<aside> 📌 SUMMARY: Derived from the Greek words pan (“all”) and psyche (“soul” or “mind”), panpsychism is the idea that consciousness is not unique to the most complex organisms; it pervades the entire universe and is a fundamental feature of reality.
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Plato and Aristotle had panpsychist beliefs, as did the Stoics. At the turn of the 12th century, the Christian mystic Saint Francis of Assisi was so convinced that everything was conscious that he tried speaking to flowers and preaching to birds. In fact, the history of thought is dotted with very clever people coming to this seemingly irrational conclusion. William James, the father of American psychology, was a panpsychist, as was the celebrated British mathematician Alfred North Whitehead; the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Max Planck once remarked in an interview, “I regard consciousness as fundamental.” Even the great inventor Thomas Edison had some panpsychist views, telling the poet George Parsons Lathrop: “It seems that every atom is possessed by a certain amount of primitive intelligence.”
Most philosophers and scientists with panpsychist beliefs kept them quiet for fear of public ridicule. Panpsychism used “to be laughed at insofar as it was thought of at all,” wrote the philosopher Philip Goff in his latest book, “Galileo’s Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness.” But now, we are in the midst of a “full-blown panpsychist renaissance.” Goff is one of a rising tide of thinkers around the world who have found themselves drawn back to this ancient theory. Spurred on by scientific breakthroughs, a lost argument from the 1920s and the encouraging way panpsychism is able to bypass the “hard problem” of consciousness, they are beginning to rebuild and remodel its intellectual foundations, transforming it into a strong candidate for the ultimate theory of reality.
In 1929, the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget found that children between two and four years old are inclined to attribute consciousness to everything around them. A child can happily talk to a grasshopper and blame the pavement if they trip up, and it isn’t such an alien thought, at that age, to think a flower might feel the sunlight and perhaps even enjoy it. Fairy tales and children’s media are infused with animate worlds in which trees, animals and objects come to the aid or annoyance of a protagonist.
Most of us dismiss these notions as we mature. Gradually, we rein the concept of consciousness closer and closer in, until, at least in the West, we usually settle on the traditional view that consciousness is present only in the brains of humans and higher animals.