Is Panpsychism the Solution to the "Hard" Problem?

Materialist scientists and philosophers have long sought to expel mind from science. Science, the argument goes, has no room for immaterial substances like mind that don't arise out of material substance like brains.

The problem these materialists have encountered, though, is that it's devilishly difficult to explain consciousness solely in terms of brain chemistry. The difficulty in explaining how feeling, sensation and meaning can be generated by electro-chemical reactions in a brain is called the "hard problem" of consciousness. Science writer Thomas Lewton explains:

It can seem as if there is an insurmountable gap between our subjective experience of the world and our attempts to objectively describe it. And yet our brains are made of matter – so, you might think, the states of mind they generate must be explicable in terms of states of matter.

The question is, how? And if we can’t explain consciousness in physical terms, how do we find a place for it in an all-embracing view of the universe?

How, indeed.

One option is to suggest that some form of consciousness, however fragmentary, is an intrinsic property of matter. At a fundamental level, this micro-consciousness is all that exists.

The idea, known as panpsychism, rips up the physicalist handbook to offer a simple solution to the hard problem of consciousness ... by plugging the gap between our inner experiences and our objective, scientific descriptions of the world.

If everything is to some extent conscious, we no longer have to account for our experience in terms of non-conscious components.

Panpsychism is growing increasingly attractive to philosophers who are mystified by the problem of explaining how matter can generate conscious experience. Few philosophers want to embrace the view called eliminative materialism that holds that consciousness is just an illusion, a view that strikes many as incoherent since even an illusion is hard to explain solely in terms of a material brain.

To the extent that panpsychism catches on it would mark the demise of materialism but not necessarily the demise of naturalism. If mind is a substance possessed by every particle of matter in the universe then consciousness can be explained by assuming that when matter reaches a certain level of complexity, as in a human brain, the quantity of mind it possesses gives rise to consciousness.

Even so, naturalism could still be preserved since the universe might still be a closed system which consists of two fundamental substances, mind and matter, rather than just matter. Thus naturalism could be saved even though materialism could not.

The problem for naturalism, though is this: it's but a short step from positing an all-pervasive mind filling the cosmos to embracing pantheism, and once the door is open to pantheism, naturalism is in trouble.

It'll find itself sliding down a slippery slope to full-blown monotheism.