In recent years a view that was not much on the radar when I was an undergraduate has come back. It is not a new view at all, and in fact it is the general form of the information is physical view I criticized in Chapter 3: the view that is called panpsychism. It is the view that there are aspects of consciousness or mind that exist in all objects such that when they are combined in the relevant ways, they form a sentience or consciousness. Some versions of this have it that subatomic particles are in some way conscious in their own right, a view that goes back (with atoms) to classical times, but most modern exponents simply hold that the feels are in some way constituted by micro-feels, to coin a term or two.
The major champions of panpsychism are Galen Strawson, Phillip Goff and, of course, David Chalmers. However, they all have different approaches. Some think that consciousness emerges from non-conscious but mental (or experiential) parts that are in-built in the universe. Some think that everything is experiential or mental. Goff and co-authors have a good article on the Stanford Encyclopedia on “Panpsychism” that summarises this view.
Panpsychism, however, relies upon there being an irreducible aspect to being conscious. My experience has a quality that a simple physical description will never convey, let alone explain. The computational approach of the materialists of the previous generations of philosophers was, as I argued in the previous chapter, insufficient and itself depended upon the equivalence of computation with physical processes. Panpsychists also dispute computationalism, but for them the problem is not that there are mechanisms of the mind, but that once all the mechanisms are accounted for and all computational models explored, there is still something unaccounted for.
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