Reflections of a Natural Scientist on Panpsychism

Abstract

Panpsychism shares many intuitions with integrated information theory (IIT), in particular that consciousness is an intrinsic fundamental property of reality, is graded, and can be found in small amounts in simple physical systems. Unlike panpsychism, however, IIT clearly articulates which systems are conscious and which ones are not (resolving panpsychism's combination problem) and why consciousness can be adaptive. The systemic weakness of panpsychism, or any other -ism, is that they fail to offer a protracted conceptual, let alone empirical, research programme that yields novel insights or proposes new experiments. Without those, progress on the mindâ–“body problem will not occur.