Panpsychism and the Religious Attitude

Preface

Preface This work is an essay in defense of panpsychism, the view affirming the presence throughout nature of mentality in the form of a qualitative perspective on an environment. Panpsychism has had a long history marked by a variety of formulations and much controversy. It has had its advocates in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but weakness in certain formulations of the doctrine have left it vulnerable to criticisms. Those by Paul Edwards and Karl Popper have been especially effective in discouraging its widespread acceptance and in promoting the view that panpsychism offers its advocates an emotionally satisfying view at the expense of sacrificing minimal standards of rationality.1 It is this view that I want to challenge after outlining a defensible version. Panpsychism was extensively discussed at the end of the nineteenth century under the influence of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. One of the most sensible discussions is provided by William James in chapter VI of his Principles of Psychology. James thinks that panpsychism in the form of what he refers to as the “mind-stuff” theory can only be established for psychology if simple units of experiencing can be identified whose compounding results in the consciousness of which we are aware. Since there is no experimental evidence for such compounding, panpsychism has no place in psychology. He does acknowledge, however, that evolutionary theory provides grounds for the doctrine because the introduction of mentality of consciousness from matter represents a radical discontinuity in evolution. We ought, he says, “sincerely to try every vii possible mode of conceiving the dawn of consciousness so that it may not appear equivalent to the irruption into the universe of a new nature, non-existent until then.” The most plausible solution, he indicates, is to conceive of consciousness as always being present: If evolution is to work smoothly, consciousness in some shape must have been present at the very origin of things. Accordingly we find that the more clear-sighted evolutionary philosophers are beginning to posit it there. Each atom of the nebula, they suppose, must have had an aboriginal atom of consciousness linked with it. . . . Some such doctrine . . . is an indispensable part of a thoroughgoing philosophy of evolution. According to it there must be an infinite number of degrees of consciousness, following the degrees of complication and aggregation of the primordial mind-dust.2 Our conceptions of cosmology and evolution have changed since the nineteenth century. The Big Bang theory has replaced the earlier view that stars and planets evolved from an original gaseous nebula. Also, we now recognize the discontinuities in evolution represented by such events as the relatively sudden extinction of the dinosaurs and the corresponding rapid development of land mammals. Nevertheless , despite these changes in theory, the transition from bare matter to material systems with a mental perspective on things remains an unexplained puzzle, and panpsychism of a kind related to the speculations of the nineteenth century provides—so I will argue—a plausible alternative solution. To say it is plausible is not to claim either conclusive arguments in its favor or experimental confirmation. Panpsychism represents one of what James describes as those “great traditional objects of belief ” which we “cannot afford to despise.” Whether we realize it or not,” he notes, “there is always a great drift of reasons, positive and negative, towing us in their direction.”3 The chapters that follow are an extended argument that “the drift of reasons” favors the panpsychist alternative. Forced with a choice, this alternative should be preferred over its competitors, but we cannot expect the reasoning used to arrive at this conclusion to have the finality we find in some areas of philosophy. For many philosophers, this in itself is good reason to avoid discussing it, preferring to restrict themselves to more tractable questions about uses of language and areas where there seems to be realistic hope of eventual agreement on answers. Better to be cautious, they think, than to run the risk of repeating viii Preface the frustrating failures of the past. I sympathize with this preference . But the effect of following it has not been to eliminate metaphysics from contemporary intellectual life. Instead, we find two competing metaphysical dogmas enshrined. One is that of universal mechanism whose proponents note continuity between infrahuman and human levels, and use this continuity to argue from what seems to be our ability to give mechanical explanations of infrahuman behavior to...