Panpsychism is the philosophical view that mind, or some simple form of experience, is a basic feature of all matter, not something that appears only in brains. Animism is different in three ways: it is a lived experience of relationship, not a theory about where consciousness is found; it holds that the world is full of persons, kin to be in relationship with, not just minded matter; and it refuses to grade consciousness from simple to complex, where most panpsychist accounts keep such a ladder. The short comparison is in What is animism?; this answer goes into it more deeply.
What is panpsychism? #
A family of views in the philosophy of mind, all holding that mind is everywhere in nature. The name comes from the Greek pan, all, and psyche, soul or mind. Its roots are often traced to the Greek philosopher Thales, who is reported to have said that “everything is full of gods”, and it runs through the philosophers Spinoza and Leibniz, the psychologist William James and the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, who held that some kind of feeling goes all the way down.1 See Who was Alfred North Whitehead, and what is process philosophy?
For much of the twentieth century it was out of favour in academic philosophy. It came back in the late 1990s with the philosopher David Chalmers’s book The Conscious Mind (1996), which asked how the felt, inner side of experience could ever arise from arrangements of matter with no inner side at all, the so-called hard problem of consciousness. One way out, he suggested, is that consciousness never ‘arose’ at all, but was part of the nature of matter from the start.2
There are several kinds. Micropsychism places the basic bits of experience in the smallest particles of matter, and builds larger minds out of them. Cosmopsychism starts from the other end. The universe as a whole is the basic mind, and individual minds are local parts of it.2 Some philosophers speak only of ‘proto-consciousness’ in matter, a kind of seed from which consciousness can grow.1
Why do philosophers take it seriously? #
Because the usual alternative leaves a puzzle no one has solved. If matter is wholly without experience, it is hard to see how experience could ever arise from it. The philosophers Johan De Smedt and Helen De Cruz point out that treating the world as lifeless by default is itself a philosophical position, which they call inanimism, and that it produces its own puzzles, such as “how can consciousness arise out of unconscious matter?”3 A second argument is that physics describes only how things are structured and how they behave towards each other, never what they are like in themselves, and experience may be what matter is on the inside.4 See Why do De Smedt and De Cruz call animism a philosophy?
What are the objections to panpsychism? #
Three main ones. Critics ask how something as simple as an electron could have any experience at all, and find the idea close to meaningless. They point out that there is little or no scientific evidence for it, since consciousness cannot be measured from outside. And they ask how tiny scraps of experience could combine into one unified mind like ours, the combination problem.5
Panpsychists reply that the experience they mean in a particle is nothing like human thought or feeling, so the first objection attacks a view nobody holds; that no theory of consciousness can yet be tested directly, so the second applies to every theory; and, in the cosmopsychist versions, that starting from the universe as one mind, not from particles, means there is nothing to combine.6 See What did Freya Mathews argue about matter and the ecological self?
How is animism different from panpsychism? #
First, animism is not a theory. It is not a belief so much as an experience, the experience that everything is alive and conscious, open to anyone willing to try the practices.7 Panpsychism is an argument in the philosophy of mind, reached by reasoning about the problem of consciousness. The two can arrive at a similar picture, a world that is not dead, by entirely different roads, and they then do very different things with it.
Second, animism is about persons and relationship. To say only that everything is alive and conscious would just be pantheism, basically; what animism adds is that everything is a person, kin to be in relationship with, which is why animist peoples speak of brother wolf and sister eagle and extend that kinship to the Plant and Stone PeopleStone People. All physical matter: mountains, sea, rivers, clouds, sun and stars: the oldest and widest of the Peoples. As some animist cultures put it, ‘we are just the Stone People, dancing for a while’. Read the full answer. Panpsychists themselves draw this line. The writer Matthew Adams sets panpsychism apart from animism, which he describes as giving intention and agency to things, where panpsychism only says that all matter has some form of consciousness.8 The philosopher Freya Mathews says the same, that animism has traditionally meant a world full of indwelling spirits, where panpsychism places a mental side in matter as such.9 See What does it mean to say the world is alive and full of persons?
Third, and in Therapeutic Shamanism above all, animism has no hierarchy of consciousness. Most panpsychist accounts grade it. Adams explains that the consciousness of a rock would be “vastly different and much simpler than that of a human being”.8 Mathews keeps full subjecthood for the universe as a whole and for certain living systems, whilst ordinary objects share its nature “but are by no means necessarily subjects in their own right”.9 Animism is a round table, with humans the youngest of the PeoplesThe Peoples. The Animal People, Plant People, Standing People (the Trees) and Stone People: our elder kin, of whom the Human People are the youngest and least wise. A family, not a hierarchy. Read the full answer, not the top of a ladder.10 Different beings have different kinds of consciousness, not more or less of it. A plant’s awareness is collective where ours is self-aware, and taking our own self-awareness as the “highest” form of consciousness is part of our arrogance as humans and the myth of our supremacy.11 So any system that ranks consciousness, whatever it calls itself, rebuilds the pyramid that animism takes down. See What is the myth of human supremacy?
Doesn’t animism say a rock is conscious in the same way a person is? #
No. Animism does not claim that every rock is conscious the way a human being is, and that is not what animists experience. Things can be conscious in ways almost beyond our comprehension, very different from us, and animism recognises that this is so. The Stone People are conscious and alive, just in a way very, very different to us, “Off the scale different”, so much so that most modern humans do not perceive them as alive at all.12 What follows is not a theory about rock minds but a way of living, treating everything as sacred and meeting it with respect.
That is the difference from a graded scale. To say the consciousness of a rock is very different from ours is to describe a difference of kind; to say it is “much simpler” is to rank it. The culture we live in teaches the ranking so thoroughly that it is soaked into the language. We speak of a ‘higher’ consciousness, and we are told that stones have no consciousness at all.13 See What are Stone People and what gifts do they bring?
Is panpsychism closer to animism than materialism is? #
In one respect, yes. Materialism says matter is dead and experience a late accident of brains; panpsychism refuses that, and so do the animist peoples, for whom everything is made of energy that is alive and conscious.14 Panpsychist philosophers have done a great deal to make the idea of a living, minded world respectable again in Western thought, and some of them, such as Mathews, go on to argue for a relationship of encounter with the world, not only of study.
The difference remains in the two things that matter most to animism, relationship with persons and the absence of rank. A panpsychism that gave equal standing to every kind of being and every kind of consciousness, and lived it as relationship, would be very close to animism; panpsychism as it is usually argued is a theory of mind in matter that keeps a ladder. See Is the living world intelligent? and What does Michael Levin’s work say about intelligence in cells and bodies?
