Panpsychism

Philosopher Galen Strawson argues that panpsychism is actually less weird than materialism—after all, how could utterly mindless matter ever give rise to consciousness? If electrons possess even the tiniest glimmer of proto-experience, then human consciousness becomes a matter of combination rather than miraculous emergence. This makes panpsychism feel less like mysticism and more like acknowledging that experience is as fundamental to reality as mass or charge.

Gottfried Leibniz demolished the "brain-as-machine" view with a devastating thought experiment in 1714: imagine shrinking yourself down and walking through a thinking brain like a mill—you'd see gears and levers, but never a single thought. His solution was that everything from atoms to humans consists of "monads," conscious units experiencing reality from their unique perspective. Three centuries later, neuroscientists still can't explain how neurons firing create the redness of red, suggesting Leibniz saw something we're only now rediscovering.

The "combination problem" remains panpsychism's Achilles heel: if every particle is conscious, why aren't rocks depressed or your liver contemplating existence? Philosopher William James compared it to trying to make a sentence by combining individual letters that each already mean something different. Contemporary panpsychists like Philip Goff propose that only certain organizational structures—like brains—allow micro-experiences to combine into unified consciousness, though exactly how remains philosophy's most expensive open question.

Panpsychism radically reframes the AI consciousness debate: rather than asking if sufficiently complex computers become conscious, we'd ask what kind of experience they already have. This shift matters practically—if even simple information processing involves some proto-experience, we might owe moral consideration to much simpler systems than expected. Tech ethicist Joanna Bryson warns this could either expand our moral circle beautifully or paralyze us from updating our phones, depending on how we handle the implications.

Indigenous animist traditions—long dismissed as primitive superstition—suddenly look philosophically sophisticated through panpsychism's lens. When a Ojibwe elder says rocks have spirit or Australian Aboriginal elders describe consciousness in landscape, they're articulating something closer to Whitehead's process philosophy than to Disney anthropomorphism. This convergence is healing colonial wounds in academia, as Western philosophy catches up to what traditional ecological knowledge maintained all along.

Panpsychism elegantly solves an evolutionary puzzle: consciousness didn't have to mysteriously "turn on" at some point in evolutionary history. Instead, it was always there, growing more complex as nervous systems developed—like how flight existed in insects before eagles perfected it. This means the first stirrings of awareness happened not in Cambrian creatures but in the first self-organizing systems, making consciousness potentially billions of years older than brains and possibly explaining why it feels so fundamental to existence itself.