a belief that there is something fundamentally, ontologically unique about the brains of higher animals, and that they alone among all the physical structures of the universe can support mental processes. This second point seems reasonable at first glance, but upon reflection is almost inconceivable; we have not a trace of a theory that would account for such a situation, and there is no physiological data that would support it.

they found justification for seeing mind in the lower animals, plants, microbes, and even the inorganic realm. On such a view, mind becomes a general and perhaps fundamental property of nature. Mind would then exist, in some form, in all things. Broadly speaking, this is the view known as panpsychism.

with the rise of analytic, linguistic, and anti-metaphysical philosophy in the early twentieth century, panpsychism was pushed to the sidelines of intellectual discourse.

I will therefore interpret panpsychism in a soft sense: that mind is very widespread, is nearly universal in extent, and crosses deeply into the inorganic realm. The precise extent of mind depends on the particular theory at hand.

Another distinction for panpsychism is the unique role that it has played in the history of philosophy. As I mentioned, it is almost certainly the most ancient conception of the psyche. In the forms of animism and polytheism, it was probably the dominant view for most or all of the pre-historical era. Eastern cultures have a nearly continuous record of panpsychist metaphysics, right through the modern era. 2 It was also widely accepted, though not often explicitly argued for, in the early years of Western thought. With the emergence of Christian theology, panpsychism fell into decline for a number of centuries, but it made a comeback with the naturalist philosophers of the sixteenth century. Support grew steadily in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, reaching a zenith in the late 1800s and the early 1900s. With the advent of logical positivism and conventional materialism or physicalism, 3 panpsychism was once again driven down, along with most metaphysical theories, to a relatively low standing. In the past few years there has been a resurgence of sorts, and it has once more become a topic of serious philosophical inquiry. Panpsychism poses a unique challenge to the dominant physicalist view of today, and thus assumes a role of special importance.

Panpsychism offers resolutions to mind-body problems that dualism and materialism find intractable. Present-day philosophy of mind is dominated by materialist theories that cannot adequately address issues of consciousness, qualia, or the emergence of mind in the universe.

Present-day philosophical thinking, and even present-day social and political systems, are largely rooted in a mechanistic view of the cosmos that was inherited from Hobbes, Descartes, and Newton: the view of the universe as a place of dead, insensate matter driven by mechanical forces. In such a universe, mind is an unexplained and perhaps unexplainable mystery, a “great exception” in the cosmic scheme. Throughout history, panpsychism has served, at almost every point, as an antipode to this mechanistic theory of mind and reality.

Analysis of mind inevitably addresses such matters as consciousness, sentience, cognition, belief, qualia, and so on—all of which are ambiguous and contentious.

There are many terms in the philosophical literature that relate to noetic qualities and abilities, and a brief survey will unearth the following (among many others): consciousness, self-consciousness, thought, cognition, intelligence, feelings, experience, inner life, what-it-is-like (to be something), qualitative feel, qualia, will, phenomenal feel, awareness, belief, perception, sense, sentience, and subjectivity. All these terms obviously evolved in a human context, and the meanings of all are rooted in our collective human experiences.

Upon laying out a panpsychist position, one is immediately faced with the charge that he believes that “rocks are conscious”—a statement taken as so obviously ludicrous that panpsychism can be safely dismissed out of hand.

The last major panpsychist philosopher to discuss the soul was Gustav Fechner, in the mid 1800s; since that time, there has been almost no such talk in serious philosophical discourse. We find occasional reference to the somewhat preferable term ‘spirit’, but even this carries an air of superstition and mystery, and thus is best avoided. Talk of the soul is best left to the theologians, or to those philosophers who prefer to speak poetically or metaphorically.

With perhaps one or two minor exceptions, panpsychism has not involved the soul for more than 200 years. No present-day panpsychist interprets psyche as “soul.” Panpsychism is not a spiritual or theological theory. It is as naturalistic, rationalistic, and hard-nosed as any current theory of mind.

Information processing is a generally distinct property from thinking, on most accounts, and is best treated as such. Therefore thinking, along with consciousness and soul, are probably best avoided when speaking of properties of universal mind.

animism, hylozoism, pansensism, panbiotism, vitalism, pantheism, panentheism, and panexperientialism.

animism has a strong air of superstition and mystery. It is most commonly used in a primitive, pre-scientific sense in which objects have identifiable and characteristic spirits—e.g., “the spirit of the tree” inhabiting an oak or “the water-spirit” inhabiting a lake. These spirits typically have a human-like personality or other qualities that exhibit the properties of a rational person, perhaps including intelligence, belief, memory, emotion, and agency. Furthermore, such spirits are typically not bound to the physical realm; they are, in some vague sense, immaterial and supernatural beings.

Scientists and philosophers thus speculated that an extra substance or principle of some sort, something non-physical, was present in living organisms. This vital force or élan vital was widely sought, but never found.

Henri Bergson, who was an explicit vitalist and borderline panpsychist.

nearly every contemporary philosopher of mind is an emergentist. They believe that, in the distant past, mind did not exist. Today, it does. Ergo, it must have emerged, in an absolute sense, from an organic milieu that was devoid of mind. Yes, they say, this must have happened; admittedly, they are not sure when or how, but self-evidently, it must have occurred.

They believe, explicitly or implicitly, that there was a point in the past history of the Earth—say, a few hundred million years ago—when there were no mind-bearing organisms in existence. Before Homo sapiens, before mammalian life, before any “higher animals” at all, there were no experiencing beings on the planet. Biology ran strictly on unthinking, unperceiving, unfeeling instinct.

Time, for instance, seems inconceivable to have ever emerged from a timeless cosmos. So too with space; we simply cannot conceive how spatiality could have come into being in a universe that was non-spatial. Time and space must have always existed, everywhere. They are “pan” qualities of reality. Other entities likely fall into this non-emergent category. Mass/ energy may be one. And certain sub-atomic qualities, like spin, charge, and quantum state, may be the same. Panpsychists add one more item to the list: mind. Experientiality, subjectivity, qualia … the emergence of such things is inconceivable, from a universe utterly without them. If they did, it is a true miracle. And if we allow miracles, then anything is possible. Panpsychists prefer a rational, naturalistic, and non-miraculous universe. And in such a universe, mind must have always been present.

third form of the emergence problem is ontogenic. Consider a developing human fetus. When, in the span of those nine months, does the fetus suddenly acquire a mind? For the emergentist, a fertilized egg is utterly mindless, whereas a newborn infant is (presumably) fully experiential. So the emergentist must ask, At what point in the process does the light suddenly switch on? But any answer he gives will be deficient. No single moment in time, no specific number of cells, is necessary and sufficient to switch on consciousness or sentience.

One is either an emergentist, or one is a panpsychist. There seems to be no middle ground. 13 Either the early Earth—and the early universe—was mindless, or it was not. If we claim that it was originally mindless, we have an obligation to explain the miraculous, brute emergence of the experiencing subject. If we cannot explain it, the panpsychist case becomes all the stronger.

Some form of panpsychism seems to have been taken for granted by nearly all major pre-Socratics. Hence they provide not arguments for it but rather their own interpretations of it, using their uniquely personal terminology and concepts.

The Milesian worldview, therefore, possessed three fundamental qualities: (1) It reflected a rational order, governed by a logos, and thus formed a coherent and comprehensible system. (2) It was evolutionary, in the sense that things moved through the world and developed or changed over time, toward a telos or end. (3) It was inherently animated. 1

For the Milesians, matter (hyle) possessed life (zoe) as an essential quality. Something like hylozoism was simply accepted as a brute condition of reality.

Consider first the concept of psyche. In addition to its common interpretation as soul, it has other important meanings and associations, including spirit, life, breath, and mind. The psyche was connected with the life energy of living things, with the divine animating spirit that produced motion in physical objects, and with the activity of the mind.

Psyche, then, is the energy that animates and produces movement in all things, including the movement of thoughts and ideas.

That some rocks exhibit greater powers of psyche than others is comparable to the notion that humans are just animals of a certain type, and that they exhibit distinctive noetic powers.