Hello, readers. I have returned to study with the aim of completing my MA in Philosophy. The following is an essay I wrote for the course, a paper on Philosophy of Religion. I hope you enjoy it.
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One recent major development in the ongoing conversation conducted by philosophers among themselves is the appearance of a new theory concerning consciousness and the material world. This new theory, known as ‘panpsychism’, has become very popular because it seems to many to help solve the ‘hard problem of consciousness’. Panpsychists believe that mental properties, conscious states, are possessed by all material things, all physical things. The most widely believed postulate as to the kind of mental properties possessed by material objects among panpsychists is that all objects possess experience. However other kinds of mental property have sometimes been suggested, such as feeling, perception, or agency. Panpsychism comes in two main forms: micropanspychism and cosmopanpsychism. Micropanpsychists believe that the most fundamental level of reality is that of atomic and subatomic particles and that these microscopic entities have rudimentary forms of consciousness. Those micropanpsychists who hold that experience is possessed by all material things, that experience is fundamental, argue that particles have experience .The consciousnesses of creatures like us are composed of billions of these microscopic subjects – but this leads us to the problem of how billions of tiny experiencing minds can sum together to produce the mind of a creature like a human. Cosmopanpsychists, by contrast, think the most fundamental level of reality is the universe as a whole. This raises the inverse problem. If micropanpsychists have a combination problem, cosmopansychicsts have a decombination problem. If all humans, say, participate in a single universal mind, how can we explain the fact that individual minds feel like individual minds and the fact that one human mind may have desires and beliefs that are not compatible with the desires and beliefs of another human mind? The combination problem and the decombination problem are the major obstacles that must be surmounted by defenders of panpsychism.
The purpose of this essay is to discuss panpsychism in relation to life. I shall begin by sketching out the theoretical considerations that have made panpsychism so popular. I shall then move on to the following important question: if, say, subatomic particles possess mental properties, what kind of mental properties must they possess? I shall conclude that we cannot know at all what mental properties are possessed by particles like electrons. I shall then discuss life. Although this seems like a circular definition, one can say that the fundamental difference between a living organism and an inanimate system is that living organisms can die whereas physical systems cannot. (I shall present less circular definitions later.) No living organism is immortal. Because living organisms desire to stay alive and to reproduce, insofar as all living organisms have mental states these mental states must involve values. A living organism desires to eat, to mate sexually if it reproduces this way, to protect itself from predation and adverse environmental stressors such as a too high or too low temperature, so on and so forth. Even if an inanimate system like a river or boulder is made up of billions of tiny minds, the collective mind of such natural objects possess no value-involving mental states because a river can dry up and a boulder erode but neither system endeavours to protect itself from such ‘death’. If the mind of a living organism is made up of a multitude of micro-subjects, the summation of these mini-minds, considered as an organised whole, together want to remain alive. I shall argue that the mind of a living organism is a ‘further fact’, a fact not reducible to the sum of smaller facts. Alternatively, if we presume cosmopanpsychism rather than micropanpsychism, we might then wonder if the universe as a whole can be regarded as a living system, a system that can perish but is trying to stay alive. This possibility is something I shall consider briefly in the conclusion of this essay. My main aim is to defend two claims: firstly, that the living mental life of an organism is a ‘further fact’ that cannot be explained away through some kind of summation of micro-subjects and, secondly, that only living organisms possess mental properties analogous to human mental properties because only organisms can possess values.
We shall begin by defining three terms: ‘panpsychism’, ‘panvitalism’ and ‘pantheism’. Panpsychism is the belief that everything has mental properties. Panvitalism is the belief that everything is alive. Pantheism is the idea that everything together constitutes God, or that God is in everything. In the ancient world, these three concepts were not distinct: many ancients were ‘animists’, believing that supernatural presences could be found be found everywhere in the natural world. However by the Enlightenment all three belief systems had fallen by the wayside. Rene Descartes, in the seventeenth century, first put consciousness centre-stage through an argument that has become a slogan, ‘Cogito ergo sum’. Descartes believed that there was a spiritual substance and a physical substance and that these two substances interacted. His theory is thus known as ‘substance dualism’. He proposed that the mechanism through which these two substances interacted involved the pineal gland in the human brain. Importantly, perhaps partly because of his religious commitments, Descartes thought humans had minds or souls but that animals did not. By the twentieth century, such cynicism had been extended by some scientists to include humans themselves. The psychological theory known as ‘behaviourism’, represented perhaps most notably by Ivan Pavlov and BF Skinner, had as a central methodological principle the axiom that because consciousness and mental states are unobservable they could not and should not be scientifically studied. Although this was a methodological principle, it contributed to the idea that any talk of minds or consciousness at all was mystical balderdash, unscientific. Behaviourism and logical positivism were both popular contemporaneously. After the 1950s, this extreme scepticism concerning the existence of minds in people and animals gradually softened and an important milestone was reached in 1995 with the publication of David Chalmers’s essay “Facing up to the problem of consciousness”. Although this was long past the heyday of behaviourism, this essay marked an important turning point. Scientists might not be able to study consciousness at all but philosophers could write and think about it.
The hard problem of consciousness involves the idea that mental states like qualia cannot be explained away biologically or neurologically. Although neuroscience might be able to sketch out how a stimulus can affect the nervous system and then result in a behaviour, science alone cannot explain consciousness itself. Chalmers presented a thought experiment – imagine a world in which many or all of the apparent human beings in it are simply zombies. They behave exactly like humans in our world but lack consciousness. Chalmers claimed that this world is possible and would be indistinguishable from our own. The view Chalmers presented in this essay is one of causal closure – all physical effects have physical causes. Thus, if minds exist and are not physical, they must be epiphenomenal. (If mental states can have physical effects, if there is not physical causal closure, the zombie world could be distinguished from the physical world.) However, we know for a fact that we ourselves possess consciousness. Thus the reason why consciousness poses a hard problem for philosophers and scientists is that we know ourselves to possess it but cannot study it through the physical sciences.
Chalmers states that he has consciousness himself and takes the courteous position towards his readers of ascribing consciousness to them as well. We assume that all normal humans possess consciousness and, today, often assume that higher-level animals also possess consciousness of some sort. One might be able to tell, for instance, that one’s pet dog is afraid of the noise of thunderstorms and firework displays by observing its behaviour, yelps and whimpers. Our attribution of mental states to other humans and to many animals involves empathy. Although we lack conclusive evidence that the humans we interact with have mental states, we tend to extend to them the courtesy of supposing that they are not zombies. The notion of the limits of potential empathy is explored by the philosopher Thomas Nagel in his 1974 essay, “What Is It Like To Be A Bat?” However it is not obvious that non-human animals possess consciousness. If we were to take the strong position represented by Rene Descarte, that only humans possess consciousness, but set aside his particular kind of Christian ideology and incorporate Darwinian evolution and neuroscience into our picture of the world, we are faced with the question of how consciousness emerges. From the Darwinian angle, we might wonder exactly when, in human evolutionary history, consciousness suddenly appeared. Why is it the case that we have it even though the common ancestor we possessed with chimpanzees presumably did not? We might also suppose that a single neurone lacks consciousness but that suddenly consciousness emerges when enough neurones are packed together and connected with each other. A part of the hard problem of consciousness is the view that if consciousness is possessed by humans (and possibly some animals) but not other animals or plants or bacteria, then it must strongly emerge. This view arises because we regard consciousness as a phenomenon that must either fully exist in some organism or not at all. The notion of strong emergence, that if a system is complex enough consciousness suddenly appears, is difficult for many philosophers to accept. There is a paradox involved here much like the Sorites paradox.
It is because the notion of the strong emergence of consciousness is so hard to accept that many philosophers have recently embraced panpsychism. The supposition that everything has mental states even if these mental states are simple, rudimentary, has ridden to the rescue of all the thinkers who find the sudden appearance of consciousness in sufficiently complex nervous systems too egregious a pill to swallow. It is like saying, drawing by analogy on the Sorites paradox, that every grain of sand in a heap has a little bit of the ‘heapness’ quality to it.
Part of the impetus of the modern movement in philosophy to champion panpsychism comes from the rediscovery of the 1927 work The Analysis of Matter by Bertrand Russell. Russell argues that physics only describes the mathematical properties of matter, only explains how matter interacts with other matter according to mathematical laws. It is a view of the role of physics that goes all the way back to Galileo. But physics tells us nothing about what matter is in itself. Russell argues that physical stuff could be of the same kind as mental stuff and his theory is thus known as ‘neutral monism’. An important premise of the argument as presented by Russell and developed by modern panpsychists is that one can sit in an armchair and, through introspection, arrive at some knowledge of one’s own mental properties. Because one has consciousness oneself and one is a material thing as well as a conscious thing, perhaps all other things are both material and conscious. It seems to me that the attribution of consciousness to things other than oneself, to other people, to some or perhaps all animals, to trees, to planets, to stars, if we go that far, must thus involve something like empathy. If the mental states of other things are entirely unlike one’s own mental states, then the argument falls apart because Russell’s argument depends on the idea that there is some kind of analogy one can draw between one’s own mental states and the mental states of other things. If the mental life of an armchair philosopher is entirely unlike the mental life of his armchair, the analogy fails and it is no longer helpful to claim that the mentalities of the matter that makes up humans and the material world with which humans interact is analogous to the mentalities of the humans themselves.
When through introspection we examine our own mental properties, what do we find? We find emotions, desires, anxieties, fears, memories, cognitions, pains, etc. Many of our simplest impulses find immediate expression through behaviours. I want to stand up and make a coffee to help with the writing of this essay and do so immediately. If there is any truth to micropanpsychism, we must imagine that simple particles like electrons and protons possess mental properties and that these mental properties are at least a little analogous to our own. Opponents of panpsychism often tend to disparage it by saying that it seems to imply that electrons experience emotions, desires, anxieties, fears, memories, cognitions, etc. I want though to take this parodic characterisation seriously. If a free electron is in the vicinity of a positive charge, it will move towards it. Perhaps electrons desire to get closer to positive charges. Arthur Schopenhauer argued that at the heart of all material things is ‘will’ and it is perhaps surprising that in the literature surrounding panpsychism there is very little reference to Schopenhauer. It is surprising because when we hold a book at shoulder level and let it drop to the ground we could imagine it as willing to fall. Similarly we could imagine that an electron wills to get as close as it can to a proton. Alternatively, we might suppose that an electron actually desires to move away from the positive charge and is pulled towards it against its will. There is a difficulty in the notion of ascribing emotions, desires, anxieties, fears, memories, cognitions, pains, etc to entities like electrons because electrons are so entirely unlike humans or higher-level animals that we cannot empathise with them. If a dog is afraid of a thunderstorm and barks or whimpers we can ascribe an emotion of distress to the dog but we lack the sensory cues to establish what emotions, if any, are associated with an electron in the vicinity of a positive charge.
Many panpsychists feel some discomfort about going so far as to ascribe emotions, desires, anxieties, fears, memories, cognitions, etc. to electrons. They argue that if we introspect we find something at the foundation of our own mental life which is experience. It is experience, they argue, which we can truly ascribe to electrons even though we cannot ascribe any other mental properties to them at all. What does it mean to have experiences? It seems that a person’s ego is conscious of the world around him or her. (When a person is asleep, the ego may be conscious, during dreams, of material created by other parts of the mind.) Phenomenologists argue that consciousness always has an element of aboutness to it, directedness. This is termed ‘intention’. To be conscious at all is to be conscious of something else. It might be argued that an electron perceives and experiences the electric and magnetic fields that affect its motion. However there is a problem with this argument. A human visually perceives the world through his or her eyes. Light passes through the lens, falls upon the retina, and triggers signals that pass along the optic nerve, eventually arriving at the back of the brain. An electron lacks eyeballs or anything at all as complex as the visual organs humans and other animals possess. This argument is not intended to push the view that electrons do not experience the world but rather that, if they do experience it, the mental properties associated with this experience are so unlike human mentality that it is impossible to empathise with them. If the ‘experience’ of an electron is utterly unlike the experience of an armchair philosopher, the analogy we need to draw between them to make the argument work is stretched to the point where it becomes too implausible to be credible.
Thus perhaps it is not truly possible to empathise with subatomic particles or larger inanimate objects made up of lifeless matter like rivers and boulders and meteors. If so, it becomes more difficult to claim that they are conscious in a way analogous to the way we are.
I would now like to relate this discussion of panpsychism to living organisms. The Cartesian position that persisted until perhaps the beginning of the twenty-first century is that all conscious creatures are alive but that not all living organisms are conscious. Plants, fungi, and bacteria for instance were regarded as alive but non-conscious. The modern panpsychist argues that all living organisms and, in fact, all non-living systems are conscious. I want to argue, contrary to both positions, that all living things are conscious in the right way and that all beings that are conscious in the right way are alive. I shall explain what I mean by “in the right way” later in the essay.
First, we need to define the term “life”. I shall cite the Oxford English Dictionary first. This dictionary defines life as “the ability to breathe, grow, produce young, etc. that people, animals and plants have before they die and that objects do not have.” Wikipedia provides the following description. “Life is matter that has biological processes, such as signalling and the ability to sustain itself. It is defined descriptively by the capacity for homeostatic organisation, metabolism, growth, adaption, response to stimulation and reproduction . All life eventually reaches a state of death, and none is immortal.” In practice, people collectively have little difficulty distinguishing living organisms from non-living objects and systems – just about the only exception is that biologists have not decided whether viruses are alive or not. We learn to divide the entities we find in our environment into living or non-living entities as soon as we become conversant with biology in high school despite the fact that ‘life’ itself is difficult to define. Although we cannot see bacteria, we learn from biologists that they can be found just about everywhere and put our trust in the biologists when they say that bacteria are alive.
The next part of the essay relies on the fact that people draw a sharp distinction between a living person and a dead person, between a living person and a corpse. Think now of a human life. A zygote is the fusion of a mother’s ovum and father’s sperm. There is thus a strong biological connection between a human and his or her parents. The human can even be considered a continuation of his or her parents’ anatomy or biology. The growing foetus relies on oxygen and nutrients passed from the mother to the unborn human through the placenta and umbilical cord. Soon after birth, the infant human begins breathing and will continue to breathe for his or her whole life, even while asleep. The cessation of breath is usually exactly the moment of death, although the brain can survive a couple of minutes without oxygen. Generally speaking, if the heart stops beating and oxygen stops reaching the brain, death occurs within a couple of minutes because the neurons in the brain begin cannibalising themselves for nutrients. The close connection between life and breath is shown by the fact that the ancients used the word ‘pneuma’ to designate an indefinable essence associated with human and animal life. We talk of the ‘breath of life’ or, in Bergson’s terminology, ‘elan vital’. Life can be considered a continuous pattern of activations and deactivations in the brain, animated by the continuous oxygen-employing respiration of brain-cells. It is a pattern of activity that should it cease for a short period of time ceases absolutely. This is not to say that there cannot be borderline cases between living bodies and corpses. Sometimes a person can continue to have a functioning heart and body but be brain-dead. However such cases are rare. Generally speaking, the difference between life and death for a human being is abrupt and undeniable.
For traditional atheist materialists, when death occurs consciousness ceases absolutely as well. “"We give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more" (Beckett, 1952). Death is seen as the ultimate downer. There is an issue here that consequentialist ethicists I think get wrong – they measure utility by comparing happiness to unhappiness, pleasure to pain, but forget that the most important concern people have is with life and death. There is a reason why news reports about wars in foreign countries talk about the number of deaths rather than the number of wounded – because death is viewed as worse than pain. In New Zealand and elsewhere voluntary euthanasia has been legalised but such laws have had difficulty being passed by governments because many, including an important portion of the medical profession, regard the preservation of life as more important than any amount of pain. The atheist view that consciousness ceases at death has a longer history than people realise – the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus famously said, “Where I am there is death is notand where death is I am not.” Epicurus is trying to reassure himself and those he is speaking to that death is nothing to fear but the fact that he needs to make this argument suggests that a fear of death is hardwired into the human mind. Similarly, the faith of the religious in the afterlife can be seen as a response to this profound fear of death. The religious believe that consciousness is intimately tied up with the soul. Christians believe either that the soul passes to heaven or hell at death or that it enters a state of dormancy to be awoken when the general resurrection occurs. Hindus believe the soul is reborn in another body. Buddhists, rather confusingly, deny that the soul exists but believe in reincarnation, although they believe that enlightened ones go on to Nirvana. The fear of death seems to me fundamental. It manifests itself everyday when we restrain ourselves from jumping off bridges or throwing ourselves in front of moving cars. If we require evidence that the fear of death is more deeply hardwired than faith in an afterlife, we can consider how even the most religious of people take measures to avoid dying even though they ostensibly believe that death is simply a gateway to paradise.
In contrast to the atheists, who believe that consciousness ceases at death, and also in contrast to religious people who ostensibly believe in everlasting life either because they believe in reincarnation or because they believe that the souls of the dead go to heaven, we could imagine that consciousness persists in the corpse even though this mentality cannot influence or control the dead body at all. We can imagine that this consciousness remains attached to the body even after the body is interred and that this consciousness gradually disperses, leaches out, as the corpse decays. This story, however, is not one ever entertained by either atheists or religious people. Atheists believe that when the lungs and heart stop functioning, when life ends, consciousness ends as well. Religious people believe in a kind of transportation of the soul somewhere else. Many religious people are substance dualists and presume that the soul travels to a spiritual realm. However neutral monists cannot endorse such a picture because they view the physical world and spiritual world as simply different aspects of the same stuff. A religious neutral monist has to argue that at death the soul travels from this physical world to another physical world. Neutral monism is thus perhaps more sympathetic to reincarnation than to the Christian view that we associate with Descartes and most typical Christians.
This discussion has obvious bearing on panpsychism. Panpsychism holds that the human body, whether alive or dead, is composed of particles that are all conscious. These particles cannot die because they were never alive to begin with. These germs of consciousness persist after the breath and heart have stopped. Because the corpse is almost physically identical to the person’s body when it was alive, the panpsychist might believe that all the constituent micro-subjects that made up the person when alive are still conscious after death. Thus the panpsychist may be forced to accept the story told above, that all the micro-subjects that had together made up the person when alive are still conscious even as they are put in a coffin and lowered underground. If one is still to believe in micopanpsychism while also accepting the gulf between a living body and a dead body, one might presume that it is the organisation of micro-subjects that together constitute the human subject, the human identity, consciousness, or soul. It is this organisation that can be considered to strongly or weakly emerge. The difference between how we view a living body and dead body is so dramatic, though, that it leads us to conclude that the living consciousness of a human comprises what Derick Parfit calls ‘a further fact’. To put the argument succinctly, the a posteriori observation that people see a vast difference between a living and dead human body provides some reason for us to believe that human consciousness does emerge, that even if micropanpsychism is true, that human consciousness is something more than the sum of its parts. I am undecided as to whether this is a manifestation of strong or weak emergence.
Questions such as this help animate Philip Goff’s book Consciousness and Fundamental Reality (2017). Goff’s concern in this book is principally to consider how the consciousness of a human or higher animal can be seen as grounded in, emerging from, constituted by, or entailed by micro-experiential components. Although Goff is an advocate of panpsychism, he does not spend any time discussing how consciousness may be possessed by non-living non-human matter. Instead he focusses on the human mind. Goff uses the term ‘ordinary experience’ or o-experience to designate the ‘mental life’ of a human or higher animal. O-experience is unified. We might also say that it is persistent. Goff considers a number of arguments that complicate any attempt to explain o-experience in terms of an assembly of micro-experiential subjects, arguments such as the subject-summing problem, the structural-mismatch problem, and the subject-irreducibility problem. In particular, the subject-summing problem seems to him a serious obstacle to any fully elaborated panpsychist theory because he asserts that o-experience must be considered something distinct from the micro-experiences of micro-subjects that might be thought to constitute it, such as “has an itchy elbow” or “smells roast beef.” There is a gulf between o-experience and micro-experiences. Goff does not provide solutions to the various problems he discusses but states instead that the panpsychist project is in its infancy and that hopefully solutions to these problems may be established in the future. Goff seems over-optimistic to me because the progress we have made in the sciences is due to the scientific method and we cannot apply the scientific method to consciousness. This is if we accept Russell’s argument that the sciences with physics at the centre can tell us only about the relations between material things and nothing about matter as it is in itself. Rather we can only make progress through better forms of introspection. An ancillary problem is that should say one philosopher be possessed of a superior form of introspection enabling her to solve these problems, she must convince others with less sophisticated forms of introspection that her solutions are correct when the contents of her own mind are simply not available to those she is trying to convince and so therefore there is no objective evidence to support her claims.
Goff’s notion of o-experience mirrors the notion that I have tried to set out concerning a unified mind or consciousness that is possessed by living humans but not by corpses. However Goff arrives at his conclusions largely through a priori arguments whereas my argument is based on the a posteriori observation that humans draw a sharp distinction between living and non-living bodies.
Could the organisation of micro-experiential subjects account for the appearance of o-experience? Consider the following simple analogy. A chair is made of four wooden legs, a seat, and a back-rest. The property of ‘chairness’ does not apply to any of these parts. We can only say that the chair emerges when its components are arranged in the right way and attached to each other. The organisation of sub-parts together constitute a ‘further fact’, that is the presence of a chair. Thus it seems to me that a macroscopic body or mind could be both an organisation of simpler components and a further fact, that the further fact is rationally deducible not only from the fact that the component parts exist but that they are organised in the right way. The alternative is mereological nihilism which does not seem to me a viable position at all when engaging with other humans and the material world. When we look at a chair we see that it is a chair. When we look at other humans, through empathy or a kind of projection, we attribute to each a mind or a consciousness or a soul or, to use Goff’s term, o-experience of the same sort as the kind we possess ourselves. However we do not perform this empathic operation based on observations of the facts that the other has two arms, two legs, a head, eyes, etc, all arranged in the right way. If we did we would see no difference between a living body and a dead body. Rather the organisation the other human manifests is a behavioural organisation. From subtle cues, such as but definitely not exclusively the fact that the other human is breathing, we establish that the other human has a mind. We perform a similar empathic operation with respect to many animals as well. We learn when young that a dog wags its tail when happy and, having learned this, can attribute an emotion, happiness, to a dog when it is wagging its tail that is at least a little analogous to our understanding of what the word happiness means when we apply it to ourselves..
It may be that the human mind is indeed constituted by multiple micro-minds but that, at death, the organisation of these micro-minds falls apart. Because an organisation of parts can be taken as introducing a further fact, it may be that when the organisation of parts ceases to obtain, this further fact, a unified persistent consciousness or mind or soul or bearer of o-experience, either ceases to exist or goes somewhere else. Presumably if, say, a person is reincarnated, it is the pattern or structure of micro-subjects exhibited by the deceased when it was alive that is expressed after the death of the old body in the body of a new born child.
I arrive now at a discussion of values. Living organisms display behaviours that non-living objects and systems do not. The most revolutionary idea of modernity is not the Theory of Relativity, even though Einstein completely altered our understanding of time and space, but the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection as proposed by Darwin in 1859. Einstein’s theory did not change our understanding of everyday reality but Darwin’s idea did. If we accept Darwinism, all living things strive to remain alive and all living things strive to reproduce. This is true not only of humans but also of dogs, cats, kauri trees, and amoebas. Thus the behaviours of living organisms are goal-directed and involve values. There is teleology involved. There is a value in remaining alive and so organisms eat, fight off diseases, protect themselves from predators, move if they can to more favourable environments, and so on. There is a value in reproducing so bower birds perform elaborate dances to attract mates. According to Evolutionary Biology, all human values are theoretically ultimately reducible to the desires to survive and to reproduce. These motivations are so basic they may not be consciously accessible. Evolutionary psychologists argue, for instance, that human artistic creativity is deep-down intended to attract a mate, a little like a peacock’s tail – this explains why the peak of an artist’s career generally occurs when he or she is at the most fertile period in his or her life. I do not want to argue that all values in human life are ultimately reducible to the desires to stay alive and to reproduce. It may be that many human values have a different provenance. But these two values are common to all living things, are shared. Because we know that these two values are common to all living things, this enables us to empathise with all living organisms even though we cannot empathise with rocks or rivers or electrons. The basis of our empathy with other living organisms is that we recognise their desire to remain alive. This is what I mean by “conscious in the right way.” Although we cannot understand the motivations of electrons, we can, with a little effort, ascribe emotions and motivations a little like our own to other organisms.
A recent change in biology and zoology is that, increasingly, animal experts have started to see and report on surprisingly intelligent behaviours by animals. A discussion of this may seem to lie outside the ambit of philosophy but changes such as this affect the intellectual zeitgeist and it would be myopic of philosophers to pretend not to notice such developments in other fields. A study recently found that cows can sometimes use tools – one was observed to hold a broom in its jaws and use the brush to scratch its hindquarters if it has an itch there. Octopuses are now considered as intelligent as three year old human toddlers, a surprising finding because octopuses are solitary animals and it was once thought that intelligence was associated with communality. Octopuses have been observed running across the sea floor carrying coconut halves so that when they rest they can hide away in the shell they are carrying. It has been shown that bumblebees, who have brains about the size of poppy seeds, can learn to solve puzzles and teach other bumblebees how to solve these puzzles. They can cooperate and, for a task that involves two bumblebees, one will wait for its bumblebee comrade to arrive before attempting the task. The prize is sugar which bumblebees value. Amoebas build shells known as tests from sand grains and, in perhaps the most astonishing finding, will discriminate between different types of particulate matter when building their homes. This is surprising because, of course, an amoeba has nothing like a nervous system. These reports of animal intelligence are so astonishing that it may lead some, including the author of this essay, to wonder if the doctrine of physical causal closure is false. Perhaps living things have minds that are not epiphenomenal and do not have a physical basis but can have physical effects. The relevance of this recent research to the current essay is that we can empathise with a mollusc like an octopus. We can imagine that by carrying a coconut shell with it, this provides it with a sense of security. We can only empathise with an animal like an octopus or a bumblebee on the basis that such creatures have desires and motivations a little analogous to our own. A fundamental telos is the desire to remain alive. (These examples all come from Youtube videos uploaded by Anton Petrov to be listed in the bibliography.)
Panpsychists are committed to the view that the atoms that make up a human, the carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen atoms, all possess consciousness. Although I believe this goes too far, we may justifiably wonder, given the previous discussion, if the cells that make up multicellular organisms like humans might each be conscious in the right way. The cells that make up multicellular organisms can die after all even if their chemical components cannot. Somatic cells have purposes additional to just staying alive. Red corpuscles have the task of carrying oxygen about the body and muscle cells have the job of contracting when the right nervous signal is received. Neurones in the brain receive electric and chemical signals in their dendrites and as a response may send electrical and chemical signals via axons to other neurones. A single neurone may not be aware of the human-level mind to which it contributes. When looked at from this perspective, we intuit that, if neurones have minds, they must be altogether different from the micro-subjects discussed by Goff that have experiences such as “has an itchy elbow” and “smells roast beef”. We do not assume that micro-experiences of this sort are possessed by single neurones although we may believe they arise somehow from near-simultaneous firings of multiple neurones. Instead neurones are impelled to send chemical and electrical signals when stimulated in the right way. Neutral monism is the theory that mind and matter are different aspects of the same fundamental stuff – I am simply approaching the questions raised by neutral monism from a scientific empirical direction rather than the philosophical introspective direction taken by Goff. It may be even more difficult to empathise with a single neurone than to empathise with an amoeba but this does not mean the a single neurone might not possess its own mind. Given this perspective, it seems that o-experience is of an entirely different sort to the experiences had by neurones, and this leads us to make a provocative claim: perhaps neurones are to o-experience as humans are to the collective mind of humanity as a whole. Individual human minds contribute to a collective mind that may have aims, such as the desire to avoid extinction, shared consciously by few or perhaps no individual humans.
On a whole then, this essay has been defending a position that may best be described as ‘biopsychism’ rather than panpsychism. My justification for saying that only living organisms can possess mental properties in the right way is based on the a posteriori observation that we draw a sharp distinction between living and dead organisms, suggesting that we ascribe to living organisms minds, consciousnesses, or o-experiences not reducible to their physical or micro-experiential components, and on the accepted Darwinian tenet that all living organisms strive to remain alive as long as possible and to reproduce. This is not to suggest that atomic and sub-atomic particles do not possess panprotopsychist properties. In a way this claim must be true because hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, and nitrogen are the building blocks of brains associated with minds and so these elemental particles must have the potential to be part of physical structures associated with mental properties. I conclude this essay by briefly mentioning cosmopanpscychism. It may well be that life is widespread throughout the universe although the technological efflorescence of recent Terran history is very rarely found elsewhere in the cosmos. If life is widespread and living things are a part of the universe, to this extent the universe can be considered alive and conscious. Whether the hydrogen clouds found between stars contribute to this cosmic consciousness is something we cannot know for now.
