Panpsychism is Making a Comeback

A belief system our species has had since before it had a name was dismissed for centuries but scientific advancements are breathing new life into it

Hiya!

I’m warning you now — we’re getting into it today. Imma take you down a wild rabbit hole of brain-melting awesomeness that will transform your perspective of the world. Today’s topic, panpsychism (pan-psych-ism), is growing in popularity as scientific advances reveal that this once-dismissed concept may be worth taking seriously.

If you haven’t heard of it, panpsychism is essentially a theory of consciousness. Its idea is that consciousness doesn’t require a brain because it’s ubiquitous in the universe — it resides in everything, even single cells and atoms. This theory is as ancient as it is controversial, but modern science is starting to understand why the concept has such an enduring history.

Panpsychism

The word panpsychism has Greek origins with “pan,” meaning “all,” and “psyche,” meaning “soul or mind,” which is pretty apt since the concept centers on the idea that everything possesses at least some degree of consciousness. Panpsychists believe consciousness is omnipotent in the physical universe. Does this mean even the chair you’re sitting in is conscious? Not necessarily, but the atoms making up the chair might be — but we’ll come back to this.

Wild as it may sound, panpsychism has a long history with our species, dating far before there was an official term for it. Shintoism in Japan, Hindus in India, and Indigenous peoples of the Americas have long believed that nonhuman entities, including animals, plants, and even natural elements or formations, are conscious.

In the West, panpsychism’s philosophy dates back to the Ancient Greeks (hence its etymology), when philosophers like Plato, Thales, and Heraclitus promoted it in various ways between 400 and 600 B.C.E.

However, they didn’t associate panpsychism with “consciousness” back then because the word wasn’t coined until the 17th century. Instead, they used words like “mind” and “soul,” both of which, like “consciousness,” express the idea of something or someone having a perspective on the world — an umwelt, if you will.

On its surface, panpsychism doesn’t seem wholly unreasonable. I mean, I think you can agree that many animals are conscious, intelligent even, and posses a soul, or whatever you want to call it, as we do. But, scientists have spent over a century dismissing this idea because it conflicts with the path scientific evolution took.

Materialism

Panpsychism fell into the shadows when monotheistic religion, the belief in a single God or entity, spread across the West — but it poked its head out during the Renaissance. That’s when 16th-century astronomer Copernicus rocked the world when he argued that Earth isn’t at the center of the universe. What does that have to do with anything? I’ll tell you.