Talk:Panpsychism

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Starting from the first sentence, this article is full of mistakes. Panpsychism is not the theory that everything is conscious, but that all basic matter (i.e. all fundamental concrete objects) are conscious (or possess the property of consciousness), so things like electrons or whatever lies at the lowest level of reality. The 'they are all connected parts of the whole' is an additional (New Age-sounding) premise that does not have to be necessarily connected to panpsychism (in fact, most panpsychists do not make such claims at all).

The sentence 'in other words the substance of the universe is composed entirely of mind or consciousness' sounds like it is describing idealism (rather than panpsychism), again in a New Age-sounding manner. What is meant by substance? Panpsychists actually claim the following: all basic (fundamental) physical things have the property of consciousness (along with other properties that they might have, such as mass, spin, charge, etc.). In other words, panpsychists do not deny the existence of physical matter, so saying that they support the claim that 'the universe is entirely composed of consciousness' is false.

The sentence 'this is not to say that rocks have a mind but that the individual atoms and other particles in the rock have some sort of awareness and are aware of each other' contradicts the first sentence of the article (that "everything" is conscious) because it says that the rock is "not" conscious (as a rock), but that its particles are. Next, the idea that 'particles have an awareness of each other' is another claim that is not necessarily connected to panpsychism (i.e. it is a premise additional to panpsychism).

Next sentence: 'panpsychism is opposed to materialism or any doctrine that argues that the reality of the universe is composed solely of matter'. This is true, but it needs to be clarified since otherwise it might be misleading. Panpsychism is opposed to physicalism (philosophers switched from talking about materialism to talking about physicalism when physicists described entities that are not strictly speaking material or mechanical, but can still be studied via physics, to put it roughly) in the sense that it is opposed to the idea that consciousness can be explained solely via reference to physical facts. However, Galen Strawson - an influential panpsychist philosopher - calls his panpsychist position "real physicalism", while others have argued that panpsychism is fully compatible with some forms or some aspects of physicalism (e.g. adding consciousness as a property to the fundamental level of reality might be similar to how we added charge to the fundamental level of reality; causal closure, the idea that physical effects have exclusively physical causes).

The final sentence: 'in other words we are all part of a grand communication scheme which is the glue that holds the universe together'. This, again, sounds like a very New Agey interpretation of panpsychism and it is not necessarily tied to the theory. I haven't yet read a reputable panpsychist philosopher who makes such claims.

Panpsychism is a very complex theory, so summarising it in a simple manner is difficult, but this article actually made the position even more confusing. It is also misleading and almost every sentence is false.

NinoK21 (talk) 00:31, 31 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]