Radical Panpsychism
Mind and Matter January 1, 2026 DOI: 10.53765/mm2025.199 (opens in new tab) via Semantic Scholar
Summary
AI-generated from the abstractRadical Panpsychism provides a mathematical and philosophical framework for panpsychism that solves the combination problem by redefining experience in structural terms: experience is the dynamics by which entities model and respond to their environments and own organization. Each entity is a fuzzy subset with internal degrees of freedom that evolve in response to environmental influences. This internal response represents mentality on a continuum from minimal experience in simple systems to consciousness in complex organisms. By grounding mentality in structural responsiveness rather than irreducible phenomenological substance, the theory expands panpsychism's scope, potentially making broader claims about the ubiquity of psychism in nature than traditional models.
Study at a glance
| Characteristics | Theoretical or philosophical paper Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Keywords | Philosophy Psychology |
| Key finding | Proposes that experience can be identified with the dynamics of self-modeling in entities, allowing panpsychism to extend to structural responsiveness rather than requiring irreducible phenomenological substance. |
Abstract
Radical Panpsychism (RP) offers a rigorous mathematical, physical, and philosophical foundation for panpsychism, addressing its central challenge ‐ the combination problem ‐ by reframing the hard problem in deflationary-structural terms: experience is identified with the dynamics by which entities model and respond to their environments and to their own organization. Each entity is modelled as a fuzzy subset of an appropriate space, equipped with internal degrees of freedom (dof) that evolve in response to environmental dof to which they are sensitive.1 This internal response, or direct model, expresses the entity’s mentality across a continuum ‐ from minimal experience in simple systems to consciousness in complex organisms. Based on a deflationary understanding of the so-called hard problem, RP shows that the label panpsychism can extend to theories that ground mentality in structural responsiveness rather than in irreducible phenomenological substance, thereby broadening the conceptual field of panpsychism itself. In this broadened sense, deflationary theories may in fact make wider claims about the ubiquity of “psychism” in nature than traditional, inflationary models, since they locate experience wherever dynamical selfmodeling occurs.