Seager, W. (2009). Panpsychism. In: B. P. McLaughlin, A. Beckermann, & S. Walter (Eds.), Handbook of Philosophy of Mind (Chapter 11, pp. 206-220).
[Abstract]Panpsychism endorses the co-fundamental status of matter and mind in so far as it allows there are features of the world which are non-mental. Panpsychism is also not generally a view in which mentality is taken as ‘substantial’. It is more natural to regard panpsychism as expressing the view that, roughly speaking, everything exemplifies certain mental properties. However, it is an important and distinctive claim of many panpsychists that the ‘object/property’ metaphysics we take for granted is fundamentally mistaken and must be replaced with another metaphysical vision of the basic structure of reality.
[Citing Place (1956)]
Citing Place (1956) in context (citations start with an asterisk *):
Section 11.2 The History of Panpsychism
* [E]mergentism fell rapidly out of favour as the new quantum mechanics promised to reveal how the heretofore primary example of uncontroversial emergence, chemistry, could be in principle reductively understood in terms of basic physics. This development led in turn to a vigorous renewal of materialist views of the mind, so that, somewhat paradoxically, the death of emergentism was not the victory of panpsychism. Rather, both accounts were supplanted by a vigorous and fruitful materialist research project in philosophy seeking to duplicate, at a very abstract level, the successful treatment of chemistry in the realm of the psychological. Just as chemical properties arise from entities which entirely lack them, so too would mental properties be seen to arise from entirely non‐mentalistic physical constituents. This philosophical project began with ‘logical behaviourism’ (see Carnap 1932/1933), proceeded to the psychoneural identity theory (see Place 1956; Smart 1959) and has led to a host of successor physicalist accounts of mind (see Kim 2006 for a survey). It has proved surprisingly difficult to produce an acceptable version of materialism, however, and the problem of consciousness has loomed recently as especially recalcitrant (see Chalmers 1996). In fact, the so‐called hard problem of consciousness, the problem of explaining exactly how material systems generate, realize, or constitute states which have phenomenal character (states for which there is ‘something it is like’ to be in them) has seemed to some so difficult that a renewed interest in more radical approaches, such as emergentism and panpsychism, has appeared; and it is in this light that we ought to consider the arguments for and against panpsychism.