Varieties of Panpsychism

Abstract

Panpsychism is not like pregnancy. A woman either is or is not pregnant. In such cases more generally, either x or not-x. By contrast, you are not either warm or not warm, tall or not tall, smart or not smart. You can be more or less slow, more or less prompt, more or less witty. The discussion of panpsychism is changed in important and fruitful ways when we recognize that the topic is better understood in the latter way than in the former. »Panpsychism is Not Like Pregnancy« would have been a strange title for a conference paper. Perhaps the paper would better have been titled »Panpsychism without the ›Pan.‹« At first glance, the panpsychism debate appears to be a question of all or nothing, just as the thief either takes all William’s money or he doesn’t. But I suggest that we need to think our way beyond this way of approaching panpsychism. Particularly in the context of panentheism, panpsychism should be more complex than, say, the thesis that all levels of evolution can be summarized under the heading of pan-psyche or, following David Ray Griffin, pan-experience. Instead, I will argue, the discussion of God, evolution, and psyche needs to be expanded to include the full variety of qualities, including awareness, intention, goal-directed behavior, mental representation, cognition, and consciousness. Clearly this shift has implications for understanding the nature and scope of metaphysics and theology, a topic to which I shall return at the end of the discussion. Three things will happen when we return to the panpsychism question after this analysis. We need to have a better grasp of the issues that are raised by the evolution of consciousness. We should be able to specify the sense in which evolution produces qualities that were not actually already in the parts. Finally, we should reach a more complex understanding of the relevance of panentheism to questions of the evolution of consciousness, and hence a more complex understanding of the Divine itself. The upshot is a more limited affirmation of panpsychism, in contrast to the more »maximal« affirmation of the existence of psyche in all things, or all things as psyche. The qualities that we call mental or proto-mental are extremely diverse. Because the differences are greater than is often acknowledged, I propose calling the result minimal or »gradualist« panpsychism rather than traditional or »maximal« panpsychism. It will not have escaped you that minimal and maximal are terms on a quantitative scale rather than expressions of a forced either/or choice. Panpsychism in this more minimal form, I will argue, is the