cannot experience pain or pleasure is not at all as crazy as one might think.

They may have an infinitely vaguer-than-human sense of being alive, but that doesn't mean they don't. With smaller brains, or not even anything you can call a brain, their sense of being conscious will be less sophisticated than ours, but it will still be there. It would be a living being that would have its own way of feeling subjectively.

Another interesting case is that of plants. Stefano Mancuso, in his interesting book Sensitivity and intelligence in the plant world exposes his research on the intelligent behavior of plants, to which he manages to give consciousness.

While it is difficult to discuss the idea that plants are self-aware, his research group, based on his research, concluded that plants They were far from being considered passive organisms: they have to have some kind of consciousness, from which their intelligence would be extracted, in order to adapt in the way that they do. make.

Criticism of panpsychism

The greatest criticism leveled at panpsychism, and using terms inspired by the idea of ​​the difficult problem of consciousness, is the so-called "combination problem". How do these little particles with supposed tiny consciousnesses assemble it to form a more complex consciousness?

Starting from the idea that our atoms are conscious particles and from their combination our consciousness arises human, more complex and, so to speak, “more self-aware”: what if we humans were like particles conscious? Is humanity, as a whole, a conscious superorganism? Nature, as Spinoza said, is all a conscious substance? How do we manage to be doing something with higher consciousness, without us being aware of it?